This highly talented, 14-year-old Kazakh player has chosen a slightly strange programme for his debut album; despite the generally Eastern European flavour, there’s an unsettling mixture of styles as we move from Paganini to Prokofiev to Beriot, and so on. But there’s plenty to enjoy – the two-violin items are beautifully played, with Amir and his uncle (and teacher), Marat Bisengaliev, perfectly matched in tone and approach. The Bacewicz duets follow on from Bartok’s in their idiomatic extension of folk style. The Shostakovich duets with piano are, I think, arrangements of film music (the CD booklet doesn’t identify them): these somewhat effusive performances emphasise the irony of their sweetly tonal idiom.
Amir is a splendidly bold player – pieces such as the Vieuxtemps ‘Tarantelle’, or the inspired folk-fiddler-style scrubbing of the Brusilovsky, show him at his best – and the Milstein Paganiniana variations, and La clochette, demonstrate how pure and accurate his technique is. But some of the music tests his interpretative powers more and shows, not surprisingly, that he’s not yet a mature artist. The Wieniawski is vivacious and exciting, but misses the many shades of expression in this magnificent piece; Vengerov, for example, is far more soulful in the minor-key middle section, and wittier later on. Similarly, the Tchaikovsky is played with a glamorous, intense tone, but little of the gentle, touching melancholy that the greatest violinists, from Leopold Auer on, have found in the music. This impression is perhaps heightened by the bright, resonant but rather shallow recorded sound.
John Lenehan’s accompaniments, throughout the disc, are excellent.'