I want to launch this blog by calling your attention to a great album, released in 2017 by the venerable Melodiya record label in Russia.
It has a couple of virtues. One is that Yury Favorin (Ю́рий Влади́мирович Фаво́рин in Russian, just in case I'm using the wrong English rendition) is a particularly good piano player from Russia, a country that seems to produce a large supply of very good, young piano players. He has plenty of power and a gift for melody. He also seems to have a wide range of music interests; his official website also lists jazz albums.
But this album also has a wonderful program of Russian Futurist music, much of it hard to find anywhere else. There isn't a bad track on the album, and it's likely to all be new to you.
For me, the big piece that makes this essential is Gavriil Popov's "Grosse Suite," a 1927 piece in four movements that dates from the brief period when Popov was arguably one of the best composers in the Soviet Union, and even the world. I have not been able to find a recording of it anywhere else.
There's also "On the Other Side," seven brief, charming pieces by another fairly obscure composer, Vladimir Rebikov, and Samuel Feinberg's Sixth Piano Sonata.
Even the "name" composers on the album are represented by pieces you may not have heard. I own a lot of Prokofiev, but this is the first performance I've come across of his very early (and lovely) "Four Etudes," and Shostakovich's First Piano Sonata also was new to me, too.
Notes: You can read a review of the album by Richard Kraus, and the discussion on Amazon by Hexameron is very well done. Favorin does have a rather incomplete Wikipedia bio.
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