These live Beethoven performances by Emil Gilels are distinguished by his customary profound artistic penetration. Nikolaieva’s Beethoven sonata cycle (recorded in the same venue in the 1980s) is robust and dynamic, and her perceptive interpretations, though not always note accurate, frequently reveal startling insights of voice-leading and large-scale structure. However, enhanced by closer, softer-edged recording, Gilels’s firmer technical security here helps to create accounts of even greater stature. Listen to the compelling forward motion he generates in the first movement of the D major Sonata, or the beguiling relationship he achieves between pulse and expressive timing in the slow movement. Gilels also gives a sleeker account of the G major Sonata, with impressively smooth lines in the first movement, a winning blend of atmosphere and lyrical spontaneity in the Andante and stylish panache in the witty finale.
In his review of a 1984 recording of Les adieux RO identified Gilels’s “architect’s sense of structure, great technical brilliance, and that uncanny blend of intellectual attack and intellectual distance which give his performances … their peculiar force and distinction”. Nikolaieva gives a striking portrayal of this sonata’s programmatic character – most notably in her violently explosive reading of the finale – yet even here Gilels conveys a broader artistic vision with nimbler fingerwork and a startling moment of reflection on the last page of the finale. A superb account of the E minor Sonata, Op. 90, completes this wonderful Gilels programme. '