Brighton Year-Round 2026

St Nicholas Galina Umanskaya Piano Recital St Nicholas Church

Galina Umanskaya

Genre: Live Music, Music

Venue: St Nicholas Church, Dyke Road, Brighton

Festival: Brighton Year-Round

Low Down

Review

Galina Umanskaya comes to St Nicholas with a wide-ranging programme of Beethoven, Ravel, Scriabin – with whom she’s already particularly associated – and Prokofiev. Studying originally with Dmitry Lyudkov, a professor at the Tchaikovsky Moscow State Conservatory, she continued her studies at London, where she graduated with first-class honours for her Bachelor’s degree and was awarded the TCL Scholarship.

Now resident here, Umanskaya took an MA at Trinity Laban under Mikhail Kazakevich; and is completing a further diploma at Birmingham Conservatoire. Very much a student of the Moscow School, she brings that institute’s famed technique and breadth of artistic and philosophical interests that extend to symbolism.

That’s helpful when unpacking Scriabin with whom she’s been involved at Pushkin House London.

Umanskaya begins with Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No 12 in A flat Major Op 26. She finds an appropriately varied sonority – and characterisation –  for the opening Andante con variatzioni; which unwinds with hints of what’s to come. The two-note motif of the Scherzo fairly gallumphs with heavy humour and off-notes to surprise you. It’s brimful of boisterous good fun.

The Marcia funebre suella morte d’un Eroe is markedly entitled in French. Quite what this celebrates is unclear around 1800. Napoleon hadn’t yet crowned himself emperor; that disillusion was four years away. The chiming march is a rival in pain, and even more expressive than Chopin’s ‘Funeral March’, which might have been modelled in this (Chopin wrote it before the rest of his Piano Sonata No 2). Umanskaya brings this up with measured power and chiming bells to produce a shattering climax.

The skittering Allegro finale is a timely and exuberant release with its rippling scales and brevity. This is muscular but fleet Beethoven, reflected through a modernist lens; and perhaps a little through both Russian and British performance practice.

The Ravel ‘Oiseaux Triste’, second of his 1905 Miroirs collection, is a piece that has to somehow evoke both lost birds scattering and yet melancholy languor. Sidden bursts of accelerando punctuate a slow pulse and overall adagio tempo. There’s a delicacy but also hardness about the brittle brilliance of their evanescent plumage and the way Ravel almost chimes with a clash of tonalities to distinguish species. This is in fact a hard piece to capture tonally, and Umanskaya manages the shift from Beethoven’s late classical to classically-pointed late Romantic consummately.

Umanskaya also traverses another late Romanticism with consummate ease. But this is not just home territory but a speciality of hers. She has helped present Scriabin events.

The Scriabin Poem Op 32/2 from around 1903 is intensely brief, freighted with late romanticism nearly crushed into symbolism and a frenetic exuberance. It’s early-mid Scriabin: the simpler melodist once hailing from Chopin is giving way to the theosophy-laden delver into secret harmonies and a literally coloured palette; and a modernism not far from Schoenberg. The piled-on chords, the accelerandi, the hint of several Chopin-esque melodies now wholly absorbed into Scriabin’s melos cascading over each other. Umanskaya thrills with her reading of this, and doesn’t hold back.

No wonder Stravinsky (whose mother always berated him with her certainty that Scriabin was a far greater composer) commented irritably to his amanuensis Robert Craft: “For, frankly, is it possible to connect a musician like Scriabin with any tradition whatsoever? Where does he come from? And who are his forebears?” Well his mother could tell him: pure symbolist Russia.

It’s fascinating and rare: yet Scriabin did spawn a school, from Prokofiev’s older friend Nikolai Myaskovsky and composer-pianist Samuel Feinberg in Russia, to a gamut of (often quite bonkers) theosophist exiles in Paris. Umanskaya plays the Poem with a fierce accelerando – absolutely right for much of Scriabin.

Umanskaya’s playing his 2nd, 9th and soon his 10th and 5th Sonatas as well as many Poems and Preludes. Sadly she feels people are more accommodated to the barbaric but spicily open melodies of Prokofiev than the hothouse world of Scriabin. It’s our loss that she can’t yet envisage a complete Scriabin recital.

Finally Prokofiev’s early Piano Sonata No 2 in D minor Op 14 from 1914, when he was 23. This is Prokofiev in full brat mode but not quite the iconoclast he’d become a year or so later. Umanskaya is thoroughly at home in this idiom as you’d expect. The Sonata was written between his first two Piano Concertos.

The Allegro ma non troppo starts with an igratiating theme that immediately explodes into an anarchist bomb then pulls back to a striking sensitive melody; and then advances.

The Scherzo in full joke mode enjoys a ripple of scales with a theme of one note followed by three tied ones, an asymmetry it takes the brief movement to work out at heltering speed. It’s exhilarating and Umanskaya relishes (very differently to the Scriabin) its barbaric chromatic crunches and wrong-note-rags as it were.

The Andante is a darker thing, finally allowing D minor to settle. Being Prokofiev though there’s a lyrical passage dominated by a three-note motif to alleviate the bitter desolation of wonder that then combines with it. Prokofiev could touch profundity at a Shostakovich level sometimes. This is an example where perhaps Shostakovich learned from him.

Given the stark tragedy of this slow movement, it might even reflect the apparent suicide by drowning of his close friend, composer Alexei Stanchinsky (1888-1914), dedicatee of his Second Piano Concerto in G minor Op 16. Such profundity wasn’t to come again in a Prokofiev Piano Sonata till the wartime 7^th.  Umanskaya digs into this with a swaying sense of how this touches the stirrings of an earlier world war. She brings this out with a hypnotic use of sustained but light pedal and seamless Andante ruffled by that three-note obsession.

The Vivace finale enters with a scampering, biting contrast between the chattering right hand in the upper register; that starts with a cascade and ominous bass. Soon a humoresque passage enters which plays off the exuberance the opening theme owns. It comes to a dead stop. This though is a Haydnesque joke suggesting Prokofiev was learning that master’s japes three years or so before his Haydn-modelled Classical Symphony (No 1).

The bass takes the buffoon role as Umanskaya simply lets the Prokofiev rip to its barbaric climax. And fade.  This is a phenomenal performance with greater clarity in the inner parts than I’ve yet heard.

Outstanding; and Umanskaya is clearly a terrific artist to watch. She possesses an individual voice and strikingly adventurous repertoire outside today’s broad sample. She’ll return in early 2028, that sadly being the first available slot in these hugely popular concerts.

Published October 29, 2026 by Simon Jenner