Given his mercurial personality I suppose it’s to be expected that Mikhail Pletnev will sometimes perplex to the same degree as he delights. I’m an admirer: forget received ideas, go along with the boldness of his imagination and be prepared to be challenged by it, and the rewards can be special. From time to time you catch a whiff of shock tactics, true, but these are part of the armoury and, for me, Pletnev’s insights have almost always outweighed the occasional obtrusiveness of manner. I have enjoyed him in Haydn, Mozart, Scarlatti, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Scriabin, and certainly in other Chopin. His B flat minor ‘Funeral March’ Sonata on Virgin Classics (3/95) seems to me superb. But having taken my time over getting to grips with his Chopin here – his first piano recording for DG – I’m disinclined to persevere further. It is a great disappointment.
The playing is certainly amazing: who could be dismissive of virtuosity which launches the Etudes in G flat (Op. 10 No. 5) and G sharp minor (Op. 25 No. 6 – tracks 7 and 8, respectively) as he does and sustains them in such dazzling trajectories? The first, the so-called ‘Black Key’ Etude, goes off like a shot from a gun. Well, no harm, surely, in thrilling to it as a spectacle once in a while – and what sound. Go on to the other Etude in the group, however, the long slow one in C sharp minor from Op. 25 (track 9), for an example of what I dislike about the disc. There, the melody is crooned rather than sung, the line continuously nudged and fussed over as if being treated with a personal brand of performance practice. If you took it down from dictation it would look very different from what Chopin wrote. Not that one is asking for literalness, of course not, but Pletnev’s distortions are a long way from tempo rubato as I understand it. The slow Waltz in A minor, Op. 34 No. 2, is similarly disfigured. The manner is would-be soulful but we are not given the real thing.
It’s not just the slow numbers which distress. Everywhere the effect is of a virtuoso toying with the surface of the music. Surface, I think, is the word – the deftness and play of colour take your breath away but the impressions left behind are expressively light. The slighter pieces such as the E minor Waltz and the Ecossaises (tracks 4 and 5), do not suffer too badly, yet even there one feels they are being patronized; and in the great A flat major Waltz, Op. 34 No. 1, the brilliance and cat-and-mouse manner are heartless.
In the first movement of the B minor Sonata I lose Pletnev completely. At nearly 15 minutes with the repeat of the exposition – and my heart sank when he went back to the beginning – it seems impossibly discursive. Every detail is turned over to see what it can be made to yield; after a while you lose any sense of differentiation, of ‘events’ of any kind. Local harmonic colour is spotlit at the expense of the broader ebb and flow and Chopin’s paragraphs of connected thought disintegrate into rhapsody. We are in a maze. We could be anywhere. Stop it, I want to object – the music is enough.
The Fantasie in F minor is more successful because Pletnev’s projection is not so adrift from the breadth of its harmonic movement; and a sense of engagement with the great power of its narrative, so missing in the sonata, does come across. Here his virtuosity too is better in place, as the servant of the message. DG’s recording is perfectly good, without I think being the equal of the all-Scriabin recital Pletnev did as his last disc for Virgin Classics (10/97). I shall be returning to this new issue to ascertain what it is I may be failing to perceive, but without much hope.'