Steven Osborne
is quite a versatile pianist, but he seems to excel, especially in
Debussy
. Here, he offers a selection of mostly late
works that avoid the programmatic context of his earlier years. The leadoff item and main attraction is the set of
12 Etudes
, composed in 1915. The composer said that pianists who attempt them should have formidable hands, and on one hand, they fall into the long tradition of etudes, or studies, designed to improve specific piano skills. On the other, they are deeply abstract, intended not only to hone pianists' abilities to handle intervals and textures but also to explore the structural possibilities of those intervals and textures themselves. They contain a good deal of humor, and here,
goes even beyond
Chopin
, whose etudes exert a good deal of influence on these. Consider the very first etude, called
Pour les cinq doigts
("
For the Five Fingers
") and satirically dedicated to
Carl Czerny
; the five-finger exercises are interrupted by a delightfully insistent chromatic note.
Osborne
excels in catching the intricate, quizzical nature of these pieces, and he is equally good in the three-movement suite
Pour le piano
, almost but not quite neoclassical, and in the even more quizzical
Le plus que lente
. The program ends with some historical oddities that may be a bit of a letdown, but that will attract serious
fans. The
Etudes
and
are not exactly unknown works, but pianists have rarely quite come to grips with them as
does here. This album made classical best-seller lists in the autumn of 2023. ~ James Manheim