A budget-priced box of critically acclaimed piano albums exploring the rich diversity of Slavic piano music: an ideal introduction to the Romantic and post-Romantic world...

A budget-priced box of critically acclaimed piano albums exploring the rich diversity of Slavic piano music: an ideal introduction to the Romantic and post-Romantic world of Slavic pianism beyond the canon of Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff.

The notable feature of this set dedicated to piano music by composers from Slavic nations is its sheer diversity. It would be possible to trace their writing for the keyboard back variously to Chopin and Schumann, but the same could be said of any other group of composers around Europe from the late 19th century onwards. What the set does illustrate is the rise of pianists, trained in a system that became known as the ‘Russian Piano School’, who could take on such formidably demanding scores as Lyapunov’s Transcendental Studies and Medtner’s ‘Winter Wind’ Sonata.

Pianist-composers such as Bortkeiwicz, Blumenfeld and Medtner flourished across Europe in the first decades of the last century, and so did piano manufacturers, producing ever more reliable and tonally sophisticated instruments that could cope with the rigours of these scores. A generation before them, Viteslav Novak in the Czech Republic and Dora Pejacevic in Croatia were writing less prodigiously demanding music which took its expressive cue from the tone-pictures of Schumann rather than the broader canvases of Liszt. In Ukraine, Viktor Kosenko was one of several composers here to use old church modes in his narmony, lending it both a patina of antiquity and at times an other-worldly novelty. In Romania, George Enescu pursued this path still further in finding a new world for the piano hardly less distinctive than Scriabin’s.

Back in Ukraine, the music of Ihor Shamo embodies a kind of melancholy yearning that is both a natural inheritance from Rachmaninoff and perhaps the nearest to a ‘Slavic’ expressive trait. All the performances here were recorded within the last decade and received with critical enthusiasm on their release.

This budget reissue includes all the original sleeve notes, making it a worthwhile investment for collectors and newcomers alike.

Past praise of previously released volumes included in this set:

Blumenfeld: Préludes (24) / Mark Viner

A welcome disc that adds two substantial Etudes in addition to the Preludes. Felix Blumenfeld (1863–1931), was a celebrated pianist, conductor, and teacher whose pupils included Horowitz and Barere. That is certainly worth boasting about. Of his own compositions, there is certainly plenty of craftsmanship at hand, if maybe not the ultimate in originality. Would I recommend this? Definitely.

-- American Record Guide

Pejačević: Piano Music / Ekaterina Litvintseva

Ekaterina Litvintseva’s new anthology covering about half of Dora Pejačević's piano music seriously raises her profile. Moving chronologically from her early salonesque trifles to her powerful Second Sonata, a work clearly preparing the way for an abandonment of tonality, it features exceptional playing from the supremely gifted pianist.

-- Fanfare

Novák: Pan / Tobias Borsboom

Inspired by the idea of the Greek god Pan, the work is a sprawling and ambitious one that evokes impressionist uses of tone color and Richard Strauss’s tone poems. There are lovely movements, especially in the blossoming melodies in `Mountains’. `Sea’ has some rippling melodies and lush harmonies. Borsboom offers useful liner notes to illuminate the use of thematic material in the work, especially how the `Prologue’ presents a theme and melodies that appear in the rest of the movements. It is a bit hard to hear the cyclical unity, though, and this music might not be everyone’s cup of tea. Borsboom’s playing is very capable.

-- American Record Guide

Enescu: Suite, Op. 18; Piano Sonata No. 3 / Saskia Giorgini

Saskia Giorgini’s idiomatic virtuosity is completely at one with Enescu’s sound world. By holding the first-movement of the Third Sonata's Vivace con brio ever-so-slightly back, Giorgini secures steadier rhythm throughout and conveys greater differentiation between detached and sustained passages. She keeps the long Andantino cantabile hauntingly afloat as she contours the music’s melodic, accompanimental and purely decorative elements in three-dimensional perspective. The same can be said regarding the Allegro con spirito’s conversational counterpoint and appropriately muted left-hand repeated-note ostinatos; here is where the Bösendorfer’s ‘fortepiano in the body of a concert grand’ timbre particularly speaks. In short, Giorgini has truly internalized this elusive, oddly gripping music, whetting the appetite for an eventual Enescu cycle. Recommended.

-- Gramophone