Up-and-coming pianist
Marina Staneva
has made unusual choices for her first two album releases. Her first was an
album of Bulgarian music
, reflecting her own background but hardly familiar elsewhere. Now, for a follow-up, she chose not major repertory sonatas but works by
Federico Mompou
, a 20th century Catalonian composer whose short works are subtle, not particularly virtuosic, and sometimes seeming to recede to the vanishing point.
Staneva
seems to know what she is doing, however, for these are fine
Mompou
performances that will satisfy those who love this composer (the present writer included). Sample the
Variations sur une thème de Chopin
, whose 12 variations have an unusual structure: the music takes on chromatic accretions and then, in the later ones, resolves to a new tonal clarity independent of the original material (from the
Chopin
Prelude in A major, Op. 28, No. 7
).
holds this dynamic confidently in hand. She is equally effective in the
13 Cançons i Danses
pieces in which a tuneful passage is paired with a dance in consistently inventive ways.
catches the faint jazz influences in some of these pieces, and she lets the fundamental simplicity of
's music speak for itself. The album is beautifully and idiomatically recorded at Potton Hall in Suffolk, and it serves notice of a major emerging talent. ~ James Manheim