Bernstein gives a performance of such persuasiveness that in every sense it sounds like a composer's performance.

It was Leonard Bernstein who in the early 1940s in New York gave the first performance of Copland's tough and ambitious Piano Sonata. With a characteristic display of versatility he took over the premiere at forty-eight hours' notice and played from memory. Here on one of the first records he ever made, later in that decade, he gives a performance of such persuasuiveness that in every sense it sounds like a composer's performance. The toccata-like figuration of the first two movements has nothing mechanical about it as Bernstein presents it, urgent and electric but with light and shade, while the slow concluding movement, tough and bald, draws a performance of such concentration from Bernstein that the many pauses are as expressive as the notes.

In Bernstein's own pieces dating from 1943, a set of seven intended to characterise different friends, the element one misses, knowing the later Bernstein, is a sense of fun. Brief as they are, these tend to be rather solemn character sketches, but the opening portrait of Copland (with a hint of pastiche) is certainly memorable and so is the piece in memory of Nathalia Koussevitzky with its echoes of Russian Orthodox chanting.

-- Gramophone [6/1976, reviewing an LP release of the piano works]