Sonya Bach

Sonya Bach’s fourth album for Rubicon is an all Mussorgsky programme. The famous Pictures at an Exibition and Night on the Bald Mountain bookend rarer repertoire such as the two Pictures from Crimea, Duma, and Méditation. Sonya Bach studied with two of the twentieth century’s great pianists – Alicia de Larrocha and Lazar Berman.

Sonya Bach’s fourth album for Rubicon is an all Mussorgsky programme. The famous Pictures at an Exibition and Night on the Bald Mountain bookend rarer repertoire such as the two Pictures from Crimea, Duma, and Méditation. Sonya Bach studied with two of the twentieth century’s great pianists – Alicia de Larrocha and Lazar Berman.

Sonya Bach has won hearts of audiences and critics alike appearing on the most prestigious concert stages of Europe, North America and Asia.

Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Sonata was extensively revised by the composer in 1931, and the revised version is tighter and thinner in texture (the Fourth Piano Concerto is a fine example the more restrained and less opulent textures the composer developed in his later years) than the original version of 1913. It represents a supreme challenge to the pianist in either version, and has all the hallmarks of the composer at the height of his powers – he had just finished his huge choral symphony The Bells at the same time. The 6 Moments Musicaux, Op. 16 are early works which exhibit the flamboyance of the youthful virtuoso. Sonya Bach includes three of the Preludes from the Op. 23 set.

A virtuoso harpsichordist and organist, it is remarkable that J.S. Bach composed only one original work for keyboard and orchestra. The fifth Brandenburg Concerto, with its huge sixty-five bar cadenza in the first movement, created the blueprint for all piano concertos that followed. However, Bach the great arranger mined his other concertos to create seven more keyboard works (No.6, omitted here, is for keyboard, flutes and strings).