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Rachmaninoff: Piano Sonata No. 1, Tchaikovsky: The Seasons - Mustonen

Rachmaninoff: Piano Sonata No. 1, Tchaikovsky: The Seasons - Mustonen

Ondine  ODE 1082-5

Stereo/Multichannel Hybrid

Classical - Instrumental


Rachmaninoff: Piano Sonata No. 1 in D minor Op. 28, Tchaikovsky: The Seasons Op. 37b

Olli Mustonen (piano)


Mustonen's fourth solo piano album for Ondine, faithfully rendering his glittering piano sound and technique in SACD quality. It features Rachmaninov's seldom-performed first Piano Sonata, coupled with Tchaikovsky's The Seasons, a popular cycle of twelve intimate miniatures. Olli Mustonen, praised by The Sunday Times as "a living dream of pianism, having broken through an expressive barrier that other players do not know exists", is known for delivering a fresh and visionary approach to standard repertoire.

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Review by John Miller - September 18, 2008

Rachmaninov's First Piano Sonata was completed in Dresden in 1908, along with the Second Symphony and an opera (later abandoned unfinished). It is therefore not, as many might think, a student work. The inspiration was for a piece based on the Faust legend, with each of the three movements initially given a programmatic title, although these were later expunged. At one stage Rachmaninov considered it as a piano concerto, and it does indeed have kinship to the first two concertos - and also to Liszt's Sonata in B minor. While it lacks the long flowing melodies which attract popular taste, it nevertheless is a substantial and important work, now sadly lying in the shadow of the Second Piano Sonata, rarely recorded and played only by real connoisseurs.

Olli Mustonen has a composer's ability to see and reveal the overall structure of each movement, and he clearly responds to its dark, boiling passions and Faustian rhetoric, using a full palette of rich, dark tone colours and brilliant technical mastery. This performance captures the listener from the work's first arresting bars, Mustonen plunging his hands into its summary chords and capricious swirls, placing the climaxes unerringly. He understands well Rachmaninov's unique sound-world in the Sonata's slow movement; a kind of improvisatory rhapsodising with lyrical fragments divided across the whole range of the piano in a multi-voiced tapestry of great emotional beauty. Several of the later Preludes and Etudes Tableaux echo this inward, questioning mood. Mustonen is gripping In the commanding finale, with the panache of his sheer nervous energy and overall command bringing its ironical Mephistophelian march to a grand conclusion.

With an imaginative programming stroke, the programme concludes with Tchaikovsky's The Seasons. Often used as a make-weight, here they become miniature tone poems; exquisite, charming, brilliant and satirical in turn. Tchaikovsky wrote them for inclusion in a monthly magazine, so they were intended for domestic use, although many of them are technically very demanding, as I can attest after my youthful attempts to play them. Mustonen clearly loves them, and brings out Tchaikovsky's debt to Schumann in the dozen 'character' pieces, which I had never noticed before.

Ondine's 5.0 surround recording gives us a fine, natural-sounding and three-dimensional picture of the piano, with discreet use of the surround channels, not too close and addidng measure of bloom from the Sello Hall in Espoo. Presentation is up to Ondine's usual standards, and the sleeve notes by Antti Häyrinen are very helpful, particularly in the apt and entertaining summaries of each of the 'Seasons'.

Highly recommended for Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky lovers, and an invitation for anyone interested in Russian music to explore one of its less well-trodden lanes.

Copyright © 2008 John Miller and HRAudio.net

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