REVIEW – CD DECCA
Anna Kravtchenko, piano talent at the service of Liszt
This is an important recording of the Liszt Sonata, which for many young pianists has become a pretext for showing off their muscles, a “stress test” that has frustrated the poetic significance of this original and highly premonitory masterpiece. Instead, Kravtchenko totally personalises its complexity, experiencing it as a saga in which the themes-characters live, interweave, become transformed, driven by a narrative thrust generated by a language that is one with the form itself. A personal but authentic reading in which she narrates with her own pronunciation, adjusts the pauses, her inflections always nourished with beautiful sound that avoids pompous temptation. The same is true for her picturesque evocation of the Rhapsody, where she vivifies the virtuoso challenge with utmost lightness, and for her sensitive recreation of the Lieder, where the vocal line seems to exist in a poetic frame of dreamy, subtly passionate beauty. (Gian Paolo Minardi)