RUSSIAN PIANO SONATAS VOLUME 1 BALAKIREV GLAZUNOV KOSENKO Vincenzo Maltempo BALAKIREV · GLAZUNOV · KOSENKO 20th Century Russian Piano Sonatas MILY BALAKIREV: Piano Sonata No.2 in B flat minor Op.102 The Ukrainian composer and pianist Viktor Stepanovych Kosenko (1896- 1. Andantino 6’47 1938) was born to an affluent military family in St Petersburg. Relatively 2. Mazurka, moderato 5’34 forgotten today, despite a catalogue (covering the years 1910-37) embracing 3. Intermezzo, larghetto 3’59 concertos, chamber works, piano music and folk song arrangements, he 4. Finale, allegro non troppo, ma con fuoco 7’52 studied in Warsaw with the pre-eminent Chopin specialist Aleksander Michałowski, whose own teachers had included Moscheles, Reinecke and ALEXANDER GLAZUNOV: Piano Sonata No.2 in E minor Op.75 Tausig (1908-14). With the onset of the First World War, Konsenko moved 5. Moderato-poco più mosso 9’06 back to St Petersburg, where he was enrolled at the Conservatory (1914- 6. Scherzo, allegretto 6’22 18). Here his composition and playing briefly caught Glazunov’s attention 7. Finale, allegro moderato 9’47 and encouragement. On graduation Kosenko joined his family in Zhytomyr, north-western Ukraine (Richter’s birthplace – he was then three, living VIKTOR KOSENKO: Piano Sonata No.2 in C sharp minor Op.14 with his aunt), taking up appointments at the Music Technicum, becoming 8. Andante con moto 9’37 director of the city’s Music School, and co-founding the Leontovych 9. Moderato assai espressivo 5’04 Musical Society. He married in 1920. Nine years later - following a period of 10. Allegro vivo 5’59 burgeoning composition, publication and concerts but squalour, and poverty domestically and unsanitory conditions generally plus mounting tensions with the Stalin regime - he moved to Kiev, taking up a position as chamber Vincenzo Maltempo piano musician and analyst at the Mykola Lysenko Institute of Music and Drama, his subsequent professorship transferring to the Conservatory in 1934. He died from cancer in October 1938 - not though before his tireless nationalist endeavours were recognised with the award of the Soviet Order of the Red Banner, bestowed personally by the First Secretary of the Ukrainian Communist Party, Khruschev. Recording: 6 September 2017, 3 February 2018, Westvest Church, Schiedam, The Netherlands Producer: Pieter van Winkel Engineer: Peter Arts Steinway D, tuned by Charles Rademaker Cover photo: Raffaele Battiloro ℗ & © 2018 Piano Classics Piano Classics is a trade name of Brilliant Classics In Zhytomyr Kosenko composed three piano sonatas, in B flat minor, Op 13 Testy, ‘tactless [and] despotic’ (Gerald Abraham), eventually forgotten by (May 1922), C sharp minor, Op 14 (June 1924), and B minor, Op 15 (1926-29, all but his inner circle, Mily Balakirev (1837-1910), together with the critic dedicated to Boris Lyatoshinsky). Flickers aside in the Third, these have little Vladimir Stasov, was the founder, mentor and self-importantly, often harshly, to do with mystic Scriabin, early Prokofiev or political rhetoric but everything hands-on adviser of the Russian nationalist school, the Mighty Handful - in common with Slavic Romanticism and heart-on-the-sleeve emotion, comprising himself, Borodin, Cui, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov. Don’t their grandiose gestures and nostalgic habitat ranging from Tchaikovsky to study the classics he used to advise, study Liszt. If we’re to believe Rimsky’s Rachmaninov via Russified Chopin and Liszt burnished with glints of song memoirs, however, his nurturing of the creative spark left something to be and dance steeped in Ukranian and Moldavian lore. Oceanically virtuosic desired. ‘With all his native mentality and brilliant abilities, there was one reminiscenza music of Golden Age hue and winged majesty, dynamically thing he failed to understand: that what was good for him in the matter of expanded. Contrasting its sub-divided single-movement companions, musical education was of no use whatsoever for others, as these others the Second Sonata is a tripartite design, with a central Moderato in E flat not only had grown up amid entirely different surroundings, but possessed minor. Its high-octane pianism, chamber-like voicings, and orchestrally utterly different natures; that the development of their talents was bound to imagined power-house octave, chordal and harmonic doublings, all point take place at different intervals and in a different manner.’ to a composer who must have been a ‘big’ performer, ebulliently spirited, He was a man rarely comfortable writing large-scale canvasses at a single equal to any commanding the Russian, European or American circuit of sitting: his First Symphony took over thirty years to reach completion. the ‘20s and ‘30s (the principal warhorse concertos were in his repertory). Though signed-off quickly, the Second Sonata (September 1905, dedicated Musically, melody and motifs, accenting starkness before sentimentality, are to Lyapunov), in the moodily post-Chopinesque ‘black’ key of the late to be had. Repetitive (architectural) elements likewise. Skeletally, too, there Russian Romantics, was even longer in the thinking and drafting - the first are intimations of a possibly psychological subplot in the shadows - the first sketches (a fugal epilogue in memory of Lermontov) dating from 1855, the movement’s (acidly plaintive) disperazione motto, the finale’s (determinedly second movement D major Mazurka, revised in July 1900, from 1856-57. On hopeful) alla marcia intrusions. But it’s in the Beethovenian exchanges a theme of wistful wandering, folk-like in nature, the opening Andantino of keys and triadic grammar, in the climaxing and resolution of tensions, journeys fugue, cadenza, sonata, variation and filigree, lyric glory to the arguments spiralling upwards, cadences settling downwards, that the fore. Evolution and development become blossoming rather than episodic essence and engine of the score is to be found. Kosenko inscribed the piece processes, the seams of the fabric blurred more than bared. Not so much to the Russian-Jewish pianist David Shor, who the year after its completion the ‘harsh sunlight and pagan voluptuousness’ of Islamey as the world and emigrated to Palestine, settling in Tel Aviv. serenity of the Eastern Orthodox church permeates its spirit, Edward Garden, the composer’s biographer, suggests, ‘where mosaics spread themselves out administrative and pastoral well-being, and numbering Shostakovich among in a magnificent plethora of delicate vision’. Transient allusions to Bach are his later students. In 1928, embittered by the consequences, hardship and graciously lit. The Mazurka is robust, heroic, glittering, fanciful, courtly before deprivations of New Order communism, and unwilling any longer to play rural, the larghetto Intermezzo a transition from D major to (root-suspended) political chess or become involved in factional infighting, he left his country, B flat minor, its combination of simple (mainly) two-part writing and richly ostensibly to attend the Schubert centenary commemorations in Vienna but pedalled illusion (implied, never indicated) placing it eloquently in that effectively to escape. Relinquishing his position at the Conservatory in 1930, tradition stretching from Chopin (and before) to Rachmaninov (and after). he made Paris his home, ‘respected,’ Shostakovich was to write, ‘but not much The piano was Balakirev’s instrument (he studied originally with Dubuque, loved ... not really knowing for whom and for what he was writing’. His copious one of Field’s pupils) and in the Finale he unleashes all its possibilites and output, dating mostly from the period between the deaths of Mussorgsky (1881) iron-framed thunder, whispered tierce de picardie finish notwithstanding. and Scriabin (1915), included eight completed symphonies, five concertos, three Here is rhythmic virility and terpsichorean swagger, the steeply inclined ballets, a number of choral settings, seven string quartets, and a quantity of Caucasian ascent calling for athletic response and aristocratic certainty – a piano music. Bridging the chasm between Tsarists and Bolsheviks, Glazunov breathtaking foil to the cross-fertilisation and intellect of the first movement. was an artist of legendary pedagogy and picturesque personality, a man of Championing its universe, Leokadiya Kashperova (Stravinsky’s and physically gargantuan girth, a ‘Homeric’ drinker. Dividing opinion, less pioneer, Tcherepnin’s piano teacher) must have relished the experience. more reconciler, travelling a battle-scarred road from homeland to exile, he knew life in all its facets, from society riches to tenement rags. Aleksandr Glazunov (1865-1936) was born in St Petersburg. Showing a He dedicated his E minor Second Sonata (1901) to his early teacher and precocious aptitude for music, with a total recall and gift for reconstruction friend Nartsis Nartsisovich Elenkovsky [Jelenkowski], a former St Petersburg that was said to have been legendary, witness his supposed rescue job on student of Alexander Dreyschock (he of the famous left-hand octaves). Borodin’s Prince Igor, he was early on discovered by Balakirev, founding father Dating from the period between Scriabin’s Third and Fourth Sonatas, its late of the nationalist Five or Mighty Handful, before being taken up by Rimsky- Romantic climate and occasionally repetitious classicism is very different, the Korsakov with whom he studied composition and theory, and whose orchestral music looking back stylistically and harmonically to the big-boned