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.

‘Write one such piece and one can die.’ So pronounced Rachmaninov, no less, after hearing the second of Medtner’s Arabesques. This is just one of the delights in the enticing selection box offered by Hamish Milne, a long-standing and ardent champion of Medtner’s music. These two discs explore the many miniatures—in size though not in ambition—that he wrote throughout his life. The very opening of his Mood Pictures shows a remarkable sophistication for a man barely out of his teens, while the magnificent pair of Elegies forms a fitting conclusion to a set that reminds us that it is sometimes among the ‘miscellaneous’ works that the greatest gems are to be found.

‘Write one such piece and one can die.’ So pronounced Rachmaninov, no less, after hearing the second of Medtner’s Arabesques. This is just one of the delights in the enticing selection box offered by Hamish Milne, a long-standing and ardent champion of Medtner’s music. These two discs explore the many miniatures—in size though not in ambition—that he wrote throughout his life. The very opening of his Mood Pictures shows a remarkable sophistication for a man barely out of his teens, while the magnificent pair of Elegies forms a fitting conclusion to a set that reminds us that it is sometimes among the ‘miscellaneous’ works that the greatest gems are to be found.

Nikolai Lugansky has established an extraordinary reputation playing Chopin and Rachmaninov, actively performing works of both composers all over the world. This outstanding 9-CD boxed set includes many of Lugansky's most celebrated recordings, having garnered the Diapason d'Or for the complete Chopin Etudes in 2000, Rachmaninoff Preludes and Moments Musicaux in 2001 and Chopin Preludes in 2002, as well as his acclaimed first disc of Beethoven Sonatas that includes the "Moonlight" and "Appassionata".

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.

Nikolai Demidenko's large-scale pianism suits Busoni's Bach transcriptions to a tee. Listen first to the E minor prelude; you sense that Demidenko truly revels in the music's declamatory syntax and booming bass lines. Part of this may have to do with the pianist's Fazioli concert grand, whose resonance cuts like a saber wrapped in a velvet cloak. Demidenko sculpts fluid paragraphs out of the D major fugue's superficially repetitious sequences, and takes the hybrid Fantasia, Adagio, and Fugue at a brisk, vehement clip. The pianist forges an effortless link between the unfinished fugue's last measures and Busoni's unmistakably crabbed conclusion.

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.