The Stillness of Arcadi Volodos
When I first encountered a recording by Arcadi Volodos some 26 years ago, it was above all his fabled virtuosity that made an impression. One thinks of his own transcription of Mozart’s Rondo alla turca, or Feinberg’s arrangement of the Scherzo from Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony. Impressive, without question.
But after a quarter of a century of Volodos, I find myself drawing a different conclusion. Behind the pianistic spectacle there was always an exceptional musical imagination, even if, in the early years, it may have been overshadowed by the sensational transcriptions with which he became famous. On his latest recording, devoted to Schubert’s great Gasteiner Sonata, D. 850, that imagination comes to the fore: here is a pianist who can reach fathomless depths with an extraordinary wealth of colour.
That quality sometimes brings to mind the playing of Nikolai Demidenko. This may not be entirely coincidental: Volodos and Demidenko share an important teacher in Dmitri Bashkirov. In both pianists one hears something of a Russian school in which tone, weight, breath and singing legato matter more than outward bravura. Such qualities were introduced into Russia in large part by Adolf von Henselt, a composer who holds a special place at Felix Editions. For me, this gives the recording a wider musical resonance: from Henselt’s nineteenth-century pianism to the sound world of Volodos today.
What makes this Schubert recording so remarkable is its command of stillness and movement. Even in busier passages, the music retains a sense of calm. Volodos shows that a score does not end with what is printed on the page, but only truly comes into being through sound, timing and imagination.
Of Schubert’s five great sonatas, only D. 958 and D. 960 now remain. Let us hope they follow rather sooner, because this recording shows just how remarkable Volodos’s Schubert has become: no less virtuosic than before, but more inward, more concentrated, and perhaps all the more impressive for it.