Nelly Mackay

Peter Philips was the most famous English composer of his time, and only Byrd, a generation older, had more compositions published. Much of Philips’s life was spent on the Continent, where he wrote music of intricate, text-conscious colour, both deeply expressive and architecturally powerful. His motets and anthems, whether celebratory, meditative or dramatic, embrace the widest range of feeling and texture. The much-admired Sarum Consort’s disc All the Queen’s Men (8572582) was praised for its ‘energy and aplomb’.

Duncan Mackay is a British composer, singer, arranger, and keyboard player who has recorded three solo albums. On this, his second solo album, has moved slightly away from the Keith Emerson imitations that permeated his first album. Slightly, because the Emerson sound still appears. On the first track, Witches, a somewhat Spanish sounding symphonic proc piece, Mackay plays Emerson-like riffs on a honky-tonk tack piano, similar in sound to keith's in Benny The Bouncer. Acousic piano appears throughout the album, with Mackay providing obvious Emerson-influenced sounds…

This recording represents a slice of a vanished world: pianist Nelly Akopian-Tamarina studied in Moscow in the 1950s and 1960s, and her teacher was Alexander Goldenweiser, a friend of Scriabin and Rachmaninov, and a carrier of traditions stretching well back into the 19th century. Her career was interrupted by disfavor with Soviet authorities in the 1970s, but has been resumed in her old age with compelling results.

Slavonic Reflections, recorded by Nelly Akopian-Tamarina in recital at Wigmore Hall, is a highly personal collection of piano music containing Mazurka’s by Chopin, Janáček’s cycle In the Mist, as well as encores by Medtner and Liadov. The programme breathes a melancholic air of sadness, while simultaneously showing an equally Slavonic inclination to dance, as well as a fascination for nature. Nelly Akopian-Tamarina belongs to a distinguished tradition of playing stretching back to the great Russian school of Scriabin, Rachmaninov and Medtner. Slavonic Reflections is her second PENTATONE release, after a 2017 Brahms album that The Guardian praised as “enchanting, intimate and irresistible”, while BBC Music Magazine described it as “revelatory Brahms from another age”.