For those not in the know, the pianist Zlata Chochieva is well known for creating unexpected associations. In Chiaroscuro, her first album for naive (V7542, 2022), she had combined the worlds of Scriabin and Mozart, in whom she hears not only the same desire for clarity and weightlessness but also a similar poetic sense of rhetoric.

Her next album (I’m Freien, V7959, 2023), a homage to nature, revealed alongside Ravel’s Miroirs and Schumann’s Waldszenen a short cycle, so little known and graceful (Petite Histoire), by Felix Draeseke! No wonder she is now offering us, for her first album with orchestra, one of the most obscure works of Russian Romanticism, the Piano Concerto by Rimsky-Korsakov.

Written in 1883 in memory of Franz Liszt, whose two opuses in the genre strongly influenced the author of Scheherazade, this Concerto, with it’s monothematic structure, built on a Russian folk theme, had greatly impressed Balakirev, who was surprised to hear such an idiomatically written soloist part, from a composer who was not a pianist himself.

At the age of fourteen, Zlata Chochieva had played the work under the direction of Mikhail Pletnev, then head of the Russian National Orchestra. This Concerto remains for her a miracle of taste, poetry and inspiration.

Her intelligent and limpid playing is ideally suited to the very delicate lyricism that Rimsky-Korsakov deploys throughout this astonishing score full of numerous and subtle contrasts. At the heart of this recording, where Zlata Chochieva is joined by the musicians of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and the German conductor Karl-Heinz Steffens, surges the merciless ardor of Sergei Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto.

In a departure from the stormy way in which this formidable score (for the fingers) is generally approached by pianists, Zlata Chochieva prefers a certain sense of phantasmagoria, rightly recalling that Prokofiev, as a spiritual disciple of Alexander Borodin and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, enjoyed stories, old Russian fairy tales and legends.

After this, we have a total change of atmosphere with the Jazz Suite for piano and orchestra by Alexander Tsfasman which concludes the album. An eminent disciple of Felix Blumenfeld, an incredibly talented pianist, to whom Shostakovich intended piano part of one of his film scores, Tsfasman introduced American jazz to the Soviet Union, and formed the first orchestra dedicated to the genre.

In Russia, he premiered Rhapsody in Blue by Gershwin, a composer for whom he had the deepest admiration. A brilliantly written, comforting and sincere score, his Jazz Suite sometimes evokes the American composer but above all Hollywood and Soviet film scores.

nikolai rimski-korsakov (1844-1908)
1 - 3 concerto pour piano et orchestre en ut diése mineur, op. 30

serge prokofiev (1891-1953)
4 - 7 concerto pour piano et orchestre no.2 sol mineur, op 16

alexandre tsfasman (1906-1971)
8 - 11 suite de jazz

This elegantly styled, expertly impassioned new recording opens on the Nikolai Rimski-Korsakov concerto pour piano et orchestre en ut diése mineur, op. 30, with the resplendent Moderato Allegretto quasi polacca and then we get the decadent Andante mosso and the more stridently triumphant fare of Allegro.

Along next is the rather ravishing Prokofiev concerto pour piano et orchestre no.2 sol mineur, op 16, which itself opens on the flourishing Andantino - Allegretto, then brings us the skittish Scherzo, the piece closing on the sternly boombastic Intermezzo, and the fervently playful Finale.

The final piece of this musical trilogy being the all-embracing Tsfasman suite de jazz, which begins with the confidence of Snowflakes, then brings us the elegantly sweeping Lyrical Waltz, coming to a close on the veritably flirtatious Polka and the magnificently fervent, yet always cultured Career.

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