Myaskovsky / Complete Piano Sonatas

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Nikolai Yakovlevich Myaskovsky (20 April 1881 – 8 August 1950) was a Russian and Soviet composer. He is sometimes referred to as the "father of the Soviet symphony". Myaskovsky was born in Novogeorgiyevsk (Polish - Modlin Fortress), near Warsaw, Congress Poland, Russian Empire, the son of an engineer officer in the Russian army. After the death of his mother the family was brought up by his father's sister, Yelikonida Konstantinovna Myaskovskaya, who had been a singer at the Saint Petersburg Opera. The family moved to Saint Petersburg in his teens. Though he learned piano and violin, he was discouraged from pursuing a musical career, and entered the military; however, a performance of Tchaikovsky's Pathétique Symphony conducted by Arthur Nikisch in 1896 made him decide to become a composer. In 1902 he completed his training as an engineer, like his father. As a young subaltern with a Sappers Battalion in Moscow, he took some private lessons with Reinhold Glière and when he was posted to St Petersburg he studied with Ivan Krizhanovsky as preparation for entry into the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, where he enrolled in 1906 and became a student of Anatoly Lyadov and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov. A late starter, Myaskovsky was the oldest student in his class but soon became firm friends with the youngest, Sergei Prokofiev, and they remained friends throughout the older man's life. At the Conservatory, they shared a dislike of their professor Anatoly Lyadov, which, since Lyadov disliked the music of Edvard Grieg, led to Myaskovsky's choice of a theme by Grieg for the variations with which he closed his String Quartet No. 3. Prokofiev and Myaskovsky worked together at the conservatory on at least one work, a lost symphony, parts of which were later scavenged to provide material for the slow movement of Prokofiev's Piano Sonata No. 4. They both later produced works using materials from this period - in Prokofiev's case the Third and Fourth piano sonatas; in Myaskovsky's, other works, such as his Tenth string quartet and what are now the Fifth and Sixth piano sonatas, all revisions of works he wrote at this time. Early influences on Myaskovsky's emerging personal style were Tchaikovsky, strongly echoed in the first of his surviving symphonies (in C minor, Op. 3, 1908/1921), which was his Conservatory graduation piece, and Alexander Scriabin, whose influence comes more to the fore in Myaskovsky's First Piano Sonata in D minor, Op. 6 (1907-10), described by Glenn Gould as 'perhaps one of the most remarkable pieces of its time', and his Symphony No. 3 in A minor, Op. 15 of 1914, a turbulent and lugubrious work in two large movements. (...)

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