Tchaikovsky: The Seasons & Grand Sonata

http://www.renaud-bray.com

http://www.renaud-bray.com

*** Résumé en anglais seulement ***Incredibly, despite several solo recordings dedicated to Russian composers, this new recording is award-winning artist Nikolai Lugansky s first Tchaikovsky recital on record. Though less well-known than his operas or his orchestral compositions, Tchaikovsky s piano music nonetheless contains essential works, such as the 'The Seasons' cycle and the 'Grand Sonata', featured here. Composed at a period of crisis in the composer s personal life, they illustrate two quite different aspects of his style: on the one hand we have the fashionable worldliness of 'The Seasons', pieces that almost belong to the genre of salon music; on the other, we see him ambitiously grappling with the classical sonata, in the tradition of his illustrious predecessors, Liszt, Schumann, Chopin. For Nikolai Lugansky, whom Gramophone has called ' the most trailblazing and meteoric performer of all', this recording is like 'having a new encounter with Tchaikovsky, almost like falling in love with someone new...ever since the Tchaikovsky Competition in 1994 I haven t played any of the pieces that I performed back then apart from the Concertos. Nearly all the solo works I played in the Competition, including the Grand Sonata, had dropped out of my repertoire I don t know why. With The Seasons, it s the same thing: I d studied four of the twelve Seasons it s very rewarding music to play. And what s surprising is that these two works are both from his Opus 37; they were composed during the same period.'