Nikolai Fedorovich Fedorov

What are the origins of the Mexican/Dutch/Russian violist Dana Zemtsov and Ukrainian/Dutch pianist Anna Fedorova? Throughout years of friendship, they discovered many similarities in their upbringing. Both Dana and Anna’s parents met in Moscow’s conservatory. Dana’s parents - Julia Dinerstein and Mikhail Zemtsov - are both renowned violists. Anna’s parents - Tatiana Abayeva and Borys Fedorov - are incredible pianists and famous piano professors.

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.

One major popular composer of Romantic orchestral music whose work, outside of his ubiquitous symphonic suite Scheherazade, is not terribly over-recorded is Russia's Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov. That, and a tendency toward what for him was an "orientalist" strain in harmonic practice and orchestration, makes Rimsky-Korsakov an ideal choice for the recordings on BIS of a relatively new ensemble, the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra, founded in 1997 by conductor Kees Bakels. It is a testament to the skill of Bakels as an orchestra builder that he has raised such a fine musical organization in just eight years. Rimsky-Korsakov: Capriccio Espagnol is intended as a follow-up to the Malaysian Philharmonic Orchestra's recording of Scheherazade, already issued, and as an added bonus, the great Japanese pianist Noriko Ogawa joins the orchestra as guest in Rimsky-Korsakov's all-too-seldom-heard Piano Concerto in C sharp minor, Op. 30. The music, recorded at the Dewan Filharmonik Petronas Hall in Kuala Lumpur, is both very well played and recorded. The Capriccio Espagnol gets off to a great start, with Bakels the orchestra is strongly sympathetic to the piece, though careful ears can pick out some raggedy ensemble in the last section. Ogawa alone is enough to make the Piano Concerto shine, and thankfully Bakels provides comfortable and gracious support to Ogawa's magisterial artistry.

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.

Nikolai Demidenko is a celebrated piano virtuoso, considered a leading exponent of the Russian school of playing. His blend of technical brilliance and musical vision have earned him consistent raves since he first emerged on the international scene in the mid-1980s, and he has become a musical fixture in his adopted home of Great Britain, where he gained citizenship in 1995. Demidenko began playing before the age of five, learning on his grandfather's old, beaten-up piano. By the age of six, he was a student of Anna Kantor (Evgeny Kissin's teacher) at the Gnessin School of Music. An obstinate student who disliked scales and technique, Demidenko still made swift progress, and he eventually entered the Moscow Conservatory. There, he studied with Dmitri Bashkirov, whom Demidenko credits with fostering his more individual qualities as a player, as well as ironing out the remaining wrinkles in his technique. Reaching the finals of both the 1976 Montreal competition and the 1978 Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow (where he played through an acute case of the flu) served as a final springboard to professional recognition.

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.

There are many great contemporary composers of our time but few write music that we can relate to so easily and closely as Nikolai Kapustin. His exquisite use of techniques and musical languages of classical and jazz ensures that his music appeals to a wide range of listeners. To those who love classical music but know little about jazz it does not sound too unfamiliar and vice versa. Indeed, it gives great pleasure to even the most untrained ears of either genre of music.

Nicolai Lugansky’s solo disc debut for Erato is more than just another recording of the Chopin etudes by a new virtuoso on the block. He’s got fingers, to be sure, but also a mind, an ear, and more than a little imagination. The pianist guides Op. 10 No. 1’s arpeggio sequences with a pliable, singing bass line, and offsets Op. 10 No. 2’s murmuring right-hand 16th-notes with intelligently shaped left-hand chords. Similarly, your ear gravitates more toward Op. 10 No. 7’s playful left-hand accents and dynamic jolts rather than to Luagnsky’s suave dispatch of the right hand’s rapid double notes.