🇷🇺Nikolai Karlovich Medtner ： Four Fairy Tales No.4 in cis-moll Op.35-4

No. 4 from Medtner’s Four Fairy Tales is a character piece that compresses a sense of narrative and intense emotional change into a brief span of time. A singing melody rises above finely moving accompaniment and inner voices, guiding the music from quiet tension toward powerful climaxes. One of its main attractions is the way the melody’s breathing is preserved while each voice is given a distinct role. Listening carefully to the harmonic changes, and shaping sudden shifts of expression through the direction of the sound and the peaks of the phrases rather than relying on sheer force, brings out both the work’s dreamlike atmosphere and its dramatic momentum.