Mompou: Prelude No. 7 (Palmier d'étoiles )

Arcadi Volodos is one of the world’s best pianists, celebrated as a “genius” and the “new Horowitz” for the unique combination of outstanding virtuosity and profound and expressive musicality.

Volodos devotes his new CD to the hardly known Catalan composer Frederic Mompou. He believes that Mompou’s solo piano works are of outstanding quality and open new worlds.

The fact that Mompou’s music is hardly known is a key to success for this CD. It can only reveal its deep und unique quality in the magnificent interpretation of Volodos.

The music of Catalonian composer Federico Mompou (1893-1987) is almost completely unknown today. Unjustly so, in the opinion of Russian star pianist Arcadi Volodos, who has devoted his new solo CD to this remarkable musical personality.

Carrying on the tradition established by his Spanish colleagues Enrique Granados and Isaac Albéniz, Mompou's works are subtle and delicate, mysterious and intimate, with a shimmering Impressionist palette. Mompou's role models are always in evidence in his many piano pieces: Chopin and Scriabin, Satie and Debussy. Yet in quiet, unobtrusive fashion, Mompou evolves a musical cosmos entirely his own from these models: his music is a true discovery.

Volodos has chosen for this CD pieces from the Mompou cycles Scènes d´Enfants (1915-18), Charmes (1920/21) and Música Callada (1959-67), which were among the composer's own favourites. In the last few years, Arcadi Volodos has regularly played works by the Catalonian composer in his recitals, prompting the Süddeutsche Zeitung to refer to his "deep sensitivity for inspired nuance".

“To achieve a maximum level of expressiveness with a minimum of means” was the defined goal of the Spanish pianist and composer Frederico Mompou. He was championed by Enrique Granados, but it was in early 1921 when his piano teacher Ferdinand Motte-Lacroix presented the works of his student to the public that Mompou made his breakthrough.

These works are performed by Olena Kushpler, a Ukrainian pianist whose concert performances are regularly greeted with enthusiasm by audiences and the media.

Federico Mompou is one of those composers who tends to pass under the radar. Treasured by fellow composers; beloved of pianists; in many ways more analogous in his work to a poet than a crafter of notes. He was a Catalan who quietly lived through the region’s turbulent 20th century, dying in Barcelona in 1987. He had no children, either physically or musically – no students to speak of, and few who could emulate his style which seemed to belong to any period and none. The notes themselves often come and go without fuss, leaving few traces behind, and in that sense his music inhabits the world of Fauré and Satie; the most definite trace could be said to be the composer’s own recordings, made in 1974. Although they’re not rhythmically complex, making these songs and dances sing and dance is harder than it looks. Alicia de Larrocha was at a distinct advantage, knowing the retiring composer as well as she did and having the whole of Spanish piano music under her fingers. This is a late recording of hers, suffused with light and warmth.