There is nothing valuable or self-conscious about her strategy; the entire music flows like a stream, taking in the easy and the craggy moments with equality. It is nearly as if the music is creating itself from the keyboard with out intervention. Listen, for instance, to how properly she captures the loping syncopations in “Forlane” from Ravel’s Le tombeau de Couperin; I’ve by no means heard it performed this properly in my life. The Angel, like most of Medtner’s music, is Romantic in structure and harmonic language but extremely fascinating in construction.
This is the third volume of Nikolai Medtner’s complete songs for Brilliant Classics by soprano Ekaterina Levental and pianist Frank Peters. It consists of his Op. 1, The Angel, in addition to a Sonata-Idyll for solo piano, ending with three unpublished songs. This would possibly signal to the uninitiated that this could be the final quantity on this …