Lubimov Schubert

Alexei Lubimov belongs to the great russian tradition of musicians such as Richter, Gilels (Lubimov was one of the last student of Heinrich Neuhaus in Moscow) and to this generation of baroque pioneers together with Gustav Leonhardt, Juijken… He is also a major artist playing russian composers such as Denisov, Schnittke, Silvestrov… and Arvo Pärt…
Alexei Lubimov developed his outstanding international carrier with these three cultures in mind. He was in Brussels in 1968 to play Denisov piano pieces where he met the Kuijken brothers. He played John Cage and Terry Riley during the Soviet Union time.

Silvestrov wrote the pieces recorded here, scored for piano solo, string orchestra, and piano and strings, between 1996 and 2005, and they are all representative of his late, meditative, song-like style. After an early career as an experimentalist, Silvestrov embraced the radical simplicity – a style of tonal, melodic, and rhythmic transparency – that has won him many admirers in the general public, but little recognition by the academic community. It would be easy to hear his music as derivative, given the limited tonal palette to which he restricts himself; his apparently naïve and artless approach, however, has an integrity and a genuinely lyrical impulse that make it hard to dismiss.

Alexei Lubimov’s 2010 disc of Impromptus by Schubert was praised in the press. During the same recording session in Haarlem in July 2009, Alexei Lubimov continued with the last three sonatas of Beethoven, Beethoven’s musical testimony which he plays with all the mastery of a great russian pianist, "a kind of russian Pollini" (Alain Lompech, Diapason).

Solo piano works and the vocal cycle "Stufen" by the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov with the Russian pianist Alexei Lubimov and the Ukrainian soprano Viktoriia Vitrenko appear on the album "Valentin Silvestrov: Forgotten Word I Wished to Say" on Sony Classical as a co-production with BR-KLASSIK."

Solo piano works and the vocal cycle "Stufen" by the Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov with the Russian pianist Alexei Lubimov and the Ukrainian soprano Viktoriia Vitrenko appear on the album "Valentin Silvestrov: Forgotten Word I Wished to Say" on Sony Classical as a co-production with BR-KLASSIK."

Olga Andryushchenko was born in Moscow and educated at the Central Special Music School, and the Faculty of Historical and Modern Performing Arts of the Moscow Tchaikovsky State Conservatory under Alexei Lubimov. She also studied organ. She completed her postgraduate studies at the same conservatory, and was also a DAAD scholarship-holder at the Cologne Hochschule für Musik.