Biography

Born in Moscow in 1990, Lukas Geniušas graduated from the Chopin Music College Moscow, in 2008. He has been a prize winner at several prestigious international competitions, including the 2015 Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow (Silver Medal) and at the 2010 International Chopin competition in Warsaw. Since 2015, Geniušas has been a featured artist of “Looking at the Stars” a Toronto-based philanthropic project whose purpose is to bring classical music to institutions and organizations (prisons, hospitals, shelters, and the like) where residents may not have opportunities to experience it live in traditional settings. His discography includes works by Beethoven, Brahms, Rachmaninoff (the complete Preludes), Chopin (the complete Etudes, the Third Sonata, and a selection of Mazurkas), Prokofiev Sonatas and works by Stravinsky, Bartók, Desyatnikov, and Tchaïkovsky. His first recording on the Mirare label (Prokofiev’s Sonatas Nos. 2 and 5) was awarded the Choc de Classica and the Diapason Recital CD of the Year in 2019.  Geniušas is also an avid collaborator in chamber music and a highly inquisitive musician who enjoys learning new works by modern composers as well as resurrecting rarely performed repertory from the past. LMMC debut.

https://geniusas.com/

Notes

Schubert wrote the four Impromptus Op. 90, along with another group of four Op. 142, in 1827 at the urging of the publisher Haslinger, who wanted “short pieces, not too difficult, and in easy keys.” The title “Impromptu” had been used a few years earlier for some piano pieces by Jan Václav Voříšek, and Schubert probably conceived his impromptus in the same mold. But it was Haslinger, not the composer, who entitled Schubert’s pieces “Impromptus.” The word belies the true construction of the works, for they are not improvisations at all, nor spur of the moment conceptions, for all have well-defined structures. Rather, the word is intended to evoke the idea that the music originated in a casual manner and was born of poetic fantasy in the composer’s mind. Each of the impromptus explores a particular mood of tonal poetry, that mood being defined at the outset. No two are remotely alike, all are constructed differently, yet as a group they represent a fine case of unity in diversity. All the Op. 90 Impromptus happen to be in flat keys.

The tiny Minuet in C-sharp minor D. 600 is just one of hundreds of dance pieces Schubert wrote over the course of his short life. Unusually, it is a stand-alone piece, not part of a larger group as was common for this kind of repertory. Its key is unusual as well, in addition to the fact that the Minuet includes no contrasting central Trio passage. (The Trio in E major D. 610 is sometimes used for this purpose.)

Rachmaninoff composed his First Piano Sonata in Dresden in 1907 concurrently with the Second Symphony. “No one will ever play this work because of its difficulty and length,” he declared. For much of its length, particularly in the outer movements, there are as many as four different voices operating simultaneously. At times it seems to behave almost like a concerto for piano and orchestra, with the pianist assuming both roles. Likewise, the sonata’s emotional range is enormous, each movement colored by the quality of a character from Goethe’s Faust: Faust, Gretchen and Mephistopheles. One can only speculate how much more popular the work might have become had it been called the Faust Sonata and provided with a programmatic commentary such as Berlioz did for his Symphonie fantastique. In fact, Rachmaninoff consciously modeled his sonata after Liszt’s three-movement Faust Symphony, which the Russian composer knew and admired.

Robert Markow