CD reviews

The Best Classical Music Albums of 2024 (So Far)

Gramophone / Martin Cullingford, 2024

Such is pianist Nikolai Lugansky’s story-telling poetry throughout this album devoted to Wagner transcriptions that we seem to step straight into the sound world of the operas themselves.

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WAGNER ‘Famous Opera Scenes’ (Nikolai Lugansky)

Gramophone / Peter J Rabinowitz, 2024

Lugansky deploys his technical magic – in particular, his sense of colour, his phrasing and his ability to illuminate key details within the most cluttered textures – less to wow the audience than to capture the depth and ambiguity of the dramatic moment.

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Wagner: Famous Opera Scenes (Nikolai Lugansky)

International Piano / Ateş Orga, 2024

Lugansky takes us on an eternal journey, metamorphosing his Steinway into a larger-than-life orchestra intricate in texture, colour and associative imagery.

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Wagner: Famous Opera Scenes (Nikolai Lugansky)

Qobuz / James Manheim, 2024

Lugansky has done nothing less than put the listener in the place of an audience that might have heard Liszt play Wagner in the composer’s own day, and ideal sound from the small Scuola della Carità reproduces the aristocratic Paris salons where Liszt would often have held forth. A bold, fresh release from Lugansky that made classical best-seller lists in early 2024.

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Wagner: Famous Opera Scenes (Nikolai Lugansky)

Limelight / Steve Moffatt, 2024

As a student he wrote a piano transcription of Beethoven’s Choral Symphony, so we should not be surprised that the eminent Russian pianist Nikolai Lugansky has taken some of his own arrangements into the recording studio. And with stunning results.

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Luganski transcrit et interprète magnifiquement des extraits d’opéras de Wagner

ResMusica / Jean-Claude Hulot, 2024

Un disque dans lequel Luganski fait montre d’une telle imagination et d’une telle maîtrise qu’il parvient à donner à ce récital une cohérence magistrale d’un bout à l’autre.

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Rachmaninov: Études-Tableaux; Three Pieces (Lugansky)

BBC Music Magazine / David Nice, 2023

This is a great overall interpretation of one (or two, if you prefer) of the monuments of the piano repertoire, where Lugansky, like the composer, knows perfectly how to achieve each and every effect, and doesn’t flinch from a ruthlessly clear recording.

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Rachmaninov: Études-Tableaux; Three Pieces (Lugansky)

Qobuz / François Hudry, 2023

He has a tremendous mastery that allows him to describe the ever-changing, but always passionate, landscapes of the Russian composer’s complex, and sometimes tortured, states of mind, making him one of its best and most talented interpreters.

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Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Nos. 14, 17 & 23

Qobuz / François Hudry, 2022

What’s immediately striking about this new album devoted to the three famous sonatas: “Moonlight,”“The Storm,”and“Appassionata”, is the way Nikolai Lugansky’s deeply personal interpretation encourages a new way of interpreting the music. It sometimes feels as if the ink that wrote these sonatas isn’t yet completely dry. There’s nothing overtly academic in his musical vision.

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Les soleils beethovéniens de Nikolaï Luganski

ResMusica / Stéphane Friédérich, 2020

Luganski est maître du temps, jouant des résonances et des harmoniques. Pas une phrase n’est prise en défaut de baisse de tension, toute la structure reposant sur ces notes qui organisent le flux musical. Le caractère grandiose, prométhéen de l’écriture s’impose.

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César Franck par Nikolaï Luganski, entre ombre et lumière

ResMusica / Maciej Chiżyński, 2020

Dans l’ensemble, la lecture proposée par Luganski bénéficie amplement de la finesse de son toucher, ainsi que de son sens du legato, perceptible même dans les passages soumis à un tempo très lent, comme dans l’Aria. Dans les deux transcriptions, dont l’une a été préparée par l’interprète lui-même, il met en valeur la douceur de ces musiques, sans nous faire oublier leur profondeur, leur élan et leur caractère tantôt méditatif, tantôt mouvementé.

Voici un disque qui ne laisse pas indifférent et marque clairement la discographie.

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Debussy: Suite bergamasque etc (Lugansky)

By Michelle Assay / Gramophone, 2018

Far from being a mere incidental bonus, Lugansky’s Suite bergamasque, its mercurial nostalgia for the past perfectly captured, is the crown jewel of the disc, a real tour de force of poetic pianism and worthy of lending its title to the recital as a whole.

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Rachmaninov Complete Preludes (Lugansky)

By Harriet Smith / Gramophone, 2018

The name of Nikolai Lugansky has become inextricably associated with the music of Rachmaninov and it’s not difficult to understand why. He has the requisite technique in spades, he has the dynamic range and, most importantly, he is emotionally completely attuned to this music.

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Debussy: Suite bergamasque – Works for Piano

By Blair Sanderson / AllMusic, 2018

For the most part, this is an album of reflective pieces that don’t require a big sound, and the program shows mostly Lugansky’s quiet side, emphasizing his polished technique and ability to glide nearly effortlessly over the keys with a delicate touch and warm tone.

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Nikolai Lugansky: Rachmaninov, 24 Preludes — ‘an ability to enchant the ear’

By Richard Fairman / Financial Times, 2018

In outline, Rachmaninov’s 24 Preludes, the Op. 23 and 32 sets plus the famous C Sharp Minor, follow on from the examples of Bach and Chopin. These, though, are truly virtuoso pieces, a high-point of romanticism, and Russian to the core. Is it surprising that Russian pianists command the field?

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Tchaikovsky: The Seasons; Grand Sonata CD review – clarity, insight and dazzling attack

By Erica Jeal / The Guardian, 2017

Lugansky pairs the massive Grand Sonata with the 12 descriptive miniatures that form The Seasons, and his interpretations are insightful and mature. There are huge spans to be shaped in the two first movements of the Sonata; if sometimes one fleetingly wishes for a little more expansiveness and abandon, that slight holding back is part of Lugansky’s pacing, and it works.

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Grieg and Prokofiev piano concertos, Nikolai Lugansky and Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, cond Kent Nagano, review

By Geoffrey Norris / The Telegraph, 2014

Neither the Grieg Concerto nor Prokofiev’s Third is exactly a stranger to the catalogue, but Nikolai Lugansky’s collaboration here with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester refreshes, rejuvenates and, in terms of interpretation, replenishes each work with a whole range of perceptive refinements.

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Rachmaninov Piano Sonatas Nos 1, Op 28 & No 2, Op 36

By Jeremy Nicholas / Gramophone, 2012

If, like me, you feel that Rachmaninov’s First Sonata doesn’t quite stack up, Nikolai Lugansky’s account may just cause you to have second thoughts. Many of its figurations, rhythmic patterns and other ideas seem to be a rehearsal for (and are put to more effective use in) the glorious Third Piano Concerto which followed the composition of the Sonata. Certainly one does not need to be cognisant of the composer’s Faust-Gretchen-Mephistopheles programme to appreciate its many arresting passages.

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Album: Liszt, Etudes / Années de Pèlerinage – Nikolai Lugansky (Naive)

By Anna Picard / The Independent, 2011

Much like Pierre-Laurent Aimard, whose own tribute highlights Liszt’s influence on later composers, Lugansky favours fantasy over whimsy. Liszt’s ticklish arrangement of Paganini’s “La Campanella” is the only rhinestone twinkler in a handsome programme.

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