Nikolai Medtner - Piano Sonata Op.25 No.2 "Night Wind" (Milne, Kholodenko, Vos, Hamelin)

Milne: 0:00
Kholodenko: 34:45
Vos: 1:04:50
Hamelin: 1:38:08

"What are you wailing about, night wind, what are you bemoaning with such fury? What does your strange voice mean, now indistinct and plaintive, now loud? In a language intelligible to the heart you speak of torment past understanding, and you moan and at times stir up frenzied sounds in the heart!
Oh, do not sing those fearful songs about primeval native Chaos! How avidly the world of the soul at night listens to its favourite story! It strains to burst out of the mortal breast and longs to merge with the Infinite … Oh, do not wake the sleeping tempests; beneath them Chaos stirs!"

This is an epigraph from Tyutchev’s poem Silentium, in which the poet sees chaos as man’s natural inheritance.
Medtner's Op.25 No.2: the colossal, enigmatic, fantastic, nocturnal, Night Wind Sonata, which is considered by many to be not only Medtner's best work, but the best sonata of the entire 20th Century. It was completed in 1911 and dedicated to Sergei Rachmaninoff, who immediately recognised its greatness. Under the title "Sonata" Medtner added a note: "The whole piece is in an epic spirit" (Вся пьеса в эпическом духе). Geoffrey Tozer said: "it has the reputation of being a fearsomely difficult work of extraordinary length, exhausting to play and to hear, but of magnificent quality and marvelous invention.
The narrative of Sonata op. 25, no. 2 may be understood as depicting a struggle of a protagonist and hinting at salvation, all of it in a story told from the perspective of a narrator. Medtner uses keys and themes that provide light within the dark and turbulent material, but the use of unexpected key areas and the order in which they appear ultimately undermines the positive narrative trajectory.

Milne's performance of Medtner's night wind sonata is, in my opinion, on par with Tozer's if not superior; it's interesting to note that the two recordings, couldn't be more different. While Tozer is menacing, tumultous, grandiose, almost violent (but not "bangy"), Milne has a way more delicate approach... elegant, dance-like, vibrant, suave, but he doesn't retain emotion, expressing that sort of mystery cealed in the tenebrous night.
The two however have some similiraties: both are extremely precise and careful when it comes to Medtner's own indications in the score. This can be heard in Milne's very strict respect of the pedal indications (Medtner often asks to keep the pedal sustained for a lot of measures for creating dense dashes of color, or on the other way he asks for a clear legato "senza pedale"), or his attention to articulation and tempi.

Kholodenko's recording is quite interesting; it is energic, colorful, masculine, vast and imaginative, almost pittoresque. Unlike Milne he sometimes sacrifices melodic and thematic clarity in favor of texture and sonority. He often ignores certain pedal markings or displaces them, and at times he goes much faster than the written tempo with the frequent, intense rubati.

Vos' performance is similar to Milne's: it's clear and precise yet somehow
different, perhaps more nostalgic. His (live!) recording is extremely convincing in terms of tempo relations and a tension curve through the whole piece, which is extremely hard to establish.
To put it in poetic terms his playing isn't about the mystery of the night wind, but rather about the "Chaos that stirs behind the tempests".

Hamelin's performance left me quite speechless when I heard it for the first time: no point describing it, just listen to it.