An illuminating juxtaposition of keyboard giants bookending the Romantic age, by a pianist with a growing international reputation.
The Latvian pianist Georgijs Osokins made these recordings for Piano Classics between 2016 and 2018, and they attracted an enthusiastic critical response on their first issue. In Gramophone, Jeremy Nicholas welcomed a ‘powerful and cleanly articulated reading’ of Rachmaninoff’s Variations on a Theme of Chopin, while the paired transcriptions ‘provide further evidence of Osokins’s stylistic identification with Rachmaninoff’s idiom.’
The Chopin album was made shortly after Osokins placed himself among the medal winners at the 2015 Chopin competition in Warsaw, where he divided opinion with interpretations which many found radical. Yet the coherence of his thinking is powerfully evident from the sequence which charts the ‘late’ thinking and keyboard writing of Chopin, as it ventures into poetic territories hitherto unexplored even by him, from the Third Piano Sonata through to the visionary Polonaise-Fantaisie. These are works that will perennially challenge and reward the most adventurous minds and musicians in any generation, and with this album Osokins placed himself among their number.
In the following decade, Osokins has gone on to win first prize at the 2018 Manhattan International Music Competition in New York, and make an acclaimed debut at the Salzburg Festival, as well as several other recordings. He has also become the youngest-ever recipient of the Latvian Grand Music Award, the highest honour in the Latvian music industry. Such awards are recognition of the artistry which illuminates this album: a piercing musicianship which places itself at the service of the composer.
