Three composers, three pianists who composed, three exiles — and one gifted young pianist from St. Petersburg trying to make a case for all of them at once. It’s an ambitious program, and on balance Polina Leschenko pulls it off.
Start with what’s hardest to defend. Mischa Levitzki — born in Ukraine to American parents who happened to be visiting, raised in the United States, trained in Berlin under Dohnanyi — was one of the great piano personalities of the 1920s, a figure who could fill Carnegie Hall on reputation alone. His compositions are another matter. The Love Waltz, op. 2 is charming the way a competent greeting card is charming: you smile, you move on. Under two minutes, and honestly that’s about right. The Waltz arabesque is more interesting — its debt to Chopin is enormous and completely unembarrassed, and there are moments where the Romantic lyric impulse genuinely catches fire before the music thinks better of itself and retreats. Leschenko plays both pieces with more affection than they strictly deserve, which is exactly the right approach.
Then Rachmaninov. The Piano Sonata No. 2 in b-flat minor is one of those works that has never quite settled into a single authoritative form — the 1913 original sprawls magnificently, the 1931 revision tightens and cuts, and then Horowitz decided he knew better than either version and produced his famous hybrid, fusing the two published texts with characteristic autocratic confidence. Rachmaninov, characteristically, agreed with him. It is the Horowitz edition Leschenko plays here, and she brings to the opening Allegro agitato a sense of controlled turbulence — the stark contrasts of register and dynamic that make this movement so unsettling in lesser hands here feel purposeful, almost inevitable. Her craft is formidable and she doesn’t make a show of it, which is the right kind of formidable. The central movement unfolds with what I can only describe as impudent grace — rhythmically pointed, texturally transparent in a way the score rarely gets, the middle voices actually audible. And the finale… she plays it with a warmth and a willingness to linger that some listeners will find indulgent and I found irresistible.
Competing versions? Horowitz’s own 1980 disc remains the standard, fierce and personal in ways that no younger pianist has quite matched, but Leschenko isn’t trying to out-Horowitz Horowitz, and that self-awareness serves her well.
Medtner is the real heart of this program. The three cycles of Forgotten Melodies — opp. 38, 39, and 40, composed between roughly 1916 and 1922, years of revolution and displacement and loss — represent Medtner at his most inward and most characteristic. He was a conservative by temperament and by conviction, a student at the Moscow Conservatory who revered the Austro-German tradition even as his contemporaries were busy dismantling it; Scriabin was his exact contemporary, and the two men inhabited completely different musical universes. The first cycle, op. 38, opens with the “Sonata reminiscenza,” nearly thirteen minutes of music that is both sonata and elegy at once, the thematic material constantly returning as if the mind cannot stop worrying at a half-remembered thing. Leschenko is wonderful here — patient with the music’s circling repetitions, alive to its harmonic ambiguities, never pushing for climaxes the music hasn’t earned. The dances that follow — the graceful, the festive, the rustic, the sylvan — are miniatures of considerable sophistication, each one a small world. The two Canzonas, particularly the “Canzona serenata,” have a nocturnal quality that lingers after the music stops.
Medtner’s advocates have always been few but passionate — Hamish Milne’s complete Chandos survey remains the benchmark for the solo piano music, and Marc-André Hamelin has made compelling cases for individual works. Leschenko belongs in this company. She has clearly lived with this music and thought hard about it, and the first cycle of Forgotten Melodies under her hands sounds not like a museum piece but like something that still has things to say about exile, memory, and the persistence of beauty.
A strong debut for a pianist worth watching.
