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Nikolai Kapustin: Piano Music

Nikolai Kapustin: Piano Music—John Salmon, piano (Naxos 570532)

In WCLV's first week airing jazz overnight along with the classical music that has been our focus for the last 60 years, we feature this 2008 release featuring the music of Nikolai Kapustin, the exponent of an aesthetic characterized as “written-out jazz.”   ClassicsToday.com reviewer Jed Distler said, “Pianist John Salmon offers a tasting menu of short pieces, bracketed at the end by the Second Sonata's Scherzo, and up front by a recently composed (2005) large-scale work,” the Piano Sonata No. 15.  The pianist’s witty program notes end with these words: “Welcome to Kapustin’s phantasmagorical musical dacha, where…Art Tatum morphs into Leopold Godowsky and Alexander Scriabin shares the piano bench with Count Basie.  Sergei Rachmaninoff, Zez Confrey, James P. Johnson, Stephen Sondheim, and Franz Schubert are there too, egging Kapustin’s many alter egos on to ever wilder flights of musical fancy.”   How timely can you get?  Classical, jazz and a composer whose music deserves to be better...from Ukraine!