Russian Romantic Piano Music – Nigel Hill

Russian romanticism for the piano

By the unanimous verdict of the jury, pianist Nigel Hill won the First Prize in the Crown Princess Sonja International Piano Competition in Oslo, 1988. The prize consisted of concert engagements with the five major Norwegian orchestras, an extensive recital tour of Scandinavia in the 1989/90 season, a cash prize, and a recording contract under which the present album has been recorded. This is indeed a prestigious album, featuring the music of Sergei Rachmaninov, Nikolai Medtner and Mily Balakirev.

Rachmaninov´s ”Sonata No. 2 in B flat minor” was written in 1913, but later revised due to the composer´s dissatisfaction with its complexity and length. Wanting to avoid the diminished dramatic power of the revised edition, Nigel Hill here performs the original. Right from the start one is plunged into a tremendous outcry of despair, a mood which throughout is rarely absent, before the work ends in one of the most hair-raising codas of all romantic piano music. Medtner´s “Sonata Reminiscenza” starts with a simple statement from which various melodic strands emerge, forming dramatic interludes in the central part of the work. The complexity unwinds, to bring back the calm with which it began. The feeling, as in so many of Medtner´s works, is that we are being taken on a journey, and a story is indeed told in melody and mood. Balakirev´s “Sonata in B flat minor” is conceived on a very big scale, with long passages of bravura writing being contrasted by pages of an intimate, almost secretive, quality, which is how the work begins and ends. Much of the sonata contains passages that could be regarded as “showpiece” music but it is none the less a very strong work that has been unduly neglected.