The second volume of BIS' complete edition of Sibelius' piano music is better than the first in one way. The digital sound is, as before, cool, clean, clear, and crisp, and Folke Gräsbeck's performances are again polished, professional, and persuasive, but the music itself here is generally better than in the first volume. That would not be very difficult, since most of the pieces in the first volume were either youthful works or transcriptions of works more familiar from the orchestral settings. In the second volume, while ...
Read More
The second volume of BIS' complete edition of Sibelius' piano music is better than the first in one way. The digital sound is, as before, cool, clean, clear, and crisp, and Folke Gräsbeck's performances are again polished, professional, and persuasive, but the music itself here is generally better than in the first volume. That would not be very difficult, since most of the pieces in the first volume were either youthful works or transcriptions of works more familiar from the orchestral settings. In the second volume, while there are still many transcriptions along with lots of salon pieces, there is also Sibelius' best original music for solo piano: the three sonatinas from 1912, dark works that partake of the same haunted atmosphere as the composer's contemporaneous Fourth Symphony. Sadly, the three sonatinas take up less than 20 minutes of these five discs' nearly six hours of playing time, and the remainder of the music, while better than the music on the first volume, is still minor and often...
Read Less
