One of the most important vocal projects of recent years: the complete songs on 5 CDs by Nikolai Medtner, performed by Ekaterina Levental and Frank Peters. Nikolai Medtner was born in Moscow in 1880. After piano lessons with his mother he entered the Moscow Conservatory where he had lessons from Pavel Pabst and Sergey Taneyev. He won the prestigious Anton Rubinstein Prize at age 20. A younger contemporary of Scriabin and Rachmaninoff he was destined for a brilliant pianistic career but he chose to concentrate on composition. In 1936 he settled in London where he spent the rest of his life teaching and composing till 1951. Medtner's style is rooted in the 19th century, full-blooded romantic, with a highly personal harmonic and melodic language, often complex and dense, but hauntingly beautiful. His vocal works fuse intricate piano accompaniments with expressive melodies and poetic texts, often by Goethe, Pushkin, or Tyutchev. Ekaterina Levental was born in Uzbekistan. She settled in The Netherlands where she studied at the Conservatory of The Hague. She embarked on a successful career as singer, dramatist and theatre producer. Pianist Frank Peters is a highly respected Dutch pianist, both as soloist and chamber music partner. He is an indefatigable champion of the piano works of Medtner. 'Levental's soft high notes are truly exquisite, and she can do things with the voice that most modern singers cannot, such as to drain the voice of vibrato for expressive effect. All things considered, she is a virtuoso vocalist of the old school, and such artists are extremely rare nowadays... "We are very lucky to have a pianist like Peters, who fully understands this dichotomy, as the pianist on this album. " (Artmusiclounge. Com). "Levental has a dark, rich voice, but her pure tone is never burdened by excess vibrato... She couldn't ask for a more responsive partner than Peters, who reveals an astonishingly deft touch and an uncanny ear for detail. " Fanfare (Volume 1, 96056). "The phrasing is so perfect, the sense of line so keen, the rubato so natural sounding, that this seems the only way to sing them... this lucidity is due to the purity of Levental's voice, which she employs with sure intonation and minimum vibrato, as well with an exquisite (but always controlled) play of colour... This is a major release. " Fanfare (Volume 2, 96061).

This is the second volume in what will be the complete piano works of Nikolai Medtner. Frank Huang has identified strongly with the works of Medtner, and it shows in this superb album.

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An unprecedented and critically praised series reaches it's fifth and final volume with richly evocative settings of German and Russian poets, from Pushkin to Nietzsche and beyond. Though born in Moscow, Medtner had partially German ancestry, and nearly half his songs are set to German poetry, which he knew in the original. In previous volumes of their complete survey of his songs, Ekaterina Levental and Frank Peters have concentrated on the Russians; now they conquer the peaks, as Medtner did, of Romantic German poetry, with texts by Goethe, Chamisso and Eichendorff. Rather less well known as a poet was Friedrich Nietzche, but he was a figure who fascinated Medtner, and the settings here speak of deep affinity. In the booklet, Ekaterina Levental reflects on her own sense of affinity with the composer. 'It was love at first hearing. It was as if someone whispered to me a truth for which there were no sounds before. He sounded out for me emotions and feelings, images, associations, a world of felt knowledge and experiences that I had been carrying inside me all along, but had never heard expressed in such a way. Someone from the past spoke to me in a language that I seemed to understand totally instinctively. Passing on this knowledge and wonder and sharing it with the audience became my dream.' This cycle on record has been a passion project for both artists, and Peters also passes on his own insights into Medtner's notoriously complex piano writing. Between them, they have gone further than anyone else in documenting a perennially undervalued Russian song composer, who deserves to be considered alongside Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky in this vein. This final volume closes out the cycle with the Eight Lieder Op.61, which move between Russian and German poets in a quintessentially Medtnerian synthesis. 'All in all, Levental and Peters make the strongest possible case for the repertoire... Levental continues to strike us with the beauty and purity of her voice and the rhetorical sensitivity of her phrasing, unfailingly tied to the affect of the text.' (Fanfare)

This debut album showcases talented 32-year-old Venetian pianist Alessandro Taverna, whose career began flourishing when he won First Prize in the Minnesota International Piano Competition, Second Prize in the London International Piano Competition, and Bronze Medal at the Leeds International Piano Competition. On hearing him, the late Lorin Maazel invited him to perform the Prokofiev Third Piano Concerto with the Munich Philharmonic in Vienna's Musikverein last year. Alessandro particularly identifies with Russian composers and made a special study of Medtner's music, which he plays to perfection.

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Nikolai Medtner's music fascinates and surprises, in the midst of what also seems to be well known. You may imagine that you have heard the melodies before, in childhood or in a dream. But, even if you haven't, it is as if you have been waiting for this music to return. In some mysterious way, it evokes the memory of the unheard. He named many of his piano pieces SKAZKA - tale. Some of them carry subtitles, but it is uncertain whether the composer had specific narratives in mind, as the name would suggest. The influential Soviet musicologists Boris Asafyev may have been right when he claimed that "these are not descriptive tales or tales that illustrate an event. These are tales of personal experiences - of conflicts in the inner life of man". In this recording, Gunnar Sama plays five of Medtner's albums, composed over the course of some 30 years.

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MEDTNER: Sonata Op. 5 / Sonata-Triad Op. 11

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Distinctly Russian, unabashedly Romantic and full-bodied, yet intellectually devised and highly disciplined, Medtner' compositions for violin and piano encompass music of rare beauty and power, gratifying for both performer and audience. Violin Sonata No.

Medtner's legacy for solo piano is now widely esteemed alongside Rachmaninoff and other giants of the Russian 'silver age': melodists to their core, romantics at heart, yet rigorous craftsmen to their fingertips, who took their muse seriously and refined their inspiration to distil a peculiarly Russian spirit of melancholy in sound. However, around a third of Medtner's output, measured by opus numbers, was dedicated to voices, and this section of his music has received much less attention. Ekaterina Levental has dedicated herself to correcting this imbalance. The Uzbek-born, Dutch-resident mezzo-soprano has given all of Medtner's songs in concert with the pianist Frank Peters; together, they now embark on a recorded cycle. Medtner lacked nothing for self-sacrificing dedication to his art, and he chose to set the finest poets of his Russian homeland: Pushkin, Fet, Lermontov and others, and then Goethe and Eichendorff in German. Unlike Rachmaninoff he continued to write songs even after emigrating and settling in London. 'Medtner's musical vocabulary is very rich and expressive,' Levental and Peters explain in their own booklet note, which is printed together with English translations of the lyrics. 'Some songs immediately captivate you, others require a certain effort from the listener. Anyone who takes up the challenge, makes a discovery. Every song is a treasure and an intimate, spiritual confession from the composer to his listener.' In the category of 'immediate appeal' surely fall the two songs of Op.13: the ardent vocal response to Pushkin's Winter Evening perfectly underscored by the stormy piano part. No less unmistakably Russian in expression is the complementary Epitaph, triumphant even in it's mournfulness and like many other of the songs here not as stern as much of Medtner's piano music. Any listener looking for the composer's personal voice, behind the virtuoso keyboard fireworks, should start here.

SOMM Recordings announces Medtner in England, a revelatory new recording exploring the musical life of Nikolai Medtner, featuring violinist Natalia Lomeiko, pianist Alexander Karpeyev and baritone Theodore Platt. Born in Moscow, Medtner was to adopt England as his home, dying in London, aged 70, in 1951. The English capital seemed to provide him with a liberating creative space as the three featured works here eloquently suggest.

Simultaneously composed between 1935 and 1938 were the two-movement Op.56 Sonata-Idylle in G major – which moves from its ‘Pastorale’ opening to, as composer and pianist Francis Pott comments in his authoritative booklet notes, “a valedictory late-summer haze” – and its immediate successor, the four-part, symphony-sized Epica Violin Sonata No.3, “an act of remembrance” for Medtner’s brother, Emil. Both works are the product of a period in which Medtner was attempting to “pare down the virtuosity of his piano writing”. And both, in their intricate design and execution, illustrate his productive struggle with the ambition.

From his more than 100 songs, the posthumously assembled miscellany of the Op.61 Eight Songs span the near quarter-century from 1927 to the year of Medtner’s death. Employing poems by Pushkin, Lermontov, Eichendorff and Fyodor Tyutchev, they are variegated exercises in temperament and mood that look back towards Schubert and forwards to Medtner’s own distinctive way in setting words and conveying emotions.

Natalia Lomeiko and Theodore Platt are making their debuts on SOMM Recordings, Alexander Karpeyev’s previous SOMM release, Composers at the Savile Club (SOMMCD 0601), was “a recital eminently worth investigating” said BBC Music Magazine in its five-star review, while MusicWeb International declared it “will be greatly enjoyed”. SOMM’s previous Medtner release, three Piano Sonatas performed by Alessandro Taverna (SOMMCD 0142), received a four-star review from The Guardian, with Gramophone insisting “Make no mistake... this first-class recording... is well worth hearing”.

The two sonatas published by Medtner as his Opus 25 make a salutary contrast – the longest and most taxing of his sonatas placed alongside a sonatina-like work possibly intended for children. Apart from showing the range of the composer’s imagination and his capacity to build musical structures that show the most careful craftsmanship, these two sonatas reveal a view of the world that is very Medtnerian: a pairing of something childlike with the heroic and terrifying. ‘In Medtner you find the whole complexity of life,’ says Dina Parakhina. ‘He built his spiritual cathedrals out of chaos.’ Op.25 No.1 is known as the ‘Fairy Tale’ Sonata, and its four concise movements really do sound as if they deal with fairies, giants, witches and goblins. The Six Fairy Tales Op.51 further illuminate this side of Medtner’s musical personality. Dina Parakhina hears a Russian figure of the Fool in No.2, and Cinderella in the balletic turns of No.3, ‘the most lyrical, elegant and feminine in style’ and perhaps a portrait of his wife. Medtner prefaced the mighty Op.25 No.2 Sonata with a poem by Fyodor Tyutchev: ‘Night wind, night wind, why do you howl?’ Longer than half an hour, this single movement invites comparison with the B minor Sonata of Liszt and the final sonata of Beethoven as a summit of late-Romantic piano literature, which absorbs tempests and idylls within his personal synthesis of German, contrapuntal rigour and Russian lyricism. The Russian-born pianist Dina Parakhina has Medtner’s music in her blood and under her fingers, as a student at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatoire at the top of a class which included Mikhail Pletnev. She became a professor of piano there before moving to the UK, where she teaches at the Royal College of Music and Royal Northern College, as well as performing around the country. Nikolai Medtner (1880-1951) was born in Moscow. After piano lessons with his mother he entered the Moscow Conservatory where he had lessons from Pavel Pabst and Sergey Taneyev. He won the prestigious Anton Rubinstein Prize at age 20. A younger contemporary of Scriabin and Rachmaninoff he was destined for a brilliant pianistic career but he chose to concentrate on composition. In 1936 he settled in London where he spent the rest of his life teaching and composing till 1951. Medtner’s style is rooted in the 19th century, full-blooded romantic, with a highly personal harmonic and melodic language, often complex and dense, but hauntingly beautiful. This new recording presents the two Piano Sonatas Op. 25, the first a Fairy Tale Sonata, the second a colossal, enigmatic, fantastic, nocturnal work, which is considered by many to be not only Medtner's best work, but one of the best sonatas of the entire 20th Century. It was completed in 1911 and dedicated to Sergei Rachmaninoff, who immediately recognized its greatness. Under the title "Sonata" Medtner added a note: "The whole piece is in an epic spirit". Dina Parakhina is a Russian-born pianist and teacher. Piano Professor at the Royal College of Music since 2009, and College Fellow since 2019, Dina taught piano at the Central Music School in Moscow for sixteen years. She performs as a soloist with orchestras, makes recordings for CDs and radio, gives master-classes across the world, and sits on the juries of international piano competitions. Born in Sochi, Dina moved to Moscow without her family to study piano aged twelve. At the Central Music School, she studied under Professor Tamara Aleksandrovna Bobovich; at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory, Dina studied with Evgeny Malinin, a protégé of Heinrich Neuhaus.

New recordings of Goethe and Heine settings by a master Russian song-writer, by performers thoroughly versed in the composer’s complex harmony and heritage. While Nikolai Medtner only emigrated from Moscow to Berlin in 1921, eventually settling in London, the Russian composer traced a deep connection to German culture through the ancestry of his mother. He was familiar with the German language and culture from his childhood, and made his first visit to Berlin in the winter of 1904-5, then returned for most of 1907 and the summer of 1909. It can be no coincidence that these original-language settings of two of Germany’s greatest poets date from this period in Medtner’s life. In his mid-20s at this point, Medtner had become internationally known as a pianist of formidable technical and interpretative gifts, but he continued to compose and to teach, taking up a post at the Moscow Conservatoire in 1909. While Medtner’s pianism often lends the quicker songs a scintillating brilliance, such as the Elfenliedchen which is third in the Opus 6 collection of Goethe’s songs, the overall mood of the collection is imbued with the feelings of love and longing which are key-signatures of Romanticism (German or Russian). Medtner was always drawn towards musical contemplation of life’s deeper themes, and he accordingly sets both poets at their most philosophical and visionary, in the Wandrers Nachtlied of Goethe and the Bergstimme of Heine.

On this album, recorded in 2022, Ekaterina Levental and Frank Peters couple the Opp 6, 15 and 18 settings of Goethe with the three Op 12 settings of Heine: a unique but natural pairing on record. The booklet includes both original texts and English translations.

This new release is the penultimate volume in this acclaimed series of Medtner’s Complete Piano Sonatas performed by series pianist Paul Stewart. Medtner’s 14 piano sonatas, the most significant achievement in this genre by any major composer since Beethoven, span his career. The Sonata-Ballade explores a tempestuous musical allegory – the triumph of Light over Darkness, of Faith over Doubt; while the Sonata in A minor is cast in a single, terse movement, with folkloric elements and frequent use of bell-like features that exude Russianness. By contrast, the ‘Night Wind’ Sonata is a monumental epic of exceptional complexity that stunned Rachmaninov and led composer and critic Sorabji to call it ‘the greatest piano sonata of modern times.’

Historic live performances, never released in any form, from one of the greatest and most popular classical pianists of all time.

Tracklist: MEDTNER: Violin Sonata No. 1, Op. 21 • Piano Sonata No. 10, Op. 38, No. 1 • 10 Romances and Songs from Opp. 13, 32, 36 & 52