Olli Mustonen
has a unique place on today’s music scene both as a pianist, conductor and composer. As a pianist, he has challenged and fascinated audiences throughout Europe and America with his brilliant technique and startling originality. At the heart of his piano playing Mustonen has a deeply held conviction that each performance must have the freshness of a first performance and this tenacious spirit of discovery leads him to explore many areas of repertoire beyond the established canon.

As a soloist, Mustonen has worked with most of the world’s leading orchestras, partnering conductors such as Ashkenazy, Barenboim, Blomstedt, Boulez, Chung, Dutoit, Eschenbach, Gergiev, Harnoncourt, Masur, Nagano, salonen and saraste. Mustonen is also increasingly making his mark as a conductor with recent highlights including leading the staatskapelle Weimar, West Australian symphony Orchestra and the Melbourne symphony Orchestra. Recent conducting engagements include a return to the Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic, Northern sinfonia and Tchaikovsky symphony Orchestra and soloist appearances with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra under Herbert Blomstedt and the Mariinsky Theatre Orchestra under Valery Gergiev.

Olli Mustonen’s recording catalogue is typically broad ranging and distinctive. His recording for Decca of Preludes by shostakovich and Alkan received the Edison Award and Gramophone Award for the Best instrumental Recording. in 2002 Mustonen signed a recording contract with Ondine, with whom he has released several albums, including the Complete Beethoven Piano Concertos with Tapiola sinfonietta.

Alexander Scriabin’s
creative career described a brilliant but tragic trajectory. He began as a pianistic prodigy in an elaborated Chopinesque style, as exemplified by his early Piano Concerto, sonatas and etudes. But his development was prodigious, and by the start of the 20th century he was capitalising with truly Russian fervour on the influence of Wagner – and the imaginative stimulus of the grandiose esoteric beliefs he was developing from Nietzsche and Theosophy – to create a personal language heady and erotically voluptuous in its chromatic freedom, extravagant and flamboyant in its gestures. This new language reached its apotheosis in the orchestral Poème de l’extase and Promethée and the heaven-storming Fifth, aloofly hermetic sixth, and triumphant seventh (White Mass) Piano sonatas. These latter works, however, already show a trend towards concision (they are all in one movement) and to allusive but logical development out of germinal motifs and chordal structures – characteristics which scriabin continued to explore and refine in the ever more inward, mystically self-communing piano works of his last years. in scriabin, virtuosity is innate in the musical ideas themselves: it is the medium of communication with the divine, the portal to Nirvana.

Apart from his sonatas scriabin devoted himself primarily to the same lyric, miniature forms that Chopin had established and practised: nocturnes, preludes, impromptus, mazurkas, etudes. But through his swift stylistic development he transformed these genres into something rich and strange – a process that can be traced, for example, in his complete etudes. The great etude cycles, from Chopin through Liszt to Debussy and Ligeti, always exhibit a two-fold aspect: on the one hand the exploration and mastery of specific technical issues, and on the other the making of enthralling, poetic music out of that process of exploration. scriabin’s etudes, of which he composed 26 in all, display this characteristic duality.