Nicolas Medtner was not only a composer worthy to be ranked with his close contemporaries Scriabin and Rachmaninov as one of the three most important Russian writers of piano music of his time but, like them, a great pianist, one who might well have joined the accepted pantheon of ‘Golden Age’ virtuosos, had composition not come so completely to dominate his artistic life. Having received his first piano lessons at the age of five or six from his mother, Medtner enrolled at the Moscow Conservatoire in 1892, his studies centring not on composition, which to a large extent he taught himself, but on his chosen instrument. When, in 1900, he graduated with the Gold Medal, the outstanding pianist of his year, his teacher, Vasily Safonov, teacher also of Scriabin and Josef Lhévinne, declared that he deserved not a gold but, if such a thing existed, a diamond medal. That same year, after winning an honourable mention in the Anton Rubinstein Competition in Vienna and about to embark on an international career as a concert artist, he peremptorily decided to devote his life to composition, henceforth following his calling with an almost religious dedication and a disregard for material success. The piano, as with Chopin and Alkan before him, became the focus of all his creative work. Although Medtner was uninterested in building a career as a performer, public appreciation of his pianistic mastery steadily increased with the occasional recitals he gave each year to acquaint audiences with his compositions, and in 1909/10 and again during the First World War he served as a piano professor at the Moscow Conservatoire. In his concert programmes, alongside his own pieces he preferred to play only the works of his musical god, Beethoven. Over the years, his performances of several of the sonatas (but especially the Appassionata and the Waldstein), the 32 Variations in C minor and the Fourth Concerto (for which he wrote cadenzas) became celebrated musical occasions. For Medtner, who played as if in a trance, with half-closed eyes and the minimum of gesture, musical performance was an act of quasi-religious communion, in which the executant was merely a medium, and the music everything. Almost unknown abroad, Medtner was overshadowed in Russia by his more charismatic colleagues Scriabin and Rachmaninov but, especially in Moscow, he built up a considerable following, his status as a major composer confirmed by the award of the Glinka Prizes in 1909 and 1916. However, in 1921, unable to reconcile himself to the Bolshevik regime, he left his homeland. His close friend, Rachmaninov, now living in exile in the United States, persuaded Steinway in New York to invite him over for a concert tour, but Medtner hesitated, preferring to continue with his creative work, albeit in the most difficult circumstances, surviving on the modest sales of his music, the rare recital, piano lessons and the generosity of a band of faithful friends. Medtner settled in Berlin for three years and then moved to Paris; in neither city was his music or his talent as a pianist in demand. In order to pay off mounting debts he at last reluctantly agreed to making concert tours of North America in 1924/25 and 1929/30, and in 1927 he returned for a series of concerts to the Soviet Union. Between 1928 and 1935 Medtner paid several visits to Britain, where he was impressed by the apparent responsiveness of audiences to his music. Encouraged by this to settle in the country permanently, in the autumn of 1935 he moved to London, where he lived until his death sixteen years later. In 1939, just when the composer was beginning to establish himself in Britain, war broke out, the sudden loss of income from cancelled concerts and lessons, and of royalties from his German publisher, making survival ever more difficult. The following year, with the Blitz on London, Medtner found sanctuary with friends in Warwickshire, but in 1942 he was struck down by the first of a series of debilitating heart attacks, which all but brought to an end his activity on the concert stage. Fortunately, he rallied sufficiently to be able to give the first two performances of his new Third Concerto in the Royal Albert Hall in February and June 1944, and in May of the same year he played for the last time his beloved Beethoven Fourth Concerto.

The Recordings
Like many other pianists, Medtner began his recording career in the studios of the reproducing piano companies, cutting fifteen rolls for Welte-Mignon in Germany in 1922 and in 1925 another four for DuoArt in New York. Then, in November 1928, during his second visit to Britain, he made three test gramophone records for Columbia, returning for sessions in March 1930 and February 1931 to record a series of his own compositions, including three of his songs, sung by the soprano Tatiana Makushina, with whom he had given his first London recital in February 1928. Medtner seems never properly to have understood the terms under which he made these Columbia recordings. He thought them very successful but, much to his bewilderment and disgust, none was ever published. He never discovered the reason why, though the catastrophic decline in record sales as a result of the Great Depression and the consequent forced merger in June 1931 of Columbia and the Gramophone Company to form EMI were doubtless contributory factors in the non-appearance of what would have seemed at the time highly adventurous and unprofitable repertoire. EMI made amends for the composer’s earlier disappointment when, in the spring of 1936, he remade for HMV most, though not all, of the items abortively recorded for Columbia five and six years before; they were published as a six-record album. Unsurprisingly, the performances are remarkably similar. ‘There may be many different ways of playing a piece’, Medtner used to say, ‘but always one way that is the best.’ Another project said to have been discussed at this time was the recording of a pair of Beethoven sonatas, but this did not come to fruition. A decade was to pass before Medtner again entered the gramophone studio. In October 1946 he recorded two pieces of his own, the Russian Round-Dance (with Moiseiwitsch) and the Improvisation, Op 31, and in the following month Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata. Despite his fragile health, he was at this time considering making another concert tour of the United States in order to revive his precarious finances, but happily an entirely unexpected, not to say miraculous, event made this hazardous undertaking unnecessary. Before the war, the son of an Indian potentate, the Maharaja of Mysore, a connoisseur of western music generally and of Russian music in particular, happened, so the story goes, to be listening to his sister playing some unfamiliar piano music. Profoundly impressed, he enquired who was the composer; it was Medtner. He decided immediately that, when circumstances permitted, he would get the evidently unjustifiably neglected composer’s music recorded to make it available to the public at large. Accordingly, in 1946, having by now succeeded to his father’s title and wealth, he set his scheme in motion, sponsoring the establishment of a Medtner Society, to make it possible for the weakened and ageing composer to record as many of his works as he wished, before it was too late. The bulk of Medtner’s consequent activity in the studio took place during 1947, with recordings of the three concertos (with the Philharmonia under Dobrowen and Weldon), two of the piano sonatas, the First Violin Sonata (with Cecilia Hansen), the Sonata-Vocalise (with Margaret Ritchie), and a cross-section of the shorter piano pieces and of the songs (with Oda Slobodskaya and Tatiana Makushina). The composer then broke off recording to complete the writing of his Piano Quintet, a work of special significance to him, which he was able to record in November 1949. There were two final sessions in the autumn of 1950, when he recorded fourteen of his songs with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf. In some respects, the Maharaja’s munificent gesture proved ill-starred, for the recordings were made in the dying years of the old 78-rpm format and, as Medtner himself feared would be the case, with the arrival of LP records they soon ceased to be available. Moreover, by no means all of them were published, and those that were have only recently begun to be reinstated in the catalogue, after nearly half a century, so inhibiting the dissemination of the composer’s work that was the original raison d’être of the whole enterprise. Even so, despite its past neglect, Medtner’s recorded legacy, like Rachmaninov’s, is of priceless value, not only because it enshrines the playing of a remarkable pianist but because it provides documentary evidence, over and above the instructions on the printed page, of just how a composer envisaged his own music’s ideal realisation.

Barrie Martyn © 1998

Producer’s note
Nicolas Medtner’s first commercial recordings were made for the British branch of the Columbia Graphophone Company Ltd. Two sessions were held in March/April 1930 at the Central Hall, Westminster, then a much-favoured Columbia venue, though the generous acoustic, so flattering to singers and small instrumental groups, proved less than ideal for solo piano. Four further sessions took place in the controlled environment of Columbia’s studios in Petty France in February/March of 1931, a time when the company was conducting comparative experiments between its new electrical recording system (denoted by the CAX matrix prefix) and the American Western Electric system (denoted by the WAX matrix prefix) which had been in use since the introduction of electrical recording in the mid-1920s. With both systems used during individual sessions, it is patently obvious that these sessions played a vital role in the development of recording technology in the UK—Josef Szigeti and Walter Gieseking appear to be the only other classical artists to perform at such sessions—though, as Barrie Martyn’s accompanying note makes clear, these pioneering technicalities proved of no comfort to Medtner when he was informed that none of his work for Columbia would be published.

With work abandoned, all relevant masters were scrapped. Nothing remained except Medtner’s personal test pressings which he retained. In time, however, his collection inevitably dwindled, the odd copy given to acquaintances and colleagues, before a sizable number were passed to one of his close friends, the Canadian pianist Alfred LaLiberté. Fourteen of these are now in the possession of that most ardent Medtner enthusiast, Marc-André Hamelin. This, then, is the appropriate moment to acknowledge Mr Hamelin’s generosity in placing his treasure at APR’s disposal. Gratitude must also be extended to Mrs Yvonne Dinwiddy for enabling APR to include an additional title, WAX 5501-6, to this programme.

Almost seven decades on, it is little short of miraculous that so many of these shellac discs—which appear not always to have enjoyed ideal storage conditions!—survive. Equally remarkable, we have an example of all thirteen pieces Medtner recorded for Columbia during his pianistic prime: never again would he be heard on disc in such commanding form. (We also have the added luxury of comparative listening in the shape of three versions of the Skazka, Op 51 No 3.) The fifteen sides are presented in chronological order. Medtner’s playing is monumentally constant throughout, though the various adjustments to distance and microphone balances made by the Columbia engineers remain tellingly apparent—as do the technical limitations of the Central Hall recordings, many of which ‘blast’ at climactic passages.

The 1946 recording of Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata, a work which was very dear to Medtner throughout his life, is the only known example of him performing another composer’s music on disc. With a new contract recently signed, it appears that both the pianist and HMV considered the occasion ought to be marked with a large-scale work which might prove to be a more commercial venture than the pianist’s earlier recordings of his own music, especially when released on the cheaper domestic plum label. Thus, despite disintegrating health, Medtner devoted two days in November 1946 to the complete recording, He had reservations about the first and fourth sides though only the latter was eventually rerecorded at an additional session the following month.

At the heart of the first disc in this set are Nicolas Medtner’s previously unpublished Columbia recordings of 1930/1. When he re-entered the recording studio in April 1936, this time for HMV (now a sister company of Columbia since the formation of EMI in 1931), Medtner naturally assumed that his earlier recordings were lost for all time and so re-recorded the majority of the titles originally set down for Columbia. Two further sessions in the following month for the necessary ‘remakes’ marked the satisfactory completion of a seven-year project. Medtner could be forgiven for assuming that this marked the end of his brief career as a ‘recording artiste’.

That he did return to the recording studio a decade later was due solely to the intervention of two prominent figures. The first was Benno Moiseiwitsch, a good friend and genuine admirer of Medtner’s music who, solicitous of the composer’s welfare and concerned about his general neglect, convinced HMV that Medtner should make more records. HMV complied, beginning in October 1946 with Moiseiwitsch and the composer recording the piano duo Russian Round-Dance which the two had performed that June in what proved to be Medtner’s last public appearance as pianist. Reassured that Medtner’s serious health problems had not compromised his keyboard prowess, HMV recorded both the Improvisation, Op 31 No 1, and Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata (included on disc 1) before the end of the year. Nothing further was planned. Then, quite unexpectedly, there entered another figure: HH The Maharaja of Mysore, an admirer of Russian music in general and Medtner’s in particular, who, as Barrie Martyn’s accompanying essay makes plain, was to exert a profound influence upon the composer during his final years. The Maharaja’s Musical Foundation enabled Medtner to record (from 1947) as much as his strength and faculties allowed.

This programme concludes with the First Violin Sonata, one of two major chamber compositions—the other was his great swan song, the Piano Quintet—which Medtner recorded under the Maharaja’s patronage, but which was never published. Why both these recordings remained unpublished has never been fully explained: perhaps the Maharaja and the composer were more than content to have had the works recorded and be in possession of their own personal copies while HMV, aware that sales would be minimal, was happy to be spared the expense of official publication. Medtner’s partner in the Violin Sonata was Cecilia Hansen (1897-1989), one of Leopold Auer’s favourite pupils. Given her established artistic ties with the composer and the fact that her previous recordings comprised only a handful of small pieces for RCA Victor in the mid-1920s, the inclusion of her sole major recording, previously available only via a limited LP edition, will surely be warmly welcomed.

The third and final disc here derives from a single year: 1947. For Medtner it was an annus mirabilis. Thanks once again to the munificence of The Maharaja of Mysore, HMV was funded to record a generous representation of his music (detailed in Barrie Martyn’s main article) for release via a specially formed HMV Medtner Society series. It was a welcome and quite unexpected change of course. Forced to withdraw from the concert platform in 1946 due to a debilitating heart complaint, Medtner had, thanks to the Maharaja, been miraculously granted an alternative interpretative milieu, one that enabled him to leave an impressive recorded legacy for posterity. For once there was an advantage to recording in short 78-rpm segments: Medtner was able to pace himself and so the command of his playing remained uncompromised. Certainly, the heroic quality of his performance of the two sonatas in particular is, by any standard, astonishing and totally belies the fact that they were made by a far-from-well man in his late-sixties. No doubt as a result of HMV’s Medtner Society series lapsing earlier than anticipated, several 1947 recordings remain unpublished. The three surviving solo piano recordings—Hymn in praise of toil, Op 49 No 1, the Novelle, Op 17 No 2, and Primavera, Op 39 No 3—are included here. (Every effort has been made to counteract the deterioration of the sole surviving matrix of Primavera.)

Finally, I would like to place on record my indebtedness to Barrie Martyn, the British authority on Medtner, for his guidance. Both he and Donald Manildi of IPAM at the University of Maryland, placed copies of the Violin Sonata at APR’s disposal. Also, to Mrs Ruth Edge, formerly of EMI Music Archives, who enabled me to confirm discographical matters.

Bryan Crimp © 2004