Art & Music Library
This is, nonetheless, what baffled audiences, notably in the West after he fled the Soviet Union within the Nineteen Twenties, and held him again from public acceptance on a scale matching that of his friend, Rachmaninov, whose music was far more conventionally melodic. The more I hear his music, in reality, the extra I feel that he mixed the harmonic language of mid-period Scriabin with a melodic line closer to Mussorgsky. Listen, for example, to his Vocalise suite; it is totally fascinating, musically fairly complicated for late Romantic music, but not in the same class as Rachmaninov’s far more memorable Vocalise which turned an instant “hit” in the classical world. The piano part, as traditional for Medtner, could be very complicated, here including some rising chromatic passages in th...