Recitals such as these invariably serve as calling-cards for their featured artists and any collector needing confirmation of Vadim Repin’s violinistic prowess need look no further. The Debussy Sonata is playful and lightly brushed with a furry, even slightly fragile, edge to the tone and never a hint of excessive pressure. Boris Berezovsky seems in absolute musical accord with his partner and that wonderful passage from 1'29'' into the second movement where the pianist sets up a motor rhythm and the violinist swirls and slides above him is especially memorable. Like all the best versions of this sonata, the music sounds spontaneously improvised.
In the Schubert A major Sonata, Repin is joined by Ralf Gothoni and while I thought the opening movement just a little too brisk for an Allegro moderato, the rest goes well and Repin wisely switches to a firmer, more focused line than he favoured in the Debussy.
The Prokofiev two-violin Sonata features fellow Siberian Anton Barachovsky in the first violin part, to fine effect. Both play with considerable expressive force and great technical aplomb. And then there are the ‘encores’, Ravel’s ‘Blues’ from his Second Sonata, with slammed pizzicatos and a seductive tone, and then Dinicu’s thrilling Hora di Mars with gipsy violinist Roby Lakatos. Here, our stellar soloist goes for broke, though anyone who knows Dinicu’s own late-1920s recording (Electrecord issued it on a 10-inch LP years ago) will also know that Repin still has a thing or two to learn about where to draw out the melody-line and how to stress those wild gipsy trills. This particular performance is brilliant but superficial.
The recordings capture the liveliness of the Auditorium du Louvre acoustic. There is applause (not separately tracked, alas) and the odd suggestion of extraneous noise, though nothing too distracting. Just one quibble. We’re told in the booklet-note that a ‘federative gathering’ around Vadim Repin gave five concerts in all ‘in which there were joyful and successful blends of music in the Russian style and the French style intermingled with pieces by Schubert and with others in the pure gipsy tradition.’ Bearing that in mind, couldn’t Erato have supplemented the 57-minute programme with another 20 or so minutes of music? Otherwise, a most rewarding disc. RC