Rhapsodic
George Gershwin (1898-1937)
Rhapsody in Blue (1924)
Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943)
Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op 43 (1934)
Fanya Lin (piano)
Polish Wieniawski Philharmonic Orchestra of Lublin/Theodore Kuchar
rec. 2022, Philharmonic Hall, Lublin, Poland
Navona Records NV6573 [43]

This imaginative coupling looks like a natural, but these performers haven’t quite made the case for it.

The best thing about Fanya Lin’s playing of the Rhapsody in Blue is the weighted tone with which she projects her clearly articulated runs: lots of pianists bring these off well, but not with a comparable sense of firm support. Elsewhere, she indulges some eccentricities: a bit of honky-tonk dotting of the straight eighth notes at 8:12 — which is not standard practice — and a teasing of the later staccatos from a very slow start. Aside from those moments, however, she does nothing out of the ordinary.

Where American orchestras inject a rambunctious energy into the tuttis, Kuchar and company sound measured, even a bit stately — not the adjective usually associated with Gershwin. Otherwise, the Lublin orchestra plays creditably, with nice blending. The poised, stylish clarinet solo brings some lift to the repeated motifs; elsewhere, quirky woodwind timbres provide character. The soft-edged strings in the Big Lyric Tune threaten to ooze, but only threaten. It’s hardly the players’ fault that the posh sounds of Maazel’s Clevelanders, on the last version I heard (Decca, with Ivan Davis the surprisingly sensitive pianist), are beyond their grasp.

From the forthright orchestral opening, everyone seems on happier ground in the Paganini Rhapsody. Lin here adopts a lighter but still solid tone. The seemingly endless run of the scherzando Fifteenth Variation goes with an astonishing lapidary finesse; elsewhere, the runs and figurations are fetching, though they never quite sparkle or scintillate. Disappointingly, Lin is pallid in the yearning Eighteenth Variation — the lightly swinging two-bar orchestral motifs are the highlight here — but she returns to life in the following one. Kuchar also draws a lovely atmosphere from the sparse, subdued meno mosso (Variation 7). In the Tempo di minuetto (Variation 12), the waltzy cellos and expressive clarinet are warmly inflected; the Fourteenth Variation, with the trumpet triplets, has a nice buoyancy.

A lightly cushioned acoustic helps the string tone to blossom. The duration is short for an actual CD, though streaming listeners may not care. The Digipak is compact, though notes both on the artists and the works are minimal.

Stephen Francis Vasta

stevedisque.wordpress.com/blog

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