A clear first choice in this repertoire and heartening confirmation of the young Vadim Repin’s considerable violinistic skills. Tension sets in right from the First Sonata’s opening bars: the tone is bright, sweet, tremulous and warmly expressive, while the music’s sombre mood is precisely gauged. In terms of sound, Repin cuts a profile somewhere between the late Oleg Kagan and the best representatives of the Franco-Belgian school; he phrases with considerable sensitivity and his attack in the work’s faster episodes – the Allegro brusco’s outer sections and most of the finale – has a Heifetzian ‘edge’. Nervous energy is also much in evidence, while the Andante – one of Prokofiev’s most haunting creations – has a wistfully distracted air that Boris Berezovsky matches with some notably perceptive piano playing. The Allegrissimo finale, too, is arresting: deftly fingered, percussively insistent and with a truly heartfelt projection of the work’s tender closing phrase.
One of Repin’s leading qualities is his obvious interpretative sincerity; nowhere does one sense the suave affectation that afflicts some of his contemporaries, a fact that registers with particular force in the Second Sonata’s opening Moderato. Here lesser artists often sound either matter-of-fact or uninterested, and even superior ones (I’m thinking in particular of Mullova and Milstein) opt for relative coolness. Repin and Berezovsky, on the other hand, are both tender and relaxed; phrasal ‘crossfire’ and keen inflexion keep sparks flying in the Scherzo (witness the central section’s leaping figurations at 2'00''), the Allegretto leggiero e scherzando is appropriately limpid, and although the finale could have swaggered rather more freely, there are magical moments to spare – especially from 2'52'' where Berezovsky effects a perfectly graded diminuendo and Repin takes up the line as if on the edge of a sigh. Both players achieve an impressive range of colour throughout and the five delightful Melodies make for a welcome sequence of encores. A first-rate programme, very well recorded.
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