A day with Mikhail Pletnev II: Verbier Festival Essentials

Generously supported by Madame Aline Foriel-Destezet

The son of two musicians, Mikhail Pletnev excelled as a pianist from a very young age and won First Prize at the VI International Tchaikovsky Competition in 1978. In addition to his pianistic gifts, Pletnev is also a renowned conductor; he has excelled in both roles over the years at Verbier, collaborating with esteemed artists like Janine Jansen and Gábor Takács-Nagy. He is known as a pianist of extraordinary clarity and artistry, with a playing style “born of a prodigious virtuosity of imagination outrageous in its beauty” (The Times)—one which is always on full display in Verbier!

This compilation for the Virtual Verbier Festival provides a sample of the Russian’s wide-ranging artistry, particularly highlighting his aptitude for the music of his compatriots: he sits at the piano in Tsfasman’s Suite for Piano and Orchestra, and stands at the conductor’s podium in Glazunov’s From the Middle Ages and Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony. Pletnev is also a consummate master of Baroque music—as beautifully evidenced by the Bach Concerto for Four Pianos in A Minor, played alongside Martha Argerich, Evgeny Kissin, and James Levine in 2003—as well as Classical-era masterpieces like Haydn’s Piano Concerto in D Major, conducted by Iván Fischer in 2014. Of course, to get the fullest picture of Pletnev as a musician, we can’t leave out his own work as a composer (the Fantasia Helvetica for Two Pianos and Orchestre, which he conducts with Lucas Debargue and Stanislav Kochanovsky, and the Sonata for Cello and Piano) and as a transcriber (his Grammy-winning two-piano arrangement of Prokofiev’s Cinderella, played here with Daniil Trifonov).

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