To play well, one doesn't have to play badly, that is nonchalantly, without a right approach to the piano as we do when we read music playing four hands…
Nikolai Medtner
Nikolai Medtner (1880–1951), a composer of genius and outstanding pianist, takes a notable place in the history of Russian music culture of the first half of the 20th century. His name ranks among the greatest musicians of the 20th century who preserved and augmented the tradition of combining composing with performing activities. Sergei Rachmaninoff, Alexander Scriabin, Sergei Prokofiev and later on Dmitri Shostakovich opened new prospects for piano art.
Like Rachmaninoff and Scriabin, Nikolai Medtner was a student of the Moscow Conservatory who made himself known during his conservatory days. He was taught by Pavel Pabst, a pupil of Franz Liszt, and Vassily Safonov, a prominent musician and co-founder of the Moscow pianistic school together with Nikolai Rubinstein. Medtner graduated from the conservatory with a small gold medal (a big one was awarded for graduates who majored in both composition and piano). Safonov declared that Medtner's play deserved a diamond medal, but the latter's aspiration for composing impelled him to choose a composing path.
Medtner's performing career was active during the first years after the graduation. Subsequently, his concerts were rare and wholly dedicated to promotion of his own works. Among compositions by other authors, Beethoven's music took a significant place in Medtner the pianist's repertoire. He was considered one of the best and most original interpreters of Beethoven's music. Medtner's performance of Beethoven's Fourth Concerto in February 1910 conducted by Serge Koussevitzky was an event in the concert life. Beethoven's Appassionata, which Medtner performed for the first time at the age of sixteen, accompanied him throughout his performing career. Also we know what Medtner said about his work on Beethoven's 32 Variations, "It's been sixteen years since I began to learn them, but I still haven't learnt them" (revisiting his favourite compositions, Medtner would perfect their renditions and find new details).
As to the performance of his own works, Medtner like no one else could unveil the depth of their concepts. The art of Medtner the pianist was significantly conditioned with peculiarities of his composing career notable for the sincerity of expression, natural intonations and absence of flashy things trading on effect. The strictness of Medtner's play was a manifestation of the highest simplicity of art only accessible to outstanding artists. In contrast to the then popular fancifuless and mannerism, Medtner's performance was "somewhat academic in the highest and best sense of the word" (Heinrich Neuhaus) and contained "not a shade of idle talk and posing" (Yuli Engel).
"Beauty is always accuracy" (N. Medtner). Like Gustav Mahler in symphonic music, Medtner always fixed in a very subtle manner everything he wanted to express with his music and wanted from its performer. The composer's accuracy of writing the musical notation was expressed in accuracy of its performance. "The meaning of music is more important than the musician who is summoned to reproduce it," he wrote. In Medtner's opinion, respect for an author's text should not lead to loss of individuality.
As Medtner's contemporaries remembered, he had inimitable possession of rhythmic (it was called steadfast and punctuated, and at the same time flexible and free), mastered succulent nuances of passages, melodiousness of sound, prominence in delivering polyphonic cobwebs of the music texture of his works, subtlest pedalization and disposition towards graphic performance.
Apart from the numerous responses of the witnesses of Medtner's piano performances, the composer's letters and notes (Medtner would normally make short notes when he composed or played the piano) have preserved his views on pianistic art those describing him as a performer. He wrote, "Technique of art is technique only when it is unnoticeable; but when technique achieves this supreme chaste perfection, it has a right to take its humble place in the number of the other notions of art… Then it becomes a word."
Nikolai Medtner's notes refer to the composer's last years. In 1946, an Indian maharajah who was an admirer of Medtner's muse allotted an amount to make recordings of all the works with the participation of the composer. However, due to Medtner's deteriorating health he was unable to realize the idea completely. Medtner cared for preserving his pianistic shape until his last days, and the recordings which now constitute a part of the treasury of the world's music culture are excellent evidence of the art of the great composer and pianist Nikolai Medtner.
The first volume of "Medtner Plays Medtner" includes recordings of the composer's selected piano pieces such as fairy tales (the genre of fairy tale invented by Medtner was one of the favourites among his piano works), pieces from the cycles Forgotten Melodies and others.
