I'm going to say right off the bat that this woman is the successor to Martha Argerich. In fact, I find her playing more musical, exciting, and compelling than the great Argerich. And I don't mean the "young" Argerich. I mean the one playing today. Okay. I said it and feel better for it.

Anyway, I played these recordings for four or five people who know music and asked them to guess who it was. Two of them said it sounded like Evgeny Kissin (one said Kissin after he's loosened up a bit). One guessed it was Argerich in her youth, and one mistook it for Howard Shelley. Another suggested Michael Pletnev. Not bad. All of them said that they couldn't remember a piano so vivid and musical. Art Dudley, my revered editor, noticed its immediate freshness and "innocence." He asked, ironically, "Doesn't she know she's not supposed to play like that? She's a threat to the piano world!"

Valentina—like her husband Alexei Kuznetsoff, as well as George Vatchnadze and Alexander Korsantyia—studied with one of the world's great pianists, Alexander Toradze, at Indiana University, South Bend. Toradze had been the Martin Professor of Piano there for several years and is fast becoming also one of the world's greatest piano teachers.

What overwhelms the listener is the range of Valentina Lisista's playing. Her Mozart K. 332 is full of the subtlest touches: humor, deep yearning—one of the loveliest sounds you'll ever hear—but her Prokofiev Seventh Sonata is full of huge washes of sound, always musical and lush. I defy you not to smile when you hear her charming Contradances of Beethoven. I frankly have never heard anything quite like it, although there's something of Ingrid Haebler's Schubertian clarity that runs throughout Lisista's playing.

The real technical stunners are Weber's "Rondo Brilliant" on Valentina and the Rossini-Ginzburg "Paraphrase on Figaro's Aria from The Barber of Seville" on Virtuosa Valentina! You'll find the same kind of clarifying brilliance in the most lucid performance of the Prokofiev Seventh I've heard in years, also on Virtuoso Valentina! I cannot remember a more exciting or original version (yes, I said original!) of one of the oldest pianistic warhorses, "Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2" by Liszt, a piece my piano teacher used to quietly state just may be the most exciting ten minutes in Western music. Her Schubert-Liszt songs (six on two records) are definitive and can compare with Vladimir Viardo's performances, a pianist I normally think of as owning this music.

Last Summer, I was fortunate enough to hear this gorgeous young woman at a Mostly Mozart Concert, in which she played the Mozart Triple Concerto with her husband and Alexander Korsantyia, with Gerard Schwarz conducting the orchestra. They made the Pekinel Sisters look like amateurs in their Mozart concerto for two pianos in the first half of the program. But what took everyone by surprise was the pre-concert concert performed by Valentina and her husband. As soon as they began their magnificent performance of the heart-breakingly beautiful Rachmaninoff Suite No. I (Op.5), you could hear about 3,500 people collectively hold their breath. The effect was palpable. In fact, my friend next to me stated: "I've never heard anything like this—that sound is so...beautiful!" (Remember beautiful, musical sound? It's been awhile. I know, but there are some musicians out there who play with such incredible technical brilliance that you don't even notice it. Some say that Dinu Lipatti had that effect on his audience.) The duo then went on to a phenomenally exciting performance of the Liszt Don Juan Fantasy that simply brought the house down.

If you want a record of that performance and much more, get the marvelously recorded Audiofon CD of Valentina & Alexei. Volume 1, on which they also perform a vibrantly lyrical Chopin Rondo. Op. 73, and (the most riveting performance of the lovely Shostakovich Suite, Op.6 that you'll ever hear. I concur with the New York Times critic James R. Oesterich's opinion that this team stole the show right out from under the main attraction. That critic also picked up on the sexuality of Don Juan by stating: "and when they fell together in duet, the voluptuous sensuality was fully worthy of an R-rating."

If you enjoyed this duo's incredible musicality on their first volume of Rachmaninoff, Liszt, and Chopin, you'll possibly relish Valentina & Alexei, Vol. 2 even more Vol. 2 opens up with William Bolcom's delightful Recuerdos, three lovely pieces which are homages to seminal influences on Bolcom's musical imagination: Ernesto Nazareth, Gottschalk, and Ramon Delgado Palicios. All three also show an indebtedness to Bolcom's teacher. Darius Milhaud. The duo plays wonderfully fresh renditions of Weber's "Invitation to the Dance," and Debussy's "En Blanc et Noir." But the piece that steals the show, believe it or not, is the redoubtable Alfred Schniltke's hilarious and simultaneously moving Gogol Suite of 1976, in which the composer plays with Gogolian motifs from his fiction in a way that is totally original (I have yet to hear anything of Schnittke that wasn't new ). The duo also has a wonderful sense of humor and finds comic and surrealist touches throughout this breathtaking music

By the way, I have never heard a piano sound as rich and reverberant as the one on these Audiofons, and they are recorded unedited so that a few minor wrong notes enhance the immediacy of these performances. Credit goes to Julian Kreeger's and Peter McGrath's utter devotion and obvious love for an "authentic" piano sound, the likes of which you simply will not hear on any other label. Until I heard these CDs. I often told friends that Audiofon's recordings of the great Nelson Freire's 1984 Miami concert and Earl Wild's "An of the Transcription" were two of the most compelling piano recordings I've ever experienced—and I was al the Wild concert at Carnegie Hall in 1981.

I, and the five people I sprang these recordings on, had not encountered this kind of musical playing since Kissin. Valentina & Alexei are fast becoming the hottest duo-piano team on the planet. They won the very prestigious Murray Dranoff Two-Piano competition in 1991 in Miami, and rumors that they were transcendally talented have been circulating around the music world since then. Well, they're true—truer than I was ready for. So do yourself a favor and get these utterly fresh, smashing performances. And thank you Julian Kreeger and Peter McGrath of Audiofon for giving us these phenomenal documents. These are prime examples of run-don't-walk-recordings. Now!