The choice of items is certainly intelligent: all four pieces demand virtuoso techniques from both players, but also something more. Mourja is as well armed a fiddler as you can find, and his secure, incisive bowing is heard to advantage at the start of the Schnittke second movement, but one can also admire the way he sets the sparky off against the lyrical, the dancelike against the ruminative, with Rozanova matching him in range of colour and accuracy. The Szymanowski also benefits from a liberal helping of un-Cartesian passion. I have a few quibbles about their freedom with Ravel's markings in Tzigane, such as Mourja's inserted piano in the opening paragraph and the delay in the diminuendo at fig. 25, it's not on the second bar of the Meno vivo, but on the piano's descending trait. Harder, and more effective. But then it doesn't seem as though Ravel ever set much store by this piece, which he wrote really for fun, so it probably doesn't do to be too fussy. The Sonata, though, is a quite different matter, and here the deformations of dynamics and especially of tempo are more than unfortunate. Performers should note that the only two changes of tempo within movements both come in the last eight bars of the first movement. Elsewhere, all is implacability, or should be. Here the tempo quickens through the blues movement before slowing disastrously at the end, and the first 10 bars of the finale are then ruined by sentimental little ritardandos at the ends of phrases. If I were world dictator I should have the letters RKB printed at the top of every Ravel score: Ravel Knew Best.

Roger Nichols
Gramophone, October 2000