Martinu hardly wrote the sort of music where every note is worth its weight in gold. Criticized for his failure to sense that ‘all kinds of heterogeneous elements mixed together do not constitute an independent style’, he unsettlingly reminds you of an actor happiest when adopting a wide variety of masks but uncomfortable when exposed, or compelled to be himself. Yet, as the powerful Sonata and Fantasie a toccata show, Martinu was capable of a genuine eloquence and stature beyond a merely elegant and impersonal expertise. As Graham Melville-Mason tells us in his notes, the Sonata was much admired by Rudolf Serkin, who programmed it alongside Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata; and, of course, all Martinu’s music was intimately connected with Rudolf Firkusny, who gave most of the first performances and who recorded an admirable selection of his piano works for RCA.
Eleonora Bekova’s programme is less inclusive (some of the delightful, Smetana-based Polkas would have left a less dour impression) but her performances show a uniform and unswerving command. Her full-blooded sonority and technique proclaim her Moscow training and, musically enriched by her success in chamber music, she makes light of every difficulty. Whether in chic Parisian asides directed at jazz and ragtime (the First and Second Preludes), in the greater weight and substance of the Sonata (which has, perhaps surprisingly, failed to enter the mainstream repertoire beside the sonatas of, say, Copland, Janacek, Barber and Dutilleux, for example) or in a garland of encores including the perky, tantalizingly brief Bagatelle, her performances are of an exemplary quality. Chandos’s excellent sound, too, makes this a prime issue.'