Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 2 / Medtner: Piano Concerto No. 1

Young Australian pianist Jayson Gillham presents his third album on ABC Classics, featuring the music of two Russian friends and piano virtuosi: Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No.2 – one of the most eternally popular pieces of classical music – and the rarely performed Piano Concerto No.1 by Nikolai Medtner, written just 15 years later. For these recordings, Gillham is joined in the studio by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and their Associate Conductor Benjamin Northey. Nikolai Medtner (1880–1951) was a close friend of Rachmaninoff (they even dedicated various pieces to one another) but history has treated their music very differently. The great Australian pianist Geoffrey Tozer, who died in 2009, was a rare champion of Medtner’s music, and it was when Gillham was invited to feature in a documentary on Tozer’s life that he discovered Medtner’s work. Dedicated to his mother, Medtner’s Piano Concerto No.1 was written during the First World War. The intense drama of the music – brought out in vivid technicolour in these recordings – is irresistible, but so too is the consolatory power of music. We discover the healing balm of music again in Angel, Medtner’s work for solo piano: a meditation, as Gillham puts it, on “the rediscovery of a divine song, halfremembered, half-forgotten, of a beauty that cannot be matched on earth”. Gillham first performed Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No.2 with the MSO in Melbourne’s outdoor Sidney Myer Music Bowl: that concert was greeted with raptur

Tracks

1~1~Nikolai Medtner 18801951: Piano Concerto No. 1 In C Minor, Op. 33 - Allegro
1~2~Nikolai Medtner 18801951: Piano Concerto No. 1 In C Minor, Op. 33 - Tranquillo, Meditamente
1~3~Nikolai Medtner 18801951: Piano Concerto No. 1 In C Minor, Op. 33 - Coda (Allegro Molto)
1~4~Nikolai Medtner 18801951: Piano Concerto No. 1 In C Minor, Op. 33 - Eight Stimmungsbilder (Mood Pictures), Op. 1: No. 1 Prologue 'the Angel'
1~5~Sergei Rachmaninoff 18731943: Piano Concerto No. 2 In C Minor, Op. 18 - I. Moderato
1~6~Sergei Rachmaninoff 18731943: Piano Concerto No. 2 In C Minor, Op. 18 - Ii. Adagio Sostenuto
1~7~Sergei Rachmaninoff 18731943: Piano Concerto No. 2 In C Minor, Op. 18 - Iii. Allegro Scherzando
1~8~Sergei Rachmaninoff 18731943: Piano Concerto No. 2 In C Minor, Op. 18 - Prelude In D Major, Op. 23 No. 4

Details

Format: CD
Artist: Orchestra, Jayson Gillham, Benjamin Northey And Melbourne Symphony
Release Date: 05 July 2021
Genre: Classical Music
Label: Abc Classic
Distributor: Rocket Group