Nikolai Medtner (1880-1951) was the third of a trio of Moscow Conservatory-trained composer-pianists of Late Romantic music.
The most celebrated was ,of course, Medtner’s good friend Sergei Rachmaninov and the second was Alexander Scriabin. While Rachmaninov’s heady mixture of swooning melodies have never stopped sweeping us off our feet, his melancholy, somewhat morbid personality, his tortured love for his Fatherland (he fled from Russia at the onset of the Revolution never to return, though his music was always popular in the USSR), his battle with depression—all make him a fascinating personality even today. Scriabin was the crazy one, his grandiose scheme to convert music into light, his view of himself as the Chosen One—you can love or hate his intensely passionate persona and oeuvre.
Medtner presents more of a dilemma. He was also an exile (to the UK), but there is no record of any psychological/ spiritual problem on par with that of his great contemporaries. He was an accomplished composer when he arrived in the UK, but, somewhat like Rachmaninov in his exile in the US, the compostions somehow dried up, away from his homeland; he became almost purely a performer and teacher.
The Muscovite found the strangest of passionate patrons though: the Maharajah of Mysore, Prince Jayachamaraja Wodeyar Bahadur became a fan and benefactor, establishing the Medtner Society in London in 1949. It brought some fame and fortune at last to the neglected struggling composer, who was able to perform and record many of his important works ; no wonder then, that he dedicated his 3rd piano concerto to his patron, a strangely quaint throwback to the age of Mozart and Haydn.
Though Medtner wrote much solo music for the piano, his most important works are his 3 piano concertos. These came into the limelight after long, in the 1990s, thanks to a fabulous award-winning recording by Nikolai Demidenko, yet another émigré Russian pianist! Medtner’s neglect earlier on, is understandable: after all, his works are few and far between; although he could write emotional tunes, his music sounds somewhat pallid and underpowered, almost watery beside that of Rachmaninov. But it is undoubtedly interesting and individualistic, especially in the understated narrative element: much of his work is based on and around old Russian folktales and legends. Its ephemerality, the lack of that really big emotional message, gives it a somewhat mercurial character, like English weather, not dramatic but changeable!
Either way, the journey of Medtner’s music has been fascinating, taking in Moscow and London and even Mysore along the way...in a sense, Demidenko’s famous performances have brought him home to Russia at last...
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