Camille Thomas / Beatrice Berrut A CENTURY OF RUSSIAN COLOURS

 

A CENTURY OF RUSSIAN COLOURS

Liza Stepanova E PLURIBUS UNUM

E PLURIBUS UNUM

Trio Advenio ADVENIO

ADVENIO

Rudolf Buchbinder THE DIABELLI PROJECT

                                                         THE DIABELLI PROJECT

LERA AUERBACH plays her Preludes and Dreams

Russian pianist and composer Lera Auerbach does not look like your average pianist/composer. She looks a little more like an actress or model, and Americans might note that she looks a bit like British actress Olivia d'Abo, who plays Nicole Wallace, Vincent D'Onofrio's notorious nemesis on the popular detective show Law and Order: Criminal Intent. However, acting is not Auerbach's sideline; it's poetry, and she has five collections of poems to credit, plus publication of more than 100 single items in various Russian poetry journals. Most of us in the West can't make heads or tails of the Russian language, therefore Auerbach's music must speak to us on her behalf. The 37 pieces found on Bis' Lera Auerbach plays her Preludes and Dreams are like pianistic poems; while a few top the three-minute mark, most of these pieces range between 3 minutes and 30 seconds. The movements are subdivided into three sets, 24 Preludes for Piano, Op. 41, Ten Dreams, Op. 45, and Chorale, Fugue and Postlude, Op. 31, but at first the listener may experience them as if all were part of the same work, or at least the same "album" -- that taken in a popular sense, rather than in a typical classical album where the disc is made up of movements belonging to works obviously different from one another. Lera Auerbach plays her Preludes and Dreams has a sense of continuity that makes it feel as though all of it is of a piece.

Auerbach is an excellent pianist, and yet not one who composes to amaze us with her dexterity. Many of her pieces are spacious, understated, and strongly reliant on distantly struck notes and the sound of chords dying away for their effect. Not even one of her pieces is truly abstract or seemingly derived from some kind of procedure; Auerbach composes by impulse and her development schemes are instinctual. At times her influences are apparent -- one hears an occasional allusion to Mussorgsky and more often to the music of Prokofiev. The fifth "dream" Tempo di Marcia features a twisted-up fragment of what seems to be a quote from Kurt Weill's Kanonensong disintegrating into the coal dust of a ground-up remnant from the "Fate" motif of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in C minor. Such direct quotations are relatively rare in Auerbach's music; however, she does work from direct impressions and personal experience and that is what goes into her music. Auerbach isn't trying to do a backflip in order to please an audience, either; some of her harmonic gestures are stern, tough, and even angry sounding. Nevertheless, her music is the result of a distinct and well-studied personality, a fact that is already well known to many top-flight performers and groups who have commissioned Auerbach for works and to Sikorski, the music publisher to whom Auerbach is its youngest composer.

Lera Auerbach plays her Preludes and Dreams shakes up the expectations commonly accorded to classical music in a variety of ways. Many pro-European musical pundits may insist that the classical tradition cannot move forward without the use of the "dreaded systems" developed early in the twentieth century and done to death by mid-century. However, Auerbach is European, isn't using the dreaded systems, and seems to be moving forward as well as anyone. Other more technologically inclined music mavens insist that the entire future of music is bound up in digital technology, and yet the only digital technology Auerbach is using here is her fingers. Auerbach, utilizing a traditional instrument and clearly recognizable musical materials, is making music that sounds fresh, mysterious, contemporary, atmospheric, and personal. Perhaps if we stopped worrying so hard about what the next big thing was going to be, we might take notice of artists like Auerbach, who is offering something right now in terms of classical music that is hip, relevant, provocative, and thoroughly enjoyable. (Dave Lewis)

Vadim Gluzman / Angela Yofee LERA AUERBACH 24 Preludes for Violin and Piano - T'filah - Postlude

Lera Auerbach, just 30, has already achieved success as a pianist, composer (more than 60 opus numbers to date), novelist and poet. Born in the Soviet Union, she trained mainly in the US and in Germany. This, the first commercial CD of her music, benefits from powerful, strongly committed performances, and excellent recording – Auerbach’s style involves vivid, sometimes aggressive exploitation of the piano’s bass register, and such passages come across with wonderful force and clarity. 

For the sequence of 24 keys, she adopts the same order as Chopin did for his Preludes (and Pierre Rode in his 24 violin Caprices). But the major and minor keys mean something rather different to Auerbach. Sometimes the key is only tenuously suggested (F sharp major); sometimes we’re half-way through the piece before it’s established (C major). On other occasions the tonal centre may be clear but the mode less so (B major). Or we come across naïve, straight-forward tonal material, subverted by unusual timbre or an ‘alien’ harmonic context (G major). 

Auerbach’s music is eclectic, in places referential (F sharp minor, with its echoes of Mussorgsky and the Mozart K488 Concerto), but put together with tremendous passion and imagination. And if some devices tend to recur over and over again (wide separation of the pianist’s hands, thumping repeated bass notes, pieces that begin with great energy which then runs out to create a sense of emptiness), the way she welds so many memorable moments into a convincing extended sequence shows a real composer at work. We’re likely to hear a lot more of her. (Duncan Druce / Gramophone)

Kim Kashkashian / Lera Auerbach DMITRI SHOSTAKOVICH - LERA AUERBACH Arcanum

Kim Kashkashian introduces a duo with Russian composer-pianist Lera Auerbach. Their first collaborative recording features Auerbach’s viola and piano version of Dmitri Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes op. 34, and Auerbach’s own, darker, sonata for viola and piano, Arcanum. The musicians first met at Switzerland’s Verbier Festival in 2010, although Auerbach had long been aware of Kashkashian’s recordings, and the “quality of life-or-death-intensity to her performing, which is rare and wonderful.” Arcanum, accordingly, was written for Kashkashian. Its title, the composer explained in a recent interview, “means ‘mysterious knowledge’: I was fascinated by the inner voice within each of us, some may call it perhaps intuition, some maybe guided meditation, but there is some knowledge that we have, which we may not necessarily verbalize or rationalize. This knowledge allows us to see the truth, to be guided, to seek answers.”

Of Auerbach’s roles as composer and performer in this programme, Kim Kashkashian notes that “Lera performs any piece of music as if she had composed it: she has a way of understanding the perspective of a piece of music, its structure, its character and the colors that go with it.”

Dmitri Shostakovich’s 24 Preludes for piano (1933) gained renewed popularity through Dmitri Tsyganov’s transcriptions of some of them for violin and piano. Lera Auerbach first turned her attention to violin/piano transcriptions of the preludes Tsyganov had not reworked. In 2008, she set the full cycle for cello and piano, two years later creating a version for viola and piano intended, she said, as a contrasting partner piece to the Sonata for Viola and Piano op 147, Shostakovich’s sombre last work. “This way, violists could enjoy both sides of Shostakovich. The journey through the 24 Preludes gives so much opportunity for colours, for experimentation of different characters, for humour – there is a lot of humour in these Preludes.” (ECM Records)