Mussorgsky: Une Larme (A Tear)

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

Maria Yudina was born in 1899 and died in 1970. She studied with Frida Teitelbaum-Levinson, a pupil of Anton Rubinstein, and with Anna Esipova, a pupil of the great keyboard lion Theodor Leschetizky. Her studies included composition, conducting, organ, philosophy, languages and literature – augmenting all of this with extra studies with Felix Blumenthal, teacher of Vladimir Horowitz. She herself spent most of her life teaching. She was a persistent thorn in Stalin’s side – she is quoted as saying to him that she ‘would pray for his salvation’. Banned from performing for five years for reciting Pasternak in place of giving encores, during the 1930s, she was forced to sleep rough in Moscow. She did, however, manage to escape the Gulags, and during the 1948 purges defended Shostakovich. For some reason Stalin turned a blind eye on her. Following the death of Stalin, she was permitted to tour ‘safe’ countries in the Eastern Bloc – often with Shostakovich. As a result of all this she remains an elusive figure in the history of pianists, absent altogether from Harold Schonberg’s respected ‘The Great Pianists’ of 1963. This 8CD set is a unique opportunity to experience a great artist who suffered deprivation, and political and artistic repression. A fearless character and tenacious spirit can be heard in these recordings. Her repertoire ranged from her beloved Bach, to Bartok, Hindemith and Xenakis via the classical and Russian schools.

Extensive booklet essay by Ates Orga.

A fascinating discovery and of interest to all scholars and enthusiasts of the piano.

Recordings date from the 1940s, 50s and 60s.

Few of her recordings remain available, so this release fills an important gap in the catalogue, and provides a fascinating insight of the life of an artist during the darkest years of the Soviet Union.