Olga Pashchenko

Olga Pashchenko & Il Gardellino – Mozart: Piano Concertos 9 & 17 (2021)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/96 kHz | Time – 01:03:10 minutes | 1,11 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics

Olga Pashchenko is one of today’s most versatile keyboard players. Equally at home on the fortepiano, the harpsichord, the organ and the modern piano, she radiates extraordinary virtuosity and passion. Her discography has hitherto enabled her to explore the music of Beethoven, her great passion, but also that of Dussek and Mendelssohn among others. A key figure was missing until now: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. That omission has now been repaired with this recording of his Piano Concertos nos. 9 and 17, written in 1777 and 1784. This initial collaboration with the ensemble Il Gardellino, founded more than thirty years ago by the oboist Marcel Ponseele and the flautist Jan De Winne, is scheduled to continue with other Mozart concertos in the next few years.

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Olga Pashchenko – Dussek, Beethoven & Mendelssohn: Transitions (2018)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/44,1 kHz | Time – 01:17:03 minutes | 701 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Fuga Libera

This first album of the Russian pianist, harpsichordist and organist Olga Pashchenko – student of Alexei Lubimov and Richard Egarr; prize winner of several international music competitions (‘Schloss Kremsegg’ for fortepiano in 2011; ‘Hans von Bulow’ for piano in 2012…) depicts the rebellious and yet very tender metamorphosis between two ‘states’ of art – Classical and Romantic. Dussek, Beethoven, and Mendelssohn stand at the crossroads of the two styles; demonstrating how the transformation to Romanticism was subtle and hidden in the smallest details of the well-composed, transparent architecture of the music of the Classical period.

The two original instruments (Conrad Graf 1826 & Donat Schoeffstoss 1812) chosen with care by Olga Pashchenko are in possession of a great clarity of sound, and uncover immense timbral possibilities, allowing one to play with the rhetoric as much as with the colours.

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Olga Pashchenko – Beethoven: Variations (2015)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:01:49 minutes | 977 MB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics

Russian fortepianist Olga Pashchenko has had teachers on both the Russian (Alexei Lubimov) and the Western (Richard Egarr) sides, and she might be the one to put these ingredients together into a mix that makes a historical-instrument star. Here she plays a Christopher Clarke copy of a Viennese Fritz fortepiano of 1818, not exactly contemporaneous with the music involved, but close to it and just a little bit clearer sonically. The music is early-to-middle Beethoven, with the central slots occupied by two large variation sets that exemplify the fearlessly experimental streak of the young Beethoven. The more familiar of the two is the set called here by the name Prometheus Variations, Op. 35, but better known as the Eroica Variations because the theme is the same as that used in the finale of the Symphony No. 3 in E flat major, Op. 55 (“Eroica”). Pashchenko exploits her instrument’s chunky, big lower register well here as the theme builds innovatively out of its bass line at the beginning. Even more striking are the 32 Variations on an Original Theme in C minor, WoO 80, issued in 1808, where Beethoven seems to begin the groundbreaking experiments with Baroque style that would characterize his later years. The variations are very brief, almost like those in a Baroque chaconne, and here again Pashchenko fills out the texture with tough, knotty details. It’s an exciting performance of an important work that is primarily ignored because it was never published. Pashchenko also offers performances of the Fantasia in G minor, Op. 77, and the two “easy” sonatas of Op. 49, which in Pashchenko’s hands are not so easy. Exciting, serious Beethoven in which listeners will forget they are listening to a historical instrument.

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Olga Pashchenko – Beethoven: Piano Sonatas Nos. 21, 23 & 26 (2017)
FLAC (tracks) 24 bit/88,2 kHz | Time – 01:09:48 minutes | 1,09 GB | Genre: Classical
Studio Masters, Official Digital Download | Front Cover | © Alpha Classics

Olga Pashchenko is in the process of creating a unique place for herself in the world of the keyboard: she moves with astounding ease and skill from the harpsichord to the fortepiano, the organ and the modern piano. After a recording of Beethoven’s variations in 2015 (awarded ffff by Télérama), the young pianist has now gone to the legendary Beethoven-Haus in Bonn, a venue she knows well since she regularly gives concerts within its walls, to record three monuments of the pianistic literature – the Appassionata, Les Adieux and Waldstein sonatas – on the original Conrad Graf piano of 1824 conserved there. She utilises all the sonic possibilities and the full palette of colours of this instrument made around fifteen years after the composition of these sonatas, three of the finest in the corpus of thirty-two that Hans von Bülow called ‘the New Testament of every pianist’. © Outhere Music

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