Volume 16 Issue 9 - June 2011

Volunteer Competitionwhich gave him the opportunityto perform Brahms’Concerto in D Minor withthe TSO.Unlike most pianists,Poletaev manages toharpsichord and fortepiano,intending to include them inhis performing career alongwith the modern piano.“What is important to me isnot so much playing variousinstruments as being ableto speak each musical lan-a lot of continuo playingon the harpsichord. Doingthis you can’t help but seethe connection betweenthe continuo and the text,which informs the musicalrhetoric. Interestingly, Ihave found it possible totransfer something of thisIlya Poletaev.to my mainstream piano playing to make it more rhetorically vivid.” music history with a focus on the less well-known works of wellknowncomposers. He has recently completed a project unearthinglargely unknown works of the twentieth-century Romanian composerGeorge Enescu, and with violinist Jennifer Curtis has recordedEnescu’s complete works for violin and piano, scheduled for releasesoon by Naxos. Not surprisingly, with abilities as both a performerand as a scholar, he has recently been appointed an assistant professorat McGill University.A little closer to home I asked harpsichord wrangler extraordinaireDawn Lyons of Claviers Baroques about Ilya Poletaev: “… He isa really, really nice guy who can play the piano and the harpsichordvery well … I mean very, VERY well … stupendously well, in fact.Den [Den Ciul, her partner in Claviers Baroques] says he is one ofthe ten best harpsichordists on the planet who can do ‘magic’.”Where this is all leading is to the good news that we will havethe opportunity to hear this accomplished Torontonian on June 4,when he will play the rarely-performed Piano Concerto No. 3 byNikolai Medtner, with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, conductedby Peter Oundjian. musicological interests and perhaps his Russian background.Nikolai Medtner, who was Russian, lived from 1880 to 1951, andwas trained at the Moscow Conservatory as both a concert pianistand as a composer (he studied composition under Taneyev). Froma Canadian perspective it is interesting that in 1924 he touredthe United States and Canada. A slightly younger contemporaryof the much better known Russian composer and pianist, SergeiRachmaninoff, he dedicated his second Piano Concerto in cminor, Op. 50 (1920–27) to Rachmaninoff, who dedicated his ownFourth Concerto to Medtner. The third Piano Concerto (in e minor“Ballade”, Op. 60, 1940–43) was written towards the end of his lifewhen he was living in London. Medtner recorded his three pianoconcertos with the Philharmonia Orchestra in 1947. sixteen” Poletaev writes. “Something that makes him a very specialcomposer is that he was able in a very original way to put togetherboth his Russian and his German roots. What makes it Germanicis its coherence, the way unity is built into it in a very organic way.This was not an important feature of Russian music. What seemsRussian to me is his thematic material, which while not overtly“Russian,” is somehow psychologically charged in that it containsANDREW CHICHIAKJune 1 – July 7, 2011 thewholenote.com 11