Gramophone recommends Benjamin Grosvenor CD
Bryce Morrison reviews Benjamin Grosvenor’s CD ‘This & That’ in April’s edition of Gramophone Magazine. The release is also chosen as a ‘Gramophone recommends’ CD.
‘...these performances by 17-year-old Benjamin Grosvenor exhibit a skill and talent not heard since Kissin’s teenage Russian debut. Even the most outlandish difficulties are tossed aside not just as child’s play but with a seemingly endless poetic finesse and resource.
Kapustin’s busy études are a gift for a pianist of such stylistic know-how and dazzling agility, while two Scarlatti sonatas are given with a haunting tonal haze and a brio respectively that would startle Martha Argerich herself (a pianist forever associated with the thrumming guitars of the D minor Sonata). The first book of Albéniz’s Iberia follows with every note of, for example, the labyrinthine patterning of “El Puerto” made to speak with a wholly personal poetry and projection. Then there is Moszkowski’s scintillating faux-Spanish salon charmer given as to the manner born, a mischievous wink here, an insinuating aside there. Grosvenor’s Chopin on the other hand is so elegantly understated as to suggest already a natural keyboard aristocrat, and a couple of Cziffra arrangements and the Gershwin-Grainger “Love Walked In” provide dazzling and seductive encores. To call such playing that of a master-pianist will invite accusation of exaggeration and hyperbole – but what else can I say?’
Bryce Morrison
This & That was also reviewed in International Piano Magazine January/February 2010.
