Käbi Laretei’s discs are themed. I won’t
reprise the brief biography of the Tallinn-born ex-wife of Ingmar
Bergman that I wrote in my review of
another of her Proprius discs. This one, dating from 1994,
a good seventeen years after the earlier record, takes as its
point of departure, as it were, exile. As she is an exile, Swedish
resident but having escaped from Estonia during the Second World
War, so were the composers represented here. Some of the upheavals
were more or less traumatic and some were, like Field’s perhaps
not quite an exile but the point is made. It’s a good opportunity
to embrace a wide range of composers and to construct a balanced
and imaginative programme.
The best things here are the Hindemith, Bartók
and the two pieces by Almqvist and Sumera. Elsewhere I find the
faults that rather beset that earlier disc reappear. She certainly
has a feel for Rachmaninov and the concentration and precision
for Hindemith, whose pieces from Ludus Tonalis are miniatures
that bring out the very best in her imagination and precision.
She seems to me to be most comfortable in music that is not overtly
romantic – the voicings in the Chopin C sharp Nocturne are very
confused – but rather in music that relies on compression or in
atmospheric music. I especially admired the elliptical otherness
she finds in the Almqvist and the insistence and treble glint
of the recent-ish Sumera piece.
The notes are her own and the sound, both of
the piano and recording, is a vast improvement on the earlier
disc.
Jonathan Woolf
Käbi
Laretei (piano)