Whatever your feeling about Nikolai Demidenko's musical judgement, this Chopin recital leaves no doubt as to his exceptional fingers. Besides great brilliance he has a wide and varied tonal palette, and a beautiful way of making the piano sing. Small wonder he could not resist the La ci darem la mano Variations (in his own revision of the Mikuli edition) by way of grand finale. Both this legendary showpiece of the composer's youth and the still earlier Schweizerbub Variations also reveal him as no mere mechanicus but a player of exuberant imagination.
His immediacy of response gives the four Scherzi a vividness all his own—just now and again perhaps too much of his own. In No. 1 in B minor he is surely wrong to take the sting out of the two opening chords (marked fortissimo and sforzando), and again on their return just before the reprise, in the strange belief that ''you can contradict Chopin's loud dynamics, you can reverse his decibellic priorities, without damaging his intentions'', as Demidenko puts it in his lengthy booklet-note. In the same work I also thought his slowing-up for the sad little phrase that ends the first section (first heard in track 2 from 0'36'' to 0'47'') somewhat excessive in view of its many returns. And exquisitely as he plays the Sleep, little Jesus melody surely this central trio section of the work is disproportionately slow. In the Second Scherzo he favours a very ruminative start to the trio before mounting to a climax just a bit too agitato for clarity. I enjoyed his imaginatively varied 'scoring' of the chorale theme in the third Scherzo even if he over-relaxes tension on its poignant return in a minor key. And even if the nostalgic C sharp minor melody in the middle of the last Scherzo occasionally seems to lose its way, his aerial grace and charm elsewhere are a delight. In sum an arresting recital despite its few small idiosyncracies, excellently recorded.'