Complete Piano Trios

SPYROS PIANO TRIO

For more than fifty years Eduard Napravnik conducted at the Imperial Opera in the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. The legendary renown of this theater very much goes back to the Napravnik Era. The Spyros Piano Trio demonstrates on the recording premiere of Napravnik’s two piano trios that the gifted orchestral conductor was also an outstanding composer. It is thus not all that surprising that we frequently encounter operatic elements in Napravnik’s works. Going against the emperor’s predilection for everything Italian, he frequently and fondly included the music of his Russian contemporaries on the program. He conducted the premieres of operas such as Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades and Mussorgsky’s Boris Godunov. Nevertheless, in his own works one is occasionally reminded of Verdi. The astonishing fact is that Napravnik found any time at all to compose while conducting a total of more than four thousand performances. His quick mind enabled him to conduct the second rehearsal of an opera from memory. It is rumored that the legendary Felix Mottl interrupted a general rehearsal of Wagner’s Tristan prepared by Napravnik after half an hour because after the excellent preparation there was no longer anything left to rehearse. The members of the Spyros Trio, Tatiana Korsunskaya, Bartek Niziol, and Denis Severin, came together by chance to perform chamber music by Louise Adolpha Le Beau. The resultant MDG recording immediately received rave reviews and in 2015 was awarded the coveted ECHO Klassik prize- just the right incentive for closer collaboration and the welcome continuation presented on this recording of works by Napravnik.

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