Search - Modest Mussorgsky, Alexander Scriabin, Sergey Prokofiev :: Mussorgsky: Pictures At an Exhibition/Scriabin: Sonata #2/Prokofiev: Sonata #8 - Boris Giltburg

Moscow-born Israeli pianist Boris Giltburg is a young virtuoso with a mature approach to the music he plays on this debut recital. Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition has been recorded by many keyboard giants, but Giltburg easily holds his own with a performance that expertly characterizes each of the vignettes and the final Great Gate of Kiev, so often turned into an exercise in bombast, is here a grand structure whose imposing bulk has the majesty Mussorgsky surely intended. The Scriabin Sonata is a two movement fantasia that enables Giltburg to demonstrate his impressive poetic resources. The Prokofiev Eighth Sonata, the last of his wartime trilogy, is perhaps the greatest of the composer?s nine. Giltburg here shows his sense of structure and holds the long opening movement together so attention never flags through one of Prokofiev's most moving and beautiful essays in nostalgia for a lost past. In the finale, Gilturg whips up a virtuosic storm. So this is an auspicious debut recital, but more than that, first-rate performances of three major works. The engineering is superb as well. --Dan Davis