Scriabin: Deux poèmes, Op. 32

Born in Kiev, Ukraine, Valentina began playing the piano at the age of three and performed her first solo recital just one year later. She has won prestigious awards for her playing internationally, including the Murray Dranoff Two Piano Competition (together with her husband Alexei Kuznetsoff).

Valentina Lisitsa has already performed at major international venues including Carnegie Hall and Avery Fisher Hall in New York and the Vienna Musikverein, and in countries as far apart as the Netherlands and Brazil. She has played with renowned orchestras including Chicago Symphony, Seattle Symphony, San Francisco Symphony and the Pittsburgh Symphony, collaborating with conductors Manfred Honeck, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, and Jukka-Pekka Saraste, among others. Upcoming performances are confirmed with the Rotterdam Philharmonic, Philharmonie im Gasteig, Munich with Münchner Symphoniker and recitals at the Victoria Hall in Geneva and Philharmonie in Berlin.

With more than 43 million views and over 52,000 subscribers to her YouTube channel, the young pianist is not only one of the fastest-rising stars of the international concert scene but probably the single most-watched classical musician, having rapidly overtaken long-established giants of the piano world in terms of global online viewing figures.

This recording was conceived as a portrait of the artist through the mosaic of his works, proceeding in chronological order – from the age of innocence to the age of experience.

These pieces with their ‘revolutionary’ harmony took the piano into the 20th century. They are a challenge to the interpreter, as they have to master both the spiritual and technical aspects of this composer’s art. Pascal Amoyel more than rises to the challenge. He studied at the Paris Conservatoire and is both a pianist and composer.

Scriabin’s cycle of Piano Sonatas is one of the most visionary and dramatic in the canon. The First dates from 1892, written at a time of crisis in his life, and is a passionate, emotionally unstable work, whilst No. 4, completed over a decade later, embodies the new developments in his stylistic armoury. The Eighth was the last of the ten to be completed, and it approaches the zenith of Scriabin’s art in its intricacy, poetry and complex tapestry of textures. The Poèmes and Morceaux represent, in even more concentrated form, the harmonic allure of Scriabin’s writing. The youngest ever laureate of the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1994, and winner of the 2007 Cleveland International Piano Competition, Alexander Ghindin has established himself as a major pianist of distinction.

A winner of many awards, the Russian pianist Anna Alexeyev has performed around the world with some of the most prestigious orchestras. In 1995 she premiered Paul McCartney’s first solo piano piece entitled “A Leaf”, which was later released on CD. This new recording features a unique combination of the piano music of Alexander Scriabin and Nikolai Roslavets.

The pairing of these two composers may appear to be a novel idea, but it is long overdue and illustrates a connection between their compositions that has been overlooked. Scriabin and Roslavets were contemporaries, but their lives could not have been more different.

Scriabin was born into an aristocratic Moscow family, had access from a young age to the best formal music training available, and enjoyed recognition as a brilliant concert pianist and innovative composer during his lifetime. Roslavets came from a rural background outside of Russia proper, taught himself to play the violin and then obtained enough formal training to enter the Moscow Conservatory at the age of 21. Although as a composer he soon fell into political disfavour and his music was rarely performed during his lifetime, since the collapse of the Soviet Union his work has begun to gain recognition.

Anya Alexeyev studied at the Moscow Tchaikovsky Conservatory and at the Royal College of Music in London. Her UK concerto appearances include the BBC Philharmonic, RPO, Philharmonia, RSNO, CBSO, BSO ECO, LMP and BBC National Orchestra of Wales.

This is one of the first four new releases on the Canadian label Marquis since Proper Note took over its distribution this month.

Numbered among the musical elect of her generation, the multi-award-winning Xiayin Wang presents a recital of piano music that virtually spans Scriabin’s career.

The mysterious impressionism of Vers la flamme (Towards the Flame) builds to an exhilarating intensity that is matched by the two contrasting Poems.

From his early Waltzes and Polonaise, with their echoes of Chopin, via the rhapsodic abandon of the Fantaisie, to the Two Dances, composed shortly before his death, these works chart an almost mystical trajectory through the composer’s life.

“Scriabin’s Fantaisie in B minor Op. 28 was a luscious wash of colour, infused with big swirls of sound. [Yang’s] soon-to-be released recording of the composer’s music should be a dandy.” The Washington Post