Muza Rubackyte's hearty, rhetorical handling of Franck's thickly textured piano writing evokes her similar mastery in Liszt, which is a good thing. While her sonority is richer than the top-heavy, occasionally strident engineering suggests, Rubackyte's true feeling for nuance and linear projection emerges at all times, from the Final's torrential octaves to the Variation's running busy counterpoint against the right hand's broken chords. Rubackyte's red-blooded virtuosity never sacrifices musical perception, and easily holds its own alongside different interpretive vantage points, be it Yukie Nagai's suave calm in the Prelude, Aria et Final's outer movements, or the limpid, ravishing tonal refinement Hough, Perahia, Moravec, and Richter bring to the Prelude, Chorale et Fugue. In short, Rubackyte's artistic excellence and Brilliant Classics' rock-bottom price recommend themselves.

--Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com