Press
09. 04. 2010
Delving into Variety
News from the world of keyboards: Arcadi Volodos and Anika Vavic devote themselves to a very colorful repertoire
... The Vienna-based Serbian pianist Anika Vavic also goes for variety on her new CD (released by Gramola). Beethoven, Schumann, Chopin and Prokofiev are present, and their different characters are approached by way of their special features. Schumann's Kreisleriana - apart from the second part (Horovitz, for example, is about two minutes faster here - are played at a pleasant clip, conveying romantic fury with his overflowing lines, but without abandoning the appropriate tone of longing. Nothing is artificially charged with emotion here, for example the fourth part is kept in a mood of contemplative clarity, only to throw the leaping construction of motifs in the fifth part into greater relief. Here, somebody is paying attention to details without losing sight of the work's entirety. This is equally evident in Beethoven's Sonata No. 7 in D-Major, Op. 10/3, marked by comical cheerfulness in the first movement and leading into darkness immediately thereafter. Still: it might make sense to devote oneself to only one composer the next time. It might lend the expressive power even more intensity.
Translation: Alexa Nieschlag