Sonata-Reminiscenza, Op. 38, No.1

Allegretto tranquillo

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, Op.22, 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.

In the summer of 1919, just two years before he was to leave the Soviet Union, Medtner installed himself in a friend’s remote country dacha to devote himself to his three sets of Forgotten Melodies, nineteen mainly short piano pieces based on ideas he had noted down over the preceding twenty years but had not included in any finished work. One idea he seems to have liked above all is a serene little inspiration – it might almost have been written by Schubert - that opens the first piece in the Op.38 set, the Sonata-Reminiscenza, and closes the last. In fact, it not only introduces the Sonata-Reminiscenza but also acts as a kind of framework to it, reappearing after the exposition and at the very end of the single-movement construction without being involved in its development in the same way as the rest of the thematic material. Of the other main themes, the most prominent is a Rachmaninov-like melody which is first heard shortly after the introduction and which goes through epic trials in a dramatic development section.

Barrie Martyn, author of Nicolas Medtner, His Life and Music, suggests that the “Reminiscence” in the title of the work is “Medtner’s reflection on his own difficult life and imminent departure from his homeland.” The turbulence of the development certainly seems to support that point of view. On the other hand, the title could refer to no more than the fact that the work - which ends not in melancholy but in the serenity associated with the introductory theme - is based on ideas going back over the whole of his composing career so far.