This final volume in Nicholas Walker’s much-admired survey of the complete solo piano music of Balakirev includes the composer’s famous work for piano, Islamey, an exotic and ultra-virtuoso oriental tale. Also featured are previously unpublished and unrecorded miniatures – pieces that are both poetic and, in the case of the Elegy on the Death of a Mosquito, witty. Transcriptions of Glinka are included, and Walker has arranged Balakirev’s passionate and sensual symphonic poem Tamara for solo piano, recreating textures redolent of the composer’s own piano style. He also plays Au Jardin, an Idyll-Étude of rapt beauty and tenderness.
