Nikolai Medtner
    Piano Concerti

* Concerto No. 2 in c, op. 50
* Concerto No. 3 in e, op. 60

Nikolai Demidenko (piano)
BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra/Jerzy Maksymiuk
Hyperion CDA66580 Total time: 74:14

* Concerto No. 1 in c, op. 33
* Piano Quintet in C, op. posth.

Dmitri Alexeev (piano)
New Budapest Quartet
BBC Symphony Orchestra/Alexander Lazarev
Hyperion CDA66744 Total time: 58:59

Summary for the Busy Executive: Love it.

Volumes 8 and 2 of Hyperion's "Romantic Piano Concerto" series stand out
from the pack.  I first came across Medtner's name forty years ago in an
essay by John Culshaw on the Rachmaninoff and Medtner concerti.  It's taken
me that long to actually hear some Medtner music, undoubtedly my own fault.
I had absolutely no use for the music of the Nineteenth Century, and its
reach into the Twentieth struck me as a lingering illness, best stamped
out.  In the last twenty years, I've changed my mind somewhat.  I can
actually listen to Brahms and Beethoven with real enjoyment rather than
narcosis.  Of course, there were always grand exceptions, usually among the
nationalists and especially among the Russians.  I liked them because they
didn't sound like Beethoven, Brahms, or Wagner.  Their melodic and harmonic
thoughts seemed to me far less predictable, as well as beautiful in their
own right.  Still, expanding my horizons meant exactly that: I didn't give
up the old houses when I moved into the new neighborhood.  For me, Russian
music is still a fabulous luxury: rich, exciting, sensuous, something to
wallow in.  The emotions are epic (sometimes even over the top), and the
music takes big strides.  At its best, it risks a lot.

The point of Culshaw's essay was to show the similarities between
Rachmaninoff and Medtner (1880-1951) and to make the case, at least for
Rachmaninoff, as a great composer, since at the time Culshaw wrote, the
composer's reputation (among most writers on music, at any rate) reached
its nadir.  Culshaw tried to describe the situation of a great composer
during cultural decadence, by which he seemed to mean an artist who found
something compelling to say with means generally considered played-out.  I
confess I have trouble following his point, probably because I don't accept
the biological metaphor of birth, growth, and decay applied to aesthetics.
Art isn't "natural" to me: that's what makes it art.  Besides, it's more
than a little paradoxical to say that the composer is great and the period
stinks, since the composer makes the period.  I suspect that some may take
the sharp lines, drawn to define a period for pedagogical purposes, way too
literally, as if once Debussy writes Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun or
Stravinsky The Rite of Spring, there's no such thing any more as Romantic
music.  Indeed, one could make the case that Romanticism is very much alive
in contemporary art, that it has never passed on, in fact.

At any rate, my view conflicts with Medtner's own.  He saw Modernism as
a repudiation of Beethoven and the artists who followed.  He considered
himself a Beethoven disciple, although you may find it hard to hear this in
the sound of Medtner's music.  Medtner shares an idiom with Rachmaninoff.
Both men knew and admired one another's work.  Medtner may even have
influenced Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 4.  But they don't write
the same music.  Rachmaninoff waxes far more lyrical, creating themes that
flower into symphonic songs.  Medtner works with Beethovenian "bits" that
he strings together in long paragraphs.  Rachmaninoff's works tend to carry
the listener from one song to another.  Medtner's force the listener to pay
attention to a fairly close argument.  The Rachmaninoff Third probably
comes closest to Medtner's level of thematic development, but - unlike
Medtner's music - it's not that sort of compositional concern that "makes"
Rachmaninoff's concerto.  While Rachmaninoff tried every genre, Medtner
confined himself mainly to music for the piano. In both, however, one
hears a lot of Russian "soul" - intense darkness, sweet singing, Orthodox
Church modes and folk modes tingeing the harmonic sound.  There is also an
amazing level of finish to these works.  Russian conservatory training (at
least in Moscow and St. Petersburg) must have been among the greatest in
the world.  Medtner didn't write very much for orchestra.  Indeed, I'm not
sure whether there's anything other than the three piano concertos.  Yet
his orchestral writing shows complete command, if not necessarily an
interest in novel sounds.  One will not hear Stravinsky's aural
inventiveness - rather, the Tchaikovskian template taken to a kind of
limit.

Medtner's three concerti are all mature works, finished in 1918, 1927,
and 1943, respectively.  The first, in one movement, grows out of a rising
semitone.  To all intents and purposes, only two basic related ideas
dominate the entire composition.  Yet Medtner gives us an amazingly rich
and various concerto, full not only of grand climaxes, but one which seems
fairly taut.  The originality of the structural thought also commends
itself.  One hears in large outline various classical forms, including
sonata, but the thematic principle is that of Wagnerian continual
variation.  I can't easily call to mind any other work by anybody which
actually pulls this off, for to a great extent these tendencies war with
one another.  The coda goes on a bit too long for me, but I can't decide
whether the fault belongs to Medtner or to a momentary lapse of the
conductor, Alexander Lazarev.  After all, I've not heard any other
recording.

If Rachmaninoff's third is his most Medtner-like, Medtner's second is
the most like Rachmaninoff in its feeling, particularly the latter's epic
second.  It taps into the same primeval power.  Medtner's concerto storms
right from the opening measures and sings heroically throughout.  The
thematic unity, less concentrated than in the first concerto, nevertheless
remains very tight, due to a recycling of themes from previous movements in
the final one.  It turns out that many of the themes relate to one another,
particularly rhythmically.  In this sense, it's also a very Beethoven-like
concerto.  The piece physically excites.  The rhythms move the body.

Structurally, Medtner's third concerto follows the most unusual plan of the
three, as one might expect from its subtitle "Ballade." Medtner connects
two huge movements by an "Interludium" of roughly a minute-and-a-half, and
he makes no reference that I can find to classical form.  He explores the
relation of three basic themes and also varies them with an abundance of
invention.  One of these variants becomes his most beautiful melody, very
much like the lyrical moments of the Rachmaninoff second.  Furthermore,
when he comes across it, he knows what to do with it.  He makes it a kind
of emotional fulcrum of the work - the main point of contrast.  Its final
apotheosis, in conjunction with the opening theme, lifts the concerto to
a grand conclusion beyond the level of formal culmination to a thematic
argument.  Furthermore, unlike so many works based on the principle of
continual development and eschewing sonata form, the listener has very
little difficulty making out the concerto's large rhetorical points.
Medtner, as always, defines his argument clearly.

The Piano Quintet, Medtner's last major piece, for me dwells on a slightly
lower plane than the concerti, although Medtner obviously intended this
work as his spiritual testament.  Words from the Psalms appear in the score
over certain themes.  Medtner refers to the shape of Russian Orthodox hymns
and to the Dies irae chant.  One can never fault Medtner's craft.  And yet
it seems less than the sum of its parts, or exactly the sum of its parts.
Perhaps it's just not vulgar enough to suit me.  The deadly air of
gentility hangs over it.  Also, the strings seem curiously de trop. The
piano stars to the point where one wonders why this is a quintet at all.
Don't misunderstand me.  The piece contains moments of great beauty,
particularly the entire second movement.  I believe, however, that it fails
to reach Medtner's usual even-higher level.

Lazarev and Alexeev do better than Maksymiuk and Demidenko, and Hyperion
recorded them better.  As should be clear by now, Medtner is a composer
of subtle details and argument.  Demidenko and Maksymiuk turn him into a
barnstormer.  They live for the moment, rather than to build in essence
a musical cathedral.  It gets so bad that both Demidenko and Maksymiuk
fail to bring out the third concerto's principal major idea every time
it appears.  Furthermore, Demidenko is so closely miked that his piano
drowns out the orchestral details, and the performance seems little more
than a read-through.  Nevertheless, I recommend both discs, simply because
Medtner's works manage to triumph over even this level of thoughtlessness.

Other volumes in this series I've enjoyed include 5 (Balakirev and
Rimsky-Korsakov), 6 (Dohnanyi), 7 (Alkan and Henselt), 12 (Parry and
Stanford - Parry rather than Stanford), 14 (Litolff), 15 (Hahn and
Massenet), and 19 (Tovey and Mackenzie - Tovey rather than Mackenzie).

Steve Schwartz