Samuil (Samuel) Evgenievitch Feinberg (1890-1962), who was born in Odessa, will be a new name to many. And those who are familiar with Feinberg are...

Samuil (Samuel) Evgenievitch Feinberg (1890-1962), who was born in Odessa, will be a new name to many. And those who are familiar with Feinberg are more likely to have come across him as a pianist rather than a composer. His recordings of piano music from Bach to Scriabin belong to the history of pianism and are still being reissued. Feinberg was certainly a remarkably gifted pianist but he saw himself, above all, as a composer. The performers on this disc - pianists Nikolaos Samaltanos and Christophe Sirodeau who have already done so much to promote the music of Skalkottas on BIS - argue that Feinberg's own music has been very unjustly neglected, largely on account of the political conditions prevailing in the Soviet Union during so much of his lifetime. In spite of his eminence as a performer, Feinberg was basically confined to the Soviet Union from the 1930s onwards and as his own compositions did not correspond to the criteria of 'socialist realism' they were not much performed. Feinberg was an influential teacher with a profound dislike of self-promotion. Contemporaries described him as a 'deeply visionary artist who was full of the abysses and ambiguities of modern life' and his piano sonatas were seen as 'poems of life'. In November last year BIS released the first two volumes devoted to Feinberg's Twelve Piano Sonatas. This second disc contains the six final sonatas which were written at various times between 1924 and 1962, the year in which the composer died. Three of these sonatas have never previously been recorded. Now available complete for the first time, Feinberg's piano sonatas will surely establish the composer as a significant figure in the history of music for the piano. This is yet another important contribution from BIS.