Rachmaninov composed his Études-Tableaux during the turbulent decade of the 1910s. Only a few months after completing the second set, he would leave revolutionary Russia for good, spending the remaining thirty years of his life in self-imposed exile in the West. This music—often dark, in contrast to the composer’s more familiar outward lyricism—can be dramatic, at times enigmatic, and at others almost prophetically nostalgic. With its dense, tightly wrought writing, it could hardly find a more ideal interpreter in the truest sense of the word: Papastefanou knows how to place her pianistic virtuosity entirely at the service of a deep and grounded musical understanding. In doing so, she unlocks the score’s inner worlds and reveals the composer’s most intimate, almost subconscious impulses.
Sergei Vasilyevich’s musical “dialogue” with Robert Schumann comes as no surprise: Papastefanou has a long-standing, deeply personal relationship with the German Romantic composer and has given us unforgettable performances of his works in this very hall. This time, she has chosen the Symphonic Studies, one of Schumann’s true opera magna.
