by someone who really has to go'bed...
(note: there is a score to this work, Medtner's opus 20 number 2, written in 1910 when my paternal grandfather was 10, that can be downloaded at IMSLP.org --
http://imslp.org/wiki/2_Tales_Op.20_%28Medtner%2C_Nikolai_Karlovich%29 -- hosted in Canada, where since the composer died in 1950, the work is public domain.
My thoughts on recent suggestions (in the op-ed section of the New York Times) that copyright laws actually be extended indefinitely - no, I do not agree - another time...)
So!
Tempo heading: "Pesante. Minaccioso." -- or -- to translate.
Heavy. Menacing.
The work expands as an "ostinato" over a repeated bass which divides into descending lines (F# E# E - F# E# E D# D -- or something like that. To hear it played, go to
the Hyperion Records Listening Room where you can hear both opus 20 Skazki in RealPlayer or Mp3 format in another recording - from the Hyperion Records label of course, Hamish Milne playing the piano. It's the second of the two works. (
This is the realplayer link, for instance.)
The piece, like many if not all of his skazki that I've heard - folk tales, ballades, not "fairy tales" which was usually the translation but suggests (also perhaps wrongly, for what is "light" about faerie? :) ) among other things a lightness of character foreign to most of his, to Rimsky-Korsakov's work of the same name, and to the written/folk genre too... - is characterful, concise. (Medtner wrote quite a few works for solo piano, and one for two pianos, called skazki; including a "sonata-skazka", his opus 25 no. 1, in three movements played without a break- whose slow second movement opens with a brief pre-echo, in the same key, of his good friend Rachmaninoff's Paganini Rhapsody's famous 14th variation... pre-echo, since that was written about three decades later.)
(After the brief opus 25 no. 1 there's in that same set of sonatas, the opus 25 no. 2- in E minor, a one-movement, well, monsterpiece :) , quoting poet Tyutchev's "The Night Wind" on the first page and lasting about a half-hour... anyhow, later, may have a bit more to say about opus 20 no. 2 but for now... more music to listen to and sleep for much to do of a Friday even though the walk I was going to go on, has been cancelled.)
