Oleg Marshev, born in Baku, Azerbaijan, is a Russian pianist who trained at the Gnessin State Musical College and the Moscow Conservatoire, and is now resident in Italy.
Composition History
Rachmaninov's Variations on a Theme of Chopin, Op. 22, was his first large-scale solo piano work, written between August 1902 and February 1903.
Composer Biography
Federico Mompou, a Catalan composer, lived in Paris as an exile during the Spanish Civil War and published no music for a period.
Interpretation
Oleg Marshev, the pianist on this recording, presents a unique 'portmanteau' version of Busoni's Chopin Variations, combining elements from the composer's 1884 original and 1922 revision.
Composer's Artistic Vision
Ferruccio Busoni, an Italian composer and pianist, had a complex relationship with Chopin's music, finding it both attractive and repulsive due to its perceived 'prostituted, profaned, vulgarized' interpretations.
Composition History
Mompou's Variations sur un theme de Chopin originated from an abandoned collaborative project with cellist Gaspar Cassadó and was revived for a ballet that also came to nothing.
Compositional Technique
Rachmaninov chose Chopin's gloomiest Prélude, No. 20 in C minor, as the theme for his variations, telescoping it into an eight-bar theme.
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