To open the concert, Andris Poga has chosen the symphonic picture “Night on Bald Mountain” by the Russian original Modest Mussorgsky. Mussorgsky was gripped by the idea of unleashing his stormy talent on a Midsummer Night witches’ sabbath in sound. The true Bald Mountain (by some accounts there are four of them) is said to stand near Kiev, and the witches make their way there both on Walpurgis Night and at the summer solstice.
After Mussorgsky we hear Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major, music of extraordinary brilliance, colour and vitality at either end, with an almost translucent, heavenly slow movement in between.
The soloist is the Bulgarian pianist Plamena Mangova. She took second prize at the fiercely demanding Queen Elisabeth Competition in 2007, and her international career began from there. She now appears with conductors such as Myung-Whun Chung, Andrew Davis, Jaap van Zweden, Dmitri Jurowski, Gilbert Varga and François-Xavier Roth. Plamena Mangova’s chamber-music partners include Maria João Pires, Boris Berezovsky, Augustin Dumay, Alexei Ogrintchouk, Alexander Kniazev and the Ysaÿe String Quartet. The pianist is invited by the Verbier Festival, the Martha Argerich Festival in Lugano, La Folle Journée in Nantes, the La Roque d’Anthéron festival, the Rostropovich festivals in Moscow and Baku, the Sommets Musicaux de Gstaad, the Radio France festival in Montpellier, the Stuttgart Bach Academy and other internationally important forums.
Plamena Mangova’s first solo album, devoted to Shostakovich, won the annual Diapason d’Or award (2007). She has also recorded the same composer’s music in an ensemble with the soprano Tatiana Melnychenko, the violinist Natalia Prischepenko and the cellist Sebastian Klinger (a Superfonic award from the magazine Pizzicato). Her Beethoven disc was praised by the radio station France Musique and the magazine Diapason. Bryce Morrison of Gramophone gave the highest marks to her recording of Strauss’s “Burleske” and Brahms’s First Piano Concerto. On her latest album Plamena Mangova plays in duo with Alexander Kniazev, a disc devoted to Franck and Ysaÿe.
Plamena’s teachers and mentors include Dmitri Bashkirov, Abdel Rahman El Bacha, Leon Fleisher and András Schiff.
And finally Sergei Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances” – the crowning work of the composer’s output. It was written at a time when Rachmaninoff had already spent twenty years in exile, yet still could not forget Russia, the home of his muse. In his last years Rachmaninoff composed rarely and little, earning his living through his phenomenal gifts as a pianist. Even so, a new masterpiece appeared from time to time, and the “Symphonic Dances” is one of the most beautiful and most dramatic examples of the genre ever written. Rachmaninoff said of the “Symphonic Dances”: “It is my last flare-up.”
Plamena Mangova – piano