The fifth volume of Geoffrey Tozer’s eloquent traversal of Medtner’s solo piano music coincides with the release of Dover Publications’ The Complete Piano Sonatas, issued under the auspices of the International Medtner Foundation (though for copyright reasons not available in Europe). Here, Tozer’s verbal descriptions of each sonata join affectionate tributes from Vladimir Horowitz, Gary Graffman, Eugene Istomin and Marc-Andre Hamelin; a starry reminder that “the least appreciated of the Russian twentieth-century Romantic Triumvirate, grouped with Rachmaninov and Scriabin” is at last achieving his true status and attention. Medtner, so far from ploughing the well-worn furrow of popular and journalistic belief, is alive with surprises, leading one into the darkest and most radiant recesses of the imagination. This is notably true of the Sonata, Op. 5 which Medtner commenced at the age of 16 and which is as taut as it is ambitious: a rare instance of early mastery. Tozer relishes every twist and turn of its ferociously demanding argument, accelerating steeply out of the opening tranquillo into the subsequent agitato and storming development. He achieves a special sense of propulsion in the Intermezzo, a skeletal comment on all that has gone before, an urgency suggesting “time’s winged chariot hurrying near”, and gives exotic terminology such as divoto and pietoso (in the rich, third movement Intermezzo) its full poetic due.
He is no less resourceful in defining lucidly the alternately pensive and feverish dreamscapes of the Sonata romantica and Sonata minacciosa, music echoing with memories of Brahms and Schumann, of Chopin and Liszt, yet resolving such key influences into a personal, heroic and recondite idiom. Chandos’s recordings are admirably bold and spacious and if Marc-Andre Hamelin, in his recent Hyperion cycle of the 14 sonatas, embraces their complex nature with a more light-winged virtuosity and subtle engagement, that in no way qualifies Geoffrey Tozer’s strong and sympathetic performances.'