Interest in Moishei Vainberg has been growing, with several of his symphonies and other pieces available on record. Now here comes this set of suites from a full-length ballet of 1955. The story, by Alexey Tolstoy, is rather a jumbled one concerning a troupe of puppets, with at their centre the Pinocchio/Petrushka figure of Buratino (the note claims this name as a nonsense jumble of the Russian words for borax and slime, but burattino is simply Italian for puppet). It gives Vainberg the chance for plenty of short pieces, 26 of them here, many lasting as little as a minute or two, and hence the need to characterize or depict quickly and wittily. This he does, if not with the sardonic swiftness of his revered Shostakovich, at any rate deftly and often quite amusingly. There is a dance for Pierrot with a sleazy saxophone, a noble-minded but somewhat eccentric tortoise, a march for a manic firefly, a solo for an unappealing rat, and a beautiful Adagio, the longest number in the score, in which Vainberg touches on a deeper lyrical vein. It is all quite lightly and engagingly done, and neatly played here by Ermler and the Bolshoi orchestra.

JW
(From: Gramophone, April 1995)