Webern: Variations, Op. 27

“George Tsontakis's Man of Sorrows is a six-movement mediation of nearly 40 minutes' duration on Christ's crucifixion. Brilliantly written for the keyboard and scintillatingly orchestrated, it reminded me of Messiaen's Turangalîla… The piece if superbly played and recorded, patently sincere and easily assimilable.” BBC Music Magazine, Proms 2007 ****

“In an age when great, good, bad and indifferent recordings rub shoulders in a chaotic marketplace, Piotr Anderszewski's playing stands out like a beacon of light and quality. His is the most powerful and distinctive of musical voices, a rare combination of purity and adventure. In Bach's Sixth English Suite his intelligence is as razorsharp as his technique is immaculate. What an endless play of light and shade he brings to the Prelude, what buoyancy to the First Gavotte! His varied registration in the Second Gavotte is central to a deeply imaginative response to Bach; so too is the uncanny stillness he evokes in the Sarabande or the sinister momentum of the final nail-biting, fiercely chromatic Gigue.
In Beethoven's Op 110 he gives us a scrupulously modern equivalent of legendary recordings of the past (by Solomon and Myra Hess, for example), reawakening our sense of the otherworldly, the speculative and mystical in this late masterpiece. His poise and tonal translucency in the opening Moderato are enviable, and so is his explosive sense of contrast in the following Allegromolto. And if for some his attention to detail will seem microscopic and over-refined, others will surely rejoice in a concentration and integrity that are at once exhausting and exhilarating.
Exceptionally self-critical, Anderszewski once left the stage during a performance of the Webern Variations at the Leeds Piano Competition, unhappy and disgruntled with his playing.
Here, even he must have felt a sense of achievement, with his precise and deeply sensitive performance.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010

“Uchida's distinctive musical personality and outstanding technique make her Schoenberg, Berg and Webern well worth hearing, however many other version of these works you have in your collection. She brings a marvellous spontaneity and sense of drama to the more overtly romantic compositions here – Berg's Sonata and Schoenberg's Op 11 Pieces. This certainly isn't one of those accounts of the Berg where you question the composer's wisdom in marking the first section for repeat. As for the Schoenberg, never has one been more aware of this music's closeness in time and spirit to the cataclysmic world of the monodrama Erwartung. Uchida's earlier recording of Op 11 was warmly praised, and this one is no less accomplished. Elsewhere, her relish for strongly juxtaposed contrast risks occasional over-emphasis, as in the third of the Op 19 pieces, and the virtues of more sharply articulated playing in this repertory are demonstrated on Peter Hill's admirable super-bargain-price Naxos disc. His account of Webern's Variations is exemplary in its clarity and feeling for line; yet Uchida manages to suggest deeper links with more romantic perspectives without in any way traducing the music's inherent radicalism.
Links with romanticism are even more explicit in the texture and thematic character of Schoenberg's Concerto, and this performance places the work firmly in the tradition of Liszt and Brahms. Not even Pierre Boulez can bring ideal lucidity to the occasionally lumpy orchestral writing, but the performance as a whole, with excellent sound, has an attractive sweep and directness of utterance.” Gramophone Classical Music Guide, 2010