Lera Auerbach - 3 Preludes from Op 41

Alive & Well - Contemporary American Art Song and Piano Music
Anatole Plotkin, tenor & Dimitri Sogoloff, piano

Lera Auerbach – from 24 Preludes Op.41, No.4 (1998) , No 4, 16 & 23, Dimitri Sogoloff, piano

Lera Auerbach has written several cycles of 24 works in all major and minor keys, following Bach’s “Well-tempered Clavier” and later similar efforts by Liszt, Chopin, Debussy, Scriabin and Shostakovich. She composed a full cycle of 24 for the piano (excerpted here), but also for Violin and Piano, Cello and Piano, as well as transcriptions for solo piano of Shostakovich’s 24 preludes for cello and piano and 24 for viola and piano. The pieces are short tone poems, each evoking a different mood within a compact, but dense composition. Although highly personal and idiosyncratic, they still recall some elements of musical past - the ghosts of Chopin, Rachmaninoff, Scriabin and Schumann haunt these works.

Lera Auerbach (b. 1973) was born in Chelyabinsk and came to the US at the age of 18, graduating from the Manhattan School of Music and Juilliard in both piano performance and composition. She is a very prolific composer, having already created 3 Symphonies, 2 Operas, 9 Ballets (including The Little Mermaid, Faust and Anne Frank), a dozen concertos for orchestra and soloists, string quartets and works for the solo piano, chorus and much more in addition to being a busy solo piano and chamber music performer. She composed for and performed with Gidon Kremer, Vadim Gluzman, Royal Danish Ballet, Caramoor Music Festival and others. Fun fact: Auerbach has recorded a disk called “Tolstoy’s Waltz” - music compositions by the famous Russian writers, poets and other non-composers: Tolstoy, Pasternak, Odoevsky, Griboyedov, Diaghilev and Balanchine – who knew?!

Video recording and editing: Cortland Tate https://www.cortlandtate.com/

Видео Lera Auerbach - 3 Preludes from Op 41 канала APDS Music