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Medtner - Incantation: Complete Songs Vol.1

Label: Brilliant Classics

Cat No: 96056

Barcode: 5028421960562

Format: CD

Number of Discs: 1

Genre: Vocal/Choral

Release Date: 14th August 2020

This product has now been deleted. Information is for reference only.

Works

Medtner, Nikolai

Poems (2), op.13
Poems (7), op.28
Poems (8), op.24
Pushkin Poems (7), op.29
Romances (3), op.3

Artists

Ekaterina Levental (mezzo-soprano)
Frank Peters (piano)

Works

Medtner, Nikolai

Poems (2), op.13
Poems (7), op.28
Poems (8), op.24
Pushkin Poems (7), op.29
Romances (3), op.3

Artists

Ekaterina Levental (mezzo-soprano)
Frank Peters (piano)

About

The start of an exciting new series: the recording of the complete songs by Medtner!

Nikolai Medtner was born in Moscow in 1880. After piano lessons with his mother he entered the Moscow Conservatory where he had lessons from Pavel Pabst and Sergei Taneyev. He won the prestigious Anton Rubinstein Prize at age 20. A younger contemporary of Scriabin and Rachmaninov he was destined for a brilliant pianistic career but he chose to concentrate on composition. In 1936 he settled in London where he spent the rest of his life teaching and composing till 1951.

Medtner’s style is rooted in the 19th century, full-blooded romantic, with a highly personal harmonic and melodic language, often complex and dense, but hauntingly beautiful.

Medtner’s legacy for solo piano is now widely esteemed alongside Rachmaninov and other giants of the Russian ‘silver age’: melodists to their core, romantics at heart, yet rigorous craftsmen to their fingertips, who took their muse seriously and refined their inspiration to distil a peculiarly Russian spirit of melancholy in sound.

However, around a third of Medtner’s output, measured by opus numbers, was dedicated to voices, and this section of his music has received much less attention. Ekaterina Levental has dedicated herself to correcting this imbalance. The Uzbek-born, Dutch-resident mezzo-soprano has given all of Medtner’s songs in concert with the pianist Frank Peters; together, they now embark on a recorded cycle.

Medtner lacked nothing for self-sacrificing dedication to his art, and he chose to set the finest poets of his Russian homeland: Pushkin, Fet, Lermontov and others, and then Goethe and Eichendorff in German. Unlike Rachmaninov he continued to write songs even after emigrating and settling in London.

‘Medtner's musical vocabulary is very rich and expressive,’ Levental and Peters explain in their own booklet note, which is printed together with English translations of the lyrics. ‘Some songs immediately captivate you, others require a certain effort from the listener. Anyone who takes up the challenge, makes a discovery. Every song is a treasure and an intimate, spiritual confession from the composer to his listener.’

In the category of ‘immediate appeal’ surely fall the two songs of Op.13: the ardent vocal response to Pushkin’s Winter Evening perfectly underscored by the stormy piano part. No less unmistakably Russian in expression is the complementary Epitaph, triumphant even in its mournfulness and like many other of the songs here not as stern as much of Medtner’s piano music. Any listener looking for the composer’s personal voice, behind the virtuoso keyboard fireworks, should start here.

Ekaterina Levental was born in Uzbekistan. She settled in The Netherlands where she studied at the Conservatory of The Hague. She embarked on a successful career as singer, dramatist and theatre producer. Pianist Frank Peters is a highly respected Dutch pianist, both as soloist and chamber music partner. He is an indefatigable champion of the piano works of Medtner.