Piano Sonata in G minor, Op.22

Tenebroso - allegro assai - Interludium: andante lugubre - allegro assai

America got Rachmaninov and we got Medtner - which Rachmaninov, as his Russian colleague’s greatest admirer, would probably have declared no bad deal for us. After leaving the Soviet Union in 1921, Medtner settled first in Paris, where he found himself totally out of sympathy with contemporary developments, and he came to London when it was already too late. Although his music was more widely appreciated here than in Paris, he had only four or five years to re-assemble his career as a composer-pianist before the war more or less terminally interrupted it.

Medtner’s one major stroke of good fortune in this country was the unlikely support he received from the Maharajah of Mysore, who financed the foundation of the Medtner Society in 1946 and subsidised an ambitious programme of recordings featuring the composer himself as pianist. Many other pianists played Medtner’s music during his lifetime, of course - Rachmaninov and Horovitz prominent among them - and he has had his posthumous champions too: both Moiseiwitsch and Gilels recorded the Sonata in G minor, for example. But it is only now, as more and more of the repertoire becomes available on CD, that he is once again being recognised as the high-quality, deeply serious but many-sided composer he was. If he was the “Russian Brahms”in any meaningful sense - and his German family origin, though distant, seems to have disposed him in favour of classical values - he was also very much himself.

One of Medtner’s Russian composition teachers, Sergei Taneyev, declared that he was “born with sonata form.” Sure enough, he did become a prolific and virtuoso exponent of the form, which he approached in a different way with every one of the fourteen piano sonatas he wrote. The fifth in order of composition, the Sonata in G minor, Op.22, completed in 1910, is Medtner’s answer to Liszt’s Sonata in B minor - a sonata-form concept but one which incorporates slow-movement and scherzo elements within the one movement. He does it so well and with such a concern for unity that no one would suspect that the central Andante lugubre interlude derives froma prelude he had written as a student several years earlier.

The way Medtner integrates the Andante lugubre is to ancticipate its opening in a few bars of Tenebroso (“shadowy”) introduction and to appoint two short phrases derived from it - a three-note rising and falling figure and a two-note rhythmic motif - to act as recurrent features of the work. The rhythmic motif is prominent in the extensive first subject group, which is a whole series of melodic ideas, beginning as the tempo changes to Allegro assai with a fragmentary march. Although there is no theme of immediately obvious significance here, a Lisztian inspiration of repeated notes in dotted rhythm is destined to assume more importance later. The first fully profiled melody is, in fact, the second subject, introduced quietly and con timidezza in sudden and effective contrast to the animated climax that precedes it. An essentially lyrical melody, it opens with close variants of the two phrases which were adumbrated in the Tenebroso introduction. With characteristic concern for unity Medtner almost immediately incorporates the Lisztian theme with dotted rhythms into the second subject and then proceeds to develop the two together.

The Andante lugubre interlude follows an impetuous acceleration, a short silence and a quiet reminder of the three-note rising and falling motif designed from the first to anticipate this very moment. So, in spite of the change of key and a very different atmosphere, the melancholy new melody seems familiar even on its first entry. As before, Medtner introduces variants of earlier material and turns his attention too to the two-note rhythmic figure, which in this case motivates a broad central climax with dense chords at one end of the keyboard spilling over in quiet arpeggios to the other end.

The recapitulation begins in the original Allegro assai tempo but in the guise of a brilliant scherzo which only gradually surrenders its identity to allow a more or less literal recall of the exposition. There is still more development to come however in a cadenza-like review of the main themes, beginning with the lyrical second subject melody, and in a dramatically heroic coda.