Yulianna Avdeeva caused great excitement when she won the 2010 Chopin Competition in Warsaw – the first woman to do so since Martha Argerich in 1965. But in Britain at least, her subsequent recital appearances haven’t quite confirmed her stature, and this release doesn’t either. Of course there are some thrilling things in her playing, flashes of technical brilliance and moments that take off ecstatically, but there are other passages in which she seems intent on bludgeoning the music into submission, using a blunt instrument when a rapier would be more effective. It gets wearing after a while. In Schubert’s Three Pieces, D946, the variation of colour and touch that’s needed in what adds up to a sonata-length span simply isn’t there, while Prokofiev’s Seventh Sonata begins at white heat but then fails to go anywhere musically, so the sheer violence of the playing is all that’s left. The Chopin Preludes veer between lyrical spontaneity and mannered point-making, so that the whole set never flows easily. Disappointing.
