The Hungarian Endre Hegedus here completes his Miaskovsky cycle; Murray McLachlan has meanwhile completed his for Olympia with the last three sonatas (Nos. 7–9) plus an assortment of miniatures ((CD) OCD252). The contrast of their approaches to the relatively academic First Sonata of 1907–10 and the relatively modernist Fourth of 1924 is again as I outlined it in my review of Hegedus's two previous discs (10/90). That is to say, the Hungarian supplies the forcefulness and command the Scotsman lacks while the latter conveys the greater sense of urgency. Neither abandons himself to the musical drama in such a way as to make a truly compelling case for Miaskovsky. Yes, there are numerous echoes of Glazunov, Scriabin and early Prokofiev in his piano writing, but there is also a sense of struggle and a wistfulness to his search for individuality, and these can be far more movingly expounded than they are here. So gratitude for the chance to hear this by no means negligible music is tempered by frustration that it is made to sound so comparatively earthbound. Decent recording quality from Marco Polo.

Gramophone, November 1993

Miaskovsky's sonatas are, quite sensibly, grouped by many writers including this disc's annotator, David Nelson. However stylistic issues are clouded by the composer's inclination to revise in later years when the romantic motes and clouds had cleared from his vocabulary. The last three sonatas - all from 1949 have a simple, folk-naïf air. The early sonatas, like the early symphonies, inhabit climes frequented by Scriabin and Rachmaninov and, up to a point, by Medtner.

Is there a certain jerkiness rather than fluency in Hegedüs's version of the First Sonata? I think so. The first movement is a moderato assai and it rather clangs and clatters. The venue for the recording has changed and not for the better. While there is a closer approach to the listener it tends to claustrophobia. The First Sonata's finale is dense, a thicket of pianistic challenges: peremptory and craggy - typical of the first three symphonies.

In the Fourth Sonata Miaskovsky pushes out the limits of his harmonic language experimenting in candid dissonance: a Mussorgskian take on Schoenberg - pecking, hectoring, unrelenting. In this he makes common cause with the Russian modernists like Mossolov and Goedicke. The Sarabanda andante is a macabre goblin pavane.

The series of three discs (a joint project with Records International) sits Cinderella-like, as it has for a decade now, in the Marco Polo catalogue. It had the misfortune to be issued at the same time as Olympia's cycle. Olympia (with pianist Murray McLachlan - now championing the piano concertos and solo music of Erik Chisholm) outpointed Marco Polo on playing time with its discs covering all the sonatas plus a selection from the more than one hundred character pieces. The Olympias play for 74.27 OCD214, 73.27 OCD217, 74.05 OCD252. It is time for the Hegedüs cycle to move from the Marco Polo list to Naxos.

Rob Barnett