Yury Favorin's "secret" album

Or at least one you have likely not heard about

My favorite piano player is Yury Favorin, and he has an excellent new album out. Calling it a “secret album” is an exaggeration, but it wasn’t easy to find out about it.

Released in November of last year, Sound Reviewe 3 1/5 isn’t available on any of the public library streaming services I use. I haven’t seen it mentioned in any of the places I use to check reviews of new classical music albums. More seriously, it isn’t even listed on the official Favorin website, which apparently has not been updated for years and would ordinarily be the obvious place for Favorin fans to find out about new recordings.

I can’t find Yury Favorin on any social media sites, either.

Perhaps part of the problem is the general anti-Russian sentiment as the result of the invasion of Ukraine. People kept listening to Beethoven during World War II when Germany was busy invading much of Europe, Asia and Africa, including of course the Soviet Union, and I didn’t see any calls for a ban on American composers and musicians when the U.S. invaded Iraq, but apparently Russian musicians will have to pay the price for Russian foreign policy.

It apparently is listed on at least some of the streaming services and you can buy it at Amazon. So when I somehow found out about it, I bought it.

It features two compositions, very different from each other. Piano Sonata No. 5, Opus 56 is by the Russian composer Boris Tishchenko (1939-2010). It’s very modernist and kind of unusual, not in the 12-tone/atonal way you’ve heard 1,000 times before, but in a unique approach. The other piece, What the Finch Sang About, is a collection of 25 melodic, accessible children’s music pieces for piano, by composer Nikolai Sidelnikov. The pieces remind me a bit of On the Other Side by Vladimir Rebikov, the collection of short pieces on Favorin’s excellent 2017 album that collected pieces by Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Popov, Rebikov and Feinberg.

The Melodiya record label’s page for the album has useful information, including a link to download the digital booklet for the album. Sound Review is apparently a series of Melodiya albums that highlight Russian composers who may be unfamiliar to many listeners. I plan to seek out some of the other albums and write about them here.