Konstantin Scherbakov has been working his way through the copious output of the Polish-American pianist and composer Leopold Godowsky (1870-1938) for 15 years. This is the 13th disc in his Marco Polo series, and it pairs six of Godowsky’s original pieces for left hand alone, with 11 of the arrangements and paraphrases. Though Godowsky hoped that his posthumous reputation would rest on his achievements as a composer, his own music continues to languish. He’s remembered now as one of the last virtuosi in the great 19th-century pianistic tradition, and perhaps also for the 53 Studies that he composed on Chopin’s Studies, pieces that remain among the most fiendishly demanding ever written. Hints of that delight in transcendental virtuosity for its own sake may not be so obvious in the six left-hand pieces, which most often sound like off-cuts of Rachmaninov, but certainly come through in the arrangements, such as the Momento Capriccioso, based on Weber, and Godowsky’s versions of two pieces by Albéniz, while the big finale, the rather raucous Symphonic Metamorphoses on Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus constantly ratchets up the bravura demands. Scherbakov is equal to everything the music throws at him, even if occasionally he seems a little strait-laced, though you’re unlikely to want to hear much of the disc very often.
