A l s o ava i l a b l e A selection of Piano Classics titles
Schnittke
For the full listing please visit www.piano-classics.com
Fiorentino
Variations
EDITION
VOLUME 3
SERGIO FIORENTINO
BEETHOVEN ErOica VariaTiONs
EDITION VOL. 3
racHMaNiNOFF cHOpiN VariaTiONs cOpLaND piaNO VariaTiONs
RACHMANINOFF Preludes Piano Sonatas 1 & 2 Transcriptions
PCL0057
Piano Concerto 5 Aphorisms Gogol Suite
2-CD
PCLD0065
Alexander Korsantia
PCL0066
Earl Wild The complete transcriptions and original piano works VOLUME 1
Chopin
Schubert
Piano Sonata in B flat D960 Piano Sonata in A D664
ÉTUDES
complete
Z lata C hoChieva
PCL0068
Klára Würtz
Giovanni Doria Miglietta, piano
PCL0069
PCL0070
Denys Proshayev St. Petersburg String Soloists, Alexander Dmitriev Nadia Mokhtari
‘Perhaps not without hope?’ The piano music of Alfred Schnittke Brevity, concision, sagacity, wit: these are the defining features of the aphorism, a rhetorical device that has mutated since Antiquity from a behavioural tenet to a philosophico-literary genre. In the early 20th century it also found its way into music. Anton Webern’s aphoristic piano pieces, and his no less short-spoken Bagatelles for string quartet, left a lasting mark on modernism and influenced an entire post-war generation of composers on both sides of the Iron Curtain. Alfred Schnittke, born in the Volga German Soviet Socialist Republic in 1934, freely admitted being a disciple of Webern: ‘There are hardly any notes, but one hears a whole universe!’ he enthused about the music of perhaps the most radical protagonist of the Second Vienna School. ‘In one-and-a-half minutes I gain an unimaginable experience.’ Schnittke may well have had this ideal in mind when he wrote his Five Aphorisms for piano in 1990, one year after moving to Hamburg. More specifically, however, he was inspired by the lyric poetry of the Russian writer and Nobel laureate Joseph Brodsky, whom he deeply revered. The atmosphere, aesthetic and sound of Brodsky’s verse guided his hand in the composition of these pieces, which in no way mirror or ‘set’ any particular poems. True, Schnittke wanted the poetry of his famous fellow-countryman to be recited before, between or after the individual Aphorisms, but he left the choice of poems
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entirely to the discretion of his performers. At the première, given by the dedicatee Alexander Slobodyanik in Carnegie Hall on 21 October 1990, Brodsky himself was meant to recite them in person. (Having been expelled from the Soviet Union in 1972, he had found sanctuary in the United States and lived in New York.) But this plan was thwarted by a conference of Nobel laureates held at the same time in Japan. As a result, Brodsky’s voice thundered down upon the New York audience from a technically substandard tape recording accompanied by crackles and pops ... On our recording Denys Proshayev dispenses with the ties to literature, which he considers more sensible in live performances. Here Schnittke’s music proclaims its message by itself, and this message is interesting enough. Like his forebear Webern, he manages in the Aphorisms to make do with hardly more than a few notes. The writing is curt, laconic, almost ascetic. Sudden stops and rests abound, creating jagged soundscapes in which heterogeneous material is served up in taught slices, hammered repeats and sustained, hymnic paeans. This music is pervaded by a feeling of improvisation that is driven to extremes in Aphorism IV, skirting the borders of silence and dispensing entirely with bar lines and tempo marks. No catchword is more frequently applied to Schnittke’s music than ‘stylistic pluralism’,
meaning the juxtaposition and blending of contrasting stylistic layers and influences. The Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra is a prime example of just this feature. Here moments redolent of romanticism clash with baroque maestosos, echoes of Beethoven and Mahler with nods to Prokofiev and Khatchaturian, quotations of the BACH motif with waltz episodes, dense clusters with diatonic excrescences, all strung together seemingly chaotically but with cryptic deeper meaning. ‘The concerto tends to sleepwalk a bit’, Schnittke confided, drawing attention to ‘monotonous rhythms gliding by, passive series of chordal repetitions, shadowy tissues of multivoice canons and surrealistic sunrises snipped from Orthodox church music’. Schnittke composed this concerto (his third for piano) in 1979. It is dedicated to the Russian pianist Vladimir Krainev (1944-2011), the subsequent teacher of Denys Proshayev, who in turn dedicates this CD to the memory of his mentor. The conductor on our recording, Alexander Dmitriev, already stood at the rostrum of the Leningrad Philharmonic on 10 December 1979 when the score received its first hearing. ‘To me, this work is one of the best piano concertos I’ve ever had the honour to play’, Proshayev enthuses, pointing out the huge extent to which Schnittke allowed personal elements to enter the score. The two most significant motifs – a little emblematic bell heard at the very opening, and the formula
‘Lord, have mercy on us’ from the Orthodox service – vicariously stand for his life history and his spirituality. ‘The first motif reflects Schnittke’s childhood memories from the days of the Stalinist purges, when many people waited in fear, night after night, for the ringing of the doorbell and their immediate arrest. The second symbolises his deep sense of religion.’ Thus Proshayev explains the particular significance of these two sonic ciphers. Unlike his first two piano concertos of 1960 and 1964, which were worked out in several movements, Schnittke chose a single-movement design for his Piano Concerto with Strings. However, he follows a subtle dramaturgy and toys with his listeners’ expectations, sometimes leading them far astray. ‘The first climax – a very active one on the surface – loses something of its real impact through a lack of proportion’, Schnittke says of the course of the music. ‘Then comes the slowly emerging solo cadenza, followed by the true climax, where everything finally bursts into a thousand pieces, unable to strike a balance between “sunshine” and “storm clouds”.... The coda consists of soft, dream-like reminiscences of everything that has gone before. Only at the end does a new uncertainty arise – perhaps not without hope?’ Obviously Schnittke’s individualist art is hardly reconcilable with the tenets of socialist realism, and his music was consequently considered suspect by Soviet cultural officialdom.
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Restrictions were placed on his freedom of development; performances were few and far between, and for a long time he was forbidden to travel abroad. In order to survive as a freelance artist he turned out some 60 film scores between 1962 and 1984. He also worked for the stage: he owed his theatrical engagements to the stage director Yuri Lyubimov, who had founded Moscow’s Taganka Theatre in 1964. ‘For a long time I couldn’t fathom what made Yuri Petrovich interested in people like me’, Schnittke confessed many years later when he was already living in the West. For Lyubimov, who often proved distant and almost absent-minded in conversation, he could only have been an ‘academic musician’. But Lyubimov held fast to Schnittke, even after their first collaboration, on Brecht’s Turandot (1972), had been banned. In 1975 he invited him to compose incidental music for a revue based on motifs from Nikolai Gogol (1809-1852). It was premièred at the Taganka Theatre one year later with the title The government inspector’s story. In fact, Lyubimov could not have found a composer better suited to his Gogol project than Schnittke. In preparing the text, he too cobbled together snippets from Gogol’s plays and prose writings into a kaleidoscope of collages and mixed episodes, beginning with the comedy The government inspector and continuing with the novellas The nose, The overcoat and The portrait all the way to the novel Dead souls. The score Schnittke concocted was equally ingenious
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and diverse, witty and effervescent. It quotes at length from music’s historical repertoire, thereby opening up a meta-level of meanings. In 1980 Schnittke’s close associate, the conductor Gennady Rozhdestvensky, compiled an orchestral suite from this incidental music that has since undergone arrangements for various other combinations of instruments, including a two-piano version by Valery Borovikov. The very opening of the suite establishes its aesthetic stance when Schnittke, after beginning with dissonant trills and chords, states the pounding motif used in Beethoven’s Fifth to indicate ‘fate knocking at the door’ – and promptly proceeds to pillory it. This is immediately followed by the appearance of Chichikov, the hero of Dead souls, who stood out even in childhood with his remarkable adaptability. Schnittke caricatures this trait with a stylistic parody of Joseph Haydn, simplified to the point of banality. Later, in the fifth piece, we again meet Chichikov, now far up the ladder in his bureaucratic career. This time his bustling energy is satirised by the fugato from Mozart’s Overture to The Magic Flute, grotesquely embroidered with the Dance of the cygnets from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. In contrast, the slow waltz in the third movement reflects, with ghastly distortion, the tale of an ominous portrait that drives its owners one after another into madness. We are even treated to the protagonist of The overcoat, a poor government clerk who dies of sorrow at the loss of his expensive item
of clothing, and whose wandering ghost then attempts to steal overcoats from unsuspecting passers-by. He raises his head in the fourth number, the Andante accelerando. Gogol’s world-view, his urge to present evil in the form of everyday mediocrity, must have struck Schnittke like a prophetic parable of life in the authoritarian system of the Soviet Union. ‘The devil’s handiwork is never linked with the exotic’, he explained in an interview with the cellist
Alexander Ivashkin, ‘but always and especially with the banal, with scum, filth and turmoil. The conflict of the sublime and the lowly in Gogol’s writings, the range of genres he cultivated, the absence of purism – all of this made a very longlasting impression on me.’
Recording in Berlin Works: “5 Aphorisms”(piano solo), and “Gogol suite”(piano duo) Artists: Denys Proshayev, Nadia Mokhtari (“Gogol Suite”) Production: Deutschland Radio Berlin, Stefan Lang Location: Kulturstall Britz, Berlin Date: 31.10.-01.11.13 Recording engineer: Wolfram Nehls Sound engineer: Matthias Schurz Pianos: C. Bechstein D 282 Tuner: Torben Garlin
Recording in St. Petersburg Work: Concerto for piano and strings (1979) Artists: Denys Proshayev (piano), Ensemble of the string soloists of the St. Petersburg Academic Symphony Orchestra, Alexander Dmitriev (conductor) Production: St. Petersburg recording studio Location: St. Kathrine’s Luterian Church in St. Petersburg Date: 13-14.09.13 Recording engineer: Victor Dinov Piano: Steinway & Sons
Susanne Stähr J. Bradford Robinson (English translation)
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Denys Proshayev “Sound magician”, “brilliant virtuoso of the highest level” and “Russian Eusebius” are some of the attributes the music critics like to describe Denys Proshayev’s piano playing. Born in Brest, he studied with Prof. Vladimir Krainev, one of the best students of Heinrich Neuhaus, at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater in Hannover. He also worked as Mr. Krainev’s assistant over a decade while undertaking conducting studies with Prof. Eiji Oue. After extensive success in international competitions, among them Clara Haskil in Vevey, “Vladimir Horowitz in Memoriam” in Kiev, European Piano Competition in Bremen, his international breakthrough came with the win of the first prize at the International Competition ARD in Munich in 2002. Some additional prizes went on confirming the remarkable value of the artist. Among them the coveted Soloist Prize of the Mecklenburg-Vorpommern International Festival, just as Julia Fisher, Daniel Müller-Schott and Daniel Hope. Proshayev has collaborated with numerous wellknown orchestras, such as the Munich and Czech Philharmonic, Danish National Radio Orchestra, Radio Orchestras of Munich, Berlin, Cologne, Leipzig, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, Hannover, St. Petersburg and Osaka Philharmonic. The pianist performed with a number of internationaly reknown conductors, among them Gerd Albrecht, John Neal Axelrod, Daniel Inbal, Alexander Dmitriev, Roman Kofman, Andrea Marcon, Eiji Oue, Michael Sanderling,
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Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Stefan Solyom and appeares regularly in major concerts venues such as the Herkulessaal in Munich, Salzburger Mozarteum, Konzerthaus Berlin, Gewandhaus Leipzig, Baden-Badener Festspielhaus, Konzerthaus Dortmund, Alte Oper Frankfurt, Mercatorhalle Duisburg, in Philharmonic Halls of Cologne, Warsaw, St. Petersburg and Kiev. Proshayev is a dedicated chamber musician. Some of his partners were Veronika Eberle, Arabella Steinbacher, Daniel Müller-Schott and the Quarteto Casals. In 2011, following the invitation of Martin Schläpfer, he became part of the highly acclaimed project “b. 10” of the Ballet am Rhein in Düsseldorf, performing Alfred Schnittke’s concerto for piano and strings. Besides, Denys Proshayev devotes himself passionately to conducting, appearing as guest conductor with the Prussian Chamber Orchestra and the Philharmonic Chamber Orchestra of Berlin, National Philharmonic of Ukraine and Macedonian Philharmonic orchestras. In 2011 he became the Principal Guest Conductor of the Philharmonic Orchestra in Lviv. His recording of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s keyboard works, released in 2006 by Sony/ BMG and highly praised by the press and public, was chosen by “Die Zeit” Edition, next to Evgeny Kissin, Midori and Mariss Jansons, and has been acclaimed as one of the “100 best classical CDs”. In Autumn 2013 Proshayev released his first recording by Piano Classics dedicated to Robert Schumann with “Papillons”,
“Davidsbündlertänze” and “Arabeske” which was warmly acclaimed a.o. by “The Guardian”, “Süddeutsche Zeitung” and Bayrischer Rundfunk. In the season 2013/2014, Denys made his debuts and reappearances in some European cities such as Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Leipzig, Hamburg, St. Petersburg, in Japan and by the MecklenburgVorpommern International Festival. The season 2014/15 will include exciting projects with Konzerthausorchester Berlin, Kiev Chamber Orchestra, Staatsorchester Mainz, a number of recitals in Europe as well as a new production of Martin Schläpfer and The Ballett am Rhein, on performing piano Sonatas of A. Scriabin together with works of F. Liszt in Düsseldorf and Duisburg.
Nadia Mokhtari piano
“Her playing combines a communicative and poetic musical sensibility with maturity and conviction”. Here is how the young pianist has been described after her performances. Nadia Mokhtari fascinates by her unusual musical development. At the age of fifteen only, she discovered her love for classical music and graduated from the Conservatoire in Lyon in a record time. Very quickly has Nadia Mokhtari became a concert pianist, and only two years after the beginning of her piano study, reached the finale of “Concours de Radio France”. She also won the first prize in the “International Piano Competition” in Paris. Nadia studied with Brigitte Engerer, Andrew Ball, Vladimir Tropp, Boris Bloch, Michel Dalberto and Ronan O’Hora. She has given numerous performances in France, England, Israel, Germany, Macedonia in venues such as Salle Cortot in Paris, Opera
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in Lyon, Tel Aviv Museum of Arts, St Martin in the Fields, London National Gallery, St Paul Cathedral, Steinway Hall, Ohrid Festival, Liszt Haus in Weimar. As much as she enjoys solo performances, Nadia is also a very keen chamber musician and has performed intensively with violin and cello. She has been forming a duo with the pianist Denys Proshayev, since two years now, with whom she has performed key works of the repertoire such as transcriptions of Beethoven Symphonies, Mozart Requiem, Tchaikovsky Nutcracker, Mozart Sonatas, Mozart-Busoni Fantasies, and Schubert works to name just a few. She studied Bachelor at the Royal College of Music in London, Master in Performance at the Folkwang Universität der Künste in Germany and is currently preparing a research proposal on the keyboard music of Jean-Philippe Rameau.
alexander dmitriev Alexander DMITRIEV was born in Leningrad to the family of a Leningrad Philharmonic Orchestra musician. He graduated from Glinka Choir College and the Leningrad State Conservatory, where he studied choir conducting (prof. E. Kudryavtseva) and musical theory (prof.Y. Tyulin). After that Dmitriev enrolled in a graduate course of symphonic conducting, taught by Nikolai Rabinovich. For ten years (1961-1971) he led the Symphony Orchestra of Karelian Radio and Television and at that stage he won the 2nd National Conducting Competition. Then he took an internship at the Academy of Music and Performing Arts in Vienna, Austria under H.Swarovski and K.Osterreicher, whereupon E. Mravinsky invited Dmitriev to join his highly respected Leningrad Symphony Orchestra. In 1971-1977 Dmitriev led the Leningrad Small Opera and Ballet Theatre (Mikhailovsky Theatre today). In 1977, Dmitriev became chief conductor of the St.Petersburg Academic Symphony Orchestra. Thanks to the more than thirtyyear collaboration of the conductor and the orchestra for the first time in Saint-Petersburg were performances of the Symphony No. 8 by Mahler, “Pelléas et Mélisande” by Debussy
and “The Child and the Enchantments” by Ravel (opera recitals), “The Power of Music” – oratorio by Händel, “Prefatory Act” – mysterium by Scriabin-Nemtin and quite a number of works by Leningrad-Petersburg composers. The repertoire of Alexander Dmitriev includes all the symphonies by Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, symphonies by Shostakovich, Schubert, almost all orchestra pieces by Prokofiev, Mahler, Scriabin, Ravel, Sibelius, Requiems by Mozart and Verdi, and a great number of new and contemporary works. Alexander Dmitriev is Professor of the RimskyKorsakov St. Petersburg state conservatory (among his pupils: A.Boreiko, V.Altschuler, A.Anikhanov, A.Steinlucht). For many years he has led the Stavanger Symphony Orchestra in Norway. Among his awards are the title of People’s artist of the USSR and Winner of the State Prize of the Russian Federation, “Order of Honour of Cultural and Art Merit, in recognition of his longstanding achievements”, Honorary symbol “For Merit for Saint-Petersburg” and the Prize of the St. Petersburg Government in Literature, Art and Architecture-2009, in “Musical-Performing Art”.
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