Felix Blumenfeld - Preludes & Impromptus (Philip Thomson)

Information

Composer: Felix Blumenfeld

• (01) 24 Preludes, Op. 17
• (25) 2 Impromptus, Op. 13
• (27) Impromptu in B major, Op. 28
• (28) 4 Preludes, Op. 12
• (32) 2 Impromptus, Op. 45
• (34) Valse-Impromptu in A flat major, Op. 16

Philip Thomson, piano
Date: 2000
Label: Ivory Classics
http://www.ivoryclassics.com/releases/71002/

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Review

ARTISTIC QUALITY: 10 / SOUND QUALITY: 10

Felix Blumenfeld (1863-1931) was best known as a teacher whose pupils included Simon Barere, Maria Yudina, his nephew Heinrich Neuhaus (himself an important teacher), and the young Vladimir Horowitz, yet his original compositions for piano are virtually forgotten. Not anymore. Ivory Classics has enlisted Philip Thomson to record Blumenfeld’s complete preludes and impromptus. Pianophiles will adore this stuff. The music is hardly profound, but more substance than you might suspect lurks underneath its charming surface. Blumenfeld’s keyboard writing recalls (anticipates, actually) the swirling serpentine patterns favored by the young Scriabin and Rachmaninov, replete with ear-tickling harmonic invention.

The disc commences with its centerpiece, the 24 Preludes Op. 17, which bear traces of Chopin’s better known cycle. The E minor prelude’s left hand runs, for instance, mirror the same gestures in Chopin’s D minor piece. If Tchaikovsky had rewritten Chopin’s E major prelude for Swan Lake, the result might have sounded like Blumenfeld’s own prelude in that key. His E-flat Prelude transforms Wagner’s Liebestod from love-death to love-in. If we filtered Philip Thomson’s sparkling, effortless, idiomatic playing through an equalizer, and added fake shellac noise, pops, and crackle, you’d swear these were long lost Hofmann, Friedman, or Lhevinne recordings. On the other hand, the old-timers would have enjoyed the benefits of Ivory Classics’ modern-day engineering. A pussycat of a disc.

-- Jed Distler, ClassicsToday

More reviews:
http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/2000/june00/blumenfeld.htm
https://www.amazon.com/Complete-Preludes-Impromptus-Felix-Blumenfeld/dp/B00004SDTU

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Felix Blumenfeld (19 April 1863 [O.S. 7 April] – 21 January 1931) was a Russian composer, conductor, pianist, and teacher. Blumenfeld studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory under Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov and Fedor Stein. From 1918 to 1922, he was the director of the Music-drama school of Mykola Lysenko in Kiev, where Vladimir Horowitz was a pupil in his masterclasses. Other famous pupils include Simon Barere and Maria Yudina. His compositions showed the influence of Chopin and Tchaikovsky. Blumenfeld's virtuoso pieces for piano are enjoying a renaissance in recent years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felix_Blumenfeld

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Born in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, Philip Thomson went to the University of Toronto, where his teacher was Pierre Souvairan. Subsequently he studied at New York's Juilliard School under Abbey Simon and won the school's Liszt competition. Thomson received wide attention in 1991 when his recording of the Maxwell edition of Liszt's De Profundis and 2 other rarely-heard Liszt concertos garnered critical acclaim throughout the world. An active teacher, Thomson taught for 5 years at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, and has been on the faculty of the University of Akron, Ohio, since 1994.

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