I confess that I hadn’t heard of Polina Osetinskaya before a review copy of this release arrived in the post, but she is plainly a pianist of a superior order. Her tone is deep and rich, her articulation faultless and her feeling for the pulse of the music she is playing is as natural as breathing – that’s something that cannot be taught. The programme here is basically an admixture of Bach transcriptions for the piano (most of them by Wilhelm Kempff) and Scarlatti sonatas (Bach and Scarlatti having been exact coevals, of course), with the chorale preludes acting as moments of calm between faster pieces. Mind you, Osetinskaya’s tempi are predominantly slow, but that’s dictated by her concern for textural clarity. The Melodiya engineers have given her excellent sound, too. This is someone we’ll be hearing more of.
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