Jonathan Kuo: Java Dreams album review – young pianist brings unflashy exuberance to complex works

(Rubicon)The Indonesian musician impresses in his debut solo recording of Godowsky’s Java Suite and Stravinsky’s piano arrangement of Petrushka “Who is not at heart a globetrotter?” asked the Lithuanian-born US piano virtuoso and composer Leopold Godowsky in the foreword to his Java Suite, published in 1925 and inspired by what he had heard and seen on a lengthy concert tour of south-east Asia. He intended this 50-minute travelogue to be the first of a series entitled Phonoramas – Tonal Journeys for the Pianoforte, and it’s shame he never got round to writing the others. It’s a fantastically demanding work and an impressive vehicle for the young Indonesian pianist Jonathan Kuo on this, his debut solo recording. Kuo is an appealingly unflashy soloist, capturing the contradictions of a work that has Lisztian scope and yet somehow remains introspective, with a Debussian feeling for sonority. He takes a wide view, shaping the music into long, sweeping phrases, reinforcing the bass notes imperceptibly even while so much is happening higher up the keyboard. The first movement is inspired by the clangorous sounds and pentatonic harmonies of the gamelan; thereafter the episod