Mussorgsky: Une Larme (A Tear)

The Japanese pianist Rieko Yoshizumi began piano lessons when she was only four. Her musical skills are wide-ranging; as well as gaining a degree in piano performance, she studied vocal accompaniment and harpsichord and in her spare time played in a rock band. On this CD she performs Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, as well as Image and L’Isle Joyeuse by Debussy.

From nostalgic memories, the sound of bells, the winds of the steppes, to visions of a flickering future; Russian piano music, from Mussorgsky to Scriabin, finds its perilous equilibrium in a romantic past, beyond the immense, icy landscapes, with intimate confessions from heartbroken souls, with a virtuosity vying with the opera and the orchestra yet which retains the gentleness of a lullaby, of a child's laughter, of a disenchanted poem scribbled down one evening of drunken melancholy. From Tchaikovsky to Rachmaninov, by way of Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and Mussorgsky, it is a journey that takes us from St Petersburg to Moscow, across that vast country with its universal emotions. The piano is the instrument of kings, in the nineteenth century above all. Rachmaninoff, as we know from his recordings, was probably the greatest of them all: virtuosic and inspired, a visionary and a poet. Scriabin, before he injured his right hand (whence the Prelude for left hand op.9), also planned a solo career. Mussorgsky, too, was an excellent pianist. Only Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and Tchaikovsky were no more than competent amateurs on the piano, but that did not prompt them to give up composing for the instrument - far from it, in fact.

Every disc of Alice Ader is awaited with baited breath by her fans: this one being no exception. From the first bars of Une Larme, Mussorgsky’s inner world is revealed in this new 2 CD set of the complete piano works. It includes the mighty Pictures at an exhibition plus Mussorgsky’s transcription of Une nuit sur le Mont Chauve by Rimsky-Korsakov.

Alice Ader, the noted concert and solo pianist is equally at home in contemporary and classical music. She earned her diplomas from the C.N.S.M. of Paris (Unanimous First Prize in 1963) and the Viennese Academy 1970. From 1967 through 1970, she studied with Geneviève Dehelly and Jacques Février in France and with Bruno Seidlhofer in Austria. For Fuga Libera she has already given us her live Art of Fugue.

The Georgian pianist Nino Gvetadze was born in 1981 and studied at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. Since winning the YPF National Piano Competition in 2004, she has appeared with many leading orchestras and performed at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. Modest Mussorgsky’s turbulent and muddled life somehow enabled him to become one of the most visionary and innovative composers in Russia in the 19th century. ‘Art is not an end in itself, but a means of conversing with one’s fellow creatures’ he wrote in his autobiography. This view may in some way explain the inconsistencies and idiosyncrasies in his music. He had been called a ‘barbarian’ by some of his colleagues, and even his friend and fellow member of ‘The Mighty Handful’ (the group of five leading Russian nationalist composers) Rimsky-Korsakov thought he lacked refinement.

His vivid tonal pallette was to become an important influence on composers such as Debussy and Ravel, the latter famously orchestrating Mussorgksy’s piano masterpiece Pictures at an Exhibition. The original is the main work on this disc which includes all his extant works for solo piano. Much of his output for piano dates from his early years as a composer, and two piano sonatas, in E flat major and F minor, have sadly been lost.

New recording, containing pieces that are rarely recorded.

One of a series of releases highlighting the winners of the principal prizes at the prestigious YPF Young Pianist Foundation’s National Piano Competition in Holland.

‘A musician to be reckoned with.’ De Telegraaf