TWO PIECES, FOR TWO PIANOS, OP. 58
Nikolai Medtner (b. Moscow, December 24, 1879/January 5, 1880; d. London, November 13, 1951)
Composed c1941-2; 19 minutes
Moscow born and bred, Nikolai Medtner clung stubbornly to the idiom of the Romantic virtuoso composer-pianist long after much of 20th century music had moved on. The piano sat at the center of his creative life. Despite winning a gold medal as the Moscow Conservatory’s outstanding pianist and earning honors at the Rubinstein Competition in Vienna in 1900, Medtner made a firm decision – composition would come first.
His 14 piano sonatas form the backbone of a catalog that also includes three concertos, chamber works and songs – each piece involving the piano. He studied keyboard with the legendary Vasily Safonov, and Russian audiences remembered his formidable pianism long after he left the country following the Revolution. In the West, matters were tougher. Medtner refused to perform anything but his own music and held fast to conservative musical ideals at a time of rapid stylistic change. It was a combination that would bring financial hardship. Later support from patrons – notably Rachmaninoff and the Maharajah of Mysore – enabled him, despite chronic ill health, to record many key works on 78s for the Medtner Society.
The Two Pieces, Op. 58 – Medtner’s only works for two pianos – were published in 1946 and likely date from wartime England in the early 1940s. The subtitle (A Tale) of the Russian Round-Dance remains unexplained, but the music vividly evokes a traditional khorovod where villagers are linked in a singing circle. Medtner does not quote folk tunes, preferring distilled gesture and motion. He often played the piece privately with its dedicatee, Edna Iles, though his 1946 recording pairs him with Benno Moiseiwitsch.
The Knight Errant moves into darker, more urgent territory. Cast in C minor, it unfolds within a tightly argued sonata design, its interwoven themes and central fugato driven by contrapuntal force and long-range harmonic tension.