Schunert Impromptus

A musician with a flamboyant style, the pianist Yanica Hristova invites us to discover three major Bulgarian composers whose music is not yet widely recorded. She intersperses these works with the famous first book of Schubert Impromptus.

Aimi Kobayashi, who rose to prominence as a prizewinner at the 2021 International Chopin Piano Competition, has been praised by Gramophone as a pianist who can “rivet the attention through fine-drawn line and hushed dynamics as much as through vivid gesture and brute force”.

Back in the fifties my music master took me to the Royal Festival Hall to hear Georges Cziffra. This momentous occasion was as much a political event as a musical one. Having recently breached the 'iron curtain' in a dramatic escape to the West from his native Hungary (where he had recently been imprisoned) in the aftermath of the 1956 revolution, the press had hyped him up into a newly discovered world class virtuoso cum freedom fighter. He fell into the role with much aplomb.

The cosmopolitan Franz Liszt and the unpretentious Franz Schubert couldn't have been more unlike in terms of lives that they led. But with their musical oeuvre, they maintain a symbiotic relationship to this day: Schubert's works were always an inspiring, 'magnificent treasure' to Liszt, which he was very fond of sharing with the world. Therefore Liszt was an advocate of Schubert's reception wherever possible. On concert tours, he also always had Schubert's music with him, including many lieder as piano transcriptions. Viacheslav Apostel-Pankratowsky traces the synergies of this artistic alliance on his debut CD with GENUIN: with exceptional reserve, energetic musical language, and warm nuance.

Khatia Buniatishvili’s first Schubert recording includes Schubert’s great last Piano Sonata (D 960), the 4 popular Impromptus and Ständchen (arr.by Liszt). Khatia will be performing the repertoire on a worldwide tour, including London’s Barbican on 1st April. Khatia is one of the today’s leading classical pianists, having performed at the most prestigious venues and events including New York’s Carnegie Hall, the BBC Proms at the London’s iconic Royal Albert Hall and Salzburg Festival.

Angela Hewitt has applied the same intense study to Chopin's Nocturnes and Impromptus as she does to any composer's keyboard works. The result is a set of pieces lovingly played and appreciated, with personally felt emotion. The most outwardly emotional displays, as in the Nocturnes, Op. 15, are never wildly loud and always return to an introverted state afterward. In the Nocturnes she uses little touches of rubato so frequently as to almost stretch the melodies out of shape, as in Op. 9/1, but she plays many of the Nocturnes a tick faster than other pianists so that they stand up to that kind of manipulation better, and she never slows down to fit in ornaments. Her ornaments always fit right into the melody, both in her timing and her phrasing, and are feathery soft.