Medtner - Piano Concerto No. 3 "Ballade", Op. 60 (Nikolaeva) [1000 subscribers special!]

[@daveluttinen2547]

This is a wonderful piano concerto. It has profoundly touched my soul today so I'm grateful for this being posted and the marvelous performance. This should be mainstream in the piano literature!

[@SeigneurReefShark]

Medtner's three concertos are among the most brilliant, romantic and breathtaking in their grandiosity, majesty, elegance and passion. They are major pieces of the piano repertoire, yet far too little known. To thank you for reaching the 1000 subscriber mark, I wish to share with you the third one, also called "Ballade". The Concerto is played by the brilliant Tatiana Nikolaeva, a sensational pianist delivering a captivating and ardently passionate interpretation. It was conducted by Svetlanov.

[@knownfact4905]

Thank you ReefShark for these complete works, all in one place

[@vanguard4065]

thank you for sharing this. i adore and am most fond of the great russian masters

[@agionet]

Very interesting discovery, I saw Medtner's name here and there, but I finally get the chance to discover his music. Thank you!

[@SeigneurReefShark]

I. Con moto largamente - 0:00 II. Interludium (Allegro, molto sostenuto e misterioso) - 15:04 III. Finale (Allegro molto, Svegliando, eroico) - 16:36

[@Александр-ш6щ3ш]

It is strange that you didn't mention Svetlanov as a conductor and the orchestra, I think due to this man's piano recordings I started listen to Medtner's music. Apart, this concerto is brilliant!

[@SeigneurReefShark]

Ohhh you are absolutely right ! My bad, I completely forgot to add the conductor's name.

[@Александр-ш6щ3ш]

@@SeigneurReefShark It's ok

[@sama.4471]

Thank you Mr. ReefShark, this is possibly my favorite work of music ever and I don't think I'd heard this recording. This concerto is just... wow. Words cannot really do justice to how unbelievably transcendent it is. Medtner at the absolute peak of his powers, written so late while other composers were writing very modern and atonal pieces. I think of this work as a swan song, almost like valediction to late Romanticism. It contains so many beautiful moments but especially in the latter half of the finale is where Medtner really reaches for the heavens. Incredible music

[@ClassikalBoi]

I'm in love with this concerto!

Good job! 👌🎼

[@ciararespect4296]

Super i just played with my school orchestra

[@isaacvandermerwe744]

okay that's insane where do you go to school

[@ciararespect4296]

@@isaacvandermerwe744 the Purcell school. Bushey England

[@DynastieArtistique]

Hold up. You played the concerto?

[@lucasdanconia]

@@DynastieArtistiqueno lol Ciara respect is a troll

[@DynastieArtistique]

@ I wrote this reply without noticing the username😹

[@moky1125]

24:00

[@DynastieArtistique]

Greatest recording, other than Medtner’s himself ofc

[@jacobleis5673]

Konstantin Scherbakov also has a good recording of Medtner's concertos. I bought his Naxos recording back of the 1st & 3rd in 1999 (when I was 18), having never heard of him; but the blurb on the back said he was a contemporary of Rachmaninoff (for whom he dedicated his 2nd concerto). I was beginning to study Rachmaninoff's preludes and bought it out of curiosity. No regrets. Working on Medtner's Op 20 No 2 right now.

[@vine2197]

Great

[@kallehed6330]

stravinskys firebird? 2:28 left hand

[@marksmith3947]

Offhand remark after listening for a few minutes. Was Medtner better at orchestration than Rachmaninoff? It occurs to me that I can barely recall how the orchestra sounds in the latter's concerti, while of course the piano part is etched deeply in my memory

[@jrb5077]

Medtner famously hated writing for orchestra, and his three concertos are his only works involving one. Whereas Rachmaninov, of course, wrote symphonies, symphonic poems and operas as well as his concertos; also, Rachmaninov was a distinguished conductor as well as a pianist. So Rachmaninov certainly had the greater facility with orchestral writing. But the orchestra plays a very subordinate role in his concertos (or at least in the first 3), probably because he wrote them as a vehicle for his own pianism.

[@isaacvandermerwe744]

Listen to Rachmaninoff's last major work, the Symphonic Dances. Some of the most ingenious, colourful, idiomatic, grateful orchestral writing out there.

[@talastra]

I don't think I've ever heard Nikolaeva outside of Bach (and Beethoven).

[@brynbstn]

I love this concerto but not this performance. It seems too artless… too literal … not enough blending of sound, phrase and concept. Tozer is much better

[@talastra]

Well, it's Medtner's fault.

[@DynastieArtistique]

@@talastrano it’s not, it’s your fault

[@DynastieArtistique]

No way you called Tozers recording better than this one lmao. Nikolaeva is better than Tozer in every way. Her playing is passionate and authentic while tozers always seems to have this suppressed feeling, as if he plays with piano with a mute on.

[@talastra]

@@DynastieArtistique I'm always inclined to believe in principle that Nikolaeva's performance is better. It takes an awful lot of wonder for me to feel what she does with a piece is surpassed. I have never been as much taken by her Beethoven as others, but I'm not as much taken by Beethoven as others in the first place. So there's that.

[@talastra]

@DynastieArtistique Okay, in the sense you have (fairly) called out my (unfairly) playful non-responsiveness to this composition, there is nonetheless some space (is there not?) where Medtner, as a non-A-tier composer, falls short. It is not only and entirely ONLY my (lack of) taste or inability to aesthetically appreciate his production. As a composer myself, I have quixotically spent 35 years laboriously putting notes on a page for 100 minutes of my opera. I am always impressed by trained composers' ability to put notes on the page (never mind imagining something, and then transcribing that on the page). My facility is in text-based composition (not musical), and I have doubtless generated tens of thousands of pages of text in my lifetime. My long-windedness readily translates into text, the present case in point. Not so with music. So, kudos to Medtner for getting all those notes on the page; I’m not being snide about that. If composers didn’t get something on a score, we’d have no performance of the piece. Although, on the other hand, it is a learned skill, no less than my learned skill generating a text like this. The more impressive part will still be that the composer’s "inner inspiration" can make it onto the page, just as my felicitous expression of an opinion on the page here is the weightier part of what I'm writing than the sheer fact of getting it on the page. Am I therefore an A-tier commentator merely by virtue of replying? Is your rejection of my point a sign of your shortcoming, not mine? If so, respect my opinion more! *heeh*. If we want to play the more interesting music game, … but before we do that. Cultural inertia makes me communicatively lazy sometimes; this is my fault, of course, but also there’s only infrequently any reward in bothering to model the alternative: namely, the obligation to state clearly that “I do not enjoy myself in the presence of this piece,” rather than commenting that the piece is flawed. My laziness here is matched by yours, since your admission of Medtner’s merits is not rooted in, “I enjoy myself in the presence of this piece.” If it is a shortcoming of mine not to appreciate this piece, it is a shortcoming of yours that you do. That’s just how the terms you are utilizing work. You’ve no more a leg to stand on (in the nakedness of your claim) than I do. *heeh* Most of these kinds of conversations are projections of “objective claims” (e.g., that the fault is mine, not Medtner’s) that serve as a smokescreen for the underlying actuality, that someone does or does not enjoy themselves in the presence of this music. We would then be able to talk about why Medtner’s “genius” does not resonate with me and why it resonates with you. And that is (from an interpersonal standpoint) a more interesting conversation than than the non-A-tier status of this composition. Such a conversation might well expose how you “cut Medtner slack” that I don’t, that you listen too charitably, that I listen with too much opposition, and the like. This too would shed light on the nature of listening to music. A more interesting conversation still might result from examining this piece as an interesting failure. We can realize that Medtner was addressing a question (or a set of questions) by composing this work, and the work itself constitutes an answer to those questions. We can attempt to sort out what those questions are and the degree (never perfect) to which he succeeded in answering them; that is what makes this an interesting failure, a point of departure for future work rather than a point of arrival to some false infinity of perfection. Although Medtner is not formally an academic (almost invariably a kiss of death for a composer), his compositional ideology (expressed in his 1935 “The Muse and the Fashion: Being a Defence of the Foundations of the Art of Music”) has more than a tinge of academic pedagogy to it, which I discern as affecting his music. In contrast, whatever Prokofiev considered his “compositional theory” of music, it was much more rooted in sheer practicality (the piece at hand) rather than affirming its values in the way Medtner programmatically insists. I didn’t know this when I first heard Medtner or Prokofiev; it simply comes across to my ear, so to speak. In the same way that someone once remarked there was more music in a prelude of Chopin than all the trumpeting of Meyerbeer (the prelude in question is no 20), in even the slight works of Grechaninov, I constantly find more “music” than the whole of this concerto.