Hyperion CDA 67159
OK, piano geeks, it's time to play 20 questions. First, I slip this disc (bad pun intended)
into your CD player. Second, absolutely no peeking. Third, I press the play button. Within
ten seconds, several hands shoot up. 'Those modal, sort of jazzy flourishes have a familiar
ring to them. Is this Keith Jarrett? Wait a second, maybe not.' An attractive tune emerges
from a veritable wolf-pack of notes. 'Aha! It's that Chick Corea standard,
called ... something something?' 'Nah, the left-hand syncopations smack more of bossa
nova.' 'Either Dick Hyman is on smoking form, or we're hearing Earl Wild's long-awaited
virtuoso etudes based on Antonio Carlos Jobim tunes?'
I then select track 7, and simply state that we're listening to a prelude. Someone singles
out the brilliant runs and deft Lennie Tristano/Dave McKenna walking basses. We try
another prelude, track 12 this time. Gospel licks and boogie-woogie flurries leap from
the loudspeakers like Monty Alexander and Ray Bryant in tandem, recorded at 33rpm and
played back at 45.
More futile, if educated, guessing goes on for a while, until we've heard all
70 minutes of this new Hyperion CD. For all this music's improvisatory impulse,
the geography of the keyboard writing clearly smacks of care and calculation. A canny
keyboard navigator is at work, whose pianistic aesthetic springs from Scriabin's and
Medtner's giddy fountains by way of Bill Evans and his disciples.
You may now peck. The composer is the Russian Nikolai Kapustin, born in 1937. He studied
piano at the Moscow Conservatory under the legendary Alexander Goldenweiser. After his
graduation in 1961 Kapustin made a name for himself playing jazz. The two sonatas and
selected preludes here represent just a small percentage of Kapustin's prolific
compositional output, yet give a full sense of his jazz-based sound-world. However blatant
Kapustin's stylistic allegiances may be, the composer conveys them with unflagging
energy and occasional formal discombobulation. His faster music can hardly contain its
own vitality and passion. On the other hand, slower movements (such as the First Sonata's
Ellington-tinged Largo, or the sexy Seventh Prelude) spin out with rich textures
and melodies that will please Cy Coleman fans or Billy Strayhorn aficionodos. One
might also imagine Paul Desmond's vermouth-toned alto sax intoning the fetching Prelude
No. 13 (and not just because of its metrical resemblance to the late saxophonist's Take Five).
Steven Osborne's fleet proficiency and poised fingerwork will not surprise listeners
who have encountered the pianist's previous Hyperion release of piano concertos by
Tovey and Mackenzie. Moreover, his timekeeping is amazingly idiomatic and secure: a
virtue one rarely finds among classical pianists who take up jazz. One or two things
betray Osborne's 'legit' orientation. Off-beat accents are not as forceful as they might be.
And chunky chords are often delivered in a clipped style that ensures evenness and accuracy
at the expense of melodic definition. One might also have wished for a freer dispatch of the
Second Sonata's opening movement that better clarifies the music's foreground and background
elements. Nicolai Petrov achieves this in his recording, but makes a few unauthorized cuts
elsewhere. At least Osborne plays the sonata complete.
For further samplings of Kapustin's work, try the composer's explosive performances of
his Fourth, Fifth and Sixth Sonatas plus the ten Bagatelles on Sony Classical.
However, Osborne's dazzling playing and excellent booklet notes get top billing. So do
Hyperion's gorgeous sonics. Buy this disc and be thoroughly entertained.
Jed Distler
International Record Review, June 2000
In the late Fifties, Nikolai Kapustin spent his days studying classical piano with
Alexander Goldenweiser at the Moscow Conservatoire and his evenings playing jazz piano
with Yuri Saulsky's big band. After graduating, he spent the next 11 years touring with
a mainstream jazz orchestra. But, unlike fellow pianists such as Sergey Kuryokhin and
Slava Ganelin, who became world-famous avant-garde improvisers, Kapustin retained a
parallel career as a straight composer, prolific in classical forms like the concerto
and sonata.
The music on this CD supports Steven Osborne's claim that Kapustin's classical writing
is steeped in his jazz influences. Yet this seems less like creative innovation than
personal nostalgia for the musics he played in his formative years - late-Romantic
classicism and American jazz of the Twenties and Thirties. Kapustin's synthesis is
well-crafted, has some exciting moments and generally exudes a breezy élan.
(It is also superbly performed by Osborne.)
But it remains a pastiche that imitates and blends without ever transcending its sources.
As Osborne notes, Kapustin rejects much of the classical music of the 20th century; he
also ignores much of the jazz of the last 50 years. The result is a music that, for all
its surface vivacity, sounds contrived and rather quaint.
Graham Lock
BBC Music Magazine, July 2000
The embattled-critic is, of course, generally off the hook when it comes to comparisons
vis-á-vis repertoire such as this, but I do recommend this recording to devotees
of Gershwin, Billy Mayerl or anyone who had the good sense to buy the two intriguing
jazz/contemporary takes on Chopin by the Jagodzinski Trio and Leszek Mozdzer released
on Opus 111 OPS 2013 and OPS 2014).
Kapustin, born in 1937, studied under Goldenweiser at the Moscow Conservatoire and
subsequently divided his time between composing for the classical idiom and enjoying what
seems to be a fairly high-octane career as a pianist on the Russian jazz circuit - the very
existence of which may be less than obvious to many - and occasionally abroad. As Osborne's
lively and lucid booklet-notes make clear (although his bracketing jazz with 'more
popular musics' is something of a can of worms), the musical language of jazz has
informed Kapustin's work to a considerable degree.
Over the past 20 years or so, much of the Russian jazz which has found a public elsewhere
has been of the more radical kind - Ganelin, Kuryokhin, the Arkhangelsk group - but
Kapustin is not of this ilk. Rather, his music is almost relentlessly agreeable,
occasionally floridly sentimental but certainly engaging and often witty, with Steven
Osborne picking up on the latter aspect particularly astutely. The recording quality is
pleasingly spacious.
Roger Thomas
Gramophone, August 2000
Art Tatum joins forces with Rachmaninov in this invigorating and unpretentious recital
Attempts to write music that effects a genuine fusion between jazz and classical idioms
almost invariably sound contrived and unconvincing. Not so on this disc. The Russian
composer Nikolai Kapustin has had vast experience in both camps, having been a pupil of the
romantic virtuoso Alexander Goldenweiser on the one hand and an active pianist in Leg
Lundström's Jazz Orchestra on the other. Not surprisingly his work exudes great
energy and dazzling brilliance. The charge of opportunism or naivety simply won't wash,
and I'm quite convinced that many young virtuosi will soon be queuing up to perform such
immensely attractive and unpretentious repertoire.
No doubt one stumbling block to a wider dissemination in the concert hall may be the
fearsome technical demands Kapustin makes on his players. The finale of the Second
Sonata (undoubtedly the most substantial and impressive work on offer here) is a
veritable tour-de-force of finger-breaking high jinks in which Art Tatum joins irresistible
forces with Rachmaninov and Prokofiev in a relentless moto perpetuo.
Elsewhere one might argue that Kapustin's absorption of some jazz clichés becomes too
much of a good thing. Certainly some of the harmonies in the slower Preludes veer
perilously close to the smoochy piano style that one might encounter in a well-furnished
hotel bar. But this slight reservation is offset by the sheer variety and directness of
most of the disc, as well as the outstanding performances from Steven Osborne. An
invigorating disc by any standards.
Erik Levi
Classic CD, August 2000