#kapustin

Kapustin in Ukraine

Le tombeau de Couperin (Maurice Ravel):

1 Submission

No propaganda

Suite in Old Style (Nikolai Kapustin):

1 Submission

(via Nikolai Kapustin - Classical Music Daily)

Nikolai Kapustin

Russian composer and pianist Nikolai Kapustin was born at Horlivka in Eastern Soviet Ukraine on 22 November 1937. When he was four, his family moved to Tokmok in Kyrgyzstan. He wrote his first piano sonata when he was thirteen, and began studying piano at fourteen in Moscow with Avrelian Rubakh. From 1945 he began to discover jazz (whch had been suppressed under Stalin), developing a career as a jazz pianist, arranger and composer, with a compositional style which fused jazz and classical music. Kapustin studied at the Moscow Conservatory (1956-61) with Russian pianist, teacher and composer Alexander Goldenweiser.

He first worked as a member of the Oleg Lundstrem Big Band, and several of his own compositions were performed by Oleg Lundstrem with Kapustin on piano. From about 1972 he moved on to work with the Radio Orchestra for five years and then the Cinema Orchestra for seven years. From the early 1980s he was able to work full-time as a composer.

Kapustin's music has been taken up by leading pianists such as Marc-André Hamelin and Steven Osborne. Several recordings have been released on labels including Melodiya and Triton. Other unreleased recordings also exist. Many of them have been rescued by his son, theoretical physicist Anton Kapustin.

Kapustin made it clear that he wasn't interested in improvisation, and that all his 'improvisations' were actually written out, which improved them. He thought of himself as a classical composer working in a jazz idiom rather than as a jazz musician. His music can sound like jazz improvisation, but is often modelled on Baroque forms.

Nikolai Kapustin: 24 Preludes and Fugues, Op 82

Nikolai Girshevich Kapustin (1937-2020) was an Ukranian composer. In his oeuvre, he merged classical forms with jazz music in a unique way. For the last day of Piano Music Week, I decided to write about the Preludes and Fugues op. 82, which were published in 1997. I love how preludes an fugues are meaningful to composers of all eras, and never fail to reflect on the actual musical inventions these very different times.

Unlike Bach and Shostakovich, Kapustin chose a different order for the pieces of this cycle. Every prelude and fugue in a major tonality is followed by one in a minor tonality (so far, this is true for the composers mentioned before), and the major and minor pieces follow two paralel sequences. The pieces in major tonality are descending from C major to G major descending on the circle of fifths. The minor tonality pieces follow the same rule, but starting from g sharp minor and ending on e flat minor.

The only thing common with Bach’s music is the polyphonic structure which is hidden beneath jazz harmonies. It is an interesting thing to hear how the freedom of jazz music fits the improvisatory character of the preludes. Contrary to this, Kapustin manages to mix the strict form of the fugue with jazz, keeping the traditional ways of voice leading and imitations but still sounding like an improvisation.

We are lucky to have a recording of Kapustin himself playing this cycle, because he was a brilliant pianist as well.