Nikolai Lugansky dedicated several solo recordings to Russian composers. Especially, his Rachmaninov Sonatas album released in 2013 got a huge success in a few months....

Nikolai Lugansky dedicated several solo recordings to Russian composers. Especially, his Rachmaninov Sonatas album released in 2013 got a huge success in a few months. Yet, this new recording is Nikolai Lugansky's first Tchaikovsky recital on record. Though less well-known than his operas or his orchestral compositions, Tchaikovsky's piano music nonetheless contains essential works of his, such as teh cycle The Seasons and the Grand Sonata. Composed at a period of crisis in the composer's personal life, they illustrate two quite different aspects of his style: on the one hand we have the fasnioable worldliness of The Seasons, pieces that almost belong to the genre of salon music; on the other hand, we see him ambitiously grappling with the classical sonata, in the tradition of his illustrious predecessors - Liszt, Schumann, Chopin. For Nikolai Lugansky, ''one of the most trailblazing performers of our time'' as for Gramophone, this recording is like ''having a new encounter with Tchaikovsky, almost like falling in love with someone new...''