Nikolai Lugansky is a 27-year-old pianist with golden-boy looks who reminds us in his enviably fleet and masterful survey of the Chopin Etudes (not forgetting the more recondite Trois Nouvelles Etudes) that he is the winner of several glittering prizes culminating in his triumph at the 1994 Tchaikovsky Competition. Considered by his teacher and mentor, the late and much lamented Tatyana Nikolaieva, as ‘the next one’ he is also described in Erato’s hyperbolic notes as ‘a vital part of the grand Russian line extending back through Neuhaus, Gilels and Richter’ and as the possessor of ‘a spell-binding poetic touch tailor-made for Chopin’s exacting series of Studies’.
Such high praise is, alas, only partly confirmed by performances where studies are apt to remain studies, cruelly exposed exercises in thirds, sixths, octaves and so forth dismissed by Lugansky with an easy, almost nonchalant expertise. But the vital transition from etude to tone-poem or the sort of performance which inspired the ever-romantic Schumann to speak of ‘sparkling light and aeolian harps’ is too rarely made. Where is the poetry and magic which illuminate page after page of Cortot’s endearingly fallible, far less note-perfect accounts, the young Ashkenazy’s imaginative resource, or Augustin Anievas’s natural keyboard elegance on an EMI LP long overdue for reissue?
Nos 3 and 6 from Op 10 and No 7 from Op 25 (which contrary to popular belief and to the rubric put out by competition organisers, are among the most demanding of the set) are less than memorable, and although there are successes, including an Op 25 No 5 where the central beguiling melody with its cascading surround is inflected with warmth and affection, these are the exception rather than the rule. No 11 from the same opus, the so-called Winter Wind Etude, is neat rather than savage and the overall impression is of a pianist more technically than musically motivated. Erato’s sound is good, but there is little comparison with the finest versions of the Chopin Etudes, most of them made an alarmingly long time ago.'