Medtner: Piano Concerto Nos. 1-3

Featuring

Ilya Stupel
Geoffrey Douglas Madge
Arthur Rubinstein Philharmonic Orchestra
Nikolai Medtner

Did you know?

1/7

Recording & Production

In 1948, Sir Jaya Chamaraja Wadiyar, the Maharajah of the Indian state of Mysore and a great admirer of Medtner, offered to finance a complete recording of Medtner's works.

Performer Biography

Geoffrey Douglas Madge, the pianist on this recording, developed an early interest in unjustly neglected composers and is known as a pioneer of rarely performed and demanding repertoire.

Composer's Artistic Vision

Medtner's compositional style is firmly rooted in 19th-century harmony, believing that form is harmony and that the rules of harmony were derived from the works of Bach, Beethoven, and Chopin.

Composer Biography

Medtner studied composition with Taneyev and Arensky and piano with Pabst, a Liszt pupil, at the Moscow Conservatory, where Rachmaninov and Scriabin were among his classmates.

Composer's Artistic Vision

For Medtner, tonality was the cornerstone of music, and he considered consonance the pivot of musical rules, with dissonance always relating to consonance.

Composer Biography

Nikolai Medtner, born in 1880, received his first piano lessons at age six from his mother, followed by instruction from his uncle F.C. Goedicke, a professor at the Moscow Conservatory.

Compositional Technique

A notable characteristic of Medtner's music is its vocal quality, with the piano always singing, even in solo pieces, exemplified by his Sonata Vocalise Op. 41.