Ravel: Oiseaux tristes (Miroirs No. 2) (Sorrowful Birds)

This is a reminder that Angela Hewitt doesn't only play—or record—the music of Bach, as she has already shown us with her disc of Messiaen, issued a couple of years ago. Here, in this 2CD set, she gives us the complete solo piano music of Ravel. (And, unlike some of the others on the market, this really is complete, containing as it does the very early, 1893, 'Sérénade grotesque', discovered comparatively recently.)

Miss Hewitt's elegant and poised playing-style familiar from her Bach recordings serves her especially well in the piano music of this fastidious French master.

Boreletti Buitoni artist, Hannes Minnaar studied at the Amsterdam Conservatory and made his international debut as a solo pianist at the Gewandhaus, Leipzig. He has a busy concert schedule performing with Dutch and Flemish Orchestras, but also performs with his own Van Baerle Trio. He was recently described as “A name to watch” by the Observer.

The outstanding Russian soloist Alexei Volodin’s first recording for Challenge Classics (CC72354), released last year, was devoted to the music Chopin. His new CD brings together piano works by three of the most influential composers of the last two centuries. Robert Schumann’s Kreisleriana was written in 18, whilst Ravel’s Miroirs and Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No. 5 are products of the first half of the 1900s.

Alexei Volodin was born in St. Petersburg in 1977, and began taking piano lessons there at the age of nine. A year later he moved to Moscow, and in 1994 he enrolled at the Moscow Conservatoire. During 2001 and 2002 he studied at the Theo Lieven International Piano Foundation in Como. Alexei Volodin has won several prizes at different international competitions, including First Prize at the Concours Géza Anda in Zurich in 2003.

Ravel composed the piano suite Miroirs in 1904-05 after he had joined the Société des Apaches, a group of ground-breaking young musicians, composers, music critics, poets, writers and painters, which included Igor Stravinsky, Florent Schmitt, Manuel de Falla and Maurice Delage. Miroirs is a musical tribute to them, and each of the five movements is dedicated to one of the members. Robert Schumann studied Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier intensively when working on the eight short pieces that make up his Kreisleriana, and consequently each individual movement is a prime example of formal discipline and structural coherence within the cycle as a whole. The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin’s enthusiasm for the mystic and poetic elements in the works of Wagner, Liszt, and Nietzsche led him to attempt to establish an all embracing, eternal and super human art form, and it is this philosophy that is the driving force behind music of his Piano Sonata No. 5.

Richter was one of the greatest exponents of the Russian Piano School and his Ravel and Grieg interpretations are considered among the finest ever made. He said of the performer “He shouldn’t dominate the music, but should dissolve into it.”

On the nineteenth of September 2010, a rapt audience in Glasgow’s City Halls witnessed the extraordinary emergence of a young, 23-year-old pianist from Kazakhstan, who had already won the International Music Critic Prize at the 2009 Ferruccio Busoni International Piano Competition. Oxana Shevchenko revealed an extraordinary command of structure, rhythmic dynamism and sheer pianistic exuberance in her performance. She seized the moment with unbridled musical commitment and drive and carried away the first prize with unanimous approval from the distinguished international jury. She also returned home with £10,000, the Alexander Stone Memorial Trophy, the Frederic Lamond Gold Medal and a Bluthner grand piano, presented by Herr Bluthner himself, after performing Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto in the finals.

Just three days after her triumph in the concerto final, Shevchenko returned to the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama, the setting of the first two rounds of the competition, to record a varied recital programme for Delphian as part of her first prize. Her chosen programme for the recording represents some of the highlights of her competition repertoire, and showcases the remarkable musical and pianistic qualities that she demonstrated during the competition.

Works by Mozart, Liszt, Shostakovich and Ravel feature on Oxana's debut disc in a programme full of highly pictorial musical genres.

“The results were announced following a tremendous, all-afternoon concert in which each pianist performed a concerto with the BBC SSO, playing in heroic form with conductor Martyn Brabbins… Shevchenko was next with Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto. She has been, frankly, gobsmacking since the start, and was absolutely consistent in her delivery of the Prokofiev: total power, complete clarity of articulation and a phenomenal level of musicianship that is already world class.” The Herald