*** Maurizio Pollin

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN: Ballades, Prélude Opus 45, Fantaisie

(Deutsche Grammophon)

*** Evgeny Kissin

FRÉDÉRIC CHOPIN: Ballades, Berceuse, Barcarolle, Scherzo No. 4

(RCA Victor)

You can't find two pianists more different than the mercurial 28-year-old Muscovite Evgeny Kissin and the cosmopolitan 56-year-old Milanese Maurizio Pollini. About all they have in common is that both played in Symphony Hall last month and both have out new recordings of the four Chopin Ballades. This quartet -- whose composition was spread out through Chopin's career -- functions almost as a sonata, with the G-minor and F-minor as anchors, the F-major as a slow movement, and the A-flat-major as a scherzo. The G-minor starts out in a stately 4/4 but after seven bars slides into a swaying, almost waltzlike 6/4, and the other three are in 6/8. Set against the uncertain mood of these storytelling time signatures there's Chopin's strict form: contrasting themes, development, recapitulation, coda.

Kissin plays with imagination, a gorgeous, full-throated tone, and an unselfconscious virtuosity that conjures Horowitz. His fussbudget phrasing, unfortunately, conjures the bad old days of early Géza Anda and Claudio Arrau: he shucks the introduction and the first theme of the G-minor and the F-minor as if they were pearl-harboring oysters. The best of the lot is the salon-like A-flat, to which he brings seriousness rather than sophistication, sounding charmingly like the "Fast zu ernst" of Schumann's Kinderszenen. But there are many exaggerated contrasts and obvious transitions, and where vision and insight are needed (the annunciating thematic bass just before the F-major's coda), they're often absent.

You could never call Pollini a fussbudget, or thoughtless, but sometimes it's hard to know what he's thinking. He takes 32 minutes, as opposed to Kissin's 37 -- just about the same timings as Alfred Cortot's legendary 1933 recording, but where Cortot seems impassioned, Pollini sounds merely headlong, though the G-minor's second theme is tender and the coda suitably stormy. His A-flat is Schumann all grown up, exquisite in its poise and panache. His F-major, however, generates no tension between the quarter notes and the eighths, and thus no weight (a problem throughout the disc); he steamrolls the looming catastrophes at bars 107 and 132, and theme runs into coda with hardly any notice. In the F-minor, the first theme's bass line is irritatingly mechanical (Kissin has the same problem), and the big crisis at bar 125 sounds muddy (too much pedal?). This is a more mature reading than Kissin's but also more guarded, though I found that by the third listen it was beginning to open up. Maybe I didn't give it enough time to breathe.

The epic, heroic readings that Ivan Moravec did in the '60s are now available on the Vai label, and they still top my list (just listen to the dance pulse he finds in the G-minor's cut-time coda). And if the unheralded Mícheál O'Rourke (on Chandos) is a shade more literal, he too has a big, noble view of these pieces.

-- Jeffrey Gantz