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Fanfare

On her debut release, young Italian pianist Stefania Argentieri makes a strong impression with both her technical confidence and her interpretive flexibility, providing confident, high-contrast performances that are more varied in perspective than those of many competitors in this repertoire. She certainly knows how to mine the Romantic underpinnings of this music (listen to the First Sonata or the second theme in the first movement of the Sixth)—and she can sing out Prokofiev’s lyricism with disarming sweetness (exemplified by the caress of the opening of the Amoroso that closes the Cinderella set). But there’s nothing weak about the playing: the climaxes are solid, the technical challenges surmounted (try her biting account of the last Etude).

At times, though, she flaunts her virtues to such an extent that the music is undermined. Take her flexibility: it’s refreshing to hear Prokofiev released from the rhythmic tightness that often imprisons his music; but as is evident from the very first band on the disc (“Cinderella and the Prince”), the extremity of Argentieri’s rubato can swerve into fussiness. Similarly, her technical facility, which allows her to etch out all the details on the page, often leads her to engulf us with secondary material (the radiance of “Cinderella Goes to the Ball” is certainly blocked by the excess of the figurations). Add to this her preference for spacious tempos and her coolness toward Prokofiev’s irony (for instance, in the second movement of the Sixth) and you have performances that, too often, turn insistent in a way that sacrifices long-range trajectory for momentary emphasis and that consequently betray the music’s basic spirit. Certainly, her assault on the Suggestion diabolique, thrilling as it is, lacks the paradoxically deft and claws-out pounce of the composer’s own feline reading. In sum, there’s a lot of fine playing here, especially in the First Sonata and sporadically in the Etudes, and Argentieri shows herself to be a newcomer well worth your attention. As a contribution to the bursting Prokofiev discography, though, especially in the Sixth, she’s not yet a major contender.