The outstanding Russian soloist Alexei Volodin’s first recording for Challenge Classics (CC72354), released last year, was devoted to the music Chopin. His new CD brings together piano works by three of the most influential composers of the last two centuries. Robert Schumann’s Kreisleriana was written in 18, whilst Ravel’s Miroirs and Scriabin’s Piano Sonata No. 5 are products of the first half of the 1900s.
Alexei Volodin was born in St. Petersburg in 1977, and began taking piano lessons there at the age of nine. A year later he moved to Moscow, and in 1994 he enrolled at the Moscow Conservatoire. During 2001 and 2002 he studied at the Theo Lieven International Piano Foundation in Como. Alexei Volodin has won several prizes at different international competitions, including First Prize at the Concours Géza Anda in Zurich in 2003.
Ravel composed the piano suite Miroirs in 1904-05 after he had joined the Société des Apaches, a group of ground-breaking young musicians, composers, music critics, poets, writers and painters, which included Igor Stravinsky, Florent Schmitt, Manuel de Falla and Maurice Delage. Miroirs is a musical tribute to them, and each of the five movements is dedicated to one of the members. Robert Schumann studied Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier intensively when working on the eight short pieces that make up his Kreisleriana, and consequently each individual movement is a prime example of formal discipline and structural coherence within the cycle as a whole. The Russian composer Alexander Scriabin’s enthusiasm for the mystic and poetic elements in the works of Wagner, Liszt, and Nietzsche led him to attempt to establish an all embracing, eternal and super human art form, and it is this philosophy that is the driving force behind music of his Piano Sonata No. 5.
