The gifted young Russian-born pianist Olga Domnina, now based in London, performs a cycle of seven pieces written for her in 2011 by her compatriot, composer Vladimir Genin. Genin is particularly known for his wonderful arrangements of the music of Mussorgsky. Seven Melodies for the Dial, dedicated to Domnina, here receives its world premiere recording.

In June 2009 pianist Olga Domnina completed the two-year Diploma in Performance course of postgraduate study at the Royal Academy of Music in London with Professor Hamish Milne, for which the Academy had granted her a merit scholarship. At RAM she won the Macfarren Prize for Best Solo Recital, awarded previously to Sir Clifford Curzon and Dame Myra Hess amongst others.

A native of Moscow, before moving to Britain she participated in a number of international piano competitions, going on to win the San Bartolomeo Competition in Italy and taking an honours diploma at the Maria Canals Competition in Spain. She has collaborated with such internationally acclaimed artists as the violinists Julian Rachlin and Viktor Tretyakov, the violist Paul Silverthorne and the cellist Thomas Carroll.

Composer and pianist Vladimir Genin was born in Moscow in 1958, and has written several symphonic and chamber works. In 1993 arrangements of Mussorgsky’s ‘Songs and Dances of Death’ and ‘Sunless’ vocal cycles were commissioned from Genin by the acclaimed Russian baritone Dmitry Hvorostovsky, and they were performed by conductor Valery Gergiev and the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra in St Petersburg that year, and by the Rotterdam Philharmonic in Rotterdam and Brussels in 1998.