Hyperion’s first offering of music by Russian composer Nicolai Kapustin (b. 1937) featured exceptional performances by Steven Osborne, and this newcomer is every bit as stunning, and then some. In case you haven’t heard, Kapustin writes jazz in classical forms. In other words it’s all notated, but stylistically it’s also the real deal. He has completely internalized the idiom in the same way that Bartók did Eastern European folk music, and the result betrays no trace of “hybridism” or incompatibility of structure and content. This shouldn’t really come as a surprise. Kapustin was trained in the great Russian piano tradition, and the American jazz line is really the only other independent school of equally virtuosic keyboard playing/composition that has arisen since. Whether we’re talking about Art Tatum or Scriabin, Medtner or Oscar Peterson, Rachmaninov or Gershwin, Kapustin knows them all and his own music shows it.
In the most formally “classical” works here (the Variations, Suite in the Old Style, Piano Sonata No. 6, and Sonatina) the result isn’t some weird classical/jazz fusion at all; Kapustin simply writes fine music using melodic and harmonic materials personal to his own, supremely natural style. Like all the best composers employing these tried and true forms, he’s a gifted melodist. The Sarabande in the Suite, for example, is profoundly beautiful, while the Sonata is full of catchy ideas eminently capable of real musical development.
The sets of etudes, though, are particularly stunning. Some, like the brilliant Toccatina in the Eight Concert Studies, recall Gershwin, but you’ll also hear a touch of Latin influence and plenty of piano figuration familiar from the early days of Joplin and James P. Johnson. The dazzling Five Etudes in Different Intervals fulfill their didactic purpose in the most imaginative way, and I can do no better than to quote the excellent notes by ClassicsToday.com’s own Jed Distler: “Should you be curious to hear how Scriabin’s Etude in Thirds might sound recomposed by a hyperactive Mariachi musician with an obsession for Burt Bacharach’s ‘Do You Know the Way to San José’, look no further than Etude No. 3…”
It almost goes without saying at this point that Marc-André Hamelin, for whom technical difficulties hardly exist, breezes though this music with characteristic bravura and command. But he’s also clearly having fun in the mischievous later stages of the Variations, in the finale of the Sonata, and in the wilder Etudes where the music’s sheer ebullience completely disarms criticism. Nor does he miss opportunities to savor the sweetness born of simplicity in Op. 40’s soulful fourth etude, entitled Reminiscence. Add to these interpretive distinctions really vibrant, sparkling sonics, and the result is a truly marvelous addition to what we can only hope will be a very, very serious exploration by Hyperion of Kapustin’s music in all of its various forms. His works offer eloquent testimony to the fact that talent allied to a disciplined cultivation of individuality (wherever you find it!) is the best route to universality. Kapustin joyfully destroys those harmful and stupid 19th-century ethnic and nationalist stereotypes that still color so much of today’s cultural dialog. It’s high time the universe accordingly took notice. [7/1/2004]
