On track: Pianists charm and shimmer

By WILLIAM DART

Japanese pianist Ayako Uehara won the Tchaikovsky International Competition in 2002, and a solo recital of the works by that composer is nicely appropriate for her recording debut.

While others might have looked to the more familiar Liszt and Chopin, Uehara has given us music that has been unjustly overlooked by too many pianists.

Half the album comprises salon pieces, charming trifles, with Uehara catching the plaintive lyricism that is often at their core.

Nevertheless, the well-known Humoresque is a bracing troika ride and the Valses are all heady capriciousness.

The Dumka of Opus 59, a favourite of Lang Lang, offers a bigger vista and the challenge to go with it. Uehara's refinement of tone and ineffable lightness of touch wins the day.

Almost half the album is taken up with the composer's great G major Sonata, a monster of a work, difficult to get fingers around and even more difficult to sustain in terms of its musical argument.

Uehara does both, from an imposing Allegro that never lets up, to a mercurial will-o'-the-wisp Scherzo.

Road Movies, the new album of music by American composer John Adams, mostly involves piano, with four works shared by Nicolas Hodges and Rolf Hind while violinist Leila Josefowicz and pianist John Novacek take on the title piece, a sonata in all but name.

The mood hovers between shimmer and glare in Road Movies, particularly in the final movement, 40% Swing, where Gershwin seems to be caught in the minimalist whirl.

Of the solo piano works, China Gates is an understated companion piece to the full-scale Phrygian Gates, the volatile course of which is fearlessly navigated by Hind.

The newest solo piece, American Beserk, with a title from Philip Roth and more than a nod in the direction of jazz and rock, is a wild child of a piece, unpredictable, skittish, a work of fury and infuriation.

Finally, Hind and Hodges get the chance to work together on two pianos in the 1996 Hallelujah Junction. In this exemplary Nonesuch recording, Hallelujah becomes a trippy, chattering trance experience that will produce a glow in even the most cautious of listeners.

* Ayako Uehara plays Tchaikovsky (EMI Classics 57719); John Adams, Road Movies (Nonesuch 79699)