News
Publication by Shiiin of a CD including all the Ivan Wyschnegradsky’s works for piano solo in semitones played by Martine Joste.
To order it, see Shiiin label: www.shiiin.com.
At the top of the website page bibliography, you’ll find a new text of remembrances which the american dancer and choregraph Margaret Fisher recently wrote on our request upon her meeting with Ivan Wyschnegradsky in Paris in 1977.
New publication to be seen on the website page videos: the Méditation sur deux thèmes de La Journée de l’Existence op. 7, with Katharina Gohl Moser, cello and Anton Kernjak, piano, produced by La Pataconera in february 2024 in Basle.
If you are able to communicate the details of a concert, research or an event concerning Ivan Wyschnegradsky, we would be grateful for your informing us.
EDITO
NB Previous editos are available by clicking here.
Ivan Wyschnegradsky, 1976 – Photo Charles Amirkhanian
April 2026 – Following the release last November of the CD « The Complete Works for Solo Piano in Half-Tones by Ivan WYSCHNEGRADSKY, performed by Martine Joste », some reviews have been published in the online magazines Musikzen and Resmusica, written respectively by Franck Mallet and Michèle Tosi. Accompagnying these mostly unpublished works by Ivan Wyschnegradsky are two short interviews with the composer as well as a richly documented and illustrated booklet. The CD is available from the Shiiin label – 56 rue des Petites Ecuries – 75010 Paris – Tel: 01 53 34 13 15. E-mail: info@shiiin.com
> Published in Musikzen on first of February 2026, by Franck Mallet:
Wyschnegradsky, Martine Joste, solo piano
He travels alone
Between continuum and black magic, Wyschnegradsky’s incandescent piano
Leaving Russia in the 1920s to find a piano maker in Europe capable of producing the quarter-tone instrument he had designed, Ivan Wyschnegradsky (1893-1979) settled in France, near Paris, to create a unique work for orchestra, chamber music, and piano, focused on expanding the acoustic space: a continuum without the slightest recourse to electrical manipulation. The pianist Martine Joste was keen to organize several concerts in his presence at the Maison de la Radio while also co-founding the I. Wyschnegradsky Association with the composer Claude Ballif. Although she had already participated in recordings of pieces for two or four keyboards (Éditions R. Block, 2e2m, Col Legno, Shiiin), her new album comprises only works for solo piano (held at the Paul-Sacher Foundation), notably a famous Étude sur le Carré Magique Sonore (1957) – “an extraordinary idea” for Messiaen – which musically reproduces the method discovered in Roman catacombs of an inscription consisting of five five-letter words arranged in a square so that the same five words are read identically from left to right as well as from top to bottom. Elsewhere, the composer plays with chromaticism in DI-RA-TE-LO-TU (1918), cultivates a post-Scriabinian stillness – Trois Pièces, Quatre Fragments – or seeks transcendence through an incantatory piano – Ombres! (Shadows) — a prelude to the dark magic of his masterpiece, La Journée de l’Existence (The Day of Existence), for narrator, choir, and orchestra, premiered in 1978 (CD Shiiin 4, 2009). A fascinating journey that concludes at the borders of Chopin, Liszt, and Scriabin with a collection of elegant Youthful Preludes dating from 1916 and reconstructed “from memory” by the composer some thirty years later—which Martine Joste rediscovers with great insight and illuminates with her talent.
Franck Mallet
Ivan Wyschnegradsky: Study on the Magic Sound Square, Op. 40; DI-RA-TE-LO-TU; Three Pieces, Op. 38; Four Fragments, Op. 5; Shadows; Two Preludes, Op. 2; 18 Early Preludes (+ interviews with Ivan Wyschnegradsky)
Martine Joste (piano)
Martine Joste – Photo S. Koitka
> Published in ResMusica on March 18 2026, by Michèle Tosi:
The Complete Piano Works in Semitones by Ivan Wyschnegradsky, performed by Martine Joste
A sought-after interpreter and leading specialist in the « ultrachromatic » music of Ivan Wyschnegradsky (1883-1979), pianist Martine Joste explores, in this new CD, the Russian composer’s works for solo piano in the so-called « normal » style (without microtonal division).
Mostly unpublished, the pieces on this CD were found in the composer’s archives at the Paul-Sacher Foundation in Basel. They follow one another in reverse chronological order in the recording, from the mature pieces, composed in France where Wyschnegradsky had resided since 1920, to the Youthful Preludes written in Russia in 1916.
The last two tracks of the disc feature the composer’s voice recorded during an interview. He presents the Study on the Magic Sound Square, Op. 40 (1957), a piece chosen by Messiaen as the required work for the International Piano Competition in Royan in 1971. The same six-measure musical phrase is heard six times according to a canonical process, ultimately forming a sonic magic square where the same « formula » can be read horizontally and vertically: a combination that unfolds the music across the entire keyboard and is reminiscent of the harmonic scales of Scriabin, « the brilliant prophet of Surart », as Wyschnegradsky nicknamed him.
Less famous and presented as a first recording, DI-RA-TE-LO-TU refers to the “simplified” notation for the black keys of the piano by Nicolas Obouhow – another pioneer of microtonal divisions. Wyschnegradsky makes them resonate in a short pentatonic piece that sweeps across the keyboard, distributing the figures on either side of a central axis. In the Three Pieces op. 38 (1957), Prelude, Elevation and Solitude, the lines are elaborated and the space is constructed according to a harmonic awareness clearly felt within music that oscillates between abstract figures and expressive impulses. This is corroborated by the title, Savage, Quadrangular, of the first of the Four Fragments, op. 5 (1918), of which there is also a microtonal version for two complementary pianos. The very short pieces, with their expressive titles (“With iron necessity”), play on variations in trajectory and sonic amplitude. Ombres (1916) was originally the title of a (lost) painting by the composer. The score brings together three short pieces written by Wyschnegradsky after a long period of depression: “Shadows of yesterday, that’s how I should title all my attemps to pour myself out, to give myself to the world”, he wrote in his 1916 diary, quoted in the CD booklet. While an inner force seems to propel the music towards the light in Shadows I, Shadows III, Lento, Lugubre (Vision of Nothingness) sets in motion a persistent motif in the lower register, reminiscent of The lugubre gondole from Liszt’s later work. It is a Scriabin-like impulse that propels the Two Preludes, Op. 2, from the same year (Grandioso and Allegro irato), brimming with energy under the pianist’s vigorous playing.
Martine Joste has selected 18 of the composer’s 24 Youthful Preludes (12 in major keys and 12 in minor keys), a collection teeming with delightful surprises that, no doubt due to scheduling conflicts, we are unable to discover in its entirety. The pieces are unpublished and without opus numbers; « some were reconstructed from memory in 1949 at the Saint-Martin du Tertre Sanatorium, » wrote Wyschnegradsky (from his Journal). The musical language is tonal, employing dissonances and the interplay of polyphonic lines (1, 7, 10). Free in tone and style, Preludes 12, 13, 16, and 21 lean towards technical study, while others attest to a search for expressiveness, exalted (4, 8) or more restrained (2, 5), always embellished with chromaticism. There is also a predilection for obstinate motifs (9 and 11) that anchor the writing in the lower register of the keyboard and structure the progression of the musical discourse. While Preludes 15 and 22 are a clear homage to Chopin, No. 20, with its mobile pedal in the bass, evokes the Bydlo of Pictures at an Exhibition: all these pieces, still under the influence of Chopin, represent different approaches to the keyboard, all executed with clarity in polyphony, digital energy, and unwavering commitment by Martine Joste, a Wyschnegradskian at heart, who reveals through this previously unpublished collection a new facet of this rich and visionary personality.
Michele Tosi
IVAN WYSCHNEGRADSKY
‘I could have been a poet, a philosopher or a musician. I chose music: I am therefore a composer.’
Ivan Wyschnegradsky, born in Saint Petersburg in 1893, lived in Paris from 1920 until his death in 1979. Admired by numerous composers, amongst whom we can mention Olivier Messiaen, Henri Dutilleux, Bruce Mather, Alain Bancquart and Claude Ballif, Ivan Wyschnegradsky is recognized by the musical world as one of the pioneers in 20th century music.
Ivan Wyschnegradsky’s 1/4 tone piano, which in 1927 he had ordered from the August Förster manufacture, first was in the home of Claude Ballif, to whom he had bequeathed it. Since 2009 it belongs to the Paul-Sacher Foundation in Basel. Photo René Block (1979).