Andrey Mishchenko - Little Sadness

Hear The Track Here

I will readily confess that classical music generally isn't my field at all. Good job too because there aren't that many good classical musicians around on my part of the internet. Thousands and thousands of earache merchants though. I'm sure though that there are a great many classical musicians on the net but most of the people I know masquerade their classical pretensions with a cloak of 'film music' Wait! Film music??!! Isn't that the bastard offshoot of classical? The one I am duty bound to consign to the death of a thousand cuts as soon as I see it? Mmmmm. I first met Andrey when I reviewed his (really) classical piano piece September 29 (Window to the Fall) (May 2010), it scraped under my critical radar because it was a) a piano piece (and I do like them) and b) it was played with some passion.

Tell you what though, Little Sadness had me scratching my head for the first few plays. Couldn't figure out for the life of me what it was exactly that I was listening to (besides the central piano theme). There is, for example, the sound of footsteps which I thought was Andrey forgetting to chop that bit out of the final mix but soon realised that it supposed to be part of the piece itself. He did mention in his review request that there was a 'small story around this music otherwise it is not obvious why it is titled "Little sadness" but i don't have translation to English yet' so until that appears I just don't know.

The heart of the track, though, is the piano again which is - I guess - Andrey's prime instrument and very good he appears to be with it too, in a classical sense. He is also, to my ears, the quintessential Russian classical pianist, huge flourishes, lots of tinkly high end work and drama you could cut with a knife. As for understanding the piece in context of what is supposed to be going on with the ambient sounds being used will have to wait until that English translation. However, as a piece of semi-classical music, Andrey shows he knows his instrument. The music, however, will remain a bit confusing for everyone until it is explained exactly why the intro is so disjointed.