Medtner - 14 Piano Sonatas (Many performers)

“I repeat what I said to you back in Russia: you are, in my opinion, the greatest composer of our time.“ – Sergei Rachmaninov (1921) It would be hard to overestimate the importance of this set. The 14 Medtner’s piano Sonatas are the peak of the great Russian romanticism. Musically, technically and intellectually his works are very difficult, and don’t show-off, which may explain their neglect. Born on December 24, 1879 according to the Julian calendar (in use in Russia at that time), Nikolai Medtner was a few years younger than Rachmaninoff and Scriabin, who had long overshadowed him before his music was the object a new craze, thanks in particular to the interpretations of pianists like Emil Gilels and more recently Geoffrey Tozer, Marc André Hamelin, Hamish Milne and Severin von Eckardstein, who allow a new rediscovery of Medtner’s music these years. Recitalist and concertist, Medtner was also a professor at the Moscow Conservatory but chose to leave Soviet Russia