Hérold: Concertos pour piano n°2,3 & 4 (Jean Frédéric Neuburger)

Somewhat overshadowed today by his compatriots Rimsky-Korsakov, Stravinsky and Rachmaninov, Alexander Scriabin is nonetheless a key figure in Russian music. At the beginning of the 20th century, the composer and virtuoso pianist broke away from the Romantic legacy to offer a unique and innovative musical language which no one would follow. His work, deeply influenced by mystical philosophy and synaesthesia, would undergo a dazzling evolution in barely two decades, interrupted by his premature death at the age of 43.

A child prodigy in his native country, the Brazilian pianist who passed away in November 2021 kept his distance from the noisy fanfare of fame. His enormous hands and his natural and virtuoso technique always assisted his full, powerful and mellow sound. Here Qobuz looks back at the career of a musician that for a long time was the “best-kept secret in the world of the piano”.

As a proper manifesto of French romanticism, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique marked the 19th century as much as Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring impacted the 20th. Composed in Paris − which at the time was a global crucible for artistic creation − these two masterpieces catapulted musical language into another dimension. On December 5th, 1830 the revolutionary work of 27-year-old Hector Berlioz deeply moved the musicians present in the small room of the old academy of music, among whom were Meyerbeer and Liszt, who were impressed by the extraordinary audacity of this piece presented just three years after Beethoven’s death.