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Salon des oubliés: Appreciating the enigmatic bonbons of composer NIkolai Medtner

By John Terauds on April 24, 2012

British pianist Hamish Milne is an eloquent advocate for Nikolai Medtner.

I’ve spent more than a month listening to Arabesques, Dithyrambs, Elegies and Other Short Piano Works, a new 2-CD album of solo piano pieces by Russian composer Nikolai Medtner (1880-1951) recently released by British pianist Hamish Milne on Hyperion.

Appreciating these short pieces is like trying to understand a charming new friend who, no matter how many times you go out for drinks and coffee together, remains elusively mysterious.

Championed by Marc-André Hamelin as well as Milne and a handful of Russian pianists, Medtner’s story is one of prodigious talent that, through personality and the vagaries of history, failed to make a wide and permanent connection. If it weren’t for a handful of champions, Medtner, who died in 1951, and his music would be pretty much forgotten.

Milne is a remarkably elegant pianist — held in the higest regard in the U.K. and not that well known beyond — who has recorded Medtner extensively, and has also spent a lot of time researching the composer’s life, methods and compositional style.

In an essay from 2003, Milne says that Medtner’s first composition, a setting of The Angel, a poem by Mikhail Lermontov, says everything we need to know about this composer. Conveniently, the Op. 1 piano-solo setting of the poem is what opens the first of the two CDs on the new album.

Here’s an English translation by Evgeny Bonver:

The angel was flying through sky in midnight,
And softly he sang in his flight;
And clouds, and stars, and the moon in a throng
Hearkened to that holy song.
He sang of the garden of God's paradise,
Of innocent ghosts in its shade;
He sang of the God, and his vivacious praise
Was glories and unfeigned.
The juvenile soul he carried in arms
For worlds of distress and alarms;
The tune of his charming and heavenly song 
Was left in the soul for long.
It roamed on earth many long nights and days,
Filled with a wonderful thirst,
And earth's boring songs could not ever replace
The sounds of heaven it lost.

An exile from post-Tsarist Russia and an advocate of the Romantic aesthetic in a world that had left it behind, the partially self-taught composer, and seriously well-taught pianist became friends with fellow traveller Sergei Rachmaninov, but their music is vastly different.

To me, it sounds like Medtner’s short pieces are forever reaching for something much greater than their limited scope allows — a melody that needs another 16 more measures, a theme that could use another variation. The pieces on this new album are particularly exuberant, as if they contain far more life force than the notes are able to carry.

Milne’s assured, totally committed interpretations further add to Medtner’s strange allure.

I can only say — go buy this album, and allow yourself to be seduced. It could be the start of a nice friendship.

In that essay, Milne quotes Medtner: “It is impossible to talk about music. It talks itself, and does so precisely at the moment when words fail.”

With that in mind, here are medtner’s Romantic Sketches for the Young, Op. 54, from an earlier recording of Milne’s. The pieces’ length, structure and variegated inventiveness are fully indicative of the treats in store on the latest album.

For extensive background notes, as well as audio samples from the new album, click here.

John Terauds

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