Professional concert pianist and touring artist, Alina is globally renowned for her powerful command of the instrument, unique interpretations and clarity of sound. In 2013, Kiryayeva released solo piano album “Sonatas,” which she recorded at New York City’s Klavierhaus, helmed by Grammy-nominated sound engineer Patrick Lo Re. It was featured on 150th broadcast of "Women in Music" on CKWR Radio in Ontario, Canada. Notes on the "Sonatas" by Jed Distler For all the consistency of his craftsmanship and formidable creative will, Beethoven was hardly a composer to rest on his laurels. The first years of the nineteenth century found Beethoven at a crucial, transitional point in his career. Having mastered the Viennese high-Classic style for which Haydn and Mozart served as paradigms, Beethoven sought to venture beyond his models and break with his past. According to Beethoven’s pupil Carl Czerny, the composer told his friend Krumpholz that “I am only a little satisfied with my previous works. From today I will take a new path.” Indeed, his Op. 27 “fantasy sonatas” points the way towards a looser, more overtly virtuosic and dramatic brand of piano writing. The celebrated opening Adagio, for example, has little to do with the two theme Sonata-Allegro first movement formula that had served both Beethoven and his contemporaries well. Its hypnotic triplet arpeggios and slowly unfolding repeated note melody are a kind of song without words. Many pianists pull this music to shreds with swan dive rubatos and italicized phrasing in a wrong-headed attempt to evoke a “moonlit” atmosphere that Beethoven never intended. By contrast, Kiryayeva’s brisk, long-lined treatment successfully underscores the music’s almost radical formal qualities. The central scherzo works best when a pianist emphasizes its caustic accents and transparent quartet-like writing. Neither of these movements, incidentally, prepares the listener for the finale’s torrential arpeggios and dramatic silences. “The common belief that this sonata tells of Beethoven’s unrequited love to Guillietta Gioccardi was born out of dedication to her of the front page of the manuscript, Kiryayeva explains. “ However, the letters and contemporaries accounts show that the dedication was made on the spur of the moment and the sonata was linked to Johann Seume's poem about a girl praying for her dying father, which is a topic much more complex and multifarious than the romanticized image of unrequited infatuation.” Many classical music works contain instantly recognizable catch phrases, such as the opening measures of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, or the main theme of Strauss’ Blue Danube. Similarly, people who’ve never heard of Chopin somehow can sing the first phrase of the B-flat Minor Sonata’s celebrated Funeral March. One of Chopin’s most popular and frequently played works, it is also one of the composer’s most atypical concoctions. For starters, the textures are largely devoid of the filigree, fioriture, and decorative passages that characterize Chopin’s piano writing. Schumann suggested that the four movements had no organic or thematic unity, and that Chopin had yoked together four of his maddest children under a single roof. Yet the linkages are revealing. Take the Funeral March’s trudging, mantra-like motto theme, transform it by making the repeated notes quicker and more agitated, and you’ve got the Scherzo’s main theme. Similarly, the turbulent left-hand eighth notes in the first movement directly relate to the enigmatic finale. In his book Chopin: the Reluctant Romantic, Jeremy Siepmann rightly claims this ninety-second finale to be the boldest and certainly the weirdest movement Chopin ever wrote, “a colloquy of bats and witches darting over the keys in continuous parallel octaves.” Prokofiev composed his Piano Sonata No. 4 in 1917, in Paris. Dedicated to Prokofiev’s close friend, Maximilian Schmidt, who committed suicide four years prior its composition. The composer premiered the work himself on April 17, 1918, in Petrograd. Unlike the exuberant, motoric sound world that largely characterizes Prokofiev’s first three Sonatas and short, virtuosic early works, the Fourth Sonata’s first two movements contain long lyrical stretches, an occasional halting quality, plus a brooding use of the keyboard’s lowest register. The finale finds Prokofiev back on energetic track with its sweeping technical demands and showy elaborations of the main theme. Kiryayeva aptly relates the music’s trajectory to “the struggle of two opposing forces - the faceless cruelty of fate and the power of one's spirit to overcome the pain.”