Elenea Bezprozvannykh - Piano Recital - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Elena Bezprozvannykh - Recital [COMPACT DISCS] date 04/10/2007

Olena Kushpler writes InchEver since my youth I have been fascinated by the music of Leoš Janácek initially by his vocal works, particularly Jenufa, an opera with an unadulterated 'peasant' tone of such radical authenticity that it transforms itself into avant-garde music. I only discovered Janácek's piano repertoire at a later date, and immediately grasped his basic aesthetic principle he wanted to write a music of truth. Virtuosity for virtuosity's sake had no place in his approach. I understood that the Bohemian master staked out a clear position in the great musical debate of the 1800s. It raged, on the one hand, between formal aesthetics, which viewed music as Inchsonically moving formsInch (in the words of Vienna critic doyen Eduard Hanslick), and, on the other hand, the musical content aesthetics of Berlioz, Schumann, Wagner, and Bruckner, who devoted their efforts to transforming poetry and even philosophy into music. In Janácek, I also feel that he strives to imbue each phrase with profound expression, thereby creating music that reflects his feelings, hopes, and disappointments. Janácek's music draws it's energy from contrasts, which can be violent at times each piece contains moments of brilliant luminosity as well as dramatic conflict. I view his piano cycle On An Overgrown Path as a clearly autobiographical work that reflects the experiences and moods he encountered in real life. The death of his daughter Olga led to profound despair, and the titles of individual pieces reflect how a father's thoughts revolved around the memories of his lost child. Our Evenings, A Blown-Away Leaf, and Words Fail are all individual pieces that foreshadow the tragedy to come. The cycle culminates in The Barn Owl Has Not Flown Away!, and we can note that folk belief viewed the barn owl as an ominous messenger of death.Inch

When the Siberian-born 'Arctic Circle Pianist' Ekaterina Litvintseva heard InchBlumenlebenInch ('Life of Flowers') for the first time, she immediately resolved to find out more about the life and music of Dora Pejacevic (1885-1923). This resolution prompted her to investigate an extraordinary corpus of music, remarkable not least for it's sheer diversity, which she has attempted to convey in this selection of Pejacevic's piano output. Among 57 extant works, 24 are scored for solo piano; there would surely have been many more in both categories had she not died of kidney failure on 5 March 1923, aged 37, having suffered complications in giving birth to her first child. This newly recorded recital marks Ekaterina Litvinseva's debut on Piano Classics, and should attract the attention of pianophiles everywhere.