Visions fugitives is the second solo recital by Anna Gourari for ECM New Series, and it sets the complete cycle of Prokofiev's twenty miniatures beside Medtner and Chopin. Gourari had made her label debut in 2012 with Canto Oscuro, a programme centred on Bach and the Baroque. Here she turns to Russian music of the early twentieth century and to one of the great Romantic sonatas. Pianists such as Richter and Rubinstein recorded selections from the Prokofiev, but few have presented the whole set, as Charles Pope Jr. pointed out on Concertonet.
Gourari was born in Kazan and trained in the Russian piano tradition. In 1994 she won the Clara Schumann Piano Competition, where Alexis Weissenberg, a member of the jury, described her playing as "almost mystical". The album was recorded in October 2013 at the Historischer Reitstadel in Neumarkt, with Stephan Schellmann as engineer and Manfred Eicher as producer. Paul Griffiths wrote the English liner notes and Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich the German ones.
Prokofiev wrote the Visions fugitives op. 22 between 1915 and 1917, and most of the twenty pieces last under two minutes. Their moods swing from lyrical to sardonic and from grotesque to calm. The tempo markings track those changes, from Ridicolosamente and Feroce to the harp-like Pittoresco (Arpa) and the closing Lento irrealmente. Medtner's Fairy Tale in F minor op. 26/3, one of his skazki, stands at the centre of the disc as a short rhapsodic narrative. Chopin's Sonata No. 3 in B minor op. 58 (1844) closes the programme. Its Beethoven-inspired opening movement runs some fourteen minutes, and its Largo sounds like a funeral song.
Writing on MusicWeb International in 2015, Dominy Clements compared her Prokofiev with recordings by Richter, Gilels and the composer himself, and concluded: "None of these are as beautiful as Anna Gourari in this work." He heard her approach as more Francophile and elegant than usual, with the influence of Debussy fully acknowledged, and found her Chopin less aggressive than Kissin's, with more room for soft dynamics. In de Volkskrant, Frits van der Waa wrote that her "intense legato" makes the piano "pliable and smooth as velvet".
CD edition of ECM New Series 2384, first released on 7 November 2014.
