The 50-year-old Anatol Ugorski, one of the former Soviet Union's best regarded pianists, was also one of its last political refugees. By contrast, the 26-year-old Austrian pianist Stefan Vladar has no such lurid tales to tell. He made his public debut at the age of 13 and seven years later outsmarted 139 other participants to win the International Beethoven Piano Competition. Fewer dark nights of the soul might make him a less plausible candidate for success in late Beethoven; but, then, the Diabelli Variations are not conventionally 'late'. Rather, they are a dazzling metamorphosis of the earliest of all the manifestations of Beethoven's genius: his skills as a keyboard virtuoso and an improviser of astonishing power and originality. So it is not surprising when a young pianist comes along and sweeps all before him, as Philip's Stephen Kovacevich (then Stephen Bishop) did in 1968 or as Benjamin Frith (ASV) and now Stefan Vladar have done more recently.
That said, it is relatively easy for a youthful escapade of a performance to slip from the mind once one has been dazzled by the playing of the quicker variations and wooed by the playing of the slower ones. Kovacevich's reading stays in the mind not because of its virtuosity (which is consummate) but because of the sustained clarity and poise, physical and intellectual, of the entire endeavour. I am not sure that Vladar is quite on this level, not because he tries to bash hell out of the Handelian Fuga (Frith is also unsettled at this point) but because in some of the slower variations he seems to be trying to manufacture a depth of utterance that he does not yet have. Significantly, it is the last variation of all that most obviously eludes him. It has (to take two examples) neither Serkin's rigour nor Brendel's surprising comic beneficence—qualities that derive from the mind rather than from the fingers.
On a blind hearing, I am fairly sure that Ugorski's Diabelli would stand out immediately as the work of an older man and a wiser spirit. Add to that the fact that he is also still very much in his prime as a keyboard virtuoso, and the results are formidable in their way. Several variations are played as well and as characterfully as it is possible to imagine in matters of virtuosity (No. 10) or hard-edged attack (No. 9). There is a robust wit in the playing of No. 23 and fine rhythmic pointing in the playing of No. 15. Few pianists could match Ugorski in the sheer beauty of the vocal counterpointing of No. 3. There are also stretches of seemingly live music-making, with nothing of the feel of a patchwork of edited takes such as we have with Richter's genuinely 'live' (though multi-concert) 1986 Philips disc.
At best, Ugorski's playing also has great daring and an effective gestural quality, finely rhetorical. I think especially of the reading of No. 6, Allegro ma non troppo e serioso, where the playing strides along as grandly as W. B. Yeats's Malachi Stilt-Jack. (DG's recording is throughout commensurately grand and wide-ranging.) Sadly, this Russian Malachi occasionally tries one trick too many, and comes a cropper. No. 2—Alla marcia maestoso—is funereal. Ugorski's speed in No. 17 brushes aside Beethoven's Allegro. And the astonishing changes of pace in the rhythmically skeletal No. 13 completely disrupt a joke that is essentially about the accuracy of the silences and the punctuality of the occasional intrusions into the silences. You might argue that these whims are the inspirations of a newly-liberated man. Perhaps. But they also smack of the oddities of Russian Beethoven playing. Like Richter, Ugorski seems to be the kind of Russian master who can subvert his own genius where Beethoven is concerned. Only Gilels seems to have been immune to this particular musical vice; and Gilels, alas, is no more.'