Jonathan Powell - Eiges: Piano Music (2015) [Hi-Res]

Konstantin Romanovich Eiges (1875–1950) was a member of the ‘Silver Age’ of Russian music, a contemporary and friend of Rachmaninov, Medtner and other major composer-pianists.

He was a member of a gifted Jewish family from eastern Ukraine, studied both in medicine and music in Moscow: many of his siblings were distinguished in their own right, and his son, Oleg, wrote twenty symphonies.

Eiges’ music bears the impress of Taneyev, his teacher, and of Skryabin and has points in common with his friends Medtner and Rachmaninov, but deserves to be remembered in its own right.

This is the first-ever CD dedicated to the music of this unjustly forgotten figure.  The pianist, composer and writer Jonathan Powell has a reputation for tackling music of enormous difficulty, not least that of Sorabji, whose Opus clavicembalisticum, Sequentia cyclica and other gargantuan works he has played around the globe. He studied the piano with Denis Matthews and, for a longer period, Sulamita Aronovsky. He took a music degree and doctorate in musicology at Cambridge University, where he also taught. He has a particular interest in music of the early twentieth century, including that of Scriabin and other Russian modernists. He is also a self-taught composer. He has made a number of previous recordings for Toccata Classics, including the music of Goldenweiser, Kornauth and Mediņš.