Horizons: A Personal Collection of Piano Encores

Andsnes here reveals a hitherto hidden side to his art – the salon charmer. Some of the pieces are favourites from his childhood, though it is not every nine-year-old who has tackled Sibelius’s uncharacteristically jolly ‘Staccato’ Etude or mastered Chopin’s First Impromptu with such fluency and grace. Appealing, too, is the drama and sweep he brings to Liszt’s Liebestraum No 3 (though it will not suit everyone’s taste) and his avoidance of cliché, while the Norwegian’s own transcription of Halvorsen’s Chant de Veslemöy (originally for violin), Ibert’s Le petit âne blanc and Debussy’s Clair de lune are played with a beguil- ing innocence, ravishing tonal finesse and – most important – palpable affection.

Bravura highlights include Gieseking’s effulgent transcription of Richard Strauss’s Ständchen and Smetana’s Am Seegestade (‘By the sea’), reminiscent of Raff’s La fileuse and a rare example of a concert étude that opens in one key (B major) and closes a tone lower! Enterprisingly, Andsnes has tracked down a score of Charles Trénet’s song Coin de rue transcribed by the coyly named ‘Mr Nobody’ whom I have no qualms about outing as none other than Alexis Weissenberg.
The whole recital is superbly recorded. As Andsnes himself says, ‘It’s great to see people walk away from a concert with a smile on their face’. This disc has the same effect.

What these performances also have is a quality that is not always quite so obvious when he is alone on the concert platform – a real sense of enjoyment in playing, and the business of communicating that enjoyment to an audience…The incidental beauties – the articulacy of Andsnes’s left hand is a marvel in itself, for instance – are all part of that, too.