Jonathan Powell; Sarah Maria Sun; Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin; Johannes Kalitzke - Concerto for Piano and Orchestra CD

Igor Markevitch, born in 1912 in Kiev, undoubtedly numbers among the most influential conductors of his generation, but as a composer he is virtually non-existent in today’s concert life. He shares this fate with many “stateless” composers who in the political turmoil and catastrophes of the twentieth century were condemned to a plurinational existence, ending up in the no man’s land of music history – Darius Milhaud brought this to the point with his remark about the ‘young Russian with no connection to his homeland’. This first recording of Markevitch’s music since the release of the Arnhem Orchestra’s series in the 1990s features four works which reveal Markevitch’s extraordinary stylistic development during the short span of his compositional activity from the 1920s to the 1940s and show him from his most captivating side: an invitation to the rediscovery of an outstanding composer heralded by Jean Cocteau as “the angel of the new.”