I've been learning this over this summer, and I find it a masterpiece (like every Medtner sonata I've played). I am so interested to hear the D-natural Medtner plays in the left hand two bars before the final section with the bells... it's clearly written as a sharp in the score but I wonder if it's a mistake in the printing. The D-natural is beautiful!
This is hard music to get anything out of. It seems like a random improvisation. I'm sure it isn't, but that's what it sounds like, and nothing remains in the mind afterwards. No wonder Medtner's music is not well known. Thanks for posting, though. Always interesting to hear composers play their own music.
Medtner does take a while to grow on. Listening and identifying the theme helps, as it holds the entire work together. The Sonata-Ballade is very rich in narrative as well. It features Medtner's recurring Muse Theme (that recurrs in his entire oeuvre) as well as the Dies Irae, as a battle of light/dark. Check out Bradley Emerson's paper (2016) for more. There are more recent recordings in better quality. Tozer etc.
Joseph Laredo I strongly recommend listening to this piece and others by Medtner multiple times, not necessarily back-to-back but, rather, returning to them every few weeks or every month. He seemed enigmatic to me, as others find, but once I had listened to his Skazki and appreciated some of his shorter sonatas, I became obsessed with understanding his music as I thought “The pieces I know are some of the most well-crafted piano works I’ve ever heard, so I must be missing something when I listen to these larger works.” Once you’ve digested a few of his sonatas, the sheer genius of the rest become more apparent. A good introduction to Medtner’s large-scale writing is his 2nd piano concerto, which most would agree has the most immediate appeal of his three concerti. Its themes have the sort of sweep and lyricism that people associate with Rachmaninoff, along with Medtner’s remarkable compositional rigour.
This sonata is a masterpiece but this recording isn’t even one of the best to listen to. Medtner wrote this very beautiful sonata, but sadly he can’t play it properly. Medtner’s pianism seems to be meh. Rachmaninoff and Scriabin were better pianists, better interpretators of their own music.
I don't agree with you, Medtner was was in fact great pianist.This interpretation is quite good and his interpretation of his piano concertos are great too! Actually Scriabin's interpretation of his own pieces are practically terible...
I believe Medtner was a better skilled pianist (interpreter of other's pieces and own's) than Rachmaninoff and Scriabin. Rachmaninoff was the most inspired of these 3, and the most composing-oriented of them. What to say of Scriabin... those left-hand octaves...
@@teodorb.p.composer actually we will never know what scriabins interpretations sounded like since his recordings are all piano rolls, which are not very accurate to how to composer actually played it
@@usurpationofmusic4596 well, that's true, still the piano rolls don't sound very naturally. But the age was different, the pianism was different, so we shouldn't judge!
