Haydn Russian

From Nadia Reisenberg's biography in the notes: "Nadia Reisenberg was born in Vilnius, Lithuania… in 1904. … The Russian Revolution came, and the Reisenberg family left Russian, traveling to Warsaw (where Nadia made her orchestral debut at the same concert where a young conductor, Artur Rodzinski, was also making his formal debut), London, Berlin, and, in 1922, moving permanently to New York. She became a pupil of Alexander Lambert (himself a student of Franz Liszt), and later studied with Joseph Hofmann at the Curtis Institute of Music. "From Hoffman I got a PhD in beautiful, sensitive pedalling, something that far too many pianists neglect these days", she remembered.

L’incontro improvviso (The unexpected encounter) is an opera in three acts by Joseph Haydn first performed at Eszterháza on 29 August 1775 to mark the four-day visit of Archduke Ferdinand, Habsburg governor of Milan and his consort Maria Beatrice d’Este. The opera is designated a dramma giocoso (a comic opera) and is an example of the then Austrian fascination with Turkish subjects...

This is a very significant historical reissue and Naxos and sound restorer Mark Obert-Thorn deserve warm thanks for bringing it back and cheap (Pearl had issued the same Dvorak in the mid-1990s, together with Feuermann's earlier recording of only the second and third movements of the Haydn Concerto under Frieder Weissmann, but it now sells at hefty prices on the marketplace, The Young Feuermann).

“Sergei Nakariakov plays the trumpet the way the rest of us breathe – if we are lucky.” (San Francisco Chronicle)

The attached CD is dedicated to the latest winner of the 64th “Busoni” Prize, awarded “unanimously” after 28 years, the 24-year-old Russian pianist Arsenii Mun. On the album, the testimony of the extraordinary feat that took the pianist from the preliminaries to the final with the Haydn Orchestra of Trento and Bolzano conducted by Arvo Volmer: Bach: Choralvorspiel Nun komm der Heiden Heiland BWV 659; Haydn: Sonata in E flat major Hob. XVI: 52; Chopin: Three Mazurkas op. 6 no. 1, op. 17 no. 2 and no. 4; Ravel: Gaspard de la nuit; Rachmaninov: Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini op. 43 for piano and orchestra.

The conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky was never a predictable artist on disc and his hottest performances could easily power the national grid. Such is the intensity of at least two Shostakovich performances that turn up in Brilliant Classics’s Gennady Rozhdestvensky Edition. I cannot recall ever hearing a more confrontational account of the Ninth Symphony than the one Rozhdestvensky gave with the USSR Ministry of Culture Symphony Orchestra on December 21, 1982, the work’s cheerful, rather sardonic “not-a-ninth-symphony” spirit suddenly pushed to the edges of irony and at times sounding positively sadistic, the first and last movements in particular. A very extreme case of “what he really meant”, whether or not you agree.