December 3rd, 2014
“It’s wonderful to hear a pianist with Kozhukhin’s gifts for playing big Russian repertoire devoting himself with such incredible enjoyment… love and affection to this incredibly inventive music.”
“So poised: his sense of rhythm, his sense of space between the notes, his puckish sense of humour… the whole disc… is unalloyed pleasure.”
BBC Radio 3, CD Review, 29 November 2014
Brahms: Fantasies No. 1 in D minor
“In Beethoven anniversary year, there will probably be many more “Moonlight”s, meaning the Sonata, than the real thing (though we’ve been lucky to see the crescent in close conjunction with Venus these past two nights). Not many pianists would dare to place it at the beginning of a programme. Denis Kozhukhin’s paradoxically no-nonsense poetry meant that a constant sense of motion culminated in the whirlwind of the finale, a steady move towards implosion mirrored in the piano transcription of Ravel’s La Valse at the end of the programme. In between came perfection in the form of pure song from Schubert and Grieg.”
