The virtuosic Supraphon debut of Jan Schulmeister

So far, the career of the Czech pianist Jan Schulmeister has been distinguished

by victories at dozens of international competitions (including the 2019 Cesar

Franck Piano Competition in Belgium, the 2021 North International Music

Competition in Sweden, and the 2022 Manhattan International Competition

in the USA), to which he added Third Prize at the prestigious Cliburn Junior

Competition (Dallas, USA) in 2023 at 17 years of age. For his Supraphon debut,

he has chosen works of the late 19th century by Russian composers, music

that is firmly grounded in the national tradition but that often seeks out and

remains open to stimuli from the surrounding world. The oldest of them,

Mussorgsky, was a loner without any depth of academic training, but he greatly

advanced the boundaries of musical expression. In Pictures at an Exhibition, he

accompanies listeners at an imaginary exhibition of paintings by his late friend,

the painter and architect Viktor Hartmann. Rachmaninoff wrote his lovely

cycle of piano pieces Moments musicaux under time pressure while facing a

profound existential and creative crisis. His classmate Scriabin, no less brilliant

a pianist, chose the path of a visionary and an experimenter as a composer,

as we can hear from an early opus he wrote for piano (at age 16), the Etude

in C sharp minor, Op. 2, No. 1. His later Five Preludes, Op. 16 (1895) reflect the

omnipresent Impressionism of Paris at the end of the century. In this repertoire,

Jan Schulmeister can demonstrate all of his qualities - virtuosic technique and

depth of musical feeling.