Concertos pour piano

Description

Anna Vinnitskaya joins Alpha Classics. Her first recording for the label is devoted to one of her favorite repertoires: Shostakovich’s concertos. “When, at the age of eleven, I performed his Second Piano Concerto for the first time, his music seemed full of optimism to me. It was only later that I understood everything that lay behind the ‘façade’ of Shostakovich’s music.” [These are two facets of the composer that the Russian pianist reveals on this album by placing the First Piano Concerto in D minor Op. 35, an “insolent” composition, a kaleidoscope of atmospheres and stylistic registers (Russian romanticism, American jazz, neoclassicism) that will never cease to surprise the listener, alongside the Concerto in F major, more traditional, radiant with youthful lightness.] A student of Sergueï Ossipenko at the Sergueï Rachmaninov Conservatory, then of the great Evgueni Koroliov at the Hochschule in Hamburg, Anna Vinnitskaya won the Leonard Bernstein Prize, but it was her first prize at the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels in 2007 that launched her career. For this recording, Anna Vinnitskaya is surrounded by choice partners: the famous Kremerata Baltica, considered one of the most creative ensembles in the musical world, and the prestigious winds of the Staatskapelle Dresden. “Anna Vinnitskaya displays a dazzling technique, to put it plainly, an Olympic one, coupled with a particularly bold taste for differentiating sonic planes (...) Stubborn, virtuosic, possessive and possessed, Anna Vinnitskaya is a musician who does not cheat. That had to bring her luck.” Marie-Aude Roux, Le Monde, 2009.