Unser neuer Gesamtkatalog

This month, the OehmsClassics Debut series introduces the young Russian pianist Alina Kabanova. After studying at the Moscow Conservatory, Kabanova moved to Germany and attended the Muenster Academy for Music. She is currently a student of Professor Volker Banfield at the Academy for Music and Theater in Hamburg. Her training in the Russian and German cultural milieu is reflected in the works performed on this CD, which ranges from Bach/Busoni to Beethoven and Schumann up to Anton Rubinstein and Sergei Rachmaninoff.

From pianists for pianists

Wunderkind Ferruccio Benvenuto Busoni (1866–1924) was only seven when he began publicly performing works of Wolfgang Amadé Mozart, Muzio Clementi and Robert Schumann in Triest. His Vienna debut took place two years later. Busoni’s mother was a pianist of German origin; his father was Italian, a virtuoso clarinetist who acquainted him with the composer who was to become “the fundament of piano-playing” for him and with whose works he dealt for the rest of his life.

The result was his Chorale Prelude and Fugue on a Bach Fragment as well as his Fantasia contrapuntistica or the Two Contrapuntal Studies based on Joh. Seb. Bach (1910 and 1917 respectively) and various transcriptions and editions: in 1888 he had already finished the transcription of the Organ Fugue in D Major. No wonder Busoni and his successors wanted to learn the famous Chaconne from 1720, Bach’s only set of variations within a single movement, considered by Busoni’s colleague Johannes Brahms to be one of the most wonderful, unfathomable works of music ever written. Brahms set this work for the left hand.

Busoni’s interpretations were truly revolutionary for his time, due to their lack of sentimentality – even though he was not particularly interested in faithfully reproducing the exact musical text – and thus paving the way for such composers as Sergei Vassilyevitsch Rachmaninov (who reworked three movements from Bach’s Solo Partita in E Major, BWV 1006, for example). Although Rachmaninov appeared chiefly as a piano virtuoso after his emigration from Russia in 1917, mainly to keep his family afloat, his series of compositions based on Bach was already complete. Rachmaninov borrowed the title of the Moments musicaux, written in 1886, from Franz Peter Schubert’s half a dozen: in the same pair-wise contrast, Rachmaninov follows a plaintive lament with an etude that reworks the same rapid figuration with ever new variations.

Busoni was also influenced by the playing of his fellow countryman, Anton Grigoryevitch Rubinstein (1829–1894), the founder of the St. Petersburg Conservatory. He looked like Beethoven and played like Beethoven, brought the piano to volcanic eruptions... When his audiences went home, they were exhausted, having the feeling they had experienced a natural phenomenon. (Harold C. Schonberg) But almost none of the works from his extensive oeuvre has remained in the repertoire outside of his homeland – except for the exceptionally popular and often transcribed Melodie in F and the significant Staccato study from the first of two collections of etudes.

In his last years, Rubinstein traveled throughout Europe with a cycle of seven “Historic Piano Recitals” – overly long programs – whose fourth was dedicated exclusively to Robert Alexander Schumann. It included the Etudes symphoniques, which were adapted especially for his friend William Sterndale Bennet and whose formal design had gone through various revisions.

The original version from 1835 was entitled Fantaisies et Finale sur un thème de M. le Baron de Fricken (the dilettante adoptive father of Ernestine, to whom Schumann had become engaged one year before). Analog to Frédéric François Chopin’s model, op. 10, it had 12 parts, of which two years later only the Thema (formerly entitled marcia funebre), the Finale and five revised movements still remained. It was these that found their way into the technically ambitious Etudes symphoniques, which instead of exploiting superficial virtuosic effects, explore the “symphonic” colors of the piano and are thus far ahead of its time. (After revising and reprinting a third version of the work in 1852 in Leipzig, Schumann removed two sections that no longer corresponded to the new title Etudes en forme de variations.)

Rubinstein’s second piano recital, dedicated to Ludwig van Beethoven, included no fewer than eight (!) of his sonatas and culminated in the rendition of the work composed between 1821 and 1823 and dedicated to his student Archduke Rudolph (this was the same period during which Beethoven also wrote his Missa solemnis, also dedicated to the Archduke). The – for Beethoven – “fateful key” always marked the caesuras within his career, and signal here his achievement of the opus ultimum of this genre. Only two movements stand opposite each other in the relationship of one to two, both approaching the boundaries of what was considered musically possible at the time: a solemnly increasing struggle followed by a lyrical song, then artful variations that finally fade away in mystical Elysian Fields.