Medtner

Earning praise for his commanding technique, elegant sound and wide-ranging repertoire, Russian Arseny Tarasevich-Nikolaev was quickly signed to Decca Classics, following his declaration at the Sydney International Piano Competition, where he was also an audience favourite. He has curated an all-Russian album: Rachmaninov (including the Moment-musicaux, which he performed so gloriously at the Competition), Medtner, Scriabin, Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky. The album also includes two Concert Études by his late grandmother – Tatiana Nikolayeva.

When one considers the life of Nikolai Karlovich Medtner it is impossible not to be amazed by his strange, tragic and yet marvellous destiny. He was recognized in Russia at the beginning of the twentieth century as one of the most important composers and was, with Scriabin and Rachmaninov, an extremely influential, almost ‘cult’ figure for a whole generation of the Russian intellectual élite. He was also a great pianist and an outstanding musical thinker. His personality was completely divorced from everyday life, but the depth and power of his intellect, entirely absorbed in music, philosophy and the history of culture, were deeply respected by such contemporaries as Nikisch, Rachmaninov, Furtwängler, Koussevitsky, Glazunov and Prokofiev.

The constant movement and passionate stream-of-consciousness of Nikolay Medtner's music suits Severin von Eckardstein wonderfully, and he it. The difference between his performance of these character pieces/tone poems for piano and that of other pianists is his touch. He is light and graceful enough that feverishly ardent passages do not burrow deeply into a good, indulgent brood and drag the listener along for the ride. Instead, he propels himself through the moodiness, but still fully acknowledges the feelings within the music.

A younger contemporary of Scriabin and Rachmaninov, Nikolai Medtner, a Russian of distant German descent, studied under Pabst, Sapelnikov and Safonov at the Moscow Conservatoire, graduating in 1900 with the coveted Anton Rubinstein Prize. Admired as a pianist of particularly formidable attainment and inventive imagination, he held important teaching appointments at the Conservatoire (1909/10, 1914/21) before eventually leaving Russia for periods of domicile in Germany, the USA and Paris. In the winter of 1935/36 he settled in England, making his home in the Golders Green area of north London.

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.

This is a wondrous disc. Yevgeny Sudbin has not been alone in championing the piano music of Nikolay Medtner: in recent times Marc-André Hamelin, Steven Osborne and Hamish Milne have all brought their special insights into a composer who can perhaps on occasion seem problematic and somehow remote. Sudbin, however, seems to have an exceptional affinity with Medtner’s language. He brings both his heart and his head into play when performing these pieces. His head tackles and illuminates textures and harmonies that might seem opaque and knotty on a first study of the scores; his heart is then harnessed to convey the extraordinary sensibility, passion and thoroughly individual cast of melody that courses through the music. As usual with Sudbin’s series of BIS discs, he also writes his own booklet-notes in a lucid way that testifies both to his enthusiasm and to his understanding.

The French pianist Lucas Debargue was a Tchaikovsky Competition sensation in 2015 (although he did not win), and this studio debut gives you a good idea of what the fuss was about. Debargue offers the French tradition in all its calmly urbane glory. You might like various aspects of this release: the unapologetically pianistic but flawlessly elegant Bach Toccata, the Medtner Sonata in F minor, Op. 5. You might sample one of the movements of the latter, inasmuch as the preponderance of recordings of Medtner's solo piano music tends to favor the thunder and lightning of Marc-André Hamelin, for example.

Like the legendary pianists of the 19th and early 20th century, such as Sigismund Thalberg, Franz Liszt, Leopold Godowsky, and Ignace Jan Paderewski, it often sounds as if Marc-André Hamelin has more than 10 fingers. His ability to play fiendishly difficult music, make it sound as if it's a stroll in the park, yet imbue it with musical sensitivity makes him worthy of the description "super-virtuoso" by The New York Times' Harold Schoenberg. Hamelin studied at the Vincent d'Indy School of Music in Montréal with Yvonne Hubert, a pupil of Cortot, then received bachelor's and master's degrees at Temple University, working under Russell Sherman and Harvey Weeden.