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.
The opera Otello by Giuseppe Verdi and Arrigo Boito not only represents the outstanding result of an intensely fruitful creative collaboration between composer and librettist, but also one of the most important core works in the opera repertoire. With his musical setting of Shakespeare’s play, the composition of which took him several years, Verdi also achieved a new level of quality within the framework of his operatic oeuvre. His path was resolute and consistent, leading him away from structured numbers of arias, recitatives and ensembles, and towards the through-composed, large-scale dramatic form. All this based on the timeless literary foundation of Shakespeare's play.
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.
One of the aspects that appeals to this listener about Nikolai Lugansky's approach to the perennial favorite piano concerti of Sergei Rachmaninov is the commitment to the organic feeling of each work. So often these concerti are served up as early career, flamboyant exercises to introduce the young pianist du jour to already accepting audiences. And at times the imprint on the works imposed by the various pianists is what remains in the hall after the performance, not Rachmaninov.
Rimsky-Korsakov is universally acknowledged as a great master of the orchestra. He even wrote a textbook on the subject consisting entirely of examples from his own music! He needed some sort of pictorial or literary stimulus to really get his imagination going, however. His "abstract pieces," like Symphonies No. 1 and 3, are comparative failures specifically because he believed that symphonic thought was incompatible with orchestral brilliance (he wasn't the only Romantic composer to succumb to that fallacy). So all of his best music is either obviously illustrative, or taken from one of his colorful "fairy tale" operas. This two-disc set gives you an excellent selection of works of both types at a great price.
Wagner’s genius is often associated with his unique feeling for orchestration. Yet the transcriptions and paraphrases for piano solo recorded here lay bare the beauty and boldness of his harmonic language, with an evocative power unrivalled at the time. Nikolai Lugansky, at once narrator and virtuoso, immerses us in a world where the heroes of legend tell us – and with what loftiness of spirit! – of the torments and aspirations of humanity.
Given the paucity of César Franck's piano music on disc, Nikolai Lugansky's focus on this composer is to be commended. On his third release for harmonia mundi, the Russian pianist reveals an organ master strongly attached to the musical forms inherited from J.S. Bach: the prelude, the fugue, and the chorale. Translated to the piano keyboard, Franck's music, with its expansively conceived structures, requires a completely fresh approach that puts the greatest performers to the test: here, Lugansky took on an additional challenge by preparing his own transcription (a brilliant one, at that!) of Franck's celebrated Choral pour grand orgue No.2.