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Infodad

Sometimes the sheer quality of music-making makes a disc worth having even if the repertoire is on the light side and scarcely unfamiliar. Zeynep Ucbasaran and Sergio Gallo are such a wonderful piano-four-hands team that their new Divine Art offering of music by Liszt and Milhaud, with a few shorter works thrown in to fill out the disc, is a genuine pleasure. This is true even though the CD is rather oddly arranged: it has a distinct Faustian focus, but with material scattered somewhat arbitrarily.

The two comparatively substantial Liszt works are heard first; then the three short ones by Dvořák; then the arrangement of O nuit d’amour from Gounod’s Faust; then the pleasant little Berceuse by Godard (1849-1895), that composer’s best-known work; then the Bizet; then Gounod’s Faust again, the opera’s famous waltz this time; and finally the delightfully jazzy Milhaud work, a piece more on the scale of Liszt’s. Ucbasaran and Gallo seem very much at home in the piano-four-hands material here, playing everything sure-handedly (so to speak) and complementing each other in exactly the right way to make these versions of the works as effective as possible, even if none comes across quite as well as in their more-familiar orchestral guise. The Liszt pieces are standouts: Der nächtliche Zug is far less familiar than Der Tanz un der Dorfschenke, better known as Mephisto Waltz No. 1, but both are excellently illustrative of their material (drawn from a Faust verse drama, not from Goethe’s version) and played very impressively.

The more-lyrical short pieces also come across quite well: Slavonic Dance No. 2, Godard’s Berceuse, and the Gounod waltz. Where the performances pale a bit is in the brighter and more-upbeat or more-intense material: Slavonic Dances Nos. 1 and 8 could use more verve, the Carmen overture has less exoticism and menace than it can possess, and Milhaud’s often-silly foray into distinctly jazz-inflected composition really needs more insouciance and faster pacing than it gets here. The absence of familiar orchestral touches is also felt especially acutely in the Bizet and Milhaud works, in which the instrumentation is responsible for a considerable amount of the effect and effectiveness of the music.

Ucbasaran and Gallo make a formidable piano-four-hands team, and the quality of their playing will be enough to endear this recording to pianists and to listeners who enjoy hearing the piano played with considerable aplomb, if not always with abandon.