Dmitry Sinkovsky / Musica Viva / Alexander Rudin BEETHOVEN Idylle Héroïque

IDYLLE HÉROÏQUE

 

Alexei Lubimov, Olga Pashchenko, Finnish Baroque Orchestra DUSSEK Concerto for Two Pianos - Chamber Works

Alexei Lubimov is one of the most admired pianists of his generation, particularly for his exploration of rarely-played repertoire on period instruments. Together with his disciple, harpsichordist and pianist Olga Pashchenko, a rising star of the new generation, and accompanied by the musicians of the Finnish Baroque Orchestra, they embark on a voyage of discovery into the music of Czech composer Jan Ladislav Dussek (1760-1812), with world premiere recordings on period instruments of his Concerto for Two Pianos and Notturno concertant.A trailblazing early romantic composer, Dussek created an innovative piano music style marked by a harmonic richness and intense emotional expressivity.

Borodin Quartet SHOSTAKOVICH The Complete String Quartets - Piano Quintet

For more than seventy years, the Borodin Quartet has been celebrated for its insight and authority in the chamber music repertoire. Revered for its searching performances of Beethoven and Shostakovich, the Quartet is equally at home in music ranging from Mozart to Stravinsky. 

Described by the Daily Telegraph Australia as “the Russian grand masters”, the Borodin Quartet’s particular affinity with Russian repertoire is based on constant promotion, performances and recording of the pillars of Russian string quartet music - Borodin, Tchaikovsky and Shostakovich, as well as Glinka, Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Schnittke. The Quartet is universally recognised for its genuine interpretation of Russian music, generating critical acclaim all over the world; the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes about them “here we have not four individual players, but a single sixteen-stringed instrument of great virtuosity”.

The Quartet's connection with Shostakovich's chamber music is intensely personal, since it was stimulated by a close relationship with the composer, who personally supervised its study of each of his quartets. Widely regarded as definitive interpretations, the Quartet’s cycles of the complete Shostakovich's quartets have been performed all over the world, including Vienna, Zurich, Frankfurt, Madrid, Lisbon, Seville, London, Paris and New York. The idea of performing a complete cycle of Shostakovich's quartets originated with the Borodin Quartet. In recent seasons, the ensemble has returned to a broader repertoire, including works by Schubert, Prokofiev, Borodin and Tchaikovsky, while continuing to be welcomed and acclaimed at major venues throughout the world.
CD 1 & 2, CD 3 & 4, CD 5 & 6, CD 7

Alexei Lubimov / Slava Poprugin STRAVINSKY / SATIE

For this Alpha-Classics album of modernist music arranged for two pianos, Alexei Lubimov and Slava Poprugin play four essential works that yield some surprises in their keyboard versions. Three of the pieces are transcriptions of instrumental music, specifically Igor Stravinsky's arrangement of his Concerto in E flat major, "Dumbarton Oaks," John Cage's reduction of Erik Satie's Socrate, and Darius Milhaud's four-hand transcription of Satie's Cinéma (composed as a soundtrack for the short Dadaist film Entr'acte, used in the ballet Relâche), with Stravinsky's Concerto for two pianos solo performed as it was originally written. Lubimov and Poprugin play three pianos, a 1906 Gaveau, a 1909 Bechstein, and a 1920 Pleyel, so the vintage sonorities of the early modern era are used effectively to create the appropriate ambience and authentic period feeling. The pianists' lively playing and crisp attacks accentuate the unique character of these instruments, and overall the performances offer distinctive timbres a world away from the familiar sound of modern pianos. This is a fascinating exploration of modernism in a medium that was quite familiar to all of the composers of the time, though startling details will emerge, especially for listeners who can hear these pieces with fresh ears. (Blair Sanderson)

Alexei Lubimov FRANZ SCHUBERT Impromptus

Alexei Lubimov, one of the last pupils of the great Heinrich Neuhaus, has had a most interesting career. He was an early champion of avant-garde music, playing the Moscow premieres of works by John Cage and Terry Riley in 1968. For this he was “punished” by the Russian regime and prohibited from foreign travel. For a while he toured Russia with the Moscow Baroque Quartet. Then in the early 1990s he made a famous Erato recording of the complete Mozart piano sonatas played on a fortepiano built by Christopher Clarke. Currently he is a professor at the Moscow Conservatory and performs around the world, pursuing his twin interests of modern and period music.
For op. 90, Lubimov plays a fortepiano built in 1810 by Matthias Müller, which was discovered in an attic and rebuilt in the Netherlands by Edwin Beunk. The instrument has three pedals and is capable of a surprisingly full sound (as in the fortissimos in the first two pieces) as well as a pure and silvery tone (shown to advantage especially in the last two). For op. 142, he uses a larger and warmer instrument made in 1830 by Joseph Schantz. It permits more colorism than the Müller piano and is ideally suited to the bigger scope of the op. 142 pieces, especially the variations of No. 3 and the flashy writing in No. 4. Throughout, Lubimov lets the music and the instruments speak for themselves, with tempos that are straightforward but characterful and rubato that is vocally inspired and never artificially applied. These are mainstream performances that rank with the very fine fortepiano recording by Jan Vermeulen (on Et’Cetera) and the stunning modern piano one by Krystian Zimerman (for Deutsche Grammophon). Lubimov’s next recording, of Beethoven’s last three sonatas played on a fortepiano by Alois Graf, was made during the same recording sessions as this one. It is eagerly anticipated. (FANFARE /Charles Timbrell)

Alexei Lubimov CARL PHILIPP EMANUEL BACH Tangere

Russian pianist Alexei Lubimov has long been both a champion of contemporary composition and a dedicated interpreter of Baroque music with a passion for period instruments. In playing older music, he has argued, the further one gets from the modern piano, the more discoveries there are to be made. We find, Lubimov says, unexplored characteristics in the music of the master composers – “new colours, vitality and unpredictability.”

In his remarkable performance of music by Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach here, Lubimov responds to the inventiveness of the composer’s fantasies, sonatas and rondos by making full creative use of the sonorities of the tangent piano. Briefly popular in the early 18th century, the tangent piano (whose strings are struck from beneath by wood or metal “tangents” and allowed to vibrate) offered, he determined, greater expressiveness and intensity than the harpsichord. Lubimov views it as an instrument well-matched to the changing temperament of C.P.E. Bach’s music, with its “rhetorical diversity, its melancholy and humour, its paradoxical harmony effects and individual rhythms.” Alexei Lubimov performs the music on a copy of a 1794 tangent piano by Späth and Schmahl, famed keyboard makers of Regensburg. The replica, from the workshop of Belgian maker Chris Maene had, says Lubimov, “a big effect on me, irresistibly inviting me to renew my imagination and suggesting at once the relevant music … C.P.E. Bach’s music affords extraordinarily generous scope for experimenting with sound design. One can dress it in completely different instrumental colours.”

Alexei Lubimov’s earlier recital disc Der Bote (recorded in 2000) included the composer’s Fantasie für Klavier fis-Moll alongside Cage, Bartók, Debussy, Mansurian and Silvestrov and found the pianist marvelling that Carl Philipp Emmanuel Bach’s music “appeared almost the most modern in the programme”. Its timelessness is evident again in the present recording. (ECM Records)

Alexei Lubimov CLAUDE DEBUSSY Préludes

“I wanted to hear Debussy in a different timbral guise, cloaked in the early 20th century colours that I would find on unique, specially selected instruments… In my search for an inspiring special sound I stumbled upon two excellent pianos that truly seduced me and breathed fresh life into the music… The music revealed itself to me from unknown angles, and like Ulysses bewitched by the Sirens, I let my pianos sing with their own voices and guide me into uncharted realms.” – Alexei Lubimov

A fortuitous encounter with an old Steinway in the Polish Embassy in Brussels – said to be the instrument Paderewski played in his recitals – stimulated Alexei Lubimov to think in new ways about these Debussy pieces he had played, often, over the last 40 years. Alexei Lubimov and fellow Russian pianist Alexei Zuev (a student of Lubimov’s since 2000) play “period instruments” here, but as Jürg Stenzl emphasizes in the liner notes, “they are concerned not with the mystique of ‘authentic original instruments’, but with the incomparably richer timbral vocabulary that Debussy posited for his music and displayed to supreme effect in his own playing. Moreover, the piano versions of two early works, ‘Prélude to the Afternoon of a Faun’ and ‘Trois Nocturnes’, which fully capture the text of the orchestral scores in their piano writing (unlike conventional ‘piano reductions’), bring out the structural, compositional and harmonic aspects with special clarity.” (ECM Records)

Alexei Lubimov MESSE NOIRE

The title refers to Scriabin’s Ninth Piano Sonata, nicknamed The Black Mass, a single movement of darkly smouldering mysticism. It is the last in a compelling sequence of Russian piano works, the first being the least Russian-sounding, Stravinsky’s Serenade in A. Lubimov perfectly catches the Apollonian detachment of its tactile neoclassicism. Both Shostakovich’s Sonata No 2 and Prokofiev’s No 7 were completed in 1942 and speak of dark times, though in different accents: the one laconic, the other expostulatory. Lubimov is subtly attentive to all these idioms. (Paul Driver /Sunday Times)

Alexei Lubimov certainly has a fine pianistic pedigree. Born in Moscow in 1944, he was one of the last students of Heinrich Neuhaus, whose previous pupils included both Emil Gilels and Sviatoslav Richter. Unlike those greats, however, the core of Lubimov’s repertory has always been the 20th century. … On this disc, the focus is Russian music from the first half of the 20th-century… Lubimov’s relaxed, transparent performance of Shostakovich’s Second Sonata and tightly coiled one of Prokofiev’s Seventh are both hugely impressive, as is his surprisingly emollient account of Scriabin’s “Black Mass” sonata. (Andrew Clements / The Guardian)

Alexei Lubimov DER BOTE

This is one of the best discs to have crossed my palm for some time. This package as a whole simply works so well. Here we have a themed compilation that doesn’t pamper to any trend, but has its own voice and something to say. Der Bote (The Messenger), the title, is attributed to Lubimov and is also the title of the last piece on the disc. The theme is mainly one of melancholy, with elegiac pieces that run the whole gamut of pianistic compositions, from CPE Bach to John Cage. The Cage piece sees him in unusually tonal territory; it’s a beautiful, and evocative piece with a definite whiff of the East. Lubimov’s intelligent coupling of these two pieces sets the tone for the whole imaginative collection.
When the 20th-century pieces are heard, there’s no feeling of a bitter pill surrounded by a sugared coating. There are offerings from Tigran Mansurian and the Russian Valentin Silvestrov. Chuck in a bit of Debussy, Bartók and Liszt and you have a fine recipe for an hour’s enjoyable comtemplation. Lubimov has a wonderful sense of darkness when need be, such as in Silvestrov’s Webernesque “Elegie” and a beautiful porcelain lightness in pieces such as Cage’s “In A Landscape”. His playing is laced with colour and mood and makes for a beautifully crafted disc. (Stephen Priest, Pianist)

VALENTIN SILVESTROV Bagatellen und Serenaden

Early in the morning in the Himmelsfahrtskirche in Sendling, before the Munich Chamber Orchestra began the first day’s work on the sessions, Silvestrov sat at the piano and began, quietly, to play. A solo piano recording wasn’t planned, but the microphones were set up for the orchestra, which included piano... Producer Manfred Eicher let the machines run anyway, and snared the first of these pieces, finding in these lontano audio snapshots a special poignancy, and encouraging Silvestrov to continue playing after the orchestra session.  There is a quality to the bagatelles almost like eavesdropping on private thoughts: the pieces sound as if created in the moment. But Silvestrov scholar Tatjana Frumkis specifies otherwise: “The bagatelles form a sort of improvised cycle… Yet what we hear is not improvisation in the strict sense: everything has been fully crafted in the composer’s mind down to the nethermost detail… The living flow of the music is sped up or restrained by a prevailing sense of rubato. The dynamics are governed by the softest pianissimos that seem to expand infinitely in the interior of the church. The listener is granted an opportunity to experience one of the composer’s unique autographs, a sound-ideal with his characteristic weightless attack (‘as if on springtime ice’).” The highly unusual recording reveals a great deal about Silvestrov as musical thinker – the bagatelles are like an x-ray of his melodic imagination – and help us understand both the sources from which his larger pieces flow and the kinds of demands he makes of his interpreters. This is not the first time that Silvestrov has recorded his own music, for his debut ECM disc Leggiero, pesante already included, as a postscript, his solo performance of ‘Hymne 2001’. It is, though, the most extensive documentation to date. (ECM Records)

Alexei Lubimov HAYDN The Seven Last Words of Christ

Although it is played on a period instrument, no one is arguing that this recording of Haydn's The Seven Last Words of Christ is historically authentic. The work, exceptionally in Haydn's output, exists in multiple versions, for orchestra, string quartet, chorus, and keyboard (either fortepiano or harpsichord). But surely Haydn did not have the instrument heard here, the rare tangent piano, in his head. This was, speaking roughly, a piano-harpsichord hybrid that never really found its footing in the late 18th century. As long as listeners are down with the idea of a fairly speculative recording, the effect of the tangent piano in this particular work is electrifying. Lubimov gets the best of both worlds: the intimacy of the keyboard version and the dynamic contrasts and timbral shadings of the orchestral original. The keyboard transcription is not by Haydn himself but was made in his own time, and he approved it. Lubimov works from this, tweaking it and adding contrasts that break up the seven consecutive slow movements and give them an extraordinarily expressive quality. Even when listeners know it's coming, the final Terremoto movement, depicting the earthquake following Christ's crucifixion, comes as a shock. Listeners will never hear the work quite the same way again after experiencing this recording, and even if Haydn didn't intend it this way, most may well end up wishing he had. (James Manheim)

Keller Quartett CANTANTE E TRANQUILLO

For Cantante e tranquillo Keller Quartett leader András Keller and producer Manfred Eicher developed a carefully balanced program based entirely upon slow movements from a wide range of works from different eras. Across the centuries, beyond generic boundaries and the lives of their creators, the movements reveal remarkable similarities of expression that perhaps only become apparent in this new context.

At the same time the selection documents the quartet's 20-year collaboration with ECM and its growing maturity. Its performances invariably approach the works with integrity and an imaginative power rooted in close listening and subtle interaction. More recent readings of Beethoven's op. 130 and 135 have been augmented with fresh recordings of György Kurtág and combined into an album with older and newer renditions of Alexander Knaifel, György Ligeti and Johann Sebastian Bach.

 But there is another feature that unites the works and movements beneath the heading 'Cantante e tranquillo' (an expression mark from Beethoven's F-major String Quartet, op. 135): a sense of the ineffable. Music history knows few compositions more enigmatic in their essence than Beethoven's late quartets.

Johann Sebastian Bach's Art of Fugue has likewise kept its secrets to the present day. Is there anything more astonishing, and yet more consummately wrought, than this opus summum that resists all speculation? As late as 1993 Peter Schleuning could write of Bach's late magnum opus that 'the history of The Art of Fugue is a history of solitude, of quests and discoveries, of experimentation and research – and of failure. The work grew old with Bach and died with him.' Yet scholars and performers alike have remained vitally alive to The Art of Fugue.
A prime example is the present quartet arrangement of several of its numbers. In any event, the part-writing of the four instruments almost has the character of a musical analysis, much like Anton Webern's arrangement of the Bach Ricercar.
Bach, to quote Alfred Einstein, was a rock on which many composers have built their works, including Alfred Schnittke and Alexander Knaifel. Also among them is György Kurtág. His epigrammatic works function like punctuation marks in the dramatic structure of the recording. As does György Ligeti with the multi-layered counterpoint of his entire oeuvre.
The CD's booklet text sums it up: 'A wistful charm imbues this entire recording of pieces which, though not written together, seem to have been predestined for each other.' (ECM Records)

Keller Quartett / Alexei Lubimov ALFRED SCHNITTKE - DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH

The Piano Quintet of Alfred Schnittke (1934-1998) begins where many chamber works might end: with the closing of eyes. It is behind these lids, the shadowy backdrops of which form the projection screen of our deepest mortalities, that the music remains. Even the Waltz of the second movement is a doppelgänger, its higher strings haunting the periphery like an epidemic. Such profound banalities are what make this a harrowing, if somnambulate, work. The piano’s role is very much subdued, providing regularity where there is none to be had. Rarely proclamatory, it reveals its deepest secrets when, at the end of the Andante, the sustain pedal is depressed merely for its metronomic effect in want of note value. The album takes its title from the fourth movement, a viscous, writhing creature that never shows its face. After enduring so many scars, the final Moderato tiptoes ever so gracefully around the fallen shards, gathering from each a snatch of light—just enough for a handful.

Schnittke very much admired the late works of Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), of which the String Quartet No. 15, op. 144 cuts deepest. Completed in 1974, two years before Schnittke’s quintet, Shostakovich’s last quartet of a planned 24 consists of six almost seamless Adagios. At 37 minutes, it is the longest of his quartets, if not also the most ponderous. A few shocks interrupt us, as the forced pizzicati of the Serenade, but otherwise we are lulled in the deepening shade of a wilted tree that sways as it ever did at the hands of an unseen breeze. Ironically, the Nocturne provides the earliest intimations of sunrise, throughout which the cello smiles through its tears. A bitter smile, to be sure, but an unforgettable change of expression in the music’s otherwise tense physiognomy. We are allowed a single breath before the Funeral March that follows. A tough lyricism pervades, as in cello’s repeat soliloquies, all of which primes us for the cathartic Epilogue, in which is to be had a forgotten treasure, a time capsule buried in childhood and only now unearthed.

Although this is an album drawn in morbidity—Schnittke’s quintet finds its genesis in the death of the composer’s mother, while Shostakovich’s quartet premiered months before his own—it is supremely life-affirming, each work a breathing testament to indomitable creativities. The Keller Quartett, joined by Alexei Lubimov for the Schnittke, lay themselves bare at every turn, wrenching out by far the most selfless performances thus far recorded of this complementary pair.

Alexei Lubimov /SWR Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra / Andrey Boreyko ARVO PÄRT Lamentate

Written for large orchestra and solo piano, and commissioned for a series of live events at Tate Modern, “Lamentate” was inspired by Pärt’s encounter with the enormous sculpture “Marsyas”, by Bombay-born artist Anish Kapoor. 150 metres long, “Marsyas” filled the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall for a year. Named for the Greek satyr flayed alive by the god Apollo, the piece consists of three enormous steel rings joined by a single span of dark red PVC membrane. The colour was intended by the artist to suggest blood and the body, and the sculpture dwarfed the viewer, too large to be viewed in its entirety from any single position: “I wanted to make body into sky”, says Kapoor.
For Arvo Pärt the dimensions of the work were breathtaking: “My first impression was that I, as a living being, was standing before my own body and was dead – as in a time-warp perspective, at once in the future and the present. ... In this moment I had a strong sense of not being ready to die. And I was moved to ask myself just what I could still manage to accomplish in the time left to me.”
“Lamentate” then, is a lament not for the dead, but for the living, who must struggle “with the pain and hopelessness of this world.” The solo piano role is designated by the composer to represent “one”, the individual, buffeted by fate. It can be viewed, he writes, “as a first person narrative”. Pärt: “The work is marked by diametrically opposed moods... Exaggerating slightly, I would characterize these poles as ‘brutal-overwhelming’ and ‘intimate-fragile’.” In the present recording, the solo protagonist Alexei Lubimov sails the sea of circumstance with extraordinary fluency, negotiating ferocious tidal waves and ominous calms. The luminescent quality to his playing, which recently served Silvestrov’s “Metamusik” and “Postludium” so well is very much to the fore, sustaining the sense of quasi-improvisational freshness that was one of Pärt’s original goals for this work. Conductor Andrey Boreyko, marshalling the instrumental forces of the SWR Radio Symphony Orchestra Stuttgart, maintains the emotional pressure throughout a very engaged performance of a work that concludes in a dialogue of reminiscences, of laments and consolations.

Arvo Pärt LAMENTATE

Written for large orchestra and solo piano, and commissioned for a series of live events at Tate Modern, “Lamentate” was inspired by Pärt’s encounter with the enormous sculpture “Marsyas”, by Bombay-born artist Anish Kapoor. 150 metres long, “Marsyas” filled the Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall for a year. Named for the Greek satyr flayed alive by the god Apollo, the piece consists of three enormous steel rings joined by a single span of dark red PVC membrane. The colour was intended by the artist to suggest blood and the body, and the sculpture dwarfed the viewer, too large to be viewed in its entirety from any single position: “I wanted to make body into sky”, says Kapoor.
For Arvo Pärt the dimensions of the work were breathtaking: “My first impression was that I, as a living being, was standing before my own body and was dead – as in a time-warp perspective, at once in the future and the present. ... In this moment I had a strong sense of not being ready to die. And I was moved to ask myself just what I could still manage to accomplish in the time left to me.”
“Lamentate” then, is a lament not for the dead, but for the living, who must struggle “with the pain and hopelessness of this world.” The solo piano role is designated by the composer to represent “one”, the individual, buffeted by fate. It can be viewed, he writes, “as a first person narrative”. Pärt: “The work is marked by diametrically opposed moods... Exaggerating slightly, I would characterize these poles as ‘brutal-overwhelming’ and ‘intimate-fragile’.” In the present recording, the solo protagonist Alexei Lubimov sails the sea of circumstance with extraordinary fluency, negotiating ferocious tidal waves and ominous calms. The luminescent quality to his playing, which recently served Silvestrov’s “Metamusik” and “Postludium” so well is very much to the fore, sustaining the sense of quasi-improvisational freshness that was one of Pärt’s original goals for this work. Conductor Andrey Boreyko, marshalling the instrumental forces of the SWR Radio Symphony Orchestra Stuttgart, maintains the emotional pressure throughout a very engaged performance of a work that concludes in a dialogue of reminiscences, of laments and consolations.