Vadym Kholodenko performs Medtner, Balakirev and Brahms

Founded in 1990, the association Flâneries Musicales de Reims aims to promote music in the city of Reims and its surroundings. With its high artistic level, the festival gathers the most talented young musicians of their generation for a series of concerts titled "Débuts". Since 2012, medici.tv has partnered with this summer musical rendez-vous to broadcast performances of these young talented musicians.

Aged only 29, Vadym Kholodenko, born in Kiev, already stands among the most promising talents of his generation. In venues all around the world, he seduced audiences and critics when he was awarded the Gold Medal at the prestigious Van Cliburn International Piano Competition in 2013. The Orange County Register in 2014 said: "Kholodenko revealed a gift for coloring and a variety of touch, always applied judicious." He studied at the Moscow Conservatory under Vera Gornostaeva. During his residency at the Mariinsky Concert Hall, he was awarded the title "Artist of the Month" by Valery Gergiev himself.

For the opening of this concert, Vadym Kholodenko performs Nikolai Medtner's Skazki (fairy tales) for Piano. These small Russian fairy tales – in the literary sense of the word – after which the composer created a truly personal musical form, could be compared to Chopin's Mazurkas or to Rachmaninov's Études-Tableaux. Under the fingers of the young pianist, we are plunged into a marvellous world which musical power evokes images of princes and princesses, elves and gnomes... These pieces are musical jewels in the composer's repertoire.

Then the pianist highlights Mily Balakirev, performing his Piano Sonata in B flat Minor. Composed in 1905, it is little known by audiences, however characterized by its deep expressiveness. ResMusica told about a work in which "the most seducing badinerie is alternated with parts in which musical language gets more complex."

Vadym Kholodenko ends this concert with a beautiful performance of Brahms' Fantaisies, Op. 116 composed and published in 1892. Sevent small Capricci and Intermezzi are part of this work in which Brahms developed another more imaginative face in the repertoire of "miniatures for piano."