The Van Cliburn International Piano Competition is alive and well. For, if too few of its previous major prize-winners have gone on to confirm their early status, this exceptionally well presented and recorded set tells us that 1993 was a vintage year. A whole record is rightly devoted to Italy's Simone Pedroni (first prize) who shows, with classic strength and maturity, that it is possible to invest every nook and cranny of Mussorgsky's Pictures with vivid and imaginative life without recourse to wilful idiosyncrasy or distortion (I am thinking of RCA's recent reissue of Horowitz's extraordinary conflation—to be reviewed). "Baba-yaga", most deeply feared of all Russian witches, is truly feroce, the concluding "Great Gate at Kiev" exultantly maestoso, and, throughout, Pedroni's towering technical resource resolves every difficulty with magisterial ease. He is no less convincing in Rachmaninov's Second Sonata (played, alas, in the composer's still fashionable revision), and if his performance of Hindemith's lurid 1922 Suite is less authoritative than Richter's (Decca, 3/93)—his "Ragtime" less trenchant, the tenutos in "Boston" less agonizing or distended—it is still highly impressive.

-- Gramophone [4/1994]