Left-field learning

Despite an education steeped in the Russian tradition, noted pianist Nikolai Lugansky forged an unusual path to a stellar career,

- Tom Service

How does the world end? If it’s going to be a pianistic apocalypse, at least in Nikolai Lugansky’s hands, it’s worth waiting for: his transcription of the ‘Immolation Scene’ from Wagner's Götterdämmerung is one of the most shattering experiences that any pianist has created, making the impossible a reality. Lugansky somehow clarifies and amplifies the power of Wagner's incomprehensibly rich maelstrom of motives, textures and colours, with the ache and radiance of the redemption-through-love melody soaring through the performance on his latest all-Wagner album for Harmonia Mundi.

The intensity of this encounter with Wagner's music began when Lugansky was in his teens in Moscow, studying at the Central Music School. In the late 1980s and early ’90s, during Perestroika and the end of the Soviet Union, the biggest influences on his life weren't the pianists, but the orchestras who came to Moscow. He remembers, in particular, a Mahler Fifth Symphony with Barenboim and the Orchestre de Paris, and a Bruckner Eighth from Georg Solti and the Chicago Symphony that changed his life. And with the money he earnt on tour, he saved up for as many CDs as he could. As he says in his Wagner album notes, ‘With the little money I had, I bought myself a CD of excerpts from the Ring with the Cleveland Orchestra conducted by George Szell on one of my first trips abroad. It was a revelation, and Wagner has never ceased to fascinate me ever since.’

Having the privilege of seeing him bring about the end of the