Sergei Bortkiewicz | Little Ballade “From Old Times“

The following biography is from Prof. dr. Wouter Kalkman on Sergei Bortkiewicz (Сергей Борткевич) (1877-1952) had a wonderful musical talent, which enabled him to pour out freely a flood of the most beautiful melodies up to old age, and an extraordinary pianistic talent, which brought him great triumphs during his concert tours which he undertook in his early years. However an unkind fate did not let him rejoice in these unusual talents and heaped many a misfortune on him in the second half of his life. Sergei Bortkiewicz was an important outstanding personality both as a musician and as a person. This expressed itself, according to contemporaries, in his entire outward appearance, in his proud upright attitude and his always evident dignified earnestness, which he at times softened with a friendly smile, but hardly ever with a merry laugh. A gentle melancholy also formed a basic feature of his character, which also echoed in his music and gave it a special charm. Bortkiewicz described himself as a romantic and a melodist, and he had an emphatic aversion of what he called modern, atonal and cacophonous music. Bortkiewicz’s built his musical style on the structures and sounds of Chopin and Liszt, with the unmistakeable influences of Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, early Scriabin and Blumenfeld. Like Medtner, the essential characteristics of his style were already present in his earliest compositions, from around 1906, although his compositions from around 1925 became more and more personal and nostalgic. Melody, harmony and structure were essential building blocks for his musical creations. His training with Van Ark, Liadov, Jadassohn, Piutti and Reisenauer ingrained a rigorous professionalism. His colourful and delicate imagination, his idiomatic pianowriting and sensitivity to his musical ideas, combined with his undisputed gift for melody, result in a style that is instantly recognizable, attractive and appealing to many listeners. Bortkiewicz - Künstlerisches Glaubensbekenntnis In an interview in the Welt am Abend on June 26, 1948 Bortkiewicz said: “I have often been called an epigone of Tchaikovsky, but that is not correct: I certainly create music in the atmosphere of Tchaikovsky and may well count myself among the Romantics, but I have retained my personal character.” He continued: “Today one is probably inclined to dismiss all melodicists as epigones. Certainly, very often wrongly. Especially as far as I am concerned, romanticism is not the bloodless intellectual commitment to a program, but the expression of my most profound mind and soul.“ This piece was briefly mentioned in a German book on piano music circa 1906-07 - so this early work is likely from that same period (so contemporary with Opuses 4-6). (It’s WoO). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- - A method to find scores: - My donation link to keep the channel growing: Thanks for listening :-)