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

Cécile Chaminade (1857-1944) was a highly successful female pianist and composer. As a pianist she toured the European countries, in 1892 making her debut in England, making acquaintance with one of her biggest fans, Queen Victoria. In 1908 she made her American debut, gaining instant and immense popularity. The reason for Chaminade’s popularity is the charm, tunefulness and general accessibility of her music. It touches a ready chord with every music lover, and the fancy titles and not overly virtuosic piano writing made that her works became drawing room favorites of the epoch.

For his second Chaminade album British pianist Mark Viner chose the Six Concert Studies, substantial and demanding works, Six Pièces humoristiques Op. 87, and some engaging and attractive character pieces: L’Ondine, Danse Créole and the favorite Lolita, Caprice Espagnol, all played with Viner’s unerring feeling for the witty and charming style, pouring out sentiment without being sentimental. Gramophone wrote about Viner’s first Chaminade album: “This new survey must count among the finest yet, showing the range and ambition of Chaminade in short works, played with an innate charm and understanding of the genre. In addition, it is most beautifully recorded. Mark Viner is recognized as one of the foremost British pianists, a strong advocate of lesser-known romantic piano music. One of his most ambitious and successful enterprises is the recording of the complete piano music by Charles-Valentin Alkan, now at volume 5, several of which issues received the highest praise in the press (5 star review, Gramophone Editor’s Choice).

REVIEW:

Cécile Chaminade’s well crafted, idiomatic, communicative, and utterly charming solo piano works are more and more finding their way to disc. I’m not certain if Mark Viner’s second Piano Classics release devoted to this composer signifies a complete cycle in the works, yet his robust virtuosity and overall dynamism vibrantly elevate this repertoire from the salon to the stage.

L’Ondine’s pearly runs, for example, tellingly contrast to the full-bodied chordal climaxes, while Viner makes more of Au pays dévasté’s brooding countenance than others. He brings a probing deliberation and almost tragic spin to the familiar Autrefois from the 6 Pièces humoristiques Op. 87 in a reading that radically differs from Joanne Polk’s fleeting, cameo-like treatment. Viner’s quickly flickering left-hand arpeggios in Guitare lilt in a manner that evokes Chaminade’s piano roll interpretation. If Polk’s Etude romantique Op. 132 is crisper and more incisively articulated than Viner’s, his Etude symphonique Op. 28 conveys greater textural depth, while the Etude scholastique Op. 139’s tarantella-like figurations effortlessly click their heels. Viner’s detailed and insightful annotations flesh out this most welcome release.

-- ClassicsToday.com (Jed Distler)

Mark Viner’s survey of the complete solo piano music of Alkan continues to turn up discoveries and reveal previously little-known or misunderstood sides of a protean figure in late French romanticism. Viner himself regards Alkan as ‘the most enigmatic figure in the history of music as a whole’.

The sixth volume of his survey focuses not on the grand cycles which have won this series such uniformly glowing reviews, but on sketches and miniatures which demonstrate Alkan’s capacity to charm as well as astound and dazzle his listeners. All these pieces are further illuminated, as before, by his own comprehensive booklet notes. Several of them will be unfamiliar to all except the most dedicated of Alkan connoisseurs.

One of the better known pieces included here, the Toccatina Op. 75, can be counted among Alkan’s finest shorter pieces for the piano, demanding phenomenal dexterity and lightness of touch. At the other end of the expressive scale, Désir is a little fantasy, one of Alkan’s most homely-sounding miniatures, yet still colored by his characteristic use of the ninth.

Felix Blumenfeld (1863-1931) was a virtuoso pianist, conductor and teacher whose class comprised the likes of Simon Barere, Maria Grinberg and Vladimir Horowitz. But he was also a composer of an oeuvre of breathtaking beauty, originality and sophistication. Even in his mid 20s Blumenfeld began teaching at the St Petersburg Conservatoire but resigned in protest at Rimsky-Korsakov’s dismissal following the senior composer’s support of the protestors killed in the Bloody Sunday massacre of 1905. At length he returned to his post but left for Kyiv on the outbreak of the Russian revolution, and became rector of the conservatoire founded by Mykola Lysenko (where he taught Horowitz). Chopin, Wagner, and other Romantic-era masters all make their presence felt in the surging melodies and passionate harmonies of Blumenfeld’s own music.

Published in 1892 by Belaieff and dedicated to Rimsky-Korsakov’s wife, the Op.17 form a quintessential work of Slavic late Romanticism. They are structured in four books of six preludes, touched with the solemnity of Orthodox chant at points and often aspiring to a grand and tragic idiom despite their relative brevity and tending towards melancholy even in the major-key pieces. The Op.17 Preludes are complemented in this new recording by Blumenfeld’s study for the left hand Op.36 – relatively familiar as an example of the technique and widely promoted by the likes of Godowsky and Lewenthal. The Op.24 Etude de Concert is a dazzling accumulation of piano sonority requiring the deftest of hands and care over voicing to bring its towering chords to life.

Perhaps the most enigmatic figure in the history of music as a whole, let alone the 19th century, Charles-Valentin Alkan remains one of the most intriguing and alluring names among the pantheon of pianist-composers. According to Franz Liszt, Alkan possessed the finest technique he had ever seen yet preferred the life of a recluse. The outstanding masterpiece of the album is the ‘Symphonie’ for solo piano which Alkan drew from his set of 12 Studies Op.39. It opens with an Allegro which is one of the composer’s most darkly impassioned conceptions, in which declamatory rhetoric, passionate outbursts and towering climaxes are all bound by a tightly organized structure. The piano writing is distinctly orchestral in nature, hence the ‘symphonic’ designation, demanding that the intrepid soloist make his or her way through towering conglomerations of sometimes ten note chords, thick, chordal tremoli and volleys of double octaves: only fully accredited virtuosi need apply! The Symphonie is placed on this album as the climax to a sequence of grand marches conceived on a similarly grand scale. They include the Three Cavalry Marches Op.39, which find Alkan at his most concise, in the Berliozian No.1, his most eccentric (the trio of No.2) and whimsical (No.3). Like them, the Marche funebre Op.26 bears witness to Alkan’s ability to channel a latent and, at times, menacing power through material of the slightest substance. The following Marche triomphale Op.27 is a massive, swaggering affair, in contrast to the ruminative melancholy of the opening paraphrase Op.45 on a poem by Legouve set in a cemetery and cast in Alkan’s most elegiac vein. A profound sadness also inflects the opening section of the composer’s ingenious instrumental setting of Psalm 137, ‘By the waters of Babylon’.