Sonata's fail to roll me over

WITH the distinct exception of Beethoven's sonatas - could anyone suggest otherwise? - I've never been drawn to works which sit me down with one musician and his instrument.

What's more, even though I grew up as the three-minute pop song reached perfection in the 60s and 70s, I've rarely taken to classical collections which present you with a string of compositions which end the moment you begin to pick up their pace and mood.

To choose Leopold Godowsky's Piano Music Volume 4: Triakontameron as the CD for my one-off appearance in this column - a composer I'd never heard about and a form I don't love - might seem strange, then.

But not, perhaps, when a little homework reveals that the Polish-American pianist had long and fruitful associations with Saint-Saens and Tchaikovsky, and the compilation includes pieces temptingly-titled An American Idyll, A Little Tango Rag and The Music-Box - even if the 30 tracks varied in length from 41 seconds (a sketch) to 4mins 24secs (a veritable landscape).

In truth, there are moments to justify my prejudices, and minutes to bury them, the aforementioned among them.

Siberian soloist Konstantin Scherbakov finds it easy to flow from one piece to the next, the common denominator being the waltz time in which Godowsky wrote them all.

If you have in mind something of a Viennese feel, however, think again.

There's little that's light about most of the near hour of recordings, but there is mood bordering on melancholy in some pieces - Lament, unsurprisingly - and abrupt changes of register in others - Resignation, for one - which echoed the thunderstorm brewing over Worcestershire as I listened.

Despite the occasional flash of the exotic, you'd need to be in an optimistic frame of mind if you were coming to this fresh though, to be fair, the composer's elaborate Epilogue version of The Star-Spangled Banner at least conjured thoughts of Gershwin and Barber. And not a moment too soon.

(Marco Polo, DDD 8.223898)