Gramophone Magazine
June 2023
Editor's Choice

Zlata Chochieva (piano)

Schumann: Waldszenen, Op. 82
Ravel: Miroirs, 5 pieces for piano
Liszt: Transcendental Study, S139 No. 5 'Feux Follets'
Liszt: Transcendental Study, S139 No. 12 'Chasse-neige'
Draeseke: Petite Histoire, Op.9
Schulz-Evler: Arabesques on themes from 'The Beautiful Blue Danube'
Bartók: Out of Doors Sz81: No.4: Night Music

For her second album with naïve, Zlata Chochieva has chosen a magnificent, audacious programme, associating Schumann, Ravel, Liszt and Bartók with the lesser known Draeseke and Schulz-Evler.

Sensitive to nature and to the emotions it inspires, the Russian pianist Zlata Chochieva has conceived this very personal album as a patchwork, sometimes inward-looking, landscape with changing skies.

“A recorded programme is not a concert programme, but I also wanted to tell a story, propose a whole tapestry of emotions, open different perspectives,” she confides.

From Schumann’s very Romantic Waldszenen to the powerful Ravelian cycle which makes up the heart of the programme, right up to the most mythical and mystical nature of Liszt, and Bartók’s mysterious nocturnal music, she navigates through a wide diversity of climates, perceptions, and feelings expressed by their relationship with nature.

Here Zlata Chochieva finds plenty of substance, revealing a temperament both ardent and delicate: her playing is at once virtuosic and poetic, in keeping with the demands of this captivating programme.

The pianist also includes some less familiar pieces, like the Petite Histoire by Draeseke, a composer she considers to be a major discovery, who admired Liszt and Wagner, and Adolf Schulz-Evler’s Arabesque, written on the theme of Strauss’s Beautiful Blue Danube with strong Liszt style undertones.

"Chochieva, stylistically convincing in Schumann, here could be taken for a different pianist, so completely does she inhabit Ravel’s sound world...Altogether a terrific programme from a greatly gifted pianist." - Gramophone Magazine, June 2023.