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Moments on CD

With his Children's Pieces for Adults, Georgian composer and pianist Nodar Gabunia created an eight-part piano cycle in 1987 in the wake of such pedagogically oriented collections as Pyotr Tchaikovsky's Children's Album op. 39, Béla Bartók's For Children Sz 42, or Dmitri Kabalevsky's Piano Pieces for Young Players op. 27, to name but a few. Musical images of childhood had long been a popular topos, which probably found it's culmination in Robert Schumann's Kinderszenen op. 15. Those character pieces, however, were not intended for children's hands, but were, in Schumann's own words, "reflections of an elder for elders," not actual children's pieces. The composition of the 24 Préludes op. 28 goes back to the years 1835/36, and in them the admiration that Frédéric Chopin had for Johann Sebastian Bach is evident. With this masterpiece, which gives the character piece "Präludium" or rather "Prélude" to it's first and probably highest climax, the composer took up Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier and it's sequence of 48 preludes and fugues not only in formal aspects, but also in terms of their constructive and material condensation, inspiring composers who followed him in time, such as Alexander Scriabin, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Karol Szymanovsky, but also Claude Debussy or Dmitri Shostakovich, to write comparable collections.