Mikhail Rudy - Russian Masterpieces: Seasons and Pictures

Tickets: £4.50
The charismatic pianist Mikhail Rudy is well known for his creative programmes, whether it be his dramatisation of The Pianist or collaboration with the jazz pianist Misha Alperin in Double Dream. He's also a worldclass virtuoso, capable of encompassing huge orchestral works on the piano, as we'll witness in his arrangement of Petrushka and performance of Mussorgsky's monumental Pictures at an Exhibition. In these concerts, Rudy delves into his Russian past. As he says, ‘Being Russian myself but living a great part of my life in the West, Russian music is for me a constant emotional link, a way of keeping Russia alive inside me.' He's joined in his second concert by his compatriot the cellist Alexander Ivashkin, a musical tour de force in his own right, being a soloist, conductor and Professor of Music at the University of London.

Tchaikovsky's The Seasons ought to have been called ‘The Months', for the complete cycle contains 12 pieces each named for a month of the year and each written to accompany lines from a poem on that month by a different poet. Published as the musical supplements to a St Petersburg monthly journal from January to December 1876, they were intended to be within the capabilities of amateur pianists, but have sufficient subtleties to interest real virtuosi, too. Their formal simplicity, coupled with the programmatic imagery, was a spur to Tchaikovsky's invention: many of them remind us of his genius as a ballet composer, and it's easy enough to imagine a ballet constructed around their sequence of varied moods and characters.

Unlike The Seasons, Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition is a visionary work and the sound of a modern Steinway is almost not enough for the range and richness of the colours required, hence the many orchestrations. A grand memorial to his friend, the painter Viktor Hartmann, it takes the form of Mussorgsky himself (a portly figure represented by a ‘Promenade' in ponderous 11/4 time) viewing ten pictures in a memorial exhibition of Hartmann's work which was held in 1874. The sharp delineations of character and colour, vividly rendering scenes and personalities, created a new manner of writing for the piano which was hardly understood for over 50 years, while the monumental finale - ‘The Great Gate of Kiev'- is one of the most majestic culminations in piano literature.



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