Pianist Georgy Tchaidze Releases All-Russian Recording with Honens

Russian pianist Georgy Tchaidze, Prize Laureate of the 2009 Honens International Piano Competition, has just released a new all-Russian recital recording on the Honens label. The album features works by Medtner, Mussorgsky and Prokofiev, all of which Tchaidze performed at his debuts earlier this year at Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall (New York), the Glenn Gould Studio (Toronto), Berlin's Konzerthaus, and London's Wigmore Hall. This CD is the 2009 Honens Prize Laureate's second recording on the Honens label.

Naxos of North America Inc. is now the official distributor of Honens label recordings throughout North and South America (physical recordings), and through online music retailers worldwide. This partnership comes after the successful release of four Honens label recordings in August 2011 including Georgy Tchaidze's all-Schubert album and 2006 Honens Prize Laureate Minsoo Sohn's album, which was one of 25 classical recordings lauded in The New York Times Holiday Gift Guide 2011.

Mr. Tchaidze's recording, produced at Canada's Banff Centre, was made possible through the Honens Competition's Artistic & Career Development Program with support and guidance from The Banff Centre's Music & Sound Program and the RBC Foundation.

Russian pianist Georgy Tchaidze is 2009 Prize Laureate of Canada's Honens International Piano Competition. The Telegraph of London commented on the "fine sensibility and perfectly honed technique" displayed at his Wigmore Hall debut in London in March 2012. His Honens win allowed him to bring his artistry beyond Russia for performances throughout Europe and North America for the first time. Last Spring, he also performed at Berlin's Konzerthaus, the Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto and Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall in New York. His festival performances this year included Canada's Westben, Toronto Summer Music, Ottawa International Chamber Music and France's Piano aux Jacobins. In 2011, he played for the Governor General of Canada at the special invitation of The Glenn Gould Foundation, and that same year performed Rachmaninov's second piano concerto with conductor Pinchas Zukerman and the National Arts Centre Orchestra about which the Ottawa Citizen wrote "commendable clarity ... unusually powerful for a performance of so little ostentation." Mr. Tchaidze is currently touring Canada with the Cecilia String Quartet, First Prizewinner of the 2010 Banff International String Quartet Competition. Tchaidze's two recordings, one of works by Schubert and this all-Russian recital album, are available on the Honens label. Aside from music, he is a film buff-directors Fassbinder, German, Sokurov and Tarkovsky are among his favorites.

Excerpted from Liner Notes:

Georgy Tchaidze in Conversation with Eric Friesen: Georgy Tchaidze has chosen not only an all-Russian program for this recording, but a profoundly Russian one with an excursion into unjustly neglected corners of the repertoire, and something magnificently familiar. The program taken as a whole is like a dense Russian fugue with a counterpoint of conflicting and parallel moods and themes. Although the Medtner and Prokofiev pieces were completed around 1916/1917, just as the old Tsarist regime was collapsing into the abyss, there are dramatic differences between them. On the one hand there is, as Georgy told me, in Medtner's music an "aspiration into the depths of the Russian past," and on the other hand in Prokofiev's Sonata a futuristic "audacious modernism." Then there is the nationalist Mussorgsky (one of "the Five"). There are the contrasting sensibilities of St. Petersburg (Prokofiev) and Moscow (Medtner and Mussorgsky). Woven throughout is The Common inspiration for all of these composers of Russian folklore, literature and art.

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