BEETHOVEN

The last sonatas op.109, 110, 11

Alexei Lubimov

Alexei Lubimov’ 2010 disc of Impromptus by Schubert was praised in the press:

‘…the result is breathtaking. Aside from the crispest E- flat Impromptu, the bitter grandeur of the A-flat major, and the delectable translucency of the instruments, what is truly startling is the "sung" melody of the G flat major. Stunning.’ The Independent on Sunday

‘This is altogether a beautiful recital by a master-pianist, and while ther’s no shortage of fine recordings of these famous pieces, there has been non in my experience to equal Lubimov on instruments of Schubert’s day.’ BBC Magazine *****

During the same recording session in Haarlem July 2009, Alexei Lubimov took on with the last three sonatas of Beethoven, Beethoven’s musical testimony musical which Alexei Lubimov plays with all the mastery of a great russian pianist « a kind of russian Pollini » Alain Lompech Diapason.

“They must be played ‘uncomfortably’, ‘intangibly’; nothing in them reveals itself, nothing ‘plays itself’, and one must take enormous pains to ‘elucidate’ the text for oneself… these sonatas are divorced from the keyboard instrument itself… as if the musical content of these sonatas ‘disregards’ the instrument to hand, overcoming its material nature and its historical characteristics… I felt still more strongly how astonishing, how unusual the compositional material is and how tenaciously Beethoven seeks to consolidate, extend, and transform for his own idiosyncratic purposes the forms and structural principles

he inherited from his predecessors.” Alexei Lubimov

Alexei Lubimov belongs both to the great Russian tradition of pianists such as Richter and Gilels (he was the one of the last pupils of Heinrich Neuhaus in Moscow) and to the generation of Early Music pioneers that includes Gustav Leonhardt and the Kuijken brothers. He is also a leading interpreter of such modern composers as Denisov, Schnittke, Silvestrov, and Arvo Pärt. With this triple cultural background, Alexei Lubimov has pursued an exceptional international career. In 1968 he was in Brussels to play Denisov when he met the Kuijkens. He gave the first performances in the USSR of John Cage and Terry Riley.

In the 1970s he founded the Moscow Baroque Quartet, the first Soviet ensemble of its kind, with which he rediscovered the Baroque repertoire on period instruments. This was followed in the 1980s by the creation of the avant-garde Alternativa festival in Moscow and a modern and historical keyboard class at the Moscow Conservatory. Alexei Lubimov is also professor of fortepiano at the Salzburg Mozarteum.

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