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).

The first countertenor to win the prestigious Metropolitan Opera Auditions, Brian Asawa is also the recipient of a career grant from the Richard Tucker Foundation. Asawa enjoys an international career and excels in the music of the Baroque as well as the contemporary. This recording features the countertenor in an eclectic collection of songs with a particular focus on the form known as the vocalise. A vocalise is a wordless vocal study sung to one or more vowels, and Asawa breathes new life into the form.
Perhaps the most famous vocalise is the haunting Pavane, Op. 50 by Gabriel Fauré. Asawa brings great sensitivity and style to the Vocalise and four other Fauré songs. Asawa's superb musicianship and melting tonal beauty is well suited to the remainder of the program which includes music by Nicolai Medtner, Heitor Villa-Lobos and Sergei Rachmaninov. The Academy of St. Martin In The Fields under the direction of Sir Neville Marriner provide lush orchestral accompaniment.

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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• The debut solo album from Vadym Kholodenko, the 2013 Van Cliburn competition winner: one of the world’s handful of most prestigious piano contests • Comparatively rare, yet supremely classy repertoire by two composers from Russia’s “golden age” of piano composition • Technically brilliant, yet soulfully deep interpretations • ""…the 27‐year‐old Ukrainian pianist put on pretty amazing display of virtuosity ― and...musical depth...” - Dallas News

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.

MEDTNER: Sonata-Ballade / Sonata Reminiscenza

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Nikolai Medtner was an oustanding Russian composer who continued the late romantic tradition. His reputation has been overshadowed by the more showy works of his friend and contemporary Rachmaninov but his music, with its dark mysticism and ravishing lyracism, is well worth investigating. Geoffrey Tozer's substantial recorded survey of Medtner's music has helped generate new interest in the composer.

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