Polina Osetinskaya SHOSTAKOVICH 24 Preludes, Op. 34 - Piano Sonata No. 2, Op. 61

“A master jeweller. In her subtle, if not to say refined, refined interpretation the composer appeared as a philosophical intellectual, and it is thanks to these pensive and critical interpretations that Polina Osetinskaya proffers that Shostakovich’s music remains topical and even highly relevant art.” 

The life of pianist Polina Osetinskaya can be divided into two stages. The first – that of “wunderkind” (a word that Polina herself cannot abide) – was when Polina performed as a girl in huge halls filled with excited sensationalists. The second, which has continued to the present day, is essentially her victory over the first. It is both a reference to serious performing and to exacting audiences.

Polina Osetinskaya ROTA - DESYATNIKOV

This disc of pieces played by the pianist Polina Osetinskaya brings together the music of Giovanni (“Nino”) Rota and Leonid Desyatnikov. An odd combination? – actually, no, Rota (1911-1979) lived entirely in the 20th century; Desyatnikov was born in 1955; but what these composers have in common is not just the century they lived in but the way their work challenges what academic music had become. Neither Rota nor Desyatnikov has ever been part of any musical movement and they have written no theoretical tracts, as was all the rage in the 20th century but we can still see their music as a riposte to contemporary isolationism, arrogance and fear of the listener.

At the conservatoire in Rome the student Rota was groomed to become the next Puccini. At the age of 12 this wunderkind wrote an oratorio which was instantly performed in Rome and Paris but by the middle of the 20th century, with the triumphant avant garde on one side and bloodless traditionalism on the other, there was no place for a second Puccini and Rota’s ten operas (the first written in 1942, the last in 1977) were always overshadowed by his film music. Rota was arguably the most important film composer of the 20th century, Federico Fellini’s friend and in many ways his co-author.

Like Nino Rota, Leonid Desyatnikov has a comprehensive list of works in traditional forms to his credit: symphonies, operas, ballets. In his early days the composer worked in a number of different theatres in Leningrad and beyond. Later he reworked several of these scores as a piano cycle, which is how his concert suite Echoes of the Theatre came about. Here, eccentrically but with a certain artistic inevitability, he brought together music from puppet shows, a vaudeville for Conservatoire students, a cartoon and motifs from the songs of Vertinsky and Efim Rosenfeld.

The waltz In honour of Dickens was created from music written for the Leningrad Youth Theatre play The Cricket on the Hearth. Titry is from the soundtrack to Valery Todorovsky’s film Moscow Nights. Nocturne comes from Alexei Uchitel’s film Giselle Obsession. Happiness is the only solo piano number from Alexandr Zeldovich’s film The Target. Albumblatt was written for the birthday of Yulia Volk-Boreiko, wife of the conductor Andrei Boreiko.

This disc demonstrates that Stravinsky’s famous dictum – “Film music exists only to enrich the composer” – was really just an idle slander. Actually, even Stravinsky’s own greatest compositions exist in genres which before Tchaikovsky, were considered merely decorative. After Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky nobody ever again spoke in a derogatory way about ballet music, for example.

In one way at least Rota and Desyatnikov are both like Stravinsky – their music can stand perfectly well on its own and in Desyatnikov’s case it always surpasses the genre it was born from.

Polina Osetinskaya PYOTR TCHAIKOVSKY The Seasons - Children's Album

Polina Osetinskaya started to play on stage at the age of six. At eight, she performed with an orchestra (at the hall of the Vilnius Philharmonic Society). She finished the lyceum school of the St. Petersburg Conservatory where she studied with the famous teacher of the Leningrad piano school Marina Wolf (she attended her class at the conservatory as well) and then took a course in Moscow with professor Vera Gornostayeva. The pianist believes that period of her life and studies in St. Petersburg, when she matured both musically and spiritually, was a true beginning of her artistic career. Today, Polina Osetinskaya is a winner of a Triumph award and active concert musician. She performs in Russia and overseas and regularly takes part in prestigious international festivals. She has performed with some leading orchestras and collaborated with well-known European conductors, including Saulius Sondeckis, Teodor Currentzis, Tugan Sokhiev, Vassily Sinaisky, Thomas Sanderling and Andrei Boreiko. The pianist’s repertoire comprises numerous works by contemporary composers that she intentionally combines with classical music in her concert programmes. Her interpretations of Tchaikovsky’s popular piano cycles are directed at radical revision of the customary renditions. Performing some of the composer’s pieces since she was a child, she, in her own words, has just gained an informed and deep insight into his music. Tchaikovsky in an inseparable unity of “human” and “musical” is a deeply tragic personality who was acutely aware of his loneliness and unachievable happiness. That is how Polina Osetinskaya interprets the composer’s inner world leaving no true judge of music untouched.

Polina Osetinskaya / Ilya Hoffman SERGEY AKHUNOV Sketches

Art tends to elude direct expression. 

Or, rather those ideas appealing to artistic language are scarcely ever plain and direct. Therefrom a musical statement grows metaphorical. 

Yet what elements – language and style – are inherent to this statement? And what integral challenges emerge for the artist and interpreter? 

At first we take a metaphor as somewhat complex, deliberately ambiguous, however, when the statement engenders new degrees of comprehension the metaphor takes root, appearing conventional and natural - similar to a math proposition, proven and evolved into a world-renowned theorem...

Then a new rank metaphors stems from the previously established layer... Presumably, the artist may again face the alternative? Whether to plunge into the metaphorical language evolution? Or withdraw to supposedly well-known tools yet creating a completely new context? 

The author, indubitably, opts for the latter. 

Ultimately, his music remains unprotected and particularly susceptible to the performance. The slightest interpretation inaccuracy may invoke a spurious association thus frustrate the statement’s metaphoricity... 

I hope our efforts succeeded to reveal author’s conception in its modern rendition where archaisms along with contemporary expression and avant-garde ideas give birth to a new dramaturgy.  (Ilya Hoffman)