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“The performances are of an all-Russian grandeur, with a sumptuous tonal resource ranging from a whispering pianissimo to the grandest fortissimo, a reminder that pianists who play without the fullest emotional commitment cut little ice in Russia. Georgievskaya ends in a blaze of glory that could only produce a storm of applause in her native land.” Gramophone - Bryce Morrison In her debut release, Chaconnes and Songs, Russian pianist Olga Georgievskaya explores the hauntingly beautiful and mysteriously connected worlds of composers, transcribers, and performers spanning three centuries and three nations, in a program that manages to crumble the traditional musical hierarchy between creator and performer. One of the piano’s best examples of lyricism, the famous and most demanding Second Sonata of Rachmaninoff, is intriguingly framed by two of the greatest chaconnes of musical history - Bach’s, in Busoni’s famous transcription, and Vitali’s, in her own arrangement. Just as Rachmaninoff himself was as at home at once as composer, arranger, and performer, Olga follows in his tradition: having underpinned the formal logic of the sonata by framing it between the two masterworks of invention over ground bass, she draws into relief its lyricism by juxtaposing two further transcriptions of Rachmaninoff songs, “Oh do not grieve” and “Fragment from Musset”. Her deep instinct for these works is beyond doubt, and she brings to her keyboard a touch that is at once dense and delicate. It is a disc of monumentality and yet great emotional intensity. It brings to the fore one of the central paradoxes of her art-form by transcending the distinction between creation, arrangement, and performance. Olga Georgievskaya gifts to us a disc which probes the very essence of music itself, and in so doing, in the words of Busoni, “stands at once inside and outside time…"