Classical Music

Classical Music

Classical Music

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.

Classical Music

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

With his second concerto disc, Yevgeny Sudbin celebrates the close relationship between two great Russian composers: Sergei Rachmaninov and Nikolai Medtner. Medtner would encourage his more famous colleague during the latter's recurring bouts of self-doubt, while Rachmaninov early on recognized Medtner's unique gifts, pronouncing him the 'greatest composer of our time'. The most sincere testament to their friendship is embodied in these two concertos, which the composers dedicated to one another. Both works were composed in the mid-1920s, with Medtner referring to works by Rachmaninov in his final movement and Rachmaninov worrying in letters to his fellow-composer about the length of his own concerto. Rachmaninov's concerto was first performed in 1926, but was panned by the critics - in part because of its duration - and the composer immediately began to make revisions and cuts. Never completely happy with the revised version, published in 1928, he made another attempt in 1941, cutting a tenth of the original work, mainly from the final movement. Having chosen to record the rarely heard original 1926 version, Yevgeny Sudbin makes an eloquent case for it in his own liner notes, calling it 'a truly epic work' with the addition 'and much more insanely difficult than the revised version.' In his advocacy for Medtner's even more expansive and all but ignored Second Piano Concerto, Sudbin is equally forthright: 'Why this concerto is not performed more often remains a mystery and is nothing short of scandalous: it offers everything a pianist, or a conductor, can wish for.' An avowed Medtner champion, Sudbin has previously recorded the composer's First Piano Concerto, combined with that of Tchaikovsky, on a disc which received a number of distinctions, including the nomination to a 2007 Gramophone Award. Reviewers described the release as 'another step in Sudbin's inexorable progress to the forefront of his generation of pianists' (Gramophone) and the soloist as 'one of the most exceptional musicians of his generation' (Le Monde de la Musique). On the present disc Sudbin receives the expert support of North Carolina Symphony conducted by Grant Llewellyn.

Classical Music

This is a hybrid Super Audio CD playable on both regular and Super Audio CD players.



Tchaikovsky renewed in this dream concerto debut disc

Yevgeny Sudbin’s performance here fairly explodes with imagination, feeling and desire. Here, one feels, is a pianist hungry to test himself intellectually and emotionally as well as technically. For a performer who reputedly gets very nervous, there is nothing tentative about his commanding style. Yet there is nothing overly monumental about it either. His Tchaikovsky is on a human scale, almost a search for something – understanding perhaps. Sudbin is on a journey, to a marvellous career as much as anything else, and it is clear that his listeners are along for the ride. The Medtner is of course the rarity on this release. It is also a cruelly difficult piece to play. Sudbin rises to its demands with aplomb and it is entirely to his credit that one is never made ostentatiously aware of just how fiendish it is. There was apparently some creative tension between him and Neschling during the sessions. Nevertheless, they can both be proud of the results.

-- Gramophone [5/2007]

To describe 26-year-old Yevgeny Sudbin as music’s brightest young star pianist is in a sense to do him a disservice. For he is above all an artist, and here in his eagerly awaited concerto debut on disc he gives us a Tchaikovsky First of spine-tingling brilliance, poetry and vivacity. This is never the Tchaikovsky you have always known, but an arrestingly novel rethink with the concentration on mercurial changes of mood and direction. Here, amazingly, is one of the most familiar of all concertos rekindled in all its first glory, brimming over with zest and shorn of all the clichés that have adhered to it over the years.

In the first movement Sudbin’s octaves ring out at 10'18" like a giant carillon, while the Andantino’s central prestissimo becomes in such extraordinary hands a true firefly scherzo. Not even Cherkassky at his finest possesed a more elfin sense of difference or caprice. And to think that all this and more is accomplished without the lift, or hindrance, of a major competition success.

Medtner’s massive First Concerto, too, could hardly be played with a more burning clarity and committment. Once wittily if misleadingly described as “a declaration of love in the language of the First Empire”, Medtner’s music remains formidably inaccessible, despite displaying the outward trappings of Romantic rhetoric. Yet Sudbin clearly believes in every note and his playing evinces, as on live occasions, a rare sense of affection. Such poetry is confirmed in his encore, his own transcription of Medtner’s Liebliches Kind! from his Op 6 songs. It only remains to add that BIS’s balance and sound are of demonstration quality and that the São Paulo SO under John Neschling sound as if influenced by neighbouring Rio’s carnival spirit, so infectiously do they respond to their radiant soloist.

-- Bryce Morrison, Gramophone [5/2007]

You know you've got a winner on your hands when a performance of a piece you know by heart and already own in dozens of recordings makes you sit up and listen to it with fresh ears. That's exactly what happened at the opening of this Tchaikovsky First Concerto. Yevgeny Sudbin attacks those pounding "Liberace" chords with virtuoso relish--and thanks to a little arpeggio action in the right hand at the top of each sequence, with a glint of humor as well. This devil-may-care opening turns out to be a bit deceptive, though, for what characterizes the remainder of the performance is Sudbin's willingness to engage the orchestra in a real dialog. Mind you, nothing is precious or mannered: he simply knows where his part fits into the overall texture, and in places such as the second subject of the first movement and the entire Andante, he lets his colleagues in the wind and string sections have their say and reacts accordingly.

The result, while never short-changing the virtuoso elements (particularly in the finale), has a give-and-take that few other versions match. There are a couple of brief spots in the first movement where the tension does drop a bit as Sudbin lapses into dreamy reverie, but otherwise this is as persuasive a performance of this warhorse as any on disc. The orchestra and conductor have just as much to offer as the soloist, being totally at one with the interpretive concept and wholly characterful in their collective response. I would have loved to have heard this live.

The Medtner First Concerto, a 34-minute single-movement post-Romantic effusion that no one seems to like very much, also receives an enormously powerful and convincing performance. Sudbin must be almost unique in the arts world in that his liner-note writing is every bit as good as his piano playing, which is saying a lot. He makes a strong case for the work and guides the listener through its twists and turns with clarity and enthusiasm. Yet despite his professions of love for the piece, the sincerity of which I do not question, it says something that he has to spend three times the space talking about it than he does the Tchaikovsky. In short, it requires a measure of special pleasing. And yet it really shouldn't. Yes, it may sound in places like Rachmaninov without the tunes, but there's nothing radical or off-putting about Medtner's style.

Perhaps he stresses form over immediacy of emotional expression, and the bottom line is that it's not easy to grasp a single-movement form lasting longer than half an hour on casual acquaintance. But if you make the effort, you will discover an impressively grand, turbulent work that progresses from tragedy to defiant triumph. It's a connoisseur's piece, for sure, and for that reason it won't necessarily appeal to the same audience as the Tchaikovsky (hence the single note of caution in the overall rating for artistic quality). Nevertheless Sudbin deserves a ton of credit for giving the piece an outing and investing it with every ounce of the passion that it deserves. As he himself notes, it is music that grows on you given sufficient time, and you will know right away if you feel like making the investment. Sudbin's own transcription of one of Medtner's songs makes a perfect encore, and the sonics in all formats are, typically for this label, state-of-the-art. In sum, a disc to live with.

--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

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.’