Manu Sinistra
Illia Ovcharenko; MDR-Sinfonieorchester; Oksana Lyniv
Pentatone PTC 5187 498 (pentatonemusic.com/product/manu-sinistra)
Injured in battle during the early weeks of World War I, 26-year-old concert pianist Paul Wittgenstein lost his right arm. Peace restored, the wealthy Wittgenstein began commissioning a composers’ Who’s Who, including Richard Strauss, Erich Korngold, Paul Hindemith and the three on this CD, to create works playable with his one remaining hand.
Following the Bolshevik revolution, Ukraine-born Sergei Bortkiewicz fled to Vienna, where he met Wittgenstein. His rarely-performed Piano Concerto No.2, Op.28, is firmly in the Late-Romantic tradition. In the Allegro dramatico, a tumultuous orchestra tutti leads to a long-lined, yearning piano melody, soon joined by the orchestra. The dreamy Andante cantabile features rippling piano runs over hushed winds and strings. Turbulence, now celebratory, returns in the Allegro vivo, a bravura display of what five super-skilled fingers can achieve.
Wittgenstein wrote to Sergei Prokofiev, “Thank you for the concerto, but I don’t understand a note of it and I shall not play it.” Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No.4, Op.53 remained unperformed until 1956, after the composer’s death. Despite sharing the playful-dramatic-lyrical idiom of Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, it still hovers on the fringe of the active repertoire.
One unquestioned masterpiece emerged from Wittgenstein’s commissions – Maurice Ravel’s gorgeous Piano Concerto for the Left Hand. It and the CD’s two other concertos receive passionate performances from Ukraine-born Illia Ovcharenko, 2022 winner of the Honens International Piano Competition held every three years in Calgary, and Leipzig’s MDR-Sinfonieorchester conducted by Ukrainian Oksana Lyniv.
