Inmost Heart
Works by JS Bach (arr. Brahms) and Brahms (arr. Busoni and Reger)
Samson Tsoy (piano)
Linn Records CKD752 76:22 mins
Clip: Bach (arr. Brahms) – Chaconne, BWV 10045 (Samson Tsoy)
Samson Tsoy is an active presence on the internet, notable for expanding the frontiers of classical music. He does storytelling residencies at concert halls, collaborates with graphic artists and has performed in a multi-storey car park in Peckham. But he’s best known as the four-hand partner of his real-life partner Pavel Kolesnikov, with whom he has founded the ground-breaking Ragged Music Festival in a socially deprived area of London’s East End.
This album presents him in the unfamiliar – and very welcome – guise of a solo pianist. Focusing on Brahms’s exploration of the Baroque – from the Handel Variations to the note-for-note tracing of Bach’s Chaconne – Tsoy believes the pieces here reflect ‘the spiritual wonder of the art of interpretation’.
And it is indeed a glorious compilation, benefiting hugely from Tsoy’s magic keyboard touch: the tenth Chorale Prelude, Herzlich tut mich verlangen, opens in a luxuriously warm glow. And the album’s centrepiece, the Handel Variations, held me spellbound, with the segues between its very short pieces gliding so smoothly past that the whole work feels like one continuous line of thought. Brisk, grave, pugnacious, seductive or tender, and with the softest ones sanctified with a delicate hint of rubato, each variation is a miniature masterpiece.
While the Busoni arrangements are sustained with persuasive grace, the Ernste Gesänge inhabit a darker territory. The challenge of these works is aesthetic rather than technical – to make their contrapuntal voices sing – and Tsoy’s responses to that challenge are unfailingly beautiful. Michael Church