Jan Schulmeister - Mussorgsky Scriabin & Rachmaninoff: Pno Works [CD]

The virtuosic Supraphon debut of Jan SchulmeisterSo far, the career of the Czech pianist Jan Schulmeister has been distinguishedby victories at dozens of international competitions (including the 2019 CesarFranck Piano Competition in Belgium, the 2021 North International MusicCompetition in Sweden, and the 2022 Manhattan International Competitionin the USA), to which he added Third Prize at the prestigious Cliburn JuniorCompetition (Dallas, USA) in 2023 at 17 years of age. For his Supraphon debut,he has chosen works of the late 19th century by Russian composers, musicthat is firmly grounded in the national tradition but that often seeks out andremains open to stimuli from the surrounding world. The oldest of them,Mussorgsky, was a loner without any depth of academic training, but he greatlyadvanced the boundaries of musical expression. In Pictures at an Exhibition, heaccompanies listeners at an imaginary exhibition of paintings by his late friend,the painter and architect Viktor Hartmann. Rachmaninoff wrote his lovelycycle of piano pieces Moments musicaux under time pressure while facing aprofound existential and creative crisis. His classmate Scriabin, no less brillianta pianist, chose the path of a visionary and an experimenter as a composer,as we can hear from an early opus he wrote for piano (at age 16), the Etudein C sharp minor, Op. 2, No. 1. His later Five Preludes, Op. 16 (1895) reflect theomnipresent Impressionism of Paris at the end of the century. In this repertoire,Jan Schulmeister can demonstrate all of his qualities - virtuosic technique anddepth of musical feeling.