Medtner: Tales (Skazki) for Piano

Featuring

Hamish Milne
Nikolai Medtner

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Composer's Artistic Vision

Medtner insisted that artists must 'earn their works by hard labour, like miners, and not try to pluck them like flowers by the wayside'.

Composition History

The title 'Skazka' (meaning 'Tale') for Medtner's shorter piano pieces, first adopted in 1904, could have been inspired by German romance, as he initially inscribed the German word 'Märchen' over his first essays in the genre.

Composer's Artistic Vision

Nikolai Medtner, the composer, was a proud and unbending man who held fast to artistic beliefs at odds with prevailing currents, expressing scorn for contemporaries like Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, and Richard Strauss.

Composer Biography

Sergei Rachmaninov, Medtner's lifelong friend and admirer, famously remarked that Medtner published works from the beginning that would be hard for him to equal later in life.

Performer Biography

Hamish Milne, the pianist on this recording, studied with Harold Craxton at the Royal Academy of Music and later in Italy with Guido Agosti, who had studied with Busoni.

Composer Biography

Medtner was a very disappointed man at the end of his life, not due to the ridicule of modernists, but by the sheer indifference of the world to his work.

Cultural Impact

The English translation 'Fairy Tales' for Medtner's Skazki, which became accepted after his 1924 American tour, is considered a misnomer because their literary inspirations come from diverse sources, not just Russian folklore.