SHURA CHERKASSKY. PIANO RECITAL. Shura Cherkas sky (piano). Philips Fourfront 0 4FM10002 (12 in., 27s. 11d.).

Stravinsky. Petrushka—Three movements. Bala- kirev. Islamey. Rodney Bennett. Five Etudes for solo piano. BartOk. Sonata (1926).

With this recital, Philips launches an interesting new series. Unlike many medium-priced offerings from top companies, the majority of records carrying the `Fourfrone label will not be reissues but rather performances either brand new or else new to this country. The four fronts of the title in fact confront the organ-loft, electronics, the spoken word and musica diversa—and it is into this last category that Cherkassky finds a place by reason of his programme. Richard Rodney Bennett's Five Studies for piano have never been recorded before, and therz seems to be no other version of Stravinsky's Three Move ments from Petrushka currently available. Balakirev and Barta have not come in for much recent attention. Nor, for that matter, has Cherkassky himself—as a recording artist. On the concert platform, of course, he is one of the best known names from Horsham to Hong Kong. But as the sleeve-note indicates, he is a pupil of Hofmann—which is to say the inheritor of a "spontaneously wayward" tradition perhaps better enjoyed live than recorded. On this record, however, there are no idiosyncracies likely to prove impossible to live with. The Stravinsky and the Bennett pieces were at some time or other studied under the composers.

In his Five Studies, completed in 1964, Bennett follows in the line of Chopin and Debussy in dissolving the sterner implications of the title into real music. No. 2 is a delicate flurry for the right hand alone, No. 4 a bold declamation for the left. All are highly complex in rhythm and strikingly imaginative in sonority. Cherkassky plays them with such fluency, clarity and sensitivity that only Beckmessers will worry about two or three little instances where the composer's extraordinarily precise dynamic indications could have been yet more punctiliously observed. BartOk's Sonata is also done with outstanding clarity and some telling details of scoring, though I'm not sure that its style and character come across at maximum voltage the whole time. For instance, tension is not screwed up to the full in the first movement's development because of insufficiently insistent reiterated sforzandos. The slow movement, while poetic, is arguably a shade too romantically fluid for BartOk's sostenuto e pesante. In the finale, I feel a Hungarian might have made the rhythmic changes more idiomatic—not least in the last 19 bars, where Cherkassky cuts short the allargando to plunge headlong into the vivacissimo.

The Petrushka movements and Islamey are fantastically difficult—and I'm still not convinced that Balakirev is worth all the trouble. In the excitement of the movement on the concert platform I think Cherkassky might perhaps take more risks. Here he is not out to beat speed records. In Petrushka it is the clarity with which he defines and colours every individual note that takes the breath away. You hear asides and countersubjects you have often missed before. You certainly never for a moment feel that the keyboard version is just penny plain after the orchestral original. I know of few other pianists with a comparable palette. The recording captures it all with an admirably faithful transparency. J.O.C.