The pianist Zlata Chochieva is well known for creating unexpected associations. In "Chiaroscuro", her first album for naive (V7542, 2022), she had combined the worlds of Scriabin and Mozart, in whom she hears not only the same desire for clarity and weightlessness but also a similar poetic sense of rhetoric. Her next album ("i'm Freien", V7959, 2023), a homage to nature, revealed alongside Ravel's Miroirs and Schumann's Waldszenen a short cycle, so little known and graceful (Petite Histoire), by Felix Draeseke! No wonder she is now offering us, for her first album with orchestra, one of the most obscure works of Russian Romanticism, the Piano Concerto by Rimsky-Korsakov. Written in 1883 in memory of Franz Liszt, whose two opuses in the genre strongly influenced the author of Scheherazade, this Concerto, with it's monothematic structure, built on a Russian folk theme, had greatly impressed Balakirev, who was surprised to hear such an idiomatically written soloist part, from a composer who was not a pianist himself. At the age of fourteen, Zlata Chochieva had played the work under the direction of Mikhail Pletnev, then head of the Russian National Orchestra. This Concerto remains for her a "miracle of taste, poetry and inspiration". Her intelligent and limpid playing is ideally suited to the very delicate lyricism that Rimsky-Korsakov deploys throughout this astonishing score full of numerous and subtle contrasts. At the heart of this recording, where Zlata Chochieva is joined by the musicians of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the German conductor Karl-Heinz Steffens, surges the merciless ardor of Sergei Prokofiev's Second Piano Concerto. In a departure from the stormy way in which this formidable score (for the fingers) is generally approached by pianists, Zlata Chochieva prefers a certain sense of phantasmagoria, rightly recalling that Prokofiev, as a spiritual disciple of Alexander Borodin and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, enjoyed stories, old Russian fairy tales and legends. After this, we have a total change of atmosphere with the Jazz Suite for piano and orchestra by Alexander Tsfasman which concludes the album. An eminent disciple of Felix Blumenfeld, an incredibly talented pianist, to whom Shostakovich intended piano part of one of his film scores, Tsfasman introduced American jazz to the Soviet Union, and formed the first orchestra dedicated to the genre. In Russia, he premiered Rhapsody in Blue by Gershwin, a composer for whom he had the deepest admiration. A brilliantly written, comforting and sincere score, his Jazz Suite sometimes evokes the American composer but above all Hollywood and Soviet film scores. Not without a most contagious and mischievous pleasure, Zlata Chochieva and Karl-Heinz Steffens revel in it's ingenuous charms (Snowflakes). 17 July 2024

Transcribing musical works for other instruments or instrumentations has a long tradition in music history. Sometimes, the composers themselves wrote different versions of their works and often it is the musicians who adapt works for their own instruments. Even great composers have enjoyed arranging the works of their predecessors and have thus transported them into their time and era of music history and lent their own interpretations to them. Among those are Sergei Rachmaninoff, Franz Liszt, and Ignaz Friedman - all three great pianists and composers. Renowned Russian pianist Zlata Chochieva presents their transcriptions of the works of great composers such as Bach, Mendelssohn and Mahler on her new album "(re)creations".

On 180gm vinyl, a new LP mastering for Zlata Chochieva’s definitive modern recording of a landmark in the Romantic virtuoso repertoire.

In March 2013, Bryce Morrison in Gramophone welcomed Zlata Chochieva’s debut on Brilliant Classics, playing Rachmaninoff (PCL0047) noting that she is ‘the possessor of a comprehensive technique who brings an inner glow to every bar. Her phrasing is indelibly Russian in its fullness and warmth, backed by a dauntless and easy command.’
Her recordings have continued to attract such praise, with this recording of the Chopin Etudes winning an Editor’s Choice award in 2015. It was claimed that one renowned pianist regarded Chochieva’s interpretation as ‘the greatest I’ve ever heard’ – backed up by Jeremy Nicholas writing in Gramophone that ‘in each of the 27 studies Chochieva comes as close to anyone to how I hear the ideal performance in my head, or as I would wish to play them had I the ability to do so… Taken as read are a superlative technique and an ideal recorded sound… One of the most consistently inspired, masterfully executed and beautiful sounding versions I can recall.’

On LP, Chochieva’s version deserves to take its place alongside classic traversals such as Pollini on DG. As with all Piano Classics LPs, the vinyl version has been mastered at the Optimal factory, renowned for its audiophile standards. The LP is packaged as a gatefold with an extensive essay on the Etudes and a full biography for Chochieva, which concludes with this endorsement from Stephen Kovacevich: ‘Zlata Chochieva is one of the most interesting and unusual pianists today. She has superb technical abilities, but it is her personal intuition in the music she play s that is special. I would be interested to hear anything she does and that is rare.’

For her second album with naïve, Zlata Chochieva has chosen a magnificent, audacious program, associating Schumann, Ravel, Liszt and Bartók with the lesser known Draeseke and Schulz-Evler. Sensitive to nature and to the emotions it inspires, the Russian pianist Zlata Chochieva has conceived this very personal album as a patchwork, sometimes inward-looking, landscape with changing skies. “A recorded program is not a concert program, but I also wanted to tell a story, propose a whole tapestry of emotions, open different perspectives,” she confides.

Scriabin and Mozart: two composers rarely associated, yet the juxtaposition here seems clear when performed by Zlata Chochieva. In this first album, the Russian pianist, new to the naïve label, is ingenious in both the cycles of fragmented variations and the more opulent sonatas or preludes. This project is inspired by the 150th anniversary of Scriabin’s birth, but Zlata Chochieva has been a fan of the Russian composer since her childhood as he was the first to appeal to her emotions as a listener and performer. Associating him with the classical Mozart – rather than a romantic composer, as is usually the case – enables Zlata Chochieva to conjure up an unexpected kinship that benefits from her vibrant and graceful style, rising to thrilling virtuosity. “The perfection in the phrasing, the polyphony and the formal proportions, plus the concision and the lack of superfluous notes are just some of the points that link Scriabin to Mozart,” she explains.

When lockdown was imposed in 2020 many artists began streaming performances from their own homes. In response, pianist Francesco Piemontesi and director Jan Schmidt-Garre launched a concert series to showcase artists living in Berlin. This collection of performances is a testament to the resilience and solidarity of these artists during the pandemic. (Naxos)