Sergei Bortkiewicz - Minuit, Op.5/1

This piece was composed in 1907. It shows that Bortkiewicz was a composer of high class.
Bortkiewicz (1877-1952) was a Ukrainian Romantic composer and pianist of Polish ancestry. Bortkiewicz received his musical training from Anatoly Lyadov and Karl von Arek at the Imperial Conservatory of Music in Saint Petersburg.

In 1900 he left Saint Petersburg and traveled to Leipzig, where he became a student of Alfred Reisenauer and Salomon Jadassohn, both pupils of Franz Liszt. In July 1902, Bortkiewicz completed his studies at the Leipzig Conservatory and was awarded the Schumann Prize on graduation. On his return to the Russian Empire in 1904, he married Elisabeth Geraklitowa, a friend of his sister, and then returned to Germany, where he settled in Berlin. It was there that he started to compose seriously.

From 1904 until 1914, Bortkiewicz continued to live in Berlin but spent his summers visiting his family in Ukraine or travelling around Europe often on concert tours. For a year he also taught at the Klindworth-Scharwenka Conservatory, where he was to meet his lifelong friend, the Dutch pianist Hugo van Dalen (1888–1967). Van Dalen premiered Bortkiewicz's Piano Concerto No. 1, Op. 16, in November 1913 in Berlin with the Blüthner Orchestra conducted by the composer.

Bortkiewicz's piano style was very much based on Liszt and Chopin, nurtured by Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff, early Scriabin, Wagner and Ukrainian folklore. The composer never saw himself as a "modernist", as can be seen from his Künstlerisches Glaubensbekenntnis, written in 1923. His workmanship is meticulous, his imagination colourful and sensitive, his piano writing idiomatic; a lush instrumentation underlines the essential sentimentality of the melodic invention.

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