Nikolai Kapustin:
Klavierkonzert Nr. 5 op. 72
Konzert für 2 Klaviere und Schlagwerk op. 104
Sinfonietta für Klavier zu vier Händen op. 49
Frank Dupree, Adrian Brendel (Klavier)
Meinhard “Obi” Jenne (Drums)
Franz Bach (Percussion)
Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin
Dominik Beykirch (Leitung)
Adrian von Ripka (Tonmeister, Konzert und Sinfonietta)
© 2023 a co-production of SWR2 and Capriccio
It was like a small miracle when the music of Nikolai Kapustin was discovered by a wider audience in the West: Who was this Soviet (!) composer whose works still sounded most like Oscar Peterson improvisations … and yet were fully composed “classical” music, with complicated scores, all black with notes?! As we now discover more and more of Kapustin’s music (and there are still vast amounts of unheard!), for all the supposedly familiar musical borrowings, a very unique, always enchanting voice emerges: whether in such an unapologetically jazzy piece as the Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion, the symphonic 5th Piano Concerto, or the perky Sinfonietta, which seemingly transports us to a smoky bar of 1940s Manhattan.
Reviews
“Kapustin poured the vocabulary of traditional jazz into classical forms of contemporary serious music, noticeably influenced by composers such as Prokofiev and Shostakovich, most clearly heard here in the madcap mix of styles in the 5th Piano Concerto.dupree plays it with the rhythmic precision and laconic virtuosity that also distinguishes him as a jazz pianist, and the Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion is hardly less brilliant, with Obi Jenne, a jazz crack, assisting Dupree on drums.” (concerti)
“With Frank Dupree, Adrian Brendle, their highly virtuosic comrades-in-arms on percussion and drumset, as with the RSO Berlin, Kapustin’s music is truly in the best hands. Particularly impressive is how freely the piano parts sound, how improvised. This is fun and in the best of moods in these gloomy times!” (FONO FORUM, May 2023)