Label: BIS SACD 1484
Our Price: $19.25
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Concerto No. 2 for Piano and Orchestra*; Tema con variazioni; Little Suite for Strings; Four Images

Geoffrey Douglas Madge, piano
BBC Symphony Orchestra/Nikos Christodoulou
In BIS’s pioneering series of Skalkottas’s orchestral music we are now releasing the sixth installment. The main work on the present disc is the Second Piano Concerto (1937), a composition, which was essential for the composer’s early posthumous reputation. In the 1950s it was championed by the legendary critic Hans Keller, who wrote: “Passionately dramatic and lyrical, heroic and tenderly submissive in turns, the Concerto is an immediately fascinating work…There is a new and incisive thought, a novel developmental idea, an unsuspected textural perspective at every corner”. Keller went on to describe its composer as follows: “the first real and great twelve-note composer since Schönberg … the anti-romantic era left him cold, or rather hot: his music is as romantic as all full-blooded music, and as classical as all great art.’’ On the disc is also Tema con variazioni, the very last composition Skalkottas worked on. (Its orchestration was interrupted by the composer’s death in 1949, and has been completed for this recording by conductor and Skalkottas expert Nikos Christodoulou.) The work is actually the fifth movement of the monumental, but unfinished, Suite for Orchestra No.2, of which the first movement, Ouvertüre Concertante, is available on BIS-CD-1014, and the fourth, Largo Sinfonico, on BIS-CD-904. These two works are followed by the Little Suite for Strings from 1942 – a work of almost extreme brevity – and the late, tonal, suite Four Images (1948). The latter work was intended for a ballet, and depicts rural life in a Greek village. The interpreters on the present disc have all appeared on previous discs in the series: Geoffrey Douglas Madge has been the soloist on the three piano concertos so far released, and Nikos Christodoulou and the BBC Symphony Orchestra collaborated on the highly acclaimed recording of 36 Greek Dances (on BIS-CD-1333/34).

Label: BIS SACD 1728
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NIKOLAI MEDTNER (1880 – 1951): Piano Concerto No. 2 in D minor, Op. 50
SERGEI RACHMANINOV (1873 – 1943): Piano Concerto No. 4 in G minor, Op. 40 (Original 1926 Version); Floods of Spring (from Twelve Songs, Op. 14, trans. for piano solo by Y. Sudbin)

Yevgeny Sudbin, piano

North Carolina Symphony/Grant Llewellyn
With his second concerto disc, Yevgeny Sudbin celebrates the close relationship between two great Russian composers: Sergei Rachmaninov and Nikolai Medtner. Medtner would encourage his more famous colleague during the latter’s recurring bouts of self-doubt, while Rachmaninov early on recognized Medtner’s unique gifts, pronouncing him the ‘greatest composer of our time’. The most sincere testament to their friendship is embodied in these two concertos, which the composers dedicated to one another. Both works were composed in the mid-1920s, with Medtner referring to works by Rachmaninov in his final movement and Rachmaninov worrying in letters to his fellow-composer about the length of his own concerto. Rachmaninov’s concerto was first performed in 1926, but was panned by the critics – in part because of its duration – and the composer immediately began to make revisions and cuts. Never completely happy with the revised version, published in 1928, he made another attempt in 1941, cutting a tenth of the original work, mainly from the final movement. Having chosen to record the rarely heard original 1926 version, Yevgeny Sudbin makes an eloquent case for it in his own liner notes, calling it ‘a truly epic work’ with the addition ‘and much more insanely difficult than the revised version.’ In his advocacy for Medtner’s even more expansive and all but ignored Second Piano Concerto, Sudbin is equally forthright: ‘Why this concerto is not performed more often remains a mystery and is nothing short of scandalous: it offers everything a pianist, or a conductor, can wish for.’ An avowed Medtner champion, Sudbin has previously recorded the composer’s First Piano Concerto, combined with that of Tchaikovsky, on a disc which received a number of distinctions, including the nomination to a 2007 Gramophone Award. Reviewers described the release as ‘another step in Sudbin's inexorable progress to the forefront of his generation of pianists’ (Gramophone) and the soloist as ‘one of the most exceptional musicians of his generation’ (Le Monde de la Musique). On the present disc Sudbin receives the expert support of North Carolina Symphony conducted by Grant Llewellyn.