“Études-Tableaux – Rachmaninov
Over faltering, metrically bumpy marching steps: as though chiseled, a syncopated melody full of internal tension. As soon as the first bars of the F minor Etude op. 33 No. 1 begin, it becomes clear that an extraordinary pianistic personality is at work here.

This music can seldom be heard to be so embossed with differentiation, metalically sprung and dynamic as under the hands of the Russian Zlata Chochieva. Her compatriot Sergei Rachmaninov would certainly have enjoyed this playing. The multi-layered, broad, and full-bodied lines of his piano music demand performers who are able to transcend technical difficulties, and to sweep them into a realm of blazing autumnal colours. The textures of these virtuoso etudes, which appeared from 1914, can give rise to moments of cosmopolitan vitality and a deep, genuinely felt, Slavic-toned melancholy, light tonal lyricism, and a sometimes opulently expansive splendour. It is part of the interpreter’s art to realise a lively balance – and Zlata Chochieva is constantly active in the quivering nervous network of the music.
The composer’s etudes have, on occasion, been criticised for a lack of any remarkable inspiration. Zlata Chochieva’s playing, however, relegates any such suggestions to clear falsehoods. With energetic accuracy and impeccable technique, this wonderful musician manages to open up the inner vastness of a fascinatingly lively world and make it transparent. Last but not least, the persuasiveness of her interpretations is also based on an unerring feeling for the architectural disposition of the pieces, which forms the basis for the occasional almost improvisatory gesture of blazing passion.”
Helmut Rohm

“A famous pianist (I shan’t say who) to whom I was speaking recently said I really should hear this young Russian pianist Zlata Chochieva in the Chopin Etudes. ‘It is,’ averred my informant, ‘the greatest I’ve ever heard.’ Quite a claim.

I’ve now listened to this disc several times and all I can say is that in each of the 27 studies Chochieva comes as close as anyone to how I hear the ideal performance in my head, or as I would wish to play them had I the ability to do so. Right from the opening C major study, as in many others, she finds some extramusical narrative beyond the text that I find profoundly moving. Taken as read are a superlative technique and an ideal recorded sound (from engineer Peter Arts). No details are overlooked yet without drawing undue attention to them: note the staccato markings of the A minor study (richly voiced by Chochieva, the left hand sounds almost like a plucked string bass) and also in the second subject of No 3, a good example of the meltingly lovely tone Chochieva produces. No 4, so often tossed off as a finger sprint (Richter, Cziffra), is given room to breathe while still being played presto and con fuoco.
I could go on picking out highlights from each study – the question-and-answer voicing in No 9, the subtle rubato in Op 25 No 1, the infamous studies in thirds and sixths in which, simultaneously, Chochieva reminds us of Chopin the contrapuntalist – moments and passages which made me listen afresh to these familiar works and, in some cases, hear things of which I had been previously unaware. The greatest on disc? I don’t know; but it is certainly one of the most consistently inspired, masterfully executed and beautiful-sounding versions I can recall.”

Jeremy Nicholas