tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-75869339064128286142024-03-05T03:58:28.883-08:00getclassicalBlog with interest in classical music, reviews of repertoire and performances, interviews with pianists and other instrumentalists and composers of classical music.Ilona Oltuski http://www.blogger.com/profile/18182444676865000920noreply@blogger.comBlogger238125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7586933906412828614.post-50939655697587187692019-02-27T20:29:00.000-08:002019-02-27T20:29:31.201-08:00Breath and Hammer II: collective convergence for a personal itinerary – Clarinetist/Composer David Krakauer and pianist/composer Kathleen Tagg premier an eclectic musical journey, newly conceptualized for the “audience-in-round configuration” of Berlin’s Boulez Saal.<strong><img alt="" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-9579" height="450" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/52908609_2255961101353400_3058367811148578816_n.jpg" width="750" /></strong>Photo: courtesy of the Kathleen Tagg and David Krakauer at Berlin Boulez Saal, set up for the performance on March 7<sup>th</sup> and 8<sup>th</sup>, 2019<br />
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“We are excited to perform a greatly <a href="https://youtu.be/a4r7JmtWG3Y">expanded version</a> of our <em><a href="https://www.krakauertaggduo.com/breath--hammer.html">Breath and Hammer</a></em> program that evolved in increments since 2015. It incorporates our arrangements of an array of composers we greatly admire, as diverse as New York-based visionary John Zorn, Syrian clarinetist Kinan Azmeh, and Cuban percussionist Roberto Rodriguez with our own original compositions, influenced by interlocking drumming patterns, romantic symphonic music, minimalism and klezmer. Intermingling such seemingly disparate musical influences have transformed into something, we believe, entirely new,” explains Krakauer over dinner in New York, sharing that part of his eminent journey with klezmer music was a musical way home to his Jewish roots. But the Grammy-award nominee defies musical boundaries.<br />
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<img alt="" class="alignleft wp-image-9581 size-blog-large-image" height="300" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/20160117_143047-848x300.jpg" width="848" />Photo: Ilona Oltuski at National Sawdust<br />
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Whether he performs Eastern European Jewish Klezmer, new world electronics with his band Ancestral Groove, or Beethoven with the Emerson Quartet, his spiritual soul is tangible.<br />
“When I reflect on the most spiritually potent moments of my life, they are bound together in my consciousness with the most human, earthy physicality: the sound of communal breath, the flicker of a candle, the sensation of breaking into a sweat,” he confesses in his introduction to <em><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Dreams-Prayers-Far-Cry/dp/B00L905GH2/ref=sr_1_1/147-9120962-3227236?s=music&ie=UTF8&qid=1550953284&sr=1-1&keywords=dreams+and+prayers">Dreams and Prayers</a></em>, a chamber music recording with <a href="https://afarcry.org/">A Far Cry</a> ensemble.<br />
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In April, Krakauer and Tagg will share the stage with a host of international artists, including Evgeny Kissin, in a celebration of Yiddish music and culture titled: <a href="https://www.carnegiehall.org/Calendar/2019/04/15/FROM-SHTETL-TO-STAGE-A-CELEBRATION-OF-YIDDISH-MUSIC-AND-CULTURE-0800PM">From Shtetl to Stage,</a> as part of Carnegie Hall’s vast <a href="https://www.carnegiehall.org/Events/Season-Highlights/Migrations/The-Great-Migration">Migrations</a> series. Krakauer has been hugely influential in the advance of klezmer into the contemporary realm.<br />
<img alt="" class="alignright size-large wp-image-9587" height="576" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/20160117_161507-1024x576.jpg" width="1024" />Photo: Ilona Oltuski at National Sawdust<br />
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“In our mutual journey <em>Breath and Hammer</em>, Kathleen and I explore our instruments intensely. Since much of the piano playing is done inside the instrument, it becomes more about strumming and the percussive elements, and the clarinet makes use of some unorthodox techniques. For example, when it comes to vibrating – which you are never supposed to do, at least not at the conservatory – I do it. It’s a shimmer into my own, personal sound.” Krakauer has also developed mastery with a circular breathing technique widely used in folk and world music, taking in or releasing air through the nose, enabling him to sustain long passages without stopping for breath. “I also use different mouthpieces…rounder ones for classical music, which makes for a less raw delivery,” he explains. “But all in all, my classical playing definitely influences my non-classical voice and vice-versa,” he says.<br />
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<br /><img alt="" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-9582" height="600" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/45447383_2187537361529108_2649247321228836864_o.jpg" width="1011" /><br />
Photo: Courtesy of artists at National Sawdust<br />
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I had the opportunity to see a mesmerizing collaboration at their 2016 launch of <em>Breath and Hammer</em> live at <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8FRYkNrviu4">National Sawdust</a>. I was impressed with the original combination of artistry and experimentation, great musicianship, and uninhibited spirituality in a quest to redefine the sounds and roles of their instruments.<br />
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In 2016 the clarinet/piano and real-life duo had joined forces with Los Angeles-based video artist Jessie Gilbert, who designed a portable video system for their shows, incorporating three interactive cameras. “As we focused so intensely on our instruments and the techniques we use, we decided to add video, thereby bringing the process of creating our sound-world visually, in real-time to the audience,” says Krakauer.<br />
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Over the past year, brainstorming with the Boulez Saal team (technical advising and audio engineering by Jay Eigenmann) and Jesse Gilbert in preparation for their venture in Berlin this <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/175709030044014/">March</a> resulted in a special solution to accommodate live projection in Frank Gehry’s uniquely reconfigurable hall.<br />
The star architect of the cubist Walt Disney Hall created a modular 360-degree space in an oval elliptical shape, evocative of the conceptual unity the Berlin <a href="https://barenboimsaid.de/home">Barenboim-Zaid Akademie</a> aspires to promote. Located within the majestic building of the former depot of the State Opera, the Akademie and the Pierre Boulez Saal concert hall indeed unite many viewpoints and conceptions under one roof, and according to Dr. Carsten Siebert, Chancellor of the Academy, they all lead to the enigmatic and highly energetic engagement of one mutual denominator – Daniel Barenboim.<br />
<img alt="" class="alignleft size-large wp-image-9583" height="768" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/IMG_0576-1024x768.jpg" width="1024" />Photo: Ilona Oltuski, Boulez Saal Berlin<br />
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Inspired by the political and philosophical dialogue between Palestinian Edward Said and Israeli Daniel Barenboim, their foundation and Barenboim’s politics-defying <a href="https://www.west-eastern-divan.org/">West-Eastern Divan</a> initiative-turned-Arab/Israeli musical collaboration, found its new academic home in the heart of Berlin. The Akademie’s concert hall was dedicated to music theoretician and composer Pierre Boulez, an admired mentor of Barenboim. Frank Gehry was brought on board pro bono, after Barenboim was introduced to him through Ernest Fleishman, the executive director of the LA Philharmonic, during a mutual visit at Yale University.<br />
In its third year now, the hall's reputation has already established itself as an internationally acclaimed performance hub, with selected life-streamed and on-demand-broadcasts by ARTE and other media outlets.<br />
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<img alt="" class="alignright wp-image-9584 size-large" height="788" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/IMG_0595-1024x788.jpg" width="1024" />Original sketch by Frank Gehry to Pierre Boulez’s avantgarde concept “Le Salle modulable”<br />
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The new hall’s leadership certainly calls for a wide diversity of projects for the new hall’s artistic planning. Daniel Barenboim, Founder and Ole Bækhøj, Director say, “since its opening in March of 2017, programs for the new hall have been dedicated to the spirit of discovery, a sense of openness, and an innovative take on tradition.”<br />
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Like fitting a square peg into a round opening, tackling the projection for <em>Breath and Hammer II</em> was a challenge to overcome for the hall, which has been famously constructed with acoustic and spatial elasticity in an “audience-in-round configuration,” according to Jesse Gilbert. Well-distributed, high quality sound production in different instrumental settings and flexible seating configurations enhance accessibility from every custom-upholstered seat in the house; another pro bono collaboration by acclaimed acoustician Yasuhisa Toyota.<br />
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The collaborative solution for the project’s visuals was finally found in a hexagonal structure, enclosing the performers and thus allowing the projection surface equal visibility from all parts of the hall. “This will be the first time Jesse joins our performance, and with that, the scope of the project and the complexity of the visuals have greatly expanded,” says Krakauer. Gilbert explains, “Through the use of live cameras and my original audio-reactive visual instrument, SpectraIGL, the audience will be invited to form a more immediate and intimate relationship with the performers and their creative process as it unfolds.”<br />
<img alt="" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-9585" height="450" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/52605725_2255960984686745_4075038401777106944_n.jpg" width="750" />Photo: Courtesy of Kathleen Tagg and David Krakauer, Set Up at Boulez Saal<br />
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The aim to allow for an immersive presentation that envelops audiences in an array of sounds and images goes hand in hand with the examination of spatial and acoustic suppleness in presentations that have become increasingly intertwined with visuals elements. Scrim, emerging from the world of theatrical effects, has since made its entrance into fine art installation and live music performance, merging the audible with projections beyond the one-dimensional screen.<br />
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The visually-enhanced “what you see is what you hear” experience has recently gained clout within the spectrum of contemporary yield. Composers’ accounts trace the bend of history, but their essential countenance remains definingly individual. As an example, in a recent aesthetic documentation of <em><a href="https://arts.mit.edu/2019-mit-sounding-spiders-canvas/">Spider’s Canvas/Arachnodrone</a></em>, part of Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s <em>MIT Sounding</em> Series, Evan Ziporyn and his collaborators explored sonification through a visualized platform, enclosing the performers of electronic instrumentation and computerized visual/sound navigation within a scrim-covered cube structure, giving artistic countenance to the sonic biome of a spiderweb.<br />
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Photo: Ilona Oltuski Spider's Canvas/Arachnodrone MIT Boston<br />
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Compared to this merging of varying arts and science disciplines, <em>Breath and Hammer II </em>stays within the realm of the inner workings of its own genre’s aesthetics, incorporating an immersive video feed focusing on close-up visuals of the artists’ craft while musically presenting an eclectic blend of genres, in an electro-acoustical context.<br />
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In <em>Breath and Hammer II</em>, Krakauer and the similarly wide-ranging South-African composer/pianist Kathleen Tag transfigure their shared artistic values and differences into a celebration of their creative process with a personal sound palette. “We have each brought everything of who we are and what we have worked on over many years, into the mix,” explains Kathleen Tagg. “In recasting each of the compositions given to us by our composer friends, we found a way to transform the material in a way that reflected our own personal sound world without literally copying the devices of any particular genre…For this performance, we have created a brand new set of ‘tape piece’ interludes that act as bridges between the different pieces of the performance. The interludes, with their sound that ‘travels’ spatially within the hall, represent that influence coming to us from the outside – from traditions that are not our own, but that we are fortunate to have been exposed to through our friends and their music.”<br />
The sound design for this performance utilizes two distinct layers. While the main pieces come directly from the central stage, the interludes, or “tape pieces” as Tagg calls them, travel on a journey through a surround-sound speaker configuration that acts as a sonic representation of musical offerings from one piece to the next. “These also nod to the ties that connect us one to the other, no matter how far apart we may seem,” says Tagg.<br />
By <a href="http://www.getclassical.org/">Ilona Oltuski</a>Ilona Oltuski http://www.blogger.com/profile/18182444676865000920noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7586933906412828614.post-56062788210806841722019-01-23T05:50:00.001-08:002019-01-23T05:50:09.304-08:00Violinist Filip Pogády – Social Media is my Agent<img alt="" class="alignleft wp-image-9238" height="251" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/1970974.jpg" width="438" />There is more to dashingly handsome violinist Filip Pogády than meets the eye.<br />
While he worked as a model for the world-famous Elite agency, becoming a poster child for big name brands like Calvin Klein and Marc Jacobs, Pogády’s heroes remain the old school violin masters of the Golden Age. His heart belongs – as it did growing up in Linz, Austria – to the sounds of Heifetz, Menuhin, and Oistrakh.<img alt="" class="alignright size-blog-large-image wp-image-9243" height="300" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/395858_10150543316857900_412672537_n-1-848x300.jpg" width="848" /><br />
Working out is definitely still a part of his daily regimen, which also includes social media posts of vigorous violin exercises of the classical repertoire made public for his large numbers of followers on various platforms. <a href="https://youtu.be/wtBlOG8Xaa4">https://youtu.be/wtBlOG8Xaa4</a><br />
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Pogády believes in sharing his passion for classical music beyond the concert hall experience.<br />
<img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-9239" height="567" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/calvinklein.jpg" width="487" />Throughout his student years, Pogády did partake in the outreach efforts of the Yehudi Menuhin Live Music Now Foundation, taking the concept a step further by performing Bach Sonatas and Partitas in New York City’s subway stations with astonishingly positive results. “Even people who are totally unfamiliar with classical music connected so directly and on such a humane level; it’s because this music is just so great,” he says.<br />
(Photo: from first modeling job for Calvin Klein)<br />
Ever since winning the Vienna Suzuki Violin Competition in the magnificent hall of the historic Vienna Konzerthaus at age 11, Pogády remembers his first experience performing with an orchestra: “The animated energy and thunderous applause from the audience that swept over the stage was an overwhelming experience, and determined my resolve to pursue a career as a violinist, right then and there.”<br />
<img alt="" class="alignleft size-blog-large-image wp-image-9241" height="300" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/1374993_10151833574957900_1305791566_n-848x300.jpg" width="848" />What followed were many years of “chasing the perfect performance, a concept that is only rarely achieved and at the end something quite unrealistic,” says Pogády. “Making music together is a matter of an exchange of energy. It can’t be over-communicated, it just has to work; you are a match or you are not,” he explains. “If it works, that happens naturally, musical ideas overlap and the temperament of each performer coincide. Of course there are always spikes possible, but the most important thing in a good collaboration is consistency,” he says, and mentions pianist Peter Fančovič, also a brilliant improviser, as one of his favorite collaborators. Connected through their Eastern European background – both were born in Bratislava, Slovakia – the young performers met at Manhattan School of Music under the tutelage of renowned masters. In 2008, Pogády was accepted to the Pinchas Zukerman Performance Program at New York’s Manhattan School of Music on a full scholarship.<br />
“It was not easy to get used to the fast pace and big pond kind of sentiment, predominating New York City’s lifestyle and the mentality of the people,” he describes. Pogády, who had absolved his undergraduate studies at the Vienna Conservatory and grew up in slow-paced Linz, took a little time to adjust to the US. At the same time, his international background facilitated an embrace of the no-home, or rather everywhere-home, mindset so necessary for today’s mostly international career musicians, whose schedules are built on involved travel for worldwide performances.<br />
“Zukerman had been my idol for many years, since my early teens,” affirms Pogády, “and it was an amazing opportunity to meet Zukerman in person for the first time at a master class when attending the Ottawa Young Artist Program Festival. It was fascinating to come face to face with the great artist I had admired for so long,” says Pogády, continuing: “It came as a great surprise that during the course of the festival, he invited me to come to New York, as his student. I was not really familiar with his teaching style yet, but I decided to pursue this one-in-a-lifetime chance and follow his invitation,” he explains.<br />
<img alt="" class="alignleft wp-image-9242 size-large" height="1024" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/DSC_1543-683x1024.jpg" width="683" />After completing his master’s degree and critics’ praises of his playing as “lighting –like,” (Russkoe Slovo) and “commanding” (NY Times), he continued his journey on his own. During that time, it became clear to the young performer that he was his best publicist.<br />
Posting his recitals and daily practice on You Tube, Facebook, and Instagram, the young performer attracted thousands of followers, and the more fans he activated, the more performance offers came in. Some of the old school recording labels were initially confused because of his previous career as a model, assuming they were dealing with a cross-over artist, not a serious classical musician. But nothing could be further from the truth; in fact the traditional, classical repertoire is at the heart of what Pogády aspires to.<br />
These days Pogády no longer pursues modeling, and the number of fans he garnered with his fashion shoots has certainly not diminished his popularity as a performer - in fact quite the opposite. In a music market where recording labels are just as eager as concert producers to hire musicians that bring their own fan base to the fore, visibility can only help.<br />
Besides his local concerts in the New York Metropolitan Area, the 31-year-old has traveled extensively for engagements in Asia and Europe and the artist's stage presence facilitated some on- screen guest appearances, including a spot on Louis CK’s <em>Louie.</em><br />
Pogády shared his 2016 LPR (Le Poisson Rouge) debut with Georgian David Aladashvili, and has been repeatedly paired with the cool, young pianist at concerts in Seoul. This December, I heard Pogády perform in an invigorating <a href="https://www.facebook.com/pogady/videos/2204237953126230/">Tchaikovsky trio</a> with pianist Vassily Primakov and cellist Yves Dharamraj at Sparkill’s Union Arts Center; it was a remarkable collaboration, and not long afterward, we had the opportunity to meet up again while traveling. During a mutual brief stopover in Berlin, Germany, we decided to seize the moment, and while the concert was still fresh in my ears, we met at borchardt, a hot spot for the best “wiener schnitzel” in town, for our interview.<br />
<img alt="" class="alignright size-blog-large-image wp-image-9245" height="300" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/42104343_10156426635817900_8210594722410921984_o-848x300.jpg" width="848" />Check out his all Tchaikovsky <a href="https://youtu.be/YU9cn41602U">debut album</a>.<br />
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/getclassical.org">Ilona Oltuski</a><br />
Ilona Oltuski http://www.blogger.com/profile/18182444676865000920noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7586933906412828614.post-64416959182824495742019-01-22T08:24:00.000-08:002019-01-22T08:24:18.424-08:00The Goffriller cello of the legendary Pablo<strong><em><img alt="" class="alignleft wp-image-9216 size-large" height="1024" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/b092e4-20181219-cello-named-pablo-02-avi-katz-819x1024.jpg" width="819" />Amit Peled releases recording of Bach Suites (Volume I) on the Goffriller cello of Pablo Casals </em></strong><br />
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(Illustration by Avi Katz)<br />
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We all love a good story told with the vivid imagination of an artist; it is even better when the story is based on life’s authentic puzzle pieces, connecting the dots to confirm an important message: that good things happen to good people.<br />
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When it comes to musical storylines, Israeli-American cellist Amit Peled has quite a few to tell and proves to be an animated and communicative protagonist. His storytelling project: <em>A Cello Named Pablo</em>, geared to inspire kids’ engagement with classical music, is based on Peled’s own, very personal endeavor with “Pablo.” The piece is narrated and accompanied by the cellist’s soaring performance on the cello of legendary Pablo Casals, who Peled describes as “our cello godfather.”<br />
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Following a personal invitation from Casals’ widow Marta to perform on the master’s cello in 2012, Peled was loaned the instrument in 2014 and concludes his precious time spent with the cello recording the final volume of the Bach Suites. <a href="https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/bach-suites-1-3/1450215117">The release date of Volume I is February 1, 2019</a>.<br />
Peled’s release represents the first recording of the Bach volumes on the original instrument used by Casals since the man’s ground-breaking initial recording of the material in 1936. Since then, of course, the previously unconquered territory has become populated with countless (Peled mentions 50) major cellists’ recordings, all of them to an extent building on the legacy of Casals’ benchmark recording. Only Peled’s work, however, can claim that added layer of historic presence, making his recording above all a revision of nuanced and intimate transformation.<br />
It was imperative for Peled to take his time getting to know and perfect his relationship with the instrument and his idol. When a student in Peled’s cello class at Peabody Conservatory, where he has taught since 2003, found an archived program of Casals’ performance at Peled’s alma mater from 1915, Peled paid homage with a concert repeating the exact program in 2015: a centennial celebration, but Peled continued to indulge several years with Casals’ instrument before approaching a recording with it, loaded as it is with such profound context.<br />
Ever since Casals acquired the instrument in 1913, crafted by noted Venetian luthier Matteo Goffriller in 1733, the cello was an integral part of the master’s signature sound, and remained so until his death in 1973 at age 96. By including Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites, six in all, during a concert performance, Casals almost single-handedly transformed today’s common cello performance practice. With his revelatory 1936 recording, Casals turned the highly virtuosic pieces previously deemed “pedagogical” into every cellist’s staple repertoire, and, Peled adds, “a musical bible” of sorts for cellists.<br />
Marta Casals Istomin, a cellist and musical tour de force in her own right, wanted to ensure that the cello left in her care continued to live on the musical saga of its master, but she also understood the artist’s need to develop his or her own path: “Marta had told me to go out with it and find my own voice,” says Peled, “but what exactly does that mean? … I was in awe, but also scared. There were all these expectations of sounding like Casals, and the instrument was not an easy one to play. It was challenging in that it had so much personality of its own; I had to learn not to disturb it by only using weight and movement – no pressure whatsoever or it would lose its precious sound – but once you figured it out, it would truly let you shine,” he explains, “and then,” he adds, “the cello did indeed have the most humane voice I ever heard in an instrument.”<br />
The recoding brought its own memorable experience for Peled. While the esteemed cellist has recorded to critical acclaim on the Naxos, Centaur, CAP, and Delos labels, this is the third recording done on his own label, CTM Classics, which stands for “catch the moment,” and as Peled explains “was born out of the desire to do just that:”seizing the opportunity to record the CD for the children’s book <em><a href="https://www.ctmclassics.com/books/">A Cello Named Pablo</a></em>. The book is based on an initial book proposition by author Marni Fogelson who had heard Peled perform and tell his story on Public Radio’s <em>Classics for Kids</em>. It is illustrated by Avi Katz.<br />
Frustrated with current contracted industry habits and waiting for others’ initiatives to come through, a successful crowdfunding initiative supported the label’s initial project. CTM launched a second recording, featuring students from Peled’s “<a href="https://www.ctmclassics.com/peabody-peled-cello-gang-cd/">Peabody Peled Cello Gang</a>,” with proceeds from the CD’s sale going towards scholarships for the students.<br />
For the recording of his first volume of the <a href="https://www.ctmclassics.com/bach-suites-13-amit-peled/">Bach Suites</a>, engineered by the eminent Norbert Kraft and recorded in a luminous church in Baltimore, Peled brought three different bows: “It took four hours to get the sound right, but when I got it we just kept recording through.” Recording is a very personal process; each artist has his own approach. “In this case the ‘historic weight’ was evident, and while I was completely at ease with the material, I wanted to delete any expected inferences,” says Peled. He intentionally left the prelude of the first Bach Suite to be recorded at the very end of the process. “It was the most delicate to record, and after three days of recording there was a completely different mindset present,” he says.<br />
The Bach Suites rendered new virtuosic opportunities for the cello’s previously single-pitched compositions by exploring fingering adjacent strings so that multiple pitches could sound when bowed simultaneously, producing a fuller and more varied polyphonic aural effect.<br />
Interpretations changed throughout the many takes, channeling the energy with which artists from all over the world have approached these preludes, dances, and fugues since Casals’ historic recording; Peled’s knowledge of these different layers is palpable in this – to date – <a href="https://youtu.be/jYBq_9823lI">final statement</a>.<br />
The thoughtfully-crafted new release confirms Peled’s close proximity to Casals’ characteristic sound world yet manages to convince – perhaps especially in this memorable and delicate opening prelude, recorded last – that Peled possesses an individual and fresh outlook given voice by his own brilliant musicianship.<img alt="" class="alignright wp-image-9217 size-blog-large-image" height="300" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Mount-Vernon-Virtuosi-848x300.jpg" width="848" /><br />
Peled is often at the forefront of initiatives eager to engage new audiences with unconventional performance concepts. With his chamber orchestra “<a href="https://www.mountvernonvirtuosi.com/">The Mount Vernon Virtuosi</a>,” which he leads as a conductor and sometimes participating cellist, he recently established the practice of kicking off a concert with the musicians’ choral singing before proceeding to the actual instrumental performance, following in the same key. “’Tuning into the concert’ provides a special atmosphere, [and] makes the performance more human and less expected,” he says. His “Mozart in Jeans” series is geared to further loosen the traditional concert experience, and special concerts for children allow for a different acoustic aura and familiarity by seating child audience members directly next to an instrument of their choice. Peled genuinely loves building community with young adults and children, saying: “Anytime, all my heart for kids.”<br />
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Peled has performed as a soloist with many of the world’s top orchestras and has built a reputation in chamber music performance with multiple musical collaborators, among them pianist Alon Goldstein, violinist Ilya Kahler (Tempest Trio), and clarinetist Alex Fiterstein. He is also a frequent guest in performances and master classes at international festivals.<br />
Peled grew up on a kibbutz in Israel, and his wide repertoire includes works by Jewish composers in programs devoted to Jewish themes. A section on his website, “<a href="http://www.amitpeled.com/journey-with-my-jewishness/">Journey with my Jewishness</a>,” is dedicated to such musical explorations of his Jewish identity: an important facet of the artist and man.<br />
These days, Peled returns to playing his 1800 Thomas Dodd edition cello in concert, which was handed to him by his late mentor Bernhard Greenhouse. Until the next Bach Suite recording, “Pablo” has returned to Marta’s care for some rest and will eventually continue on to inspire another gifted young cellist.<br />
Thankful for all his exciting experiences with “Pablo,” Peled and his capable hands are secretly hoping for another journey accompanied by a historic instrument, so if anyone could point him in the direction of a Stradivarius, perhaps<em>, </em>do not hesitate to inspire some new musical adventures!<br />
<a href="http://getclassical.org/">Ilona Oltuski</a>Ilona Oltuski http://www.blogger.com/profile/18182444676865000920noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7586933906412828614.post-7606417324111638842018-10-21T19:44:00.001-07:002018-10-21T19:44:24.589-07:00Pianist Asiya Korepanova –artistic force and creative incubator<strong><img alt="" class="size-full wp-image-8134 alignleft" height="768" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Asiya-Korepanova_Emil-Matveev.jpg" width="511" /></strong><br />
<strong><em>In the concert event titled: In memory of a great Artist, on December 9<sup>th</sup>, 2018 at 3 pm, dedicated to works of Tchaikovsky as part of the Sparkill, N.Y. Union Arts Center’s concert series, Korepanova shows her cycle of 18 drawings inspired by Tchaikovsky’s Eighteen Pieces, Op. 72, for the first time in New York. (photo credit: Emil Matveev)</em></strong><br />
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<strong><em>She also shares the stage, performing excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s large scale work with the series’ artistic directors, pianists Vassily Primakov and Oxana Mikhailoff, as well as cellist Yves Dharamraj and violinist Filip Pogady, in a mixed chamber music and solo piano program dedicated to the 125<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the eminent composer’s death. A collection of Korepanova’s 18 poems, accompanying each drawing, ispart of the exhibit.</em></strong><br />
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“Originally I did the drawings for Tchaikovsky in 2010, but have changed several of them since. I started learning the pieces of Op.72 inspired by the beautiful recording by Michael Pletnev, on the Deutsche Grammophon label. I quickly became obsessed with these 18 works and felt like I absolutely have to play them for the sake of my sanity and all kind of ideas for the images [and text] came to me, during this intense occupation with the music. It’s hard to describe in words, but the music sparkles some associations in my mind that can be visual or literal, and could be far from the immediate character of the musical piece,” explains Korepanova “Written late in his life,” she says, “the set of [Tchaikovsky’s]character pieces have vivid titles, opening up the temptation to interpret. For example ‘Dialogue,’ what could that be about? Or ‘Prankish girl,’ wonders Korepanova.<br />
<strong><em><img alt="" class="alignright wp-image-8135 size-large" height="1024" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Lullaby-780x1024.jpg" width="780" /></em></strong><br />
But perhaps more than an attempt to illustrate an exact storyline, the artist wants to express the mood she personally associates with the music:”There is a deep, hidden sadness in this music that does not necessarily come across in an obvious way, and that feeling addressed a lot of choices for me in terms of performance, imagery and text. I can’t say any specific composer translates another way; it is my reflection on music that comes across differently. Different music would bring another kind of inspiration, but I can’t label that,” she explains.(Wilde Jagd)<br />
(Lullaby)<br />
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The <a href="http://en.tchaikovsky-research.net/pages/Eighteen_Pieces,_Op._72">piano pieces</a> were first published by <a href="http://en.tchaikovsky-research.net/pages/Pyotr_Jurgenson">Pyotr Jurgenson</a> in September 1893 as Op. 72. They are included in volume 53 of Tchaikovsky's <em><a href="http://en.tchaikovsky-research.net/pages/Complete_Collected_Works">Complete Collected Works</a></em>, edited by Anatoly Drozdov (1949).<br />
Korepanova created a fine drawing that corresponds to each of the 18 musical titles, as well as a poem.<br />
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(Wilde Jagd)<br />
<img alt="" class="alignleft size-large wp-image-8136" height="1024" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/8.Wilde-Jagd-678x1024.jpg" width="678" /><br />
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<ol>
<li><strong>Impromptu</strong><br />Allegro moderato e giocoso (F minor, 119 bars).</li>
<li><strong>Berceuse</strong><br />Andante mosso (A-flat major, 80 bars).</li>
<li><strong>Tendres reproches</strong><br />Allegro non tanto ed agitato (C-sharp minor, 129 bars).</li>
<li><strong>Danse caractéristique</strong><br />Allegro giusto (D major, 218 bars).</li>
<li><strong>Méditation</strong><br />Andante mosso (D major, 85 bars).</li>
<li><strong>Mazurque pour danser</strong><br />Tempo di Mazurka (B-flat major, 192 bars).</li>
<li><strong>Polacca de concert</strong><br />Tempo di Polacca (E-flat major, 166 bars).</li>
<li><strong>Dialogue</strong><br />Allegro moderato (B major, 73 bars).</li>
<li><strong>Un poco di Schumann</strong><br />Moderato mosso (D-flat major, 95 bars).</li>
<li><strong>Scherzo-fantaisie</strong><br />Vivace assai (E-flat minor, 313 bars).</li>
<li><strong>Valse-bluette</strong><br />Tempo di Valse (E-flat major, 162 bars).</li>
<li><strong>L'espiègle</strong><br />Allegro moderato (E major, 46 bars).</li>
<li><strong>Echo rustique</strong><br />Allegro non troppo (E-flat major, 105 bars) <sup><a href="http://en.tchaikovsky-research.net/pages/Eighteen_Pieces,_Op._72#cite_note-note2-2">[2]</a></sup>.</li>
<li><strong>Chant élégiaque</strong><br />Adagio (D-flat major, 93 bars).</li>
<li><strong>Un poco di Chopin</strong><br />Tempo di Mazurka (C-sharp minor, 163 bars).</li>
<li><strong>Valse à cinq temps</strong><br />Vivace (D major, 100 bars).</li>
<li><strong>Passé lontain</strong><br />Moderato assai quasi Andante (E-flat major, 78 bars) <sup><a href="http://en.tchaikovsky-research.net/pages/Eighteen_Pieces,_Op._72#cite_note-note3-3">[3]</a></sup>.</li>
<li><strong>Scene dansante: Invitation au trépak</strong>(Танцевальная сцена: Приглашение к трепаку)Allegro non tanto (C major, 237 bars).</li>
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Few performers evoke the elusive model of perfection that might be referred to as<img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-8137" height="578" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Asiya-Korepanova_Maria-Bocharova.jpg" width="700" /> “the whole package,” as best as the Russian born <a href="https://www.asiyakorepanova.com/">pianist Asiya Korepanova</a>. Her performances are as virtuosic in facet as they are layered in depth, and whatever artistic angles the project entails, she engages unequivocally, propelled by the vigor of her innermost herself. (photo credit: Maria Bocharova)<br />
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Korepanova’s genuine talent, expressed throughout differing creative outlets of music performance, arranging, composition, art and poetry could be described as subtle and striking at the same time, with a commitment and flair for audience engagement that is tangible. Weather on the concert stage, or enlightening a classroom full of children with her non-for-profit <em><a href="https://www.musicforminds.org/">Music for Minds</a></em>, with her innovative you-tube series <em><a href="https://www.asiyakorepanova.com/midnight-pieces">midnight pieces</a> </em>or her <em><a href="https://www.festivalbaltimore.com/">Festival Baltimore</a></em>, creating a communal connection with classical music’s past, present and future takes center stage for Korepanova at all times.<br />
Growing up in Moscow, Korepanova was familiarized early on with an artist’s need and obligation to build green roots, growing one’s audiences through constant outreach and performing for people in common places ranging from kindergartens to factories. “The effort it takes to make more people familiar with your art, while typically rewarded by minimal wages, also bears its own powerful excitement and the utmost valuable exchange of energy. This remains an important part of my day,” says Korepanova. “I don’t need to be paid to run my pieces in the morning for an audience. That’s part of my routine anyway and if I have a stimulated and engaged audience, like the school children for whom I created <em>Music for Minds</em> for, that’s great.”<br />
For<em> Festival Baltimore</em>, a summer concert series and Academy at the University of Maryland now in its third season, Korepanova curates and performs with a mission of presenting and exploring complete cycles of composers; a complete collection of works that refers to a particular genre or instrumentation. The performances, which take place in chronological order, are geared to give a fuller experience of the composer’s personal development of style and characteristics over time, and to develop a deeper understanding and more intimate relationship with the work and its development during the lifespan of a composer. Ranging in repertoire from Baroque to Contemporary, the participating artists and students have so far performed complete Beethoven Cello Sonatas, complete Paul Creston works for alto saxophone with piano, complete Richard Strauss chamber works with piano, George Walker piano sonatas and complete Tchaikovsky string quartets – each performed during the span of just one evening’s program. The ambitious syllabus of the historic complete cycle is indicative of Korepanova’s faith in audiences’ supposedly dwindling attention spans. She loves the idea of a challenge and finds audiences, rather intrigued by these continuous no-intermission sessions, tend to show up equipped with music scores and plenty of time to spare.<br />
Korepanova has personally experienced the power and intensity of performing an entire cycle of works and likens it to the transformation of time itself; this aspect has become something of a signature throughout many of her programs.<br />
Cyclic works also inspire her artwork as a dialectic reflection engaged with some of the musical masterworks she encounters. While Korepanova mentions many artistic influences ranging from Jan van Eyck to Aubrey Beardsley, Hieronymus Bosch to Andrew Wyeth, she identifies her artistic imagination on canvas – at least in her works based on music - as another layer of emotional response to the music.<br />
Homeschooled until the age of 10, Korepanova has been drawing ever since she can remember, making all kind of connections between the arts: writing music to poetry, poetry to music, drawing to poetry and music etc. “I was hyperactive as a child, so my mother figured she can distract me with creative activities, and I browsed through the museum catalogues, while still on her lap. That is how I first got my pencils and pens and a typewriter, which I learned letters from, producing countless lists of nonsensical ‘poems.’”<br />
Her first attempts (aged 9-12) of putting different art forms together purposefully were articulated with two publications of her drawings and poems, and with her collection of poems to Tchaikovsky’s cycle, <em>The Seasons</em>. In 2007, she published a collection of poems and drawings set to Liszt’s 12 <em>Transcendental </em><em>Études</em>, followed by a collection of drawings for Bach’s <em>The Well-Tempered Clavier</em>, Book I, the following year.<br />
“Sometimes when you draw inspired by music, suddenly you understand something new about the music. It is almost like a coloring book – somehow you add an extra layer of information to your perception of the musical text – which often manifests in something very interesting, often unusual. At the same time, my personal task is to try my best not to conceive my drawings as illustrations. They have to be able to stand on their own, by themselves.”<br />
“I do not really think visually when playing music, it is rather an association. Music, art and poetry interconnect in my mind, but these are connections I feel and they are not necessarily the same for others. You can’t capture one through the other, you can only reflect,” she says and specifies the different process:”Drawing comes with the knowledge that I won’t be able to change anything once it’s on the paper. Writing music is different, you can listen or play and go back erase notes and add notes. With drawing, you have to think very clearly right away…both are very precious, you almost tiptoe each time you attempt to create a new one,” describes Korepanova.<br />
You can learn more about Korepanova’s work and upcoming performances on her website: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/redirect?event=video_description&v=gvrEH6nYPKE&redir_token=lz7_1IKmXqDYf0_locmNs1FMtJt8MTUzNzg2NjM1OUAxNTM3Nzc5OTU5&q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.asiyakorepanova.com%2F">https://www.asiyakorepanova.com/</a><br />
By Ilona Oltuski, <a href="http://www.getclassical.org/">GetClassical.org</a><br />
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Ilona Oltuski http://www.blogger.com/profile/18182444676865000920noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7586933906412828614.post-83093015003456371462018-10-07T16:45:00.000-07:002018-10-07T16:46:11.257-07:00Israeli Chamber Project – Projects within the unending pursuit of musical exploration<strong><img alt="" class="size-large wp-image-8099 alignnone" height="685" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/ICP2-1024x685.jpg" width="1024" /></strong><br />
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<b>Embarking on their
second decade as a chamber ensemble, the <i><a href="http://www.israelichamberproject.org/"><span style="color: windowtext;">Israeli
Chamber Project</span></a></i> starts the 2018/19 season with a unique program,
coined the <i>Debussy Effect</i>.</b><br />
<strong>With the music world marking the centennial of Debussy’s death in 1918, the ensemble takes the iconic French composer’s romantic <em>Piano Trio</em> and his later <em>Premi</em></strong><strong><em>ère Rhapsody</em></strong><strong> as point of reference, affirming the profound effect of his work on three of his compatriots, Ravel, Faure, and Salzedo.</strong><br />
<strong>The October 18<sup>th </sup><a href="http://www.israelichamberproject.org/the-debussy-effect">program</a> at Merkin Concert Hall, featuring one of the group’s frequent collaborators in Peter Wiley, cellist of the Beaux Arts Trio and the Guarneri String Quartet, promises to be an interesting season opener to a busy year, including the ensemble’s first appearances in Europe, at London’s Wigmore Hall, as well as major venues across the U.S. and Canada, including Montreal’s Bourgie Hall, and Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center. </strong><br />
In 2012, four years into ICP’s foundation as an ensemble with a mission statement, I had the great pleasure to<a href="https://www.getclassical.org/israeli-chamber-project/"> interview</a> one of its founding members – pianist and executive director Assaff Weisman. Catching up on ICP’s upcoming events, the development of the ensemble’s reach within these years is remarkable; otherwise things have not changed all that much. Weisman, remains ICP’s proficient pianist with a precise touch and gentle soul. Articulate and soft mannered, he focuses on the group’s development of the American market. From the beginning, the group’s founder, clarinetist Tibi Cziger, serves as its artistic director, responsible for both programming and the logistics of all Israeli tours. “Additionally,” explains Weisman, “our board of directors offers invaluable assistance with the running of the organization, and this allows our artists to focus solely on making music.”<br />
Although the group has slightly stretched out from its original eight - to eleven members, currently performing in alternating formations according to repertoire, their mission has hold true to its original initiatives, geared towards several goals: Giving back to the source of their mutual heritage, Israel. Bringing this heritage to international concert stages and in the process, building bridges with the non-political language of music and love for a profession in music that unites them.<br />
<img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-8102" height="329" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Israeli_Chamber_Project-2-720x340-696x329.jpg" width="696" />In an increasingly volatile and politicized climate within the music industry, this is no small challenge and Weisman expresses disbelief in the fact that ICP has not yet been offended by demonstrations by political agitators, in an effort to mobilize attention against anything connected to Israel.”While some of our performers have already experienced such hostile measures during their performances, ICP has been spared such confrontations so far,” he says. “At the end we can only offer what we offer and we do this with utmost inclusivity, where dialogue is always welcome. Be that through our educational outreach programs for under-served school children in the US, or in Israel, with our efforts to bring classical music to remote locations, including some with a predominantly Arab population,” he explains.<br />
In a <a href="http://21cm.org/magazine/sounding-board/2017/05/04/surviving-the-first-decade/">2017 article</a>, Weisman shares personal experiences of building the group and reminiscences about specific challenges, ICP faced during these years.<br />
photo credit: Yoav Etiel<br />
Turns out that mutual respect and personal relationships are even more important than close proximity in connecting this group of musicians. “With ICP, we had good fortune in that most of our members grew up together in Israel, getting to know one another as part of the country’s small but very lively musical scene. At the time, pianist Yael Kareth was the only one of us living in Israel. Cziger, cellist Michal Korman, harpist Sivan Magen, violinist Itamar Zorman and I lived in New York, while violist Guy Ben-Ziony and violinist Daniel Bard were based in Europe. Despite the difficulties of running a group across three continents, our commitment to each other as musicians and people strengthened our commitment to the ensemble,” writes Weisman.<img alt="" class="size-full wp-image-8100 alignnone" height="641" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/icp10-photo-by-the-talented-Yoav-Etiel-—-with-Matan-Dagan-Nitai-Zori-Michal-Korman-Yos-Avraham-Alon-Reuven-Mauricio-Paez-Tibi-Cziger-and-Guy-Eshed..jpg" width="960" /><br />
With great expertise, Weisman explains how the special situation in Israel became both a challenge and part of a solution for ICP: “Back in 2008, seven of our eight founding members were pursuing careers outside of Israel – emblematic of a broader “brain drain” from the country, where lack of government funding, little to no private philanthropy and a small market severely limited the possibilities for a sustainable career in chamber music. But we all felt a strong connection to our cultural heritage and, wanting to give back to the community that had first guided us, we saw an opportunity to foster connections within Israel’s fragmented society while bringing a distinct musical energy to audiences abroad. Of course, we wanted to do this in a sustainable manner, which led to the birth of ICP.<br />
What started as two annual tours across Israel (including places on the periphery, where live classical music is hard to come by, as well as metropolitan centers), quickly became three, and we were fortunate to bring along such distinguished guest artists as <a href="mailto:https://www.curtis.edu/faculty/faculty-bios-by-name/peter-wiley.html">Peter Wiley</a>, <a href="mailto:http://antje-weithaas.de/en/">Antje Weithaas</a> and <a href="mailto:http://www.lizaferschtman.com/">Liza Ferschtman</a>. Meanwhile, with five of our members in New York, we established a U.S. base of operations for North American tours. Today, though our founding members are still spread across the globe, we’re able to increase our activities on both sides of the Atlantic through a careful expansion of our roster, long-range planning and intensified fundraising.”<br />
In the meantime, ICP has built a home with regular concert performances in New York City, resonating with audiences here, as much as in Israel.<br />
<img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-8101" height="378" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/b6909d92-e522-49fe-8aae-1bf189a74c68.gif" width="800" />Being open for a good project remains the ensemble’s credo; hence the name. “A <em>project,” </em>describes Weisman, “is something evolving, not something with a finite end. Just like our involvement with music is about never-ending, continuous discovery. Each of our concerts becomes just that: a new project in our unending pursuit of musical exploration.”<br />
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<a href="http://www.getclassical.org/" target="_blank">Ilona Oltuski</a>Ilona Oltuski http://www.blogger.com/profile/18182444676865000920noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7586933906412828614.post-31038684437260284732018-07-28T20:25:00.001-07:002018-07-29T06:36:55.317-07:00Pianist Shai Wosner ‘Premieres’ a Piece Each Time<img alt="" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-7981" height="433" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/20090604_shai_wosner_33.jpg" width="650" />New Yorkers have had ample chance to admire internationally acclaimed pianist Shai Wosner, who has partnered in concert with celebrities like Martha Argerich, Pinchas Zukerman, and Daniel Barenboim. Photo: (Marco Borggreve)Wosner has been a regular favorite in piano series all over town, in collaborations with musicians like Martin Fröst, Jennifer Koh and Missy Mazzoli, and as a curating contributor of consecutive programs at the 92Y. Wosner’s interest in exploring subtle connections between works he performs has also brought about his 2017 release <a href="https://goo.gl/images/hDxiGV"><em>Impromptu</em></a>, recorded on the Onyx label. Among the smaller works that trail back to works with an ‘impromptu’ or improvisational character, the conceptual mix on the album ranges from Beethoven to Schubert, Chopin, Liszt, and Dvořák, with actual improvisations by Gershwin and Ives next to some stylized miniatures like Schubert’s Four Impromptus, D. 935. <a href="https://youtu.be/E05ldi14AzM">Listen to Shai on Schubert here</a>.<br />
Wosner’s numerous sensitive Schubert performances, and his highly insightful stage persona complete with nickel-framed glasses giving him that touch of an intellectual gaze, have moved critics to call on his likeness to Schubert; he has been described by <em>Gramophone</em> as a “Schuberterian of unfaltering authority and character,” and has performed Schubert’s last six piano sonatas on multiple programs in New York and throughout the United States and Japan. While Wosner, tall and slim (unlike Schubert), lives with his wife (unlike Schubert), a medical doctor, and their two children on the Upper West Side, one can thoughtfully relate the two men in their sensitive nature among other qualities. Few people know of Wosner’s own struggles and elations, the many great influences in his life, and how he became the artist he is today. In a <em>tête à tête</em> with GetClassical, he talks about the secret life and lust of a musician he learned to conceal early on.<img alt="" class="alignright wp-image-7982" height="594" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/maxresdefault-1024x576.jpg" width="1057" /><br />
Wosner grew up on a Moshav, a cooperative agricultural community in Israel, with fertile grounds, but not particularly for classical music. Despite this, there was an upright piano in the living room of his childhood home, which no one played; Wosner’s sister, 12 years his senior, had taken a short run of lessons, and there it was: abandoned, but with its quaint wooden finish a familiar addition to the sparingly-furnished living room, ready to be explored.<br />
<img alt="" class="aligncenter wp-image-7984 size-large" height="577" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/d8099dd620554691de47b93c19ff2adc-1024x577.jpg" width="1024" /><br />
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(Photo from the Finale of the 1999 Queen Elisabeth International Piano competition)<br />
Intrigued, young Wosner picked out some basic tunes, teaching himself how to play songs he heard on the radio. Soon, he was harmonizing, adding chords, and, thrilled with his accomplishments, he could not wait to sit at the piano to play when he returned home from kindergarten every day. Wosner’s parents thought it was time for piano lessons.<br />
A talented violinist and pupil of famed Ilana Fayer, Wosner’s mother had to quit playing early on to support her family after the death of her father. She was surprised to meet with some resistance from her son, who was perfectly happy in his playful state of musicianship, worried to turn his joyous hobby into something that sounded a lot like a burden. But for the sake of being able to play more intricate songs, he agreed to meet with a teacher from nearby Kfar Saba. From the beginning Opher Brayer, a jazz musician by training, introduced ear training and improvisation into Wosner’s weekly piano lessons. He also soon understood that Wosner needed more of a challenge, and introduced him to <a href="https://www.tau.ac.il/~krasovsk/">Emanuel Krasovsky,</a> a giant in the Israeli piano world. They clicked immediately, and Krasovsky, who was teaching at the Academy at the time, became Wosner’s mentor. Krasovsky recognized quickly that in addition to piano lessons, a more all-encompassing approach to music was necessary, and introduced Wosner to <a href="http://andrehajdu.com/">André Haydu</a> for instruction in composition, theory, and improvisation; here Wosner learned everything but piano. Hungarian-born, Haydu had studied with Kodaly and went to Paris to study with Messiaen. With Haydu, Wosner became intimate with music analysis, appreciation, and improvisation in a most organic way. “Both my mentors were quite different, but outstanding in their own right,” explains Wosner.<br />
Haydu, who had written many books about music and whose teaching was based on his own vast experience within two great music traditions, familiarized Wosner with both – the rich Hungarian tradition and the French, with its freedom and nonchalant open mindedness towards foreign flavors. “He was a religious man, and fascinated with ethnic music, he had an incredible knowledge of literature and opened up the world of some of the amazing connections between different composers and music traditions for me. A great communicator, he was able to captivate anyone’s attention, from young to old, without dumbing things down. Haydu was a great composer in his own right; among his lifelong friends were Ligety and Kurtág. In addition to everything I learned about the piano from Krasovsky, I was very fortunate to have this great musical thinker in my life; I will always appreciate Krasovsky’s magnanimous generosity to letting me dwell in both worlds, the nuanced one of the instrument and the broad world of its musical context,” says Wosner.<br />
(Photo Credit: The Artsbeat Piano Blog)<img alt="" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-7985" height="314" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/31artsbeat-piano-blog480.jpg" width="480" /><br />
Photo: Marco Borggreve<br />
With Haydu, Wosner met twice a week at Jerusalem’s Bar Ilan University, and with Krasovsky at the Academy of the Tel-Aviv University. “Even though the distances where not that great, it was quite a ‘schlepp’ to get there,” explains Wosner, “and my mom was committed to driving me back and forth. She also took me to concerts quite regularly. But my greatest memories are from listening to recordings. When I discovered the liner notes in Hebrew of one of these great composer’s collections, I was immediately gripped; reading about the composers and their pieces gave me an opening into the culture around them,” he says. “Like through a time machine I was transported into the world of music, and I was craving more. This was around the time I started working with Haydu, which of course reinforced this fascination. It was an escape from the rest of my life, in which I had no one to discuss my newfound discoveries, my friends (I had a few) did not care at all about all this. I realized early on I had to keep this interest apart from them, it was not really welcomed. So it did make me feel like an outsider, at times, or at least like someone with a double life,” describes Wosner. Only much later on, in High School, did Wosner realize he was not alone.<br />
At the time, Wosner did not even realize the long commute from the Moshav to Thelma Yellin High School of the Arts in Givatayim. Every morning, Wosner caught an early ride with his father at 5.30 am, and got to school at 6:30, killing time before everyone else showed up, and taking the bus for an hour and a half each day on the way back home. “I could not care less about the long way to school, as it meant freedom for me. I could unreservedly focus more on what I loved doing and there were others like me, who cared about classical music,” which was, of course, a new experience in his life.<br />
“There was music history, orchestra, and music-related activities available all the time, and my interest of accessing music through operatic and orchestral works was hugely stimulated. Initially this passion of mine had come to the foreground since I was 12 years old, when my sister gave me a recording of Mahler’s 5<sup>th</sup> Symphony. ‘If this was his 5<sup>th</sup> Symphony, there obviously must be others,’ I thought. It was for me like finding a new book of the Harry Potter series, and visits to the music store were my favorite outings with my parents. They would also buy music scores for me, and I remember in particular my fascination with Mozart’s <em>Requiem</em>. I had been very impressed with the movie about Mozart and heard the track over and over, but it was the moment when I opened the score… I remember knowing the sound in my ears; to make that connection, of what the sound could be and what the score looked like. That was a real revelation.”<br />
Today, Wosner avoids listening too much to recordings, but prefers to try to think like the composer. Looking at any score he will typically ask himself, ‘what did the composer have in mind with his particular choices?’ “To see the vocabulary used in each style is like a language, it gives you a more organic view. The logic behind a piece, the choices become visible, and they are not arbitrary; the piece becomes as a living organism with many different layers. A piece can be felt in many different ways depending how you approach it, and trying to follow the perspective of the composer kind of blurs the line between performer and composer. When you keep this kind of open mind and let the music lead you, it also makes it possible to experience the music in different ways each time and to communicate more convincingly, which makes it so compelling. It is as if you are creating the piece again, that’s why my favorite term is to ‘premiere’ the piece, each time again, to make it come to life anew. It’s certainly a way to keep it fresh, and ideally, it can be what drives the performance and makes it part of you – you live it.”<br />
<img alt="" class="size-full wp-image-7986" height="600" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/07/SCCAShai-Wosnerphoto-3-by-Marco-Borggreve.jpg" width="400" /> Shai Wosner<br />
Photo: Marco Borggreve<br />
At age 18, Wosner was enrolled – like every young Israeli – in the army. At the time there was talk about continuing his studies in the USA. Isaac Stern had a summer class in Jerusalem, where Joseph Kalichstein was teaching. Wosner attended the workshops in Jerusalem and performed for Stern and Kalichstein. “Stern was just sitting there, with his glasses on the forehead listening, and just dismissed me after I finished saying: ‘ok you can leave now.’<br />
“He stayed on,” says Wosner, “conversing with my teacher [Krasovsky], and it turned out that Emanuel Ax was looking for student at the time. They would make a phone call, they said, and I was asked to send a recording to Ax. That was the start of my years at Juilliard, and studying with the amazing Emanuel Ax,” he explains.<br />
“I would see him very often, at the time he was actually present a lot and we had fantastic long afternoons, and I am proud to call him my friend today. He is one of these artists who doesn’t make a lot of fuss, but [is] still extremely convincing, whether it’s a tune or a phrase, or building the whole piece, I find him tremendously inspiring. I think he is one of the finest pianists around today,” says Wosner.<br />
Wosner also attended the first workshops of the Barenboim-Said West-Eastern Divan Orchestra in 1999. “In the beginning there were mostly rehearsals, with Barenboim conversing; I learned a whole lot. It started with more piano and chamber music, and only later developed into a whole orchestra. It’s a very admirable project, without political indoctrination, but many healthy debates. There were right- and left-wing views. Clearly you had to believe in some form of co-existence between Israel and its Arab neighbors… otherwise, what’s the point,” he says.<br />
In 2017, Wosner performed at the Jerusalem Festival, led by Barenboim’s wife Elena Bashkirov, together with Martha Argerich. “I think she is one of the most creative pianists alive, or probably in history. Her playing can be so spontaneous, almost impulsive, but the magic is that if she does it, it feels inevitable. It’s pointless to imitate this –it’s just how she is. Even at 77, which is obviously a fact amazing in itself, she still sounds as fresh and energetic as she did at 27,” he marvels. He continues: “When you play together, she can lead the duo when she has the main voice in her part, take complete charge, and then, when you have the main part in your score, she can wrap her playing around yours like no other, in complete and perfect harmony. Playing with her was the most natural, easy feat. I just had to pinch myself a couple of times that this is really happening…but I loved every bit of it.”<br />
In the fall season, Wosner will continue the Schubert Sonatas program with a new project, which, still coming together, will involve several composers around a central concept, “similar to the <em>Impromptu</em> recording idea, but with contemporary composers, involving several commissions of new solo pieces,” he explains.<br />
I will be in the audience.<br />
By <a href="https://www.blogger.com/getclassical.org">Ilona Oltuski</a>Ilona Oltuski http://www.blogger.com/profile/18182444676865000920noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7586933906412828614.post-67483043268389002442018-06-13T19:02:00.000-07:002018-06-13T19:02:18.186-07:00Pianist Lise de la Salle – personally nonchalant – unstoppable at the piano<em><img alt="" class="wp-image-7897 size-full alignnone" height="753" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/lise-piano-noir-et-blanc-nicolas-Brodard.jpg" width="960" /></em><br />
<em>“I don’t watch myself, I am not aware of how I look, the music is here…who cares how you look!” ( Photo Credit: Nicholas Brodard)</em><br />
After winning the European Young Concert Artists Auditions in Paris in 2003 and then the following year in New York, the young French-born pianist quickly became a renowned performer on New York concert stages. Watching the de la Salle perform during the latest Young Concert Artist’s Gala at Alice Tully Hall, one could not help but marvel in the YCA alumna’s lively performance style, incorporating freely-moving, grandiose choreography at the piano.<br />
De la Salle likes to change her programs frequently. One of the reasons for this is her broad taste in repertoire. “I force myself to jump around from Bach to Ravel, to Chopin to Gershwin to Rachmaninov. It’s wild, I love so many amazing composers, and I don’t want to refrain from doing just that.”<br />
But another reason for constant change of style is to challenge her emotional and technical response: “I like the challenge. You learn a lot when you switch repertoire often, since you never play two pieces alike. It makes me think about what it is I am doing more, and how I do it. Having to adapt one’s technique constantly, my interpretation, my philosophy…it’s a great exercise and keeps you alert and fresh,” she explains.<br />
“Lately I had that special connection with Beethoven concertos, which I played a lot in the last months. But when I worked on Rachmaninov, that same feeling of excitement set in instantaneously, developing my closeness to the composer.<img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-7898" height="427" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/lisepiano5.jpg" width="641" /><br />
“It depends what I work on, but usually I can get totally immersed with the work of the composer. If I really had to choose that one ‘Island’ composer, for me it would be Mozart. I find everything in Mozart’s music, all the emotions, joy, sadness, drama, deep feelings but also laughter and jokes; there is a lot of humor in Mozart,” she explains and adds: “I like that the music is simple in sound and on the page; so obvious, but at the same time so clever and so human. This is music that talks to my heart every time, and I get it immediately.”<br />
Despite the brevity of our personal meeting, I sensed her strong energy level and positive outlook. De la Salle comes off as a “what you see is what you get” kind of person, with a very refreshing and straightforward attitude. At 29 years old, de la Salle did not necessarily share the more common anxiety-ridden path of many pianists’ long and difficult career-related decisions, which many of her young colleagues have faced after finishing their training. Home schooled and in and out of the Paris conservatory from age 14 (to accommodate her active concertizing life), this is a pianist that does not look back: “If I have regrets? Well yes and no. Yes, in some ways it’s perhaps easier to have a more regular youth with more relaxed teenage years, but I’d rather have my life now,” she says, certain she would not have the life she lives currently if she had not spent those younger years focusing rigorously on the opportunities that presented themselves to her. “And I have plenty of fun times now, behaving like a teenager while touring and traveling to summer festivals, doing chamber music together with the many friends I have made in the music circle. Life is always about a balance, and for me, building my career early on had a very positive outcome,” she says.<br />
De la Salle was only 16 years old when she came to international attention in 2005 with a Bach/Liszt recording that <em>Gramophone</em> magazine selected as “Recording of the Month.” De la Salle, who records for the Naïve label, was again recognized in 2008 for her recording of the first concertos of Liszt, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich – a remarkable feat for someone only 20 years old.<br />
As anyone these days, de la Salle is keenly aware that the experiences of women are very different from those of men in her field. “Luckily, though, I myself have never had even half a bad experience,” she says. “I consider myself very lucky to have only [had] encounters where everyone is respectful towards women, and while it’s still dominantly a man’s world, I don’t feel less appreciated. I have always had great rapport with the many men I’ve worked with, and all of my collaborations have been lots of fun, so far,” she says.<br />
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Her personal rapport is especially strong with her duo partner, Christian-Pierre La Marca, a young cellist with whom she recently released her latest CD, <em>Paris- Moscow</em>. He is the only musician with whom LaSalle partners on a regular basis; the rest of the time she likes to stay open to different propositions.<img alt="" class="alignleft wp-image-7899 size-medium" height="300" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Image-1-1024x1024-300x300.jpg" width="300" /><br />
This particular connection between de la Salle and La Marca was not made by managers, but reached personally. “We wrote to each other, saying: ‘I like what you do a lot…’ and it continued from there. We met for a drink and clicked instantly, talking about everything that came to mind. Only later did we say: ‘hey, let’s read together through some music.’ Our musical communication continued to feel as if we were still sharing drinks on a night out. Playing together, there was this same, instant connection. Since then, we built our duo, without any pressure, and it grew more serious from there. We did a recording, and then the round becomes complete, and you go on tour together. Last October they released the album <em>From Moscow to Paris</em> on the Naïve label, gathering pieces by Fauré, Saint-Saëns, Massenet, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Stravinsky, and Rimsky Korsakov to portray the two cities during the turn of the 19<sup>th</sup> century,” she explains. They will tour the US end of this year, promoting the CD and their duo collaboration.<br />
During her many months touring, de la Salle’s partners vary often; she enjoys working with different collaborators and keeping herself open to opportunities. “I always look forward to new projects, finding new repertoire and new collaborations,” she remarks. “I constantly tour the world, what changes is the repertoire I tour with, and the people I collaborate with,” she explains.<br />
“One of the most exciting experiences is to collaborate with an orchestra,” she says. “I have built many relationships with conductors I admire. My most long-term collaboration is with Fabio Luigi. We worked on so much repertoire together and went on tour in Asia, Europe, and the US, and recorded among other works the complete cycle of Rachmaninov concertos live; I adore working with him,” she mentions.<br />
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Friendships are of the utmost importance to de la Salle, “I love to socialize, but I also appreciate having my private space, which I don’t get so much of. I am a firm believer in serious friendships; you don’t get to have a lot of real, true friends. I am lucky meeting a lot of interesting, new people all the time, but I don’t call all of them friends necessarily. My close group of friends is at home in Paris, and also in New York where I used to live for a few years; I love the city and it still feels like a second home to me,” she says. De la Salle visits New York often, about every six weeks, but it is Paris where her roots are, and she feels deeply connected to her family and friends across the pond.<br />
De la Salle says playing in Paris fills her with joy and excitement: “Excited with joy makes my playing better, even in troubled times. Strong emotions give the music heightened intensity. Sometimes when you live it you don’t realize that, but looking back, you can see its different. If you are truly happy, it gives you a certain freedom in how you express the music. If you feel on top of the world, your audience feels that as well, and anything is possible.”<br />
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Ilona Oltuski http://www.blogger.com/profile/18182444676865000920noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7586933906412828614.post-6358672589317404722018-06-02T20:03:00.001-07:002018-06-03T14:02:31.606-07:00Pianist Ching-Yun Hu – unbiased brilliance<em><img alt="" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-7868" height="800" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/rachmaninoff-album-cover.jpg" width="800" />“The decision to make an album of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s works was made from a pure love of his music. I want to evoke from listeners the most beautiful experiences through this music that encompasses all of human emotions, of love, hope, nostalgia, loss despair…This music reminds me of my childhood struggles, and beautiful moments spent with my family. It transports me to another world.” </em><br />
<em>- Ching-Yun Hu</em><br />
With these words from the liner notes accompanying her recently released Rachmaninoff recording, pianist Ching-Yun Hu’s sentiment for the Russian master reflects the emotional intensity present in each of her engaging interpretations of his music. Hu’s deep affinity for the exceedingly expressive repertoire has been recently showcased by WRTI, Philadelphia’s classical radio station, which also co-produced the album in honor of the 145<sup>th</sup> anniversary of the composer’s birth.<strong> <a href="https://youtu.be/baA8-KYZ46U">See excerpt here.</a> </strong>As a tribute to the label’s own 165<sup>th</sup> anniversary, New York’s Steinway Hall also celebrated the Steinway artist with a CD release performance event.<br />
“I guess Rachmaninoff‘s works were always close to my heart,” says Hu, “there was something about the Russian sentiment I was attracted to, even when I was just twelve years old and told my parents I wanted to go study piano in Moscow.” Growing up in Taipei, Hu’s piano teacher introduced her to Russian literature and music early on. “I had always been studying with Russian teachers or teachers that came out of the Russian School of Piano, throughout my student years. …As a teen, I was reading novels by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and fell in love with the romantic melodies and lavish harmonies of Rachmaninoff. How could one resist his appeal to all of humanity, speaking directly from the heart? His music is so communicative. I can’t understand how some people find it not serious enough. To me it is [very] personal; you have to dig deep and bring your own emotions into it, and especially when recording, one needs to feel compelled to leave a bit of a personal imprint behind,” she explains.<img alt="" class="alignright size-large wp-image-7869" height="683" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Ching-Yun-Publicity-Photo-CD-cover-1024x683.jpg" width="1024" /><br />
And so she does, heightening the emotional tension of the music with newly pronounced inner voices that seem astonishingly novel at times and greatly stimulating. This is not a relaxed listening experience of a composer often misunderstood as sentimental – this is a high wire act, puzzlingly dangerous, constantly shifting between expressive up and downs. Exposing inner harmonies so prominently can easily destroy balance in relation to the melodic line, but Hu exposes both distinct parts with crystalline brilliance, never losing the context of the whole structure, compromising neither her grip on articulation nor her clarity; the result is mind-blowing musical poetry.<br />
During her second year studying with Sergei Babayan at the Curtis Institute of Music, Hu entered the prestigious 2008 Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition in Tel-Aviv, winning that year’s shared top prize, along with Israeli pianist Roman Rabinovich; the win helped launch her promising career.<br />
In describing the somewhat stressful months leading up to the competition, Hu praises Babayan as a major motivational force in preparing the demanding repertoire. She also credits Babayan as one of her biggest inspirations in music altogether, letting her in on the magic that lives in the details, and making everything come together for her during their many lessons at the piano, which would occasionally last several hours.<br />
<img alt="" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-7870" height="550" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/18_Ching-Yun-Hu_weit-_3__galerie.jpg" width="800" />Coincidentally, I had been present at the competition and even then, the young pianist stood out to me for her vivacious and colorful playing facilitated by a brilliant technique. While many shared my enthusiasm for the young artist’s brilliance and range of expression – incidentally winning her the audience favorite prize – I also could not help but notice some of the voices in the audience critiquing her as “just another Asian-trained, super-fast technical player,” dismissing her skill as “robotic” after “hours in the practice room.” How unfair and undeserved this bias opinion seemed to me then. Despite the many accomplished careers of a large number of musicians of Asian heritage and training, this kind of bias skepticism still seems to prevail at times with some of today’s audience members.<br />
Indeed China’s rapidly increasing piano boom, with approximately 40 million children studying piano actively, is certainly accompanied by its share of undistinguished talent. At some conservatories, the students are trained under extreme conditions to impress with mechanical skills like speed and accuracy in a performance culture rife with bribery and scandals. To overcome the vast devastation of the Cultural Revolution that banned the piano as a symbol of the bourgeoisie, it of course takes more than mega concert halls filled with Lang Lang fans delighting in China’s newly-esteemed socio-economic status and parents reveling in the pianistic accomplishments of their own children. The international exchange of culture, however, is rapidly increasing, and by now the Asian population in America’s conservatories – just like previous generations of immigrants hailing from Germany, Eastern Europe, and especially the former Soviet Union – provides by far the largest part of the classical music talent pool today. This also manifests itself in an exchange of increasingly fertile ties within the international music community.<br />
With ample experience, entering Juilliard’s pre-college division at age fourteen and expanding her education after her years at Curtis with some additional years in Europe, Ching-Yun also developed her entrepreneurial skill set. Her performance at the Rubinstein left a particularly strong impression: “It felt like all participants, in spite of being at a competition, belonged to one big family. I liked the atmosphere there so much, I returned many times for performances. I even credit this experience a little with the inspiration founding my own festival in Taipei in 2012, and then PYPA, Philadelphia Young Pianists’ Academy, in 2013,” she says.<br />
Giving back to a new generation of young pianists feels natural to her, especially showing new-comers what to expect and helping to guide them: “Growing up I did not know the right path to a professional career, I want to make it easier for them,” she explains. One member of the faculty at PYPA is Gary Graffman, mentor to superstars like Lang Lang and Yuja Wang.<img alt="" class="alignright size-large wp-image-7871" height="614" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/website-1280x768-1024x614.jpg" width="1024" /><br />
“I was probably the opposite of the stereotype image of a Shanghai Conservatory little kid, practicing 6 hours a day for speed and perfection. Arriving at Juilliard I actually struggled a bit to cope with technique, since my teacher, who came from Vienna, was after beautiful sound and developing a storyline. Both aspects are important, one is nothing without the other. To have a real technique, that means to gain the technical skill not as an end but means to allow for the freedom to express oneself,” she explains. Many things go into developing that performance quality and visitors of PYPA have an opportunity to collect their own impressions, during intimate master classes with world renowned mentors.<br />
“To be together with peers and surrounded by music is one of the most stimulating experiences there is,” Hu says about PYPA, which is now in its 6<sup>th</sup> season.<br />
The young music talents that arrive at PYPA with differing expectations will certainly understand more about what it takes to become a true musician – and perhaps even find a little bit of a shortcut in the process, with Hu and her knowledgeable team leading them in the right direction.<br />
Read more about the <a href="https://chingyunhu.com/">artist</a> and<a href="https://chingyunhu.com/projects/"> PYPA</a><br />
By <a href="http://getclassical.org/">Ilona Oltuski </a><br />
This article was sponsored by <a href="http://www.jonathaneifert.com/">Jonathan Eifert</a>, Public RelationsIlona Oltuski http://www.blogger.com/profile/18182444676865000920noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7586933906412828614.post-4528391963681074232018-05-23T05:36:00.000-07:002018-05-23T08:03:10.815-07:00The Brandenburg Duets<img alt="" class="alignleft wp-image-7837 size-full" height="634" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Eleonor-Bindman_Jenny-Lin_04-951x634.jpg" width="951" />"Sharing the piano bench with a partner is as intimate a musical relationship as it gets,” describes Eleonor Bindman her passion that led her to her latest project.<br />
“When I perform a composition, the orchestral aspect is always what inspires me most,” she says. And playing four-hand at the piano, in a partnership feels like it doubles the inspiration.”<br />
photo credit: ©Masataka Suemitsu Eleonor Bindman and Jenny Lin<br />
In 2014, Eleonor Bindman was scouting materials for a four-hand piano duet she was gearing up to perform as part of a Bach concert series at the Old Stone House in Brooklyn. She was most interested in the Brandenburg Concertos, but the pianist and composer/arranger, an avid Bach player was not satisfied with what she found: the only prominent existing transcription of the collection for two pianos, by Max Reger. Inspired, Bindman began her examination, rearranging the first concerto’s transcription – but that quickly left her wanting to conquer the whole project. The result is a monumental achievement that conveys the orchestral density and unique character of each of the original works in a modern arrangement – <em>The Brandenburg Duets</em>.<br />
Bach’s original Brandenburg Concertos, composed over several years for various solo instrument groupings, and was originally presented to the Margrave of Brandenburg in 1721. Max Reger’s 1905/6 transcription for two pianos was interesting, according to Bindman, but lacked in structural balance for the two performers and authoritative answers to some of the individual nuances of each of the original concerto compositions.<br />
“Attempting to play the Reger version, resulted in the struggle of one performer to penetrate the densely arranged material of tangled treble notes, while the bass player plodded through an uneventful path,” Bindman explains. She deemed an equal partnership in a piano-duet performance necessary, and to achieve that, embellishing the existing manuscript was not enough; Bindman was looking to achieve a complete overhaul with a fresh perspective.<br />
“Doubling the cello/base part in octaves, as Reger did, made no sense because it kept both hands of the Secondo occupied and resulted in excessively bottom-heavy sonorities. Likewise, throwing all of the treble parts together in the Primo – violin, violas, oboes solo French horns, flutes or trumpet plus the harpsichord –rendered the part unplayable at any decent tempo and hid the counterpoint in clusters of chords,” she says.<br />
<img alt="" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-7839" height="815" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Eleonor_Bindman_08-544x815.jpg" width="544" />A new score for the concerto, geared to the baroque polyphony, with typically four, clearly distinguishable voices, demanded some omissions of the many clusters of voices, to gain more clarity. The Freiburg Baroque Orchestra’s ‘chamber’ sound, served as point of reference for Bindman’s newly textured hierarchy of the voices in its finalized newly achieved version, which projects clarity, while honoring the elegance of the original score.<br />
The translation of a concerto score for two pianists always bears the complexity of rivalry, of two instruments of the same sonority. It is much less of an intricate task to distinguish differing instruments. So to introduce a more variant sound production within a two-piano version, Bindman wrote differing expressive lines for both players. Particular modifications of the two- piano repertoire, like crossing hands, makes for an interesting audible vitality of blending and differentiating voices, while using the modern piano’s full range of a pianistic orchestration. In order to achieve a full and interesting sounding score, Bindman did not hesitate to lose some of the original score’s rudiments.<br />
She also decided to modify certain sequences, based on their key settings and harmonic ranges, in order to enhance the overall listening experience. The result adds greatly to the two-piano repertoire, which thrives as a four-hand performance –no orchestra necessary.<img alt="" class="alignright size-large wp-image-7838" height="1024" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Eleonor_Bindman_Piano_portrait-678x1024.jpg" width="678" /><br />
Even before this Bach transcription, Bindman had always felt drawn to making repertoire written for other instruments, her own as a pianist and in particular for piano duo. Her debut recording of <em>Three Works by Modest Mussorgsky</em>, includes her transcription of his <em>A night On Bald Mountain</em>. This arrangement as well as some original piano works for children in a collective titled:<em> An American Calendar</em> has been published by Carl Fisher. Some of her existing transcriptions are not published as yet like that of a waltz, from Tchaikovsky’s opera <em>Eugene Onegin</em>.<br />
Bindman started to enjoy four-hand playing early on with her longtime teacher Vladimir Feltsman. In collaboration with pianist Susan Sobolewski, Bindman’s <em>Duo Vivace</em> released <em>Out of the Blue</em>, with two-piano and four- hand arrangements of works by Gustav Holst, Leonard Bernstein, and George Gershwin. “When I delve into the work of a composer, I am often inspired by works outside the existing piano repertoire,” says Bindman. “The piano has the potential of being such a symphonic sounding instrument; it can reproduce the sound of the whole orchestra and I simply did not want to feel held back from playing a piece I loved, because it was not written for the piano. In the 1800s it was the usual thing. Everyone had a piano. And while it was really time consuming; transcriptions were born out of that same frustration. Now technology has changed so tremendously, and has made everything much more accessible. When I started my first transcription in the early nineties, I had to still write it down with pen and paper and have someone transfer it into<em> Finale</em>, the computer program. “ photo credit: ©Masataka Suemitsu<br />
Presently Bindman is teaching a group of enthusiastic adult students, whose ambitions she greatly admires and supports. It only makes sense to her to transfer her experiences with four-hand playing to her new audience of amateur musicians, for whom a satisfactory repertoire seems so much more limited to find: “Its music making for the soul,” she says, and “I feel a lot of four – hand music is inherently much easier to manage, than solo repertoire. It’s a great pleasure to help them achieve their desires, and the experience with someone at your side is very special. The Brandenburg duet version now with the four-hand score, gives it a new dimension, fulfilling a demand for this new market.” Her goal after its completion is the publication of the Brandenburg Duets for the upcoming anniversary of the concertos in 2021.<br />
Bindman shares a long professional history with Jenny Lin, her duo partner on the recording. They had met at the Jose Iturbi International Piano Competition, but more importantly were part of the same musical social circles in New York City. Lin, who has made a name for herself as a major voice in the contemporary scene was excited about the project from the get go:” Yes it’s true I am playing a lot of contemporary repertoire, but also like to mix and match old and new, experimenting with some classical in conjunction with contemporary works, and who says no to Bach?” she volunteers. Lin did not previously play four hands though; the Brandenburg Duets established her fist professional project and recording as a piano duet. “It’s a challenge,” she admits, “you have to learn another person’s habits, but we succeeded beautifully and that’s because Eleonor had such a very clear idea of what she wanted to achieve,” she explains.<br />
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<img alt="" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-7840" height="596" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/GP777-78Cover-600x596.jpg" width="600" />Bindman had been working on the project for two years, by the time Lin came on board but felt she brought a special edge to the endeavor. She also credits “the greatest team of engineers at the famous <em>Sono Luminus Studio</em> in Virginia, where we recorded,” says Bindman. And Lin agrees: “Working with the best recording studio in the country, was an amazing experience. When we started out, it was a little bit of a work in progress; the score had to be adjusted and edited a bit along the way, mostly for practical advantages. This entailed redistributing some of the parts and of course each time there is a change – you have to learn that. Some of these readjustments had to happen to make the score more accessible and that’s a good thing, of course. It was a great project and I am glad to have been involved with it and will do anything Eleonor needs me to do, to further support her in this amazing endeavor.”<br />
The Brandenburg Duets were completed and recorded in 2017 and released by Naxos Records on their Grand Piano label, in March of 2018.<br />
Watch the trailer of a practice session with Jenny Lin and Eleonor Bindman<a href="https://youtu.be/pMSENcYG5R4"> here</a>.<br />
This post was sponsored by Jonathan Eifert, PR. <a href="http://jonathaneifert.com/">Jonathaneifert.com</a><br />
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<br />Ilona Oltuski http://www.blogger.com/profile/18182444676865000920noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7586933906412828614.post-67283943345980381902018-05-16T07:09:00.000-07:002018-05-16T07:12:39.626-07:00Pianist Till Fellner – In allegiance with the composer’s intent <br />
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<span class="entry-date" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-right: 46px;"><a href="https://www.getclassical.org/pianist-till-fellner/" rel="bookmark" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #636363; display: inline-block; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17px; padding-left: 18px; position: relative; text-decoration-line: none;"><time class="entry-date" datetime="2018-05-16T13:43:10+00:00" style="box-sizing: border-box;">MAY 16, 2018</time></a></span> <span class="entry-author-link" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-right: 46px;"></span><span class="entry-love" style="box-sizing: border-box; margin-right: 0px !important;"><a class="entry-love-it" data-post-id="7808" href="https://www.getclassical.org/pianist-till-fellner/#" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: #636363; display: inline-block; font-size: 12px; line-height: 17px; text-decoration-line: none;"><span class="love-count" style="box-sizing: border-box;">0</span></a></span></div>
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<em style="box-sizing: border-box;">A disciple of Alfred Brendel since 1990 and known to share his mentor’s fondness for the inveterate Austro-Germanic repertoire, Fellner also shares the veteran’s suggestion that piano playing is a ‘long-term objective’ – a continuous dialectic immersion into detail to illuminate an essential perspective and build on its inner principles. After winning first prize at the 1993 Clara Haskil International Piano Competition, Fellner followed suit with his own extensive dedication to two of the milestones of the piano: Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier and Beethoven’s cycle of 32 piano sonatas, gaining critical success and international engagements. At times too easily shelved as ‘specialist’ with a particular interest in the pillars of the classical genre, Fellner, once coined a ‘musical chameleon,’ offers great versatility and imagination in a body of works that spans (except for Rachmaninov’s oeuvre) much of the gamut of solo and chamber works, with an increasing scope of contemporary repertoire. In a personal conversation in his mother tongue, the pianist, based on his somewhat publicity-shy and no-nonsense stage demeanor often portrayed as distant and removed, appears rather candid, witty and quite jovial; a timeless and elegant pianist with a bend for profound inquiry.</em></div>
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At forty-six, the sophisticated Austrian pianist recently gave his long overdue debut with the New York Philharmonic. In Fellner’s hands, under the baton of Christoph Eschenbach, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.22 in E-flat Major, K.482, was projected glass clear into the rear of the hall, engaging the audience purposefully and with detailed finesse. Fellner chose to add tender appeal with Paul Badura-Skoda’s cadenza for the first movement, leaving on a high note with the finale’s vigorously virtuosic Hummel cadenza. With nowhere to hide and every note exposed in the dense drama of the score, Fellner revealed a deep affinity with the piece and its subtle character changes. There was a present intimacy, and the delectable joy of performance, perhaps supported by the fact that the concerto was among the pieces with which he won first prize at the Clara Haskil International Piano Competition – the first Austrian to do so – at a pivotal instant in 1993 that launched his steadily mounting career. Photo credit: Ilona Oltuski</div>
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“When I am fascinated with something, I want to understand it fully. I am curious to learn more, to explore and delve into the subject whole-heartedly,” says Fellner. That may relate to the work of a composer, literature, or movies – he adores Buñuel’s cinematic oeuvre and the crucial role music plays in it compared to the usual soundtrack; it is this probing quest for discovery that drives him as a performer.</div>
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Fellner’s penetrating portrayal and rapport with the composition at hand, a kind of ‘being in the zone,’ is an all-encompassing mental and physical task. Before going on stage, his backstage ritual incorporates autogenic training – relaxing and concentrating at once so that: “by the time I enter the stage I am already in the mindset of the piece I am going to perform, its mood and particular character,” says Fellner. It is a constant learning process. Fellner is one to track his efforts, compare what worked and what did not, willing to change details or even an entire approach. “I am often recording myself in practice and performance, which helps me to understand a great deal from each experience. In a performance there is always something unexpected happening, sometimes also things one likes. It’s important to take a step back and reassess, like a painter who moves away from his easel to glance at his work from a distance. The importance of a critical stance, seeing things with different eyes over time and taken out of its immediate emotional context during performance, applies to music as well,” he says.<img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-7810" height="372" sizes="(max-width: 620px) 100vw, 620px" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/till-fellner.jpg" srcset="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/till-fellner.jpg 620w, https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/till-fellner-300x180.jpg 300w" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; float: right; height: auto; margin: 15px 0px 15px 20px; max-width: 300px; outline: none !important; vertical-align: middle;" width="620" /></div>
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Photo credit: The Berlin Philharmonic in concert</div>
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With so many concert performances each year (Fellner played up to ninety concerts in former years, lately the number nears fifty annual performances) the challenge of repetitive motion requires optimizing and enhancing one’s movements at the piano, both musically and physically. Being such a physically (in addition to emotionally and mentally) involved task, the constant and extreme repetitive exertion of the finger, hand, arm, back, and shoulder involved in daily routines, requires optimal alignment of each body part and adherence to specific rules of engagement throughout the rapidly shifting motions.</div>
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Pianists have to adjust constantly to new instruments, adapt their technique for touch, speed, and volume, and meet high athletic demands while fine tuning their aesthetic response. To optimize his technique with a physically conscious approach, but also in the interest of being able to instruct his students from a more informed perspective, Fellner acquired counsel from a former Taubman pupil, Sheila Paige. The legendary Dorothy Taubman had devised a systematic approach to understanding the physiological formation that underlie a natural piano technique, based on optimized (strain free) movements that allow for a highly expressive command at the keyboard. Fellner met with Paige last year in Philadelphia and found her instructions highly insightful: “She has a strong background in Alexander Technique and the Taubman approach but has infused both practices’ insights into a concept of her own,” he explains. And indeed many descendants of the Taubman approach are known to have modified the rather complex application, to differing degrees.</div>
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Just as positions on technique are varying, defining the role of a concert pianist as an artist has been identified by diverse standards, throughout the history of piano performance. Amongst pianists, Brendel – Fellner’s most important inspiration – is often associated with the ‘apollonian’ approach of a dominant thinker, as opposed to the more emotionally-driven ‘virtuoso’ performer. Fellner, however, does not acknowledge such artificial division; he is not one to identify with the academic rigidity of any historical approaches and does not believe in any performance that remains ‘objective’ or unemotional. His credo remains that any interpretation has to be substantiated by the score. Fellner’s many lessons and time spent with Brendel helped him identify the craft of how to approach and reveal his values as a performer: “Many of Brendel’s explanations seemed so simple and made so much sense, how come I did not think about this before, by myself? More often his remarks are kept sparse, like when he critiqued [a somewhat] chaotic performance of Liszt’s <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Sonetto 104 del Petrarca</em>: ‘Remember this is still a rendering of a sonnet, a strict lyrical form! You bear a fever of 102, when a 97.5 temperature would be adequate,’” he describes his mentor’s typical rhetoric at the piano, which was often accompanied by humming and animated gesticulation.</div>
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Alfred Brendel quit the podium in 2008, but after their many years together, Fellner’s relationship with the revered master has developed increasingly into an intimate kinship based on mutual respect. In 2004, Brendel gave the following description of his student: “Till Fellner has all the ingredients: intelligence, sensitivity, curiosity, an ample aesthetic appetite, a high capacity for concentration, tenacity, an enviable command of the instrument, strong rhythmic control.”</div>
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<img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-7811" height="349" sizes="(max-width: 620px) 100vw, 620px" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/tillfellner.jpg" srcset="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/tillfellner.jpg 620w, https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/tillfellner-300x169.jpg 300w" style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; float: right; height: auto; margin: 15px 0px 15px 20px; max-width: 300px; outline: none !important; vertical-align: middle;" width="620" />Photo credit: Allen Mcinnis</div>
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Fellner was one of the first one to see and critique the original manuscript of Brendel’s 2012 book, <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">A pianist’s A-Z </em>, but he won’t dare call himself Brendel’s colleague. Fellner illustrates his rapport with Brendel, as he praises his mentor’s ability to absorb the work as a whole while connecting details organically with the bigger picture. “Already when I played for him the first time, he delved into profound instructions, giving an overview of the piece as a whole. But at the same time, he picked out nuanced details. I seldom experienced both elements in such a fascinating combination.</div>
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Fellner compares his role as a performer with that of an actor, who becomes the different characters of a score and brings them to life according to the vision of the composer. While every interpretation of a work bears the individually-nuanced fingerprint of its performer, Fellner resents interpretations built on personal mannerism: “My responsibility always lies with that original artistic vision. Rather than to create my own version and to willfully take liberties, my goal is to figure out what the composer wanted and to reveal it as accurately as possible. No one wants a robot-like effect of course, just playing the notes is never desirable,” he remarks, and continues, “Playing the piano for me always was about the journey, a long-term goal of approaching perfection, which never can be fully achieved, of course. Ideally one loses oneself within the task. But it’s also a matter of being in the moment, intense and exciting…And it’s a lot of fun, there is such a broad variety and each piece is different.” With Brendel, he is convinced that there are no rules that slavishly apply to every work – instead you have to look carefully at every bar, and then you have to try to find solutions.</div>
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Fellner possessed an early talent, as well as an early curiosity for music that was developed by regular visits to the lively Vienna concert scene with his parents and sister. His resume confirms his inquisitiveness and flexibility as much as his prioritization of long-term goals. He only graduated in 2003, after his studies at the Vienna conservatory were sporadically interrupted by the swift onset of performance offers. In 2001 and then again in 2012, though, Fellner took a year-long sabbatical devoted to exploring new repertoire and reevaluating his goals.</div>
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Since 2013, Fellner, who resides in his native Vienna and was married last year, teaches at the Zurich Hochschule der Künste. As an exclusive recording artist for the ECM label, his releases include the first book of the <em style="box-sizing: border-box;">Well-Tempered Clavier</em>, the Two & Three-Part Inventions of J. S. Bach, Beethoven’s Piano Concertos Nos. 4 & 5 with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra and Kent Nagano, and, most recently, a CD of chamber music by Harrison Birtwistle. Being in the here-and-now of music’s contemporary evolution is as important to Fellner as exploring the traditional masters. He has given the world premieres of works by Kit Armstrong, Harrison Birtwistle, Thomas Larcher, Alexander Stankovski, and Hans Zender. In 2016, an Alpha Classics release of the Belcea Quartet’s recording of the Brahms Piano Quintet with Fellner, a frequent collaborator with the quartet, won the Diapason d’Or. Fellner’s ongoing collaboration with British tenor Mark Padmore, with whom he toured Japan in 2017, will continue, among others, with Lieder recitals in Vienna and Salzburg. Fellner participated among many distinguished artists, including Alfred Brendel, in the documentary <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pianomania" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: black; text-decoration-line: none;">Pianomania</a> about the Austrian Stefan Knüpfer, a Steinway virtuoso piano tuner. Fellner’s current project, a complete Schubert cycle which will span four concerts in total, will be presented among other international destinations at this year’s distinguished <a href="https://www.austria.info/uk/things-to-do/cities-and-culture/festivals/schubertiade-festival" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: black; text-decoration-line: none;">Schubertiade Festival</a> in the towns of Hohenems and Schwarzenberg, Austria.</div>
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<a href="https://getclassical.org/" style="background-color: transparent; box-sizing: border-box; color: black; text-decoration-line: none;">Ilona Oltuski</a></div>
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</section>Ilona Oltuski http://www.blogger.com/profile/18182444676865000920noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7586933906412828614.post-56999036857969273592018-04-23T11:56:00.000-07:002018-04-23T11:56:46.687-07:00Silenced - Orsolya Korcsolán’s engaging Deutsche Grammophon release of works by Sándor Kuti<img alt="" class="alignleft wp-image-7732 size-medium" height="300" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Kuti_Cover_4000x-300x300.jpg" width="300" /><br />
A child of holocaust survivors, Hungarian born violinist Orsolya Korcsolán had always felt a deep connection to her roots, linking her Jewish heritage closely with her personal and musical identity. Crossing paths with some of classical music’s past and present iconic figures inspired a prolific career in music that now spans from performing and recording artist to cultural ambassador and pedagogue.<br />
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While still a violin student at Budapest’s Franz Liszt Academy, Orsolya attended – as one of the festival’s youngest participants, sixteen at the time – the Schleswig Holstein Music Festival, in Germany. Meeting and working with Sir George Solti during that time, remains one of her most powerful experiences and awakened her initial interest in what was to become her passion project:”Solti told me the moving story of a long lost friend of his Budapest past, the gifted composer Sándor Kuti . In the 1930ies they had been classmates at the composition class of Ernő Dohnány and their joint graduation recital in 1934 was held to critical acclaim, at the Grand Hall of the Franz Liszt Academy.<br />
Only later Orsolya learned that Kuti’s last work had been his Sonata for Solo Violin, which he had written down on a crumpled piece of paper, during his detention at the Ukrainian labor camp in Kárpátalia. Dedicated to his pregnant wife Ami, who was in hiding in Budapest, Kuti passed it on to his guards. But by the time the letter had reached Amy, Kuti had been murdered, never to hear his last work performed,” explains Orsolya.”It is a heartbreaking Sonata for solo violin, in three movements, his last work and it is full of longing and despair,” and it was going to take some time, before faith led her to its full discovery.<br />
After finishing her studies at that history clad Budapest conservatory, Orsolya, further headed Solti’s advice to continue her violin studies at New York’s Juilliard School. Here, Orsolya became one of the last students of the late Dorothy Delay, and worked with Itzhak Perlman and Rohan de Silva, his steady pianist accompanist, carrying on the legacy of violin virtuoso Ivan Galamian.<br />
After winning the Dorothy DeLay Award and the Cornelius Vander Starr Award, two prestigious prizes granted to further the development of outstanding talent, she settled in Vienna, while keeping her strong ties to her native Budapest. Besides performing the regular violin repertoire both as a soloist and chamber musician, she continued to follow her special interest in Jewish themes and composers.<img alt="" class="alignright wp-image-7736 size-large" height="1024" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/DSC00779aa-683x1024.jpg" width="683" /><br />
“It just always felt so natural and personal to me,” she describes her activities in pursuit of restoring these rare Jewish treasures to renewed reception, connecting the dots further and creating a broader cultural perspective.<br />
She served as the ambassador for the Jewish Summer Festival in Budapest and artistic director of the "Missing Links" concert series at the Holocaust Memorial Centre and the Budapest Goldmark Festival.<br />
As the artistic advisor and artist-in-residence for the Vienna Jewish Cultural Festival, she performed with artists such as Grammy nominee clarinet player David Krakauer, and with mandolin player Avi Avital – a Grammy nominee, Echo Award winner, and Deutsche Grammophon artist.<br />
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Her albums “MOSAIC - Classical Jewish Compositions for Violin and Piano” and “KornGOLDmark – Works by Erich Korngold, Carl and Rubin Goldmark” released by Solo Musica München, featuring the world premiere recording of Rubin Goldmark's Plaintive Air for violin and piano, were well received and praised as<em> “heartbreakingly beautiful”</em> (Scene Magazine), <em>“a sweeping experience” </em>(Pizzicato),<em> “full of emotions”</em> (Crescendo Magazine).<br />
Besides showcasing Orsolya’s versatile command and compelling sound, both recordings are markers on her penetrating journey of discovery, which has made Orsolya one of its devotees and protagonists: Jewish identity in music performance.<br />
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What is the common thread among all these different angled composers, where do they fit into the genre of their time and is there a mutual connection, identifying a particular Jewish spirit? No easy questions, given the multitude of characteristics of each of these very different artists. In her latest 2017 recording then, fully devoted to one single composer’s path, Orsolya transports the listener to an affecting place, within the tragic background of its time.<br />
<em>Silenced</em>, released on the Deutsche Grammophon label explores the individual musical identity of Sándor Kuti, in the light of tragic history. The recording, in collaboration with soloists of the Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra, presents the first original collection of all of the Hungarian-Jewish composer’s surviving chamber works for string, including the Sonata’s World Premiere Recording; it also brings Orsolya’s personal path full circle.<br />
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During her continuous research at the Music Academy Library in Budapest, Ágnes Gádor, then the head of the library, made Orsolya aware of Kuti’s daughter, Éva. Upon their meeting, Éva supplied Orsolya with some of the original materials, Kuti’s handwritten scores and letters, family photos and newspaper clippings, lying untouched for decades in a box at the bottom of an old cabinet.<br />
In Orsolya’s capable hands, academic research – she is currently also completing her PH.D at the University of Jewish Studies and working on her first book titled <em>Sándor Kuti – Music is silenced</em> – translates into a captivating witness of a time in turmoil and a soulful listening experience.<br />
Photo: © Posztós János / BTF Uránia National Film Theatre, Budapest<br />
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This April she returns from performing her program <em>Silenced, </em>celebrating her CD release at the star-clad Budapest Spring Festival, to Vienna, directing and teaching the next generation of exceptionally talented, young musicians at <em>Musikschule in Wien.</em> Acknowledging the importance of music education, she founded her private music school at the historic <em>Palais Palffy</em>, which she founded in 2013, allows her as she says: “to continue the great tradition and pass on appreciation for music and culture,” to future exceptional performers as well as audiences.<br />
Highlights of her upcoming season include the new release on the Naxos label in September, of the Concerto for Violin, Horn and Shofar by Brazilian-American composer Miguel Kertsman with conductor Denis Russel Davis and the London Philharmonic Orchestra, the World Premiere of Ádam Kondor’s Violin Concerto for ORF – the Austrian Broadcasting Comrporation, as well as recording further compositions of composers, silenced by the Holocaust for Universal Austria/Deutsche Grammophon. <a href="https://youtu.be/qcLhVVjdq9c">Silenced - Watch the trailer</a><br />
By <a href="http://www.getclassical.org/">Ilona Oltuski</a>Ilona Oltuski http://www.blogger.com/profile/18182444676865000920noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7586933906412828614.post-66454082360865661452018-04-21T08:56:00.001-07:002018-04-21T08:56:27.153-07:00PIANOFEST IN THE HAMPTONS celebrates 30 golden years in support of its collective talent<em><img alt="" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-7714" height="563" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/30Years.png" width="750" />With Rites of Spring 30<sup>th</sup> Anniversary Concert at the <a href="http://www.meiselgallery.com/">Louis K. Meisel Gallery</a>, Pianofest honors its founder Paul Schenly, and kicks off its new season with performances by Tomer Gewirtzman, Fei-Fei and Konstantin Soukhovetski </em><br />
If you are a budding concert pianist, what better way to escape lonely hours spent at the piano and retreat to summer night dreams and harmonies with conservatory buddies and delighted concert audiences in the Hamptons?<br />
Some of Pianofest alumni attended the catered gallery’s reception and concert, paying homage to its mission and catching up with their mentor. “Pianofest is just truly exceptional,” says Pianist Rixiang Huang, a former student of Paul Schenly in Cleveland and currently studying with Jerome Loventhal and Matti Raekallio, at Juilliard. I did not know anyone when I arrived to the US; it was a great opportunity to make new friends. It is so different when you live together in this social setting; you really get to know each other and connect on many levels. Pianofest offers also great opportunities to prepare for competitions in a friendly and open minded environment and perform for supportive audiences. They were so engaged with each performance, which builds great confidence; something not to be underestimated in building the career of a concert pianist.”<br />
Famed alumni Sergej Babayan recently shared his in-depth impressions on the <a href="http://www.pianofest.com/new-blog/">Pianofest blog</a>: “Warm friends defined Pianofest for me—it was always an absolute pleasure. I was practicing all day and preparing concerti for competitions—this was the perfect place for it, and it was also an amazing learning experience for my musical future. I became acquainted with many aspects of America—for example even playing on American Steinways, very different from the instruments I knew in Moscow. I loved the audiences at Pianofest—these audiences are extremely attentive and gave me a very special feeling. They are very devoted, very cultured, and with good taste. They have developed good ears because of their experiences at our Pianofest concerts with Paul's commentary, and their proximity to New York City. I love these people. They are here to support music and young musicians, and they are here to support Paul.”<img alt="" class="alignright wp-image-7720 size-blog-large-image" height="300" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/DSC_6281-1-848x300.jpg" width="848" /><br />
Besides weekly performances at donor’s house parties and formal concerts at Avram Theater in South Hampton, Levitas Center for the Arts and St.Luke’s Episcopal Church, it is the collective spirit of the ‘artist colony’ that attracts young musicians to Paul Schenly’s Pianofest.<br />
An eminent pedagogue from Cleveland’s Institute of Music, Schenly’s vision to nurture talent in the spirit of the Golden Age of the piano, connects performers and audiences by creating community.<br />
In its 30<sup>th</sup> season, Pianofest has greatly impacted some of its participants and inspired by now more than three hundred eighty pianists, season after season.<br />
In an East Hampton home equipped with 8 pianos, 12 pianists are hosted under Schenly’s tutelage (Photo middle) during two four-week sessions, each year. “This creates a real experience, unlike any other,” says Konstantin Soukhovetski, artist in residence at Pianofest and the Gala’s MC. <img alt="" class="alignleft size-medium wp-image-7722" height="200" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/DSC_6094-1-300x200.jpg" width="300" /><br />
”I was a student there for 6 years in the early 2000’ and experienced the exceptional atmosphere firsthand,” which he captures in his <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMAf8mnJ_1k">Pianists in the Hamptons</a> Reality Show episodes that take “a glimpse into the day-to-day life and the real people that make up Pianofest; the artists off-duty,” says Soukhovetski. Under Schenly’s tutelage, each of the musicians comes away with essential lessons learned; both musical and personal. “Paul has been a tremendous influence and mentor for me over the years,” says Soukhovetski. “For a young musician it is so important to have someone who sees you as a unique artist and nourishes you, sharing their insights and experiences without “changing you,” he explains. Pianofest was always a safe place for me to musically experiment, and dare to try out things I would be too timid to try anywhere else. I felt encouraged to just be the best ‘me’ that I can be.”<img alt="" class="alignleft wp-image-7721 size-blog-large-image" height="300" src="https://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/DSC_6207-1-848x300.jpg" width="848" /><br />
Pianofest performers are chosen from the talent pool of the international competition circle, constantly preparing new programs and ready to perform - sometimes on a whim's notice - generously.<br />
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Next to Konstantin Soukhovetski, (photo right) who performed one of his own Song-Transcriptions, the evening featured virtuoso performances by Fei-Fei, (photo left) winner of the Concert Artists Guild Victor Elmaleh Competitionand T<span class="text_exposed_show">omer Gewirtzman, (photo left) winner of the Young Concert Artists International Auditions.</span><br />
Pianofest is also a staple in the Hamptons’ summerscape and its local supporters are enthusiastic about the upcoming season.<br />
A special perk: Dede Gotthelf, a passionate supporter and owner of Southampton Inn, spontaneously offered a free overnight stay, in attendance of any of the Pianofest concerts. I might just take her up on it…<br />
<a href="http://www.getclassical.org/">Ilona Oltuski</a><br />
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<a href="http://www.pianofest.com/">Pianofest Schedule</a><br />
<a href="http://www.southamptoninn.com/">Southampton Inn</a><br />
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMAf8mnJ_1k">Pianists in the Hamptons</a><br />
Ilona Oltuski http://www.blogger.com/profile/18182444676865000920noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7586933906412828614.post-14280939854710635422018-04-19T05:45:00.000-07:002018-04-19T05:58:46.642-07:00New enthusiasm for Eurythmy – Gabrielle Amenier moves to shine light on human experience and the creative process <br />
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<a href="https://blogcritics.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Armenier-Armenier-Ravel.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-5485957" height="425" src="https://blogcritics.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Armenier-Armenier-Ravel.jpg" width="640" /></a>Armenier’s recital, spanning chamber and solo performances of works by Brahms, Ravel, Piazzolla, Wiprud, Auerbach, Gusev and Stanhope, is based on the principals of Eurythmy formulated at the turn of the century by Rudolf Steiner. Comprising "tone", “speech” and “silent” Eurythmy, Armenier’s Eurythmy performances explore human experience through a powerful recognition of informed movements. These sculpt space in time and reflect on artistic performance by visually enhancing our concept of sound production. The interdisciplinary approach lies at the root of an interactive discipline, linking art, poetry, language and music with the movements found at the base of all art forms. </div>
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Gabrielle Armenier’s early experiences with Eurythmy as a young active violinist freed her from a thorny relationship with her instrument and resulting stage fright. “Eurythmy taught me not to hold on to my body, to my instrument, but to anchor my gestures in space. It turned a most often confrontational relationship to space into an intrinsic one” she said during our interview following her <a href="https://eana.org/index.php/sol-etudes-a-eurythmy-recital/">Sol-Etudes</a> program at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall this February. This repertoire will be featured again in Napa on April 27th.<br />
<a href="https://blogcritics.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Armenier-Damirov-Brahms-330x220.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" class="alignright size-medium wp-image-5485958" height="266" src="https://blogcritics.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Armenier-Damirov-Brahms-330x220.jpg" width="400" /></a><br />
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“Tone Eurythmy is choreographed directly from the elements of the score, but aims beyond its ‘mechanical translation’ by addressing the experience that arises when listening to music,” explains Armenier. “Eurythmy does not need music, music does not need Eurythmy. But the reflection of one into the other opens up a different aspect of human experience” says Armenier.<br />
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Differently from other for<br />
ms of movement performance, like ballet for instance, Eurythmy does not employ the body as a tool for personal emotional expression. “In Eurythmy I don’t become the gesture, but rather I lend my body to a gesture. The audience is thus invited to become part of a gesture that is not solely my own. Movements relate to music by paying attention to the time element that lives between the notes and to the spatial one that lives in the phrase” she explains.<br />
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Facing the audience at all times overcomes a linear, one-dimensional approach to space. Eurythmy aims to enhance the quality of our perception of space, leading to a more connective and empowering experience. As it relates to the body, some of its principles overlap with those of the <a href="https://www.alexandertechnique.com/">Alexander Technique</a>. In how it unfolds in space, eurythmists move between two centers of gravity in constant interaction: one is the human heart and the other the plane of infinity. These infinitely small and large points of reversal inform how you use the joints. "Joints have to be empty for the tone of a piano to resonate in. Or filled with a flowing movement for the sound of a violin,” Armenier explains.<br />
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For Contemporary music, gestures are also choreographed according to elemental qualities. Polarities of darkness/light, cold/warmth, light/heaviness, or textures such a metal, wood, wool, play a role in how the gestures fit one with other. Colorful veils and flowing costumes additionally enhance the visual qualities of the movements. The interest of Eurythmy focuses not on the human body itself, but on its ability to sculpt the space around it.<br />
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<a href="https://blogcritics.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Armenier-Gusev-330x220.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img alt="" border="0" class="alignleft wp-image-5485959 size-medium" height="220" src="https://blogcritics.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/Armenier-Gusev-330x220.jpg" width="330" /></a>The qualitative polarity of Goethe’s quote: “Music is liquid architecture, architecture frozen music” applies, according to Armenier, directly to Eurythmy in that “our gestures are derived from a close study of the human body in its relation to space; interval gestures come from the shape of the bones. The sculpting process that formed them is magnified to form the interval movements. The prime comes from the collar-bone, the second from the humerus, the Major and minor thirds from the radius and the ulna, the fourth from the wrist, etc. Tone gestures on the other hand divide the space around the body into a radiant architecture.”<br />
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Eurythmy represents a performing experience unlike many others; it lures you in to new shores, perhaps a bit like the song of the sirens once captured Odysseus. Armenier’s confident and graceful movements ignite at least curiosity in the discipline, exploring the many mysterious and somewhat inexplicable layers of sound, space and movement with a new artistic potential.<a href="www.http://getclassical.org" target="_blank"> Ilona Oltuski</a><br />
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This article was previously published as Editor's pic on<a href="https://blogcritics.org/eurythmy-gabrielle-armenier/" target="_blank"> BLOGCRITICS</a><br />
<br />Ilona Oltuski http://www.blogger.com/profile/18182444676865000920noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7586933906412828614.post-16607100870678321722018-02-05T21:01:00.000-08:002018-02-05T21:01:34.127-08:00Nikita Mndoyants - Pianist, Transcriber, Composer shines in powerful US debuts<i>Mndoyants’ reputation as an artist of the highest standard is building momentum. As the 2016 1st Prize winner of the Cleveland International Piano Competition, a multitude of concert opportunities are lining up for the Russian artist, but beyond that, other programs realize his potential and are eager to provide further platforms for his talent. </i><br />
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<img alt="" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-7579" height="451" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/27164141_1566525300104432_3406646258151692628_o.jpg" width="640" />At <a href="http://www.eurasiafestival.org/">EURASIA FESTIVAL</a>, which launched in the fall of 2017, immediately representing an important NYC performance podium with viable space at the National Opera Center, young Mndoyants’ recital was presented among the series’ strong concentration on Russian artists, many of whom are former colleagues of the festival’s co-founder, pianist Aza Sydykov, from the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow.<br />
Presenting artists such as those from the former Soviet regions and showcasing their broad heritage and the area’s fascinating culture has become part of Eurasia’s unique cultural mission, and an outgrowth of individual initiatives. One of these is the <a href="https://www.kyrgyzamericanfoundation.org/">Kyrgyz American Foundation</a>, founded by Eurasia Festival’s own creators.<br />
<img alt="" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-7581" height="478" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/23722753_10215186104704555_609426349827573776_n.jpg" width="640" />In close collaboration with his wife, the American Opera Soprano Nikoleta Rallis, and the American pianist and producer Jonathan Levin, Sydykov founded the foundation in 2016. “Our trio is equally involved with the festival and the foundation and there would be nothing like it in existence if not for the tireless work of all three of us,” says Sydykov.<img alt="" class="alignright wp-image-7580 size-large" height="640" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/27021561_1566526030104359_8010842508873973778_o-765x1024.jpg" width="478" /><br />
Initially the festival was presented by <a href="https://www.olympia-arts.org/">Olympia Arts</a>, Sydykov’ and Rallis’ performing arts consulting company. Starting this March, the festival will be directly associated with the foundation, which, supported by a prominent team of advisors on its board will help to promote the Kyrgyzstan region’s rich culture, and further the artistic exchange between Kyrgyzstan and the US.<br />
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There exists an extraordinary talent pool among the artists presented at the series (see my recent article about pianist <a href="http://www.getclassical.org/passage-from-russia-to-america-pianist-composer-and-transcriber-vyacheslav-gryaznov-delights-in-musical-storytelling/%20;%20but%20beyond%20the%20essential%20musical%20talent">Vyacheslav Gryaznov</a>) – many hail from Russian conservatories via American academia, and are en route to claim their international careers.<br />
Nikita says, “Slava (Vyacheslav Gryaznov), Aza and I shared the same teacher, Nicholai Arnoldovich Petrov, at the Moscow Tchaikovsky State Conservatory,” where Nikita has also taught orchestration since 2013. “With Slava, we performed some of his beautiful arrangements of symphonic works for two pianos together at the Central Music School. Slava’s transcription of Rachmaninov’s <em>Symphonic Dances</em> and Stravinsky’s <em>Rite of Spring</em> are just formidable,” he adds.<br />
In 2004, Nikita gave his first chamber music performances with the Borodin Quartet, when he attended the prestigious Verbier Festival Academy, meeting some of the greatest performers alive; he remembers being especially impressed with Martha Argerich’s performance there. Just recently, they met again when she performed in a rare engagement in Cleveland, with Cleveland’s own Russian import: pianist and mentor Sergej Babayan. Keeping in good company seems as important as winning medals. Before the Cleveland, Mndoyants had won the 2007 Paderewsky International Piano Competition and was a finalist at the 2013 Van Cliburn Piano Competition.<br />
With his visa valid for three years after winning Cleveland’s competition in 2016, Nikita is determined to make use of his time. He has continued to develop his interest in chamber music with such ensembles as the Brentano, Ebene, Zemlinsky and Szymanowski quartets. It is mainly for chamber music and smaller piano works that he finds inspiration for his own compositions. “It is too late for large piano works, like Sonatas etc. It seems almost impossible to add something larger to the canon,” he feels. “I performed last year at the prestigious Great Hall of the Composers at the Moscow Conservatory, and just a few weeks ago my violin concerto was performed at the Moscow Conservatory by professor Vinnitsky. I also performed recently in St. Petersburg with Charles Dutoit, and will soon return to perform again, which means a lot to me, since it’s so important to not just play once at a place.”<br />
Around 40 concert opportunities are generously associated with the Cleveland competition, which only happens every four years, leaving enough time to concentrate on furthering their winners’ careers, and sparing another year in preparation of the next competition.<br />
Last June, as part of one of these Cleveland winner’s concerts, Nikita performed at Carnegie’s Weill Recital Hall to rave reviews, promising “a stunning start for Mndoyants as he embarks on an international career,” and lauding a “rising talent that comes onto the scene so polished that there isn’t much to say other than to simply applaud it” (Pianistmagazine.com, Bachtrack.com). The June 2017 concert had been his New York debut, and at that same time, his Steinway CD was released, garnering him a Grammophon review as well. “This was of course very important for me, as it helped spread the word internationally,” he says.<br />
Next season will bring Nikita to the Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, following his guest artist appearance last summer at the Ruhr Festival. He has also performed several times in Paris (Salle Cortot and Auditorium du Louvre du Paris), Brussels (Bozar Centre), and Luxembourg (Philharmonie), and has been artist-in-residence at the French Wissembourg Festival since 2012. Here, in addition to performing, he oversaw performances of his own compositions, which have been gaining interest from many artists including violinist Daniel Hope, and are being published by Composers, Muzyka and Jurgenson.<br />
Following recordings for solo piano and chamber ensemble on the Classical Records and Praga Digitals labels, his latest CD on the Steinway label, features three cycles of miniatures: Schumann’s <em>Davidsbündlertänze</em>, Beethoven’s <em>Bagatelles, Op. 126</em>, and Prokofiev’s<em> Sarcasms. </em>Jed Distler, who wrote the liner notes, remarks: “The time honored cliché ‘Good things come in small packages,’ most decidedly applies to the three groups of works comprising this release.” While comparable in their shorthand dimension, the challenges of each of these cycles are so varied, revealing the performer’s deep understanding of each of if its thematically fundamentally different components. Their precise execution is rendered with crystal clear pronunciation, and an impressive range of resolute vitality; all while offering an astoundingly nuanced color palette.<br />
<img alt="" class="alignleft wp-image-7582 size-full" height="426" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/26961797_1566525020104460_8051353021831982078_o.jpg" width="640" />In performance, one can observe how the choreography of Nikita’s hands generate such an impressive polyphonic tone production, corresponding to the utmost command of a large authoritative power; his gestures are calculated, yet fluid, following every whim of a musical thought instantly. At times, his performative proceeding is brought to a total halt in midair - with both hands hovering over the keys for a split second in a breathtaking moment for the audience - before it is released again, continuing its rhythmic flow into the keys.<br />
It is clear that there is great imagination at play and that goes for his performance as well as for his skilled compositions; Mndoyants also won first prize at the Myaskovsky International Competition for composers. At his performance at Eurasia Festival, Nikita’s own <em>Intermezzo</em> received its US premiere. The brevity of the piece follows his aforementioned conviction as the only possible contemporary form to explore for the genre “as did Prokofiev or Ligety.” He describes his composition style as “not being radical.” He says, “there is a tonal bass line, but complex harmonies inspired by composers like Lutosławsky or Weinberg. The latter, for example, especially influenced my violin concerto, and I also love rhythmic constellations as featured in works by Ligety or Stravinsky.”<br />
At the festival, where we met before and during his rehearsal, he adds: “I am so happy to partake in Aza’s festival, as he really got a great idea to focus on the art of this area, which incorporates such wide and varied regional cultural elements. The so-called ‘Russian School of Music,’ which musically dominated these previous republics, has huge connections with the European culture of classical music, but also carries East Asian folkloristic elements. There are so many influences, for example Armenian ingredients and the fascination with the Orient, which in my opinion connects a lot of the Russian composers,” he explains. “The Composers’ Union, which was founded under Stalin, was such a unique organization, which brought about a great exchange and cross-pollination between composers. In the sixties and seventies, composers like Schnittke, Gubaidulina or Denisov, who by now are already considered to be the ‘classical’ composers, continued to unify and represent a layer of culture that carries distinct features. But there is also a specific musical mentality and understanding of what music is, one’s approach to sound, structural ideas ….an essential musical identity.”<br />
<img alt="" class="alignright size-large wp-image-7583" height="640" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/27369064_1574535702636725_4860424274143353250_o-683x1024.jpg" width="426" />Luckily, there will be more opportunities for us to familiarize ourselves further with such talent brought about by this identity; next in concert at <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/267221660413984/">Eurasia Festival</a> will be master pianist and mentor Pavel Nersessian on February 17<sup>th</sup>. Nersessian will also be presented by Russian pianists Vassily Primakov and Oxana Mikhailoff at their new <a href="https://www.facebook.com/events/1964153673840496/">Sparkill Concert Series</a> on February 11<sup>th</sup>.Ilona Oltuski http://www.blogger.com/profile/18182444676865000920noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7586933906412828614.post-58534854033155209412018-02-02T10:54:00.000-08:002018-02-02T10:54:29.476-08:00The Emerson String Quartet teams up with piano virtuoso Evgeny Kissin<i>In a presentation conceived by their management at Winderstein and IMG, pianist Evgeny Kissin joins the Emerson String Quartet in a 2018 concert tour. Commencing with performances in France, Germany and Austria, and crossing the pond in April, the eagerly-anticipated collaboration continues to Chicago, Boston, and for its final performance on April 27th, at <a href="https://www.carnegiehall.org/Calendar/2018/04/27/EVGENY-KISSIN-EMERSON-STRING-QUARTET-0800PM?sourceCode=27515">New York's Carnegie Hall.</a></i><br />
<i><img alt="" class="alignright wp-image-7557" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Kissin-in-Verbier-2011-photo-Ilona-Oltuski.jpg" height="479" width="640" /><br /> (Photo Credit: Ilona Oltuski) </i><br />
<i>Kissin returns newly married, after a sabbatical from his yearly US performances. With this special chamber music venture that pairs Carnegie Hall’s darling with a formal string ensemble for the first time, Kissin continues to expand the scope of his creative spectrum, broadening his offerings even further, past Jewish poetry recitals and his latest foray into writing and composing.<br /> While steeped in the tradition of the art passed down by the great mid-century Guarneri and Juilliard String Quartets and shaped by iconic mentors such as violinists Oscar Shumsky and the late Robert Mann – founding member of the Juilliard quartet who just passed away this January – the Emerson String Quartet has managed to transition the chamber music genre like few others in the 21st century.<br /> With the advance of the digital area and a Deutsche Grammophone recording contract covering masterpieces in the new format, the Emerson Quartet was put on the map of international stardom, recognized with numerous awards, including nine Grammys.<br /> After its re-formation five years ago, with Welsh-born cellist Paul Watkins coming in for David Finckel – the quartet’s longstanding charismatic (and photogenic) cellist since 1979 – the Emerson Quartet continues to hold its uniquely eminent position amid the generation’s divide.<br /> Now in its 41st season, the Emerson Quartet – Philip Setzer (founding violinist), Eugene Drucker (founding violinist), Paul Watson (cello), and Lawrence Dutton (violist) – along with Kissin promises to make for an ideal partnership in this sustained journey of discovery. </i><br />
<img alt="" class="alignleft wp-image-7556" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Press_Photo.jpg" height="426" width="640" />(Photo Credit: Lisa Mazzucco)<br />
Kissin has performed chamber music all his life, collaborating with renowned soloists, for example in his 2015/2016 Carnegie Hall Perspective Series’ premiere trio appearance with cellist Mischa Maisky and violinist Itzhak Perlman. Even though the pianist personally prefers to “play more,” during his own solo recitals, as he told me once before, he regularly shares the stage with others, showing intimate familiarity in an array of diverse chamber music repertoire.<br />
Just last summer he performed both piano quartets on the upcoming program - the famously challenging Mozart Piano Quartet in G Minor, K.478 and Fauré’s lyrical Piano Quartet No.1 at the Verbier Festival with violinists Dmitry Sitkovetsky and Roman Simovic, violist Antoine Tamestit, and cellist Mischa Maisky. This performance also contained the powerful Dvořàk Piano Quintet No.2, planned for the second half of the program, which he recalls performing at Verbier’s 2004 festival with violinists Vadim Repin and Laurent Korcia, violist Yuri Bashmet, and cellist Alexander Kniazev. In February, he will also take the entire program with the Kopelman String Quartet for another spin to Madrid.<br />
The New York-based Emerson String Quartet in turn has had its fair share of collaborations with famed soloists. Asked about some of their choice pianists, Eugene Drucker together with Philip Setzer, the founding violinist of the Emerson Quartet, points out frequent affiliations with Emanuel Ax and Yefim Bronfman, both friends and neighbors on the Upper Westside. During their long career, however, the Emerson Quartet has featured partnerships with numerous pianists, as variant as Menahem Pressler and Jean-Yves Thibaudet.<br />
<img alt="" class="alignleft wp-image-7558" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Emerson-rehearsal-at-IMG.jpg" height="462" width="640" />(Photo Credit: Ilona Oltuski Rehearsal at IMG)<br />
Rehearsals for the ensemble’s multi-faceted programs this season begin after a long winter break, when the four men resolutely enter IMG’s midtown mansion. While the group sets up note stands and exchanges thoughts on the sequence of scores they’ve come together to work on, one cannot help but notice the strong rapport between the varied personalities in their conversational, but focused interaction. As they pick up their instruments, their energetic pitch projects strongly, yet with a certain unfussy elasticity that makes for a musical appeal, larger than the sum of their voices. It is interesting to observe the exchange of first and second violin seats during rehearsal, a process which had become a trademark of the ensemble early on. While not an unusual situation for student ensembles trying on different hats, this “egalitarian” proposal within a professional setting indicates a profound advocacy of equal partnership between individual artists.<br />
This impression is evocative of a testimonial David Finckel recently shared with me: “Thank God the Emerson Quartet never set its interpretations in stone, unchangeable for any reason….and it was, and I believe is, artistic independence and individual artistic identity that keeps the group healthy, artistically and socially, and dare I say successful, for more than forty years.” That success is evident, at the very least in their attracting collaborations with artists like Kissin.<br />
<img alt="" class="alignright wp-image-7559" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/emerson-quartet-Al-Hirschfeld.jpg" height="311" width="400" /><br />
Al Hirschfeld sketch of the Emerson String Quartet, courtesy Emerson String Quartet<br />
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“We had met Zhenya,” as Kissin is called in place of the more formal Evgeny, “in person, when he came to our concert in Prague two years ago,” explains Setzer, whose extra role in the quartet also encompasses programming to a large extent. He adds: “it seemed important for him to establish some personal rapport, and our meeting was indeed very pleasant. I had heard him perform once at Verbier, and for me he truly is one of the great musicians of all time. Performing with different pianists can bring out varied inclination in interpretation, tempi and sound production. The biggest expectation from joining forces with a pianist is the balance of how opaque the piano’s sound quality can become and how powerful, without drowning out the strings. I have a feeling our alliance might make for some revelations, that’s why it’s so exciting to have multiple performances together, hopefully translating into further collaborations in the future.”<br />
“Of course we have heard each others’ recordings, but we have no idea yet about any specific outcome, except that we have been doing this for a long time and he is simply brilliant, so I am sure we will make each other happy,” remarks Lawrence Dutton, the quartet’s violist, who as the ensemble’s treasurer also handles its fees, retainers, and many of the travel arrangements.<br />
While on tour, the ensemble balances time spent socially with ample accommodation for personal retreat, notably preferring their rooms to be located at some distance from each other. David Finckel explains, “in the Emerson Quartet we all loved to eat, and I think it’s still that way, having had many, many meals with Paul Watkins… We always ate together on tour whenever we could. My former colleagues in the quartet are very interesting people, and lots of fun. Dinner conversations can range from philosophical to scatological, and we had lots and lots of great times on tour…together. Yet,” he continues, “there’s a kind of mantra that musicians like to repeat: ‘If you are not practicing, someone else is,’ which emphasizes not only the competitive aspect of a music career, but also the eternal, internal affliction that we all suffer from knowing that, as good as we get, we are never as good as the music we are playing, and that there is no end to the mountain-climbing that a dedicated artist commits to upon embracing a lifetime in music. So it’s as simple as this: if I desperately need to take a nap before a concert, I don’t want to hear my colleagues practicing because I won’t sleep.”<br />
“When we started out as a quartet,” recalls Dutton, “we used to talk things out a lot beforehand, but that changed over the years and it became less talk and more doing, listening, and trying things out. That is the exciting part,” he explains. “When we perform with a soloist for the first time, we are ready to be inspired and to try new angles. Having different performance opportunities lined up will afford us the opportunity to evaluate what works and what doesn’t work, and to try something different each time.”<br />
<img alt="" class="alignleft wp-image-7561" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Kissin.jpg" height="400" width="319" /><br />
Sketch of Evgeny Kissin by Roman Rabinovich<br />
“About a year ago, Zhenya emailed us a handwritten manuscript of one of his own compositions for string quartet,” says Drucker, who often crafts written statements and the occasional program note for the quartet. His novel The Savior, which integrates some of his family’s biographical data, reflects on music and the human condition through the moral predicaments of a young German violinist during the Holocaust. “About a month ago, he sent a recent recording of this work with the Borodin Quartet. I guess he was looking for input if the composition works well for strings, which I am able to confirm. And judging by his more traditional concert programs,” Drucker adds, “one would not expect this great feeling for an interesting atonal style.”<br />
“I am very excited for our collaboration, we have a lot of mutual respect for each other,” says Drucker, adding that the program is highly unusual for a performance with string quartet. “Usually a guest soloist would perform in one or perhaps two pieces, with us coming in as a quartet in between, unlike in this program, where Kissin will perform in each segment of the program, while Philip and I will take turns with the quartets.”<br />
“Programming the pianist in every piece will make for a true chamber music concert, perhaps one of a kind,” exclaims Paul Watkins. He points out that “his composition actually works extremely well, and as the ensemble’s cellist I am the only one reading a bass clef!”<br />
Watkins, several years younger than the other Emerson Quartet members at 48 years old, is closest in age to Kissin, who is now 46. He remembers vividly hearing Kissin for the first time when he performed with a Russian group of visiting artists at his alma mater, the Yehudi Menuhin School. “Kissin must have been no older than 13 when he sat down to play a Chopin Ballade or something of that sort, and I thought to myself: ‘oh wow, so this is how it’s done.’”<br />
An accomplished conductor and a pianist, the cellist also marvels about having become such an integral part of the quartet’s new sound vision after a very smooth transition. “No one will ever change that distinct integrity of all of Emerson’s individual voices, but I definitely brought a different sound quality into the total partnership,” he says. “With its long, continuous existence and success, I had big shoes to fill, replacing a great man – perhaps the best – and had to learn a lot of new repertoire,” he says, referring to Finckel. “But after playing with them for only five minutes I knew I wanted to join. I was up to the challenge, and that’s only possible when you are all-in, otherwise you are in the wrong place,” he adds.<br />
“The cello is the foundation in a string quartet and Paul has a very different musical personality than David,” mentions Drucker, “I would describe our sound as being a bit deeper now. Paul has this deep bass baritone, while David had more of a sumptuous tenor voice. Apart from the sound, the change in our timing was subtle, without losing its edge. I think that while David favored a more streamlined rhythmic approach to most of the music we played, now there is more of an expansive sound, with more time taken between phrases and sections, and perhaps a slightly more ‘romantic’ inclination,” explains Drucker. Dutton adds: “The sound of the quartet indeed hinges on its cello, to a certain degree it creates a cushion for the other strings. Other than David’s more penetrating voice, Paul’s is a more rounded timbre going back to the Budapest or the Guarneri sound.” “Yes,” agrees Setzer, “it gives the violins a different base to sit on.”<br />
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<img alt="" class="alignright wp-image-7560" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/Kissin-and-Vadim-Repin-Verbier-2011-photo-Ilona-Oltuski.jpg" height="400" width="299" />Evgeny Kissin with Vadim Repin in Verbier (Photo Credit: Ilona Oltuski)<br />
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If musical life on stage and interaction among performers can reveal some truth about reality, it certainly matters who partners up with you, out there. At the 2011 Verbier Festival, violinist Vadim Repin, having performed with Kissin since childhood said to me, “So many things can go wrong during a chamber music performance, but Kissin always manages to keep you safe. No matter what happens he will come to your rescue, and I will gladly put my life in his hands.”<br />
In conclusion here is Finckel’s personal outlook: “Every house needs a foundation, which determines not only its size but its stability. Every piece of music has its bass line, chord roots, harmonic underpinning, and it’s the cellist’s responsibility in a quartet to ensure that those building upon the foundation have proper support. I’ve read that lack of physical support is the most innate fear that we possess. I think that’s true in chamber music as well.”Ilona Oltuski http://www.blogger.com/profile/18182444676865000920noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7586933906412828614.post-62039319513271151442017-12-16T14:16:00.001-08:002017-12-16T14:18:33.662-08:00Robert Kapilow – Making Music Accessible<img alt="" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-7529" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/419570_319012618158230_1169779860_n.jpg" height="315" width="851" />With humor and animated enthusiasm, Robert Kapilow creates a unique platform, inviting music lovers to deepen their journey of musical discovery. In each of his ‘What Makes It Great’ concert experiences, he divides a classical masterwork into its individual components, analyzing its stylistic intent, rhythm and harmonic structure to reveal underlying key elements that the composer applied.<br />
On this quest for a musical blueprint, Kapilow and his performers dismantle the piece’s expressive effects without vilifying its magic. The process is sensitive: it’s something qualified performers perhaps bring out intuitively in their performance, but it is a valid method for popularizing a basic level of familiarity with classical music’s language, which many might argue has lost its former reach and impact.<br />
“I noticed this estrangement from the classical canon early on in my days when I was conducting classical symphonies with the Yale Orchestra and simultaneously working with popular music on Broadway. It was a pivotal moment when I realized how different the experience was. Broadway audiences were familiar and enthusiastic with where the music was taking them, they knew when to applaud and shows were sold out every night,” said Kaplan in an interview at Merkin Hall before his recent concert series’ installment of Beethoven’s last String Quartet, No 16, Op. 135. <a href="http://harlemquartet.com/">The Harlem Quartet</a>, currently serving a three-year residency at London’s Royal College of Music, made for a perfect, joyful collaborator in Kapilow’s dissection of the piece’s singular phrases; the ensemble alternated rhythmic patterns and harmonic turns before performing it in its entirety for an informed audience, and achieving the desired outcome.<img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-7530" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/CpdnNvihLr1Fgw4mnA0JjfDAQZcFuI4XsU7X_VjYP0U.jpg" height="853" width="1280" /><br />
To follow Kapilow’s instructions, audiences don’t need to know anything about music; he does not use intimidating musicological terms that may get novices confused, all one must do is to keep an open mind. Challenging his audiences’ active engagement is key to both Kapilow’s motivation and his success. He claps out rhythmic patterns zealously: “Bagedi-Baa-Jadam.” He splits the audience into sections, relating to them the different instruments’ entry points. Audiences, who have clapped together, are sure to recall the peculiar melodic shifts and rhythmic samples demonstrated which makes for a more familiarized experience of the piece in its performance. Kapilow explains how the experience turns dynamic: “Not just with music,” he explains, “but also in the corporate world, for example, the important thing is to help people understand what to listen for. Communication is only possible when we share the same language. You have to get it on the tiniest level to get the nuances right and understand the big picture,” he says. “People want an in. All you have to do is bring the meaning back, where it’s lost or hidden, and bring people into the conversation. It’s not a mystery.”<br />
His public radio broadcasts of ‘What Makes It Great’ initially started out with ten-second snippets, followed by Kapilow hosting interpretations of singular phrases, and eventually kick-started his broadcast at <em>Live From Lincoln Center</em> and a series of presentations in New York and Boston that have by now spanned more than 20 years.<br />
Kapilow’s audiences vary vastly addressing all ages, bringing his fundamentally inquisitive approach to a multitude of subjects that range from corporate programs and addressing orchestras to making connections between music, monuments and art. His original compositions, including several for children, are published by Schirmer and often featured live at his ‘FamilyMusik’ programs. This body of work includes the famed <em>Green Eggs and Ham </em>and other Dr. Seuss texts set to music.<br />
<img alt="" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-7531" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/dCJmGeQtH85hQafea3dMHo710z3JZnfS-tXGD0355uc.jpg" height="1280" width="853" />He lives by the same high standard he extracts from his audiences, as he explains: “When I was [19 and] studying with the legendary Nadja Boulanger, I had a critical moment when I came to her apartment, [and I was] playing the Mozart A-minor Sonata for her. She interrupted me, almost hitting me, and yelled: ‘This is grotesque!’ I did not bring out the inner voices enough... I did not listen.”<br />
Returning to Yale, and later the Eastman School of Music, he learned his lesson. Now, all can learn from it, as his presentational method makes ‘listening’ and ‘how to listen’ major subjects, even for audiences. Benefitting from his training as a pianist, conductor and composer, Kapilow’s educational interactive programs now span all ages and regions.<br />
Currently Kapilow is working on his third book. Titled <em>Listening for America</em>, it is based on the American Songbook. His previous book, <em>All You Have To Do Is Listen</em>, has been awarded PSP Prose Award for Best Book in Music and the Performing Arts, and was followed by his 2011 publication <em>What Makes It Great </em>(Both were published by Wiley/Lincoln Center). The latter was especially designed to take advantage of new tablet technology, and its possibility to embed music scores without interrupting the continuance of the text.<br />
“It was not easy to find the right way to address audiences. The concept is not that different from teaching a graduate class at Yale, and yet it took me a while to taper down expressions I was used to in exchange for simple terms. We are all in our [own] little bubble and we talk a certain way. Whether you explain to kids that not all composers are dead, or tell professional performers to hum to different beats to make your point, accessibility must be the focus.”<br />
In his upcoming January 29th. 2018 installment of <a href="http://www.kaufmanmusiccenter.org/mch/event/what-makes-it-great-haydns-symphony-no.-104-in-d-major/?utm_content=version_A&sourceNumber=30695">What makes it great at Merkin Hall,</a> Kapilow will feature the Manhattan School of Music Chamber Sinfonia, tackling Haydn's Symphony No. 104 in D Major.<br />
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Ilona Oltuski http://www.blogger.com/profile/18182444676865000920noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7586933906412828614.post-91552743210527034212017-12-13T14:25:00.000-08:002017-12-16T14:27:20.450-08:00Passage from Russia to America – Pianist, composer and transcriber Vyacheslav Gryaznov delights in musical storytelling<em><img alt="" class="alignleft wp-image-7510 size-full" height="2985" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/03-BW.jpg" width="2000" /></em><br /> <em>A version of this article was published on BlogCritics (Nov.31,2017)</em><br />
Currently enrolled in the Artist Diploma program at Yale University, Slava, as he is called by his friends, speaks freely about the experiences that brought him to America from his native Russia.<br /> Dissatisfied with the trend in Russian politics toward entangling career with ideology, Slava was keen to follow his fascination with the “land of the free,” and search for new opportunities. Many of his friends and former colleagues from the music world had made the move from Moscow to the US, but leaving one’s home is always a very personal passage. For Slava, it may not have been quite as dramatic a journey as the one of his compatriot and musical hero Sergei Rachmaninoff, who, fleeing political turmoil in his homeland was never to return, but one requires great personal impulse and initiative to make such a significant change nevertheless.<br /> Slava still commutes between Connecticut and his Alma Mater, the Moscow Conservatory, where he holds an assistant associate position and presides over a large piano studio. All the while he performs in both the US and Europe, but has increasingly spent time in the Metropolitan area, making a new home for himself at Yale with his wife Julia and their eleven-year-old son, Alexander. “Last year I still split my time between Moscow and the United States evenly,” he remarks, “but now my visits there are decreasing. I sometimes feel a bit guilty for leaving my students, whom I have been connected to so closely for the past eight years. There is an encompassing friendship that connects me to all of my students there. I love to teach and my only reconciliation with leaving is that my efforts always went way beyond the expected routine and duties. In our many shared hours of mutually exploring music, I always gave my fullest commitment to finding some hidden sights and a fresh way to look at music, asking questions and getting answers, which in turn makes every performance unique,” he says.<br />
This personal commitment - going beyond the text and beyond the duration of a lesson – is something he holds up to a very high standard from a pedagogical standpoint. “Coming to Yale, I was taken with the high level of musicianship and creativity, while coming from the so-called ‘Russian School,’ which is in such high regard in the West. I find that there is tremendously prolific talent around here. What strikes me as odd – at least in my short time here – is the seeming lack of interest in furthering this talent pool beyond their absolved programs. A good student in Russia will be welcomed into the next level of studies, while for example at Yale, it is really difficult for students to advance, let’s say into a doctoral program.” This lack of accessibility to opportunities for growth and recognition seems foreign in concept to the Russian-trained musician, who himself had advanced through each stage of musical training at the Moscow Conservatory.<br /> Perhaps the interest in this general outreach effort, rather than continuing their efforts on behalf of their original set of students, stems from a different prevailing attitude about what it means to teach a musician. Of course one should not generalize too much, yet it is interesting to share some of the impressions that seem to be bound by specific cultures.<img alt="" class="alignright wp-image-7508 size-full" height="1349" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/09.jpg" width="900" /><br /> Becoming a student in the US again, studying with Boris Berman, also a graduate of the Moscow Conservatory, Slava has some interesting notions when comparing the customary approaches to pedagogy in both cultures, at least at first glance: “In Russia, students are often discouraged from going to extremes: in sound level, in ideas, in everything actually…this is typical training for competitions, which is ‘polite,’ and polished, suitable for a jury and to satisfy everybody. It has nothing to do with artistic bravery, taking risks and never compromising,” he states.<br /> “This goes against all traditions! But that goes for competition training everywhere, these days. Here, [in the US] there seems to be more freedom. Kind of a ‘do what you want,’ approach, ‘I don’t really care how you get there…’ yet, students don’t seem to offer extremes. They often stay ‘polite,’ one could call it boring, to begin with. No exceptional bravery here, with exceptions of course. Students are working very hard, but lessons here are more general, and not too concentrated on technical solutions being offered from the teacher’s side.”<br /> In terms of differences in approach, Slava tells that in Russia, a lot of “the work” is done by the teacher:”Even if a lazy student comes like a blank sheet of paper, with perhaps some musical ideas but no means of expressing them, the teacher’s job is to achieve a “nice” performance. To the contrary, in American pedagogical situations, most of the work has to be done by the student with a minimal amount of influence from the teacher.” If a performance is already satisfactory, making it truly great could require a lot of work by the teacher, and while Slava’s impression is by no means comprehensive due to the short time he had spent here, the notion that the Russian pedagogical culture could be producing lazy students while the United States’ could be producing lazy teachers, may not be so far fetched.<br />
Again, generalizations are never completely accurate, but it is certainly an interesting notion of a cultural approach to “teaching genius.” Could it have to do with the calling to the profession, which may be a much more individually-driven effort in the US than in Russia? Is it the highly seeded-out talent pool that arrives at US conservatories, whose faculties only expect the next wunderkind to show up and impress?<br /> “I don’t think the so-called ‘Russian school’ of training exists anymore,” Slava says. “Everything depends on the person who teaches. Maybe in US it’s more general; in Russia it’s still a little more concrete. I think [in Russia] we are training our pianists in a more competitive way, like in sports. China is out of everyone’s league here. In the US it’s more relaxed. But being trained to win [piano competitions] does not speak to the nurture it takes to make a musician.”<br /> “Yet competitions are important,” Slava says, and perhaps not winning the New York Concert Artist (NYCA) competition in 2015, the first competition he entered in the US, was an important lesson: “I am learning what to do, and what not to do. That is part of the experience,” he says. “I made the mistake of playing my own Romeo and Juliet transcription,” he mentions, “but in an eight-minute excerpt, within a round of only fifteen minutes, I did not come across properly….but perhaps it had just not been the right moment in time for me… and I decided to try once more, the following year,” he says.<br />
Of course, as we know, some of the musicians who did not win competitions are some of the most extraordinary ones, as time has proven. Some careers have been forged on failed competition results, yet for most of the young artists, who are not yet renowned to a wider audience, they are still a means to achieve performance opportunities and international recognition. They still represent a significant mechanism by which young artists are introduced to new audiences and brought managerial attention.<br />
On a personal note, Slava presents himself as an artist, who, beneath his modesty shows a nonchalant and humorous side, especially when talking about his own beginnings as a nurtured talent, not self-aware of any special skills. About his first meeting with the dean of the famed Moskow Central Music School, he laughingly remarks: “He suggested I should pick up percussion instead of piano, which I loved, and truth be told, my level of piano was not that strong since I did not play any serious repertoire, so to make me a drummer sounded quite reasonable.” After Slava was paired with Manana Kandelaki, a new graduate of the school, as a piano teacher, Slava’s mother, convinced of her son’s talent, took on a janitorial position at the school to allow for her son’s attendance. They came a great distance from Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk to Moscow with 9-year-old Slava, in order for him to attend the specialized school. Slava credits Manana’s attention and unique perspective on questioning musical interpretation, the most important tool to craft a successful performance, with his success in the field; only knowing why one chooses a certain way gives rise to true independence as a musician.<br />
Determined to broaden his horizons, Slava, who won the first Russian Presidential Award and numerous international competitions, returned in the 2015/16 season to play auditions for several American universities. He gave several performances for the New York-based Impromptu! Classical Music Recital Series produced by the Drozdoff Society, devoted to the dissemination of music by its namesake composer, whose work Slava admires. He also gave NYCA another try. This time he offered shorter pieces, among them one of his favorites, Rachmaninoff’s Etude Tableau No.5, Op. 59.<br /> “I feel very confident with this piece,” he says, and it appears - among other virtuoso Rachmaninoff works, including the exciting Sonata No2, op. 36, beautifully rendered on a CD, live recorded at an educational and charitable concert in Ivanovka, Rachmaninoff’s estate museum in 2007. Throughout the recording, the artist proves his virtuosic chops while exercising extraordinary control over the melodic storyline of these most challenging pieces, which are all about achieving a perfect pianistic balance between the strong emotional tension and intellectual coherent interpretation of the text.<br />
NYCA’s first prize offering made his Carnegie Hall Weill Recital Hall concert in 2016 (photo) happen and also brought about a performance at the Berlin Philharmonic, as well as a recital in Paris with Sirena Huang, another recent winner of NYCA. Klara Min, founder of NYCA, is thrilled that Slava won the competition; she describes him showing: “a true artist’s spirit combined with warm humanity, in all his multi-faceted musical activities, not only in his performances.”<img alt="" class="alignleft wp-image-7509 size-full" height="3000" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/carnegie-1.jpg" width="2000" /><br /> Other recitals in New York City followed inevitably. This October, Slava performed in the Eurasia Festival, founded by Aza Sydykov and his wife Nikoleta – both also alumni of the Moscow Conservatory.<br />
Here I was finally able to hear Slava perform live for the first time in the concert hall of Opera America; his performance left a lasting impression on me, confirming whispers about his reputation I had heard beforehand. His performance of Liszt’s Études d’éxecution transcendante, S.139 was masterful, convincing and stimulating, and the second half of the recital’s introduction to his own arrangements of works by Borodin, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and Glinka was a prolific proof of his individual talent and prowess. This spring, as part of the NYCA award, a Steinway recording will be released under the title: “The Century of Russian Music,” showcasing a whole set of Slava’s transcriptions of works by Glinka and Prokofiev.<br />
Russian music, especially the glorious romantic compositions has swamped the US since the Cold War, and we have been inundated with performances of this virtuosic palette of repertoire, featured in recitals by almost every graduate of Juilliard, and any other American conservatory.<br /> While the generation of pianists before Slava’s – let’s say Kissin’s age, especially in Russia – mainly concentrated on the study of the German classical canon of composers, the sweeping virtuosity and the emotion-stirring beauty of the Russian Romantics has reached an all-time high in popularity with the younger generation of performers who immigrated to the West. What better way, especially for young Russians, to identify with their cultural heritage – music full of temperament and emotion, filled with testimonials to their enormous technical dexterity at the instrument?<br /> Yet, the art of refinement in performance, especially in music that innately “colors with a big brush,” requires an even deeper, complete intellectual capacity to find the music’s convincing plot without falling under the spell of its storm. It seems to me that the younger generation has grappled with this concept, and as a result, exhibits a style that is both freely expressive and not an exposition of virtuosic skill for the sake of virtuosity. Slava’s approach is a remarkable illustration of this trend.<br />
Minute variations, which arrive from intimate anticipation, humorous details and fiendishly hidden elements exposed only through an utmost fine-tuned understanding of the composer’s score are also characteristics present in his own arrangements, several of which are already published by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schott_Music">Schott</a>, one of the oldest established German music publishers. Arranging and composing are very important components of Slava’s art. The time necessary to devote to these aspects would not allow for an all-encompassing concert performance career, he thinks. Ideally, he would like to devote an equal amount of time to performing, arranging and composing, for which he has not enough time at the moment.<img alt="" class="alignright wp-image-7507 size-full" height="2971" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Vyacheslav-Gryaznow-photo-Ilona-Oltuski-GetClassical.org_.jpg" width="3624" /><br /> His first original work was his <em>Rhapsody in Black</em>, written for Nikolai Petrov for piano duo. Based on the some of the famed works by Gershwin, (not his<em> Rhapsody in Blue)</em>, especially <em>Porgy and Bess</em>, Slava describes the three-month composing process as one the most exciting periods of his life. “I had this idea for the style, with different medleys for piano and violin, and orchestral suites. But my goal was to create something of my own, a complex composition with its own story line.” He had brooded with an idea for two years without finding the right starting point, but when the actual deadline arrived, it catapulted the creative process. “My storyline was about starting where Gershwin had left of, with Porgy travelling to New York, and motives of the legendary ‘Summertime’ representing Bess.” While there were no plans of coming to the US in 2011, when the idea for his rhapsody evolved, in hindsight, perhaps the spark of inspiration represented a preview of things to come for the artist. Earlier on he performed Gershwin’s <em>Rhapsody in Blue</em> in Moscow, at the conservatory’s Tschaikovsky Hall. He was enthused with his own music, and did not stop exploring different performances and scores. When Petrov called, things got intense: “Petrov called me almost every day, it was a big rush. I sent some material to him and he right away began learning it. Some fragments got changed a few times; they threw the old parts away and learned a new. When the piece was finished, Petrov laughingly remarked: ‘You deserve a state premium now, as did Rachmaninoff!’”<br />
“I am proud of my piece, as a composer but also as a performer. My next plan is to give it its American premiere here, performing it myself,” he adds. “It’s not a-tonal music, it’s easy to listen to and that’s what music is to me: I need to have an underlying story line, a process in time, call it story or an emotional line that connects the episodes. My goal and obligation is to create it, an adventure where my audience can follow. Creating that story makes the music play, technical problems disappear when you concentrate on the center of our craft, propelling music.”Ilona Oltuski http://www.blogger.com/profile/18182444676865000920noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7586933906412828614.post-4694900450374741902017-11-04T09:09:00.001-07:002017-12-16T14:21:08.031-08:00Orpheus and the “Underworld” of the Conductor-less Chamber Ensemble<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilt_EZGkDtsmXuwP7sc_9baIWlEzrQXe7fIQwrs9pHrc8YYJfRxImuorthobNrvnKbr-f60EyCwIHdVyXuHKq0HAM58tuC36GMSbbElPoWn6AE99xcNbTDqRcvLKbwN90sXlgA935XPpw/s1600/Orpheus+Full+Approved+2016+-+Matt+Dine.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1600" data-original-width="1484" height="640" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEilt_EZGkDtsmXuwP7sc_9baIWlEzrQXe7fIQwrs9pHrc8YYJfRxImuorthobNrvnKbr-f60EyCwIHdVyXuHKq0HAM58tuC36GMSbbElPoWn6AE99xcNbTDqRcvLKbwN90sXlgA935XPpw/s640/Orpheus+Full+Approved+2016+-+Matt+Dine.jpg" width="592" /></a></div>
The orchestra’s chosen namesake, the Greek mythical hero Orpheus whose music could charm wild beasts and coax trees and rocks to dance, evokes the orchestra’s founding aspirations from 1972. While Hermes was said to have invented the lyre, Orpheus was the one to perfect it, imbuing it with power – even over Hades – allowing him return passage from the Underworld. What has been perfected at Orpheus is its groundbreaking initiative to introduce democratic choice into the traditional orchestral hierarchy, historically led by a single conductor. At Orpheus, it’s all about the music, experienced and performed by equally important musicians in a collective, self-governed environment.<br />
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Photocredit: Matt Dine<br />
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Sitting down at Orpheus’ offices at Manhattan’s Riverside Church with Alan Kay, principal clarinetist and one of the three artistic directors of the ensemble this season (the others being Laura Frautschi and James Wilson), allows for a glimpse into the now historic transformative ideas of the famously conductor-less orchestra.<br />
Recommended by the great clarinet virtuoso Charles Neidich, Kay started his collaboration with the orchestra as a young substitute performer in 1985. He was elected as a member shortly thereafter, when a spot in the ensemble opened up.<br />
“It is a lot about friendship. We do care about each other on a personal level and that comes from listening to each other,” he exclaims. “We are not about one single point of view, but about group decisions. How to play music is constantly re-evaluated and up for discussion by giving multiple performances of the same repertoire with alternating positions, which keeps things fresh at all times,” he says. Kay describes the invigorated spirit that characterized Orpheus’ initial formation and ongoing development: “The ideas that came from the sixties when we were young musicians, this uninhibited feeling of being able to achieve anything with our lust for freedom of expression…this got implemented in this new way of making music at Orpheus, which quickly became a sensation, and wildly recognized with a legendary long term contract by Deutsche Grammophone, previously unheard of for such a young ensemble.”<img alt="" class="alignright wp-image-7489 size-full" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/Orpheus-1617-Recording-Session-credit-Matt-Dine.jpg" height="480" width="640" /><br />
Photo credit: Matt Dine.<br />
Producing four LPs every year in bi-annual recording sessions with the German label put Orpheus on the international map. With international star soloists flocking to record with the group, and composers submitting new commissions, Orpheus proudly looks back on its 71 albums, including its Grammy Award-winning take on Stravinsky in its 2000 recording, <em>Shadow Dances</em>, and 43 premieres of original, commissioned works.<br />
Kay says Orpheus’ “amazing” recording streak lasted into the nineties, but has functionally ended as the recording industry has entered into an era of tumultuous change. “Recordings of Orpheus performances are still done, occasionally, mostly consisting of live recordings with patching sessions in the studio, but they have not gained the same recognition as marketing tools as our recordings from those previous years,” he remarks. “A decisive factor for our Carnegie Hall concert series and connected outreach tours remain our guest artists. Their choice depends a bit on logistical reasoning these days, but they all are established artists, who bring interesting ideas and enjoy collaborating in this personal interaction that we are about,” adds Kay.<br />
Indeed, musicians at Orpheus remain involved on every level of the ensemble’s artistic, and by now quite elaborate administrative, process. From branding and ticket marketing, to setting the order of rehearsals, rotating concert masters and parts – which alternate for each performance and even each piece – every musician is involved.<br />
Michael Volpert, renowned for his almost encyclopedic musical knowledge holds the title of ‘Director of Artistic Planning’ at Orpheus, and modestly describes his role as “making sure that everyone shows up at the right place at the right time.” While offering me coffee, Volpert shares his insights with me about Orpheus’ complex three-headed system, which comes up for election every three years. “With the orchestra’s growing success and mounting outreach strategies, the administrative system’s scope has to adjust,” he explains. Yet, the concert master committee makes sure the essentials continue to be in place. “The concert master tells me for each and every performance where the musicians are sitting, and who they want to sit with, who their stand partner for each piece will be, and who will play 2<sup>nd</sup> violin in this setting. It remains a totally democratic structure,” says Volpert.<br />
<img alt="" class="alignleft wp-image-7490" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/17-10-14-Orpheus-on-tour-in-Kentucky-credit-matt-Dine-1024x768.jpg" height="480" width="640" />This signature democratic mode of operation has been trademarked as the ‘Orpheus process,’ and has led to leadership research in other fields; studies and seminars on democratic leadership models inspired by Orpheus have been conducted at Harvard, Morgan Stanley and Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospitals, among others. ‘Access Orpheus’ and the ‘Orpheus Institute’ are further symbols of the ensemble’s active outreach initiative, and the academic and entrepreneurial value of their method. These programs bring Orpheus’ process and institutional values, but also its engaging performances to students of all ages, and create opportunities for further artistic growth. After all, building new audiences is recognized as a premium responsibility of modern arts organizations and ensembles. Photo Credit: Matt Dine<br />
This year, Orpheus has followed up on the salon concert format, with smaller ensemble performances held at the intimate space of violin and bow-maker Tarisio. “These concerts are ideal for getting to know young artists, and our commissioning process now also includes Jazz repertoire. Repertoire has to follow performance practice, and arranging larger works for smaller ensembles becomes also an important factor for staying relevant in a constantly changing music environment,” recognizes Kay.<br />
To find out how Orpheus’ musicians will spend the next season, check out their concert <a href="http://orpheusnyc.org/calendar/">schedule.</a>Ilona Oltuski http://www.blogger.com/profile/18182444676865000920noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7586933906412828614.post-40554087159854644052017-11-04T08:53:00.001-07:002017-11-04T09:15:21.429-07:00Pegasus: The Orchestra – Cultural Incubator of Community<img alt="" class="size-large wp-image-7473 alignleft" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/PegasusGroup2-1024x639.jpg" height="398" width="640" />Pegasus, the winged divine stallion of Greek mythology, friend of the muses bringing lighting and thunder from Olympus to the people, perfectly embodies the orchestra’s broad aspirations: “As musicians and artists we dream of achieving new heights and letting our imagination take flight,” says Pegasus founder, pianist and composer <a href="http://www.karenhakobyan.com/" style="color: black;">Karén Hakobyan</a>: “We as humans have always dreamt of defying gravity. Music does just that – it gives us wings.” Hakobyan passionately embraces his new role as artistic director of the recently launched orchestral ensemble with the emblematic name. (Photo credit: Ohad Ashkenazi, Pegasus at Mana, location Mana Contemporary)<br />
The position marks the next organic step in Hakobyan’s personal evolution as a musician. “I have written orchestral scores from a very young age,” he says, “and [I] chose my instrument, the piano, thanks to its polyphonic qualities, mimicking the varying orchestral sounds.” This fascination also led him to delve into conducting, training with the MET’s own <a href="https://www.pinnaclearts.com/artist.php?id=134" style="color: black;">John Keenan</a>. Next month, Hakobyan will have the chance to prove himself as Pegasus’ principal conductor, but in our conversation Hakobyan favored discussing aspects of his broader vision for the ensemble and its personnel: “The orchestra’s members all have very active careers as soloists and chamber musicians, [and] many of them also freelance with top orchestras in the region. What makes our collaboration especially fertile is that it forms a platform for our members to carry over their own, personal projects, letting them grow as individuals as well as profiting the ensemble.” He remarks, “Pegasus’ format is flexible – the orchestra can mean so many things; the main goal is to let its members shine in a bold and individualistic way, uncommon to the typical orchestral environment.” The orchestra’s <a href="https://www.eventbrite.com/e/pegasus-the-orchestra-debut-concert-tickets-36520011337" style="color: black;">debut concert</a> will take place October 13, 2017, at the DiMenna Center For Classical Music, and will feature works by Hakobyan, Komitas, Debussy and Mendelssohn.<img alt="" class="alignright size-large wp-image-7474" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/EventbriteBanner1.41-1024x512.jpg" height="200" width="400" /><br />
While Pegasus plans to execute larger collective performances at times, its current full size of thirty-five core members strong– certainly presents some disadvantages, especially for concert availability and touring logistics. In performance, Pegasus will range in size from string quintet to large chamber ensemble at times within the same concert, allowing for diverse presentations and programs, every so often challenging the customary orchestral format. In March 2018, the Leonard Bernstein centennial, their program, ‘Americana,’ will feature unusual transcriptions for eighteen instruments of <em>West Side Story</em>, as well as Gershwin’s <em>Rhapsody in Blue. </em>Different instruments will be showcased in interesting ways, allowing for more solo performances than usual from each of the ensemble members. Some performances will take place without a conductor and change the pace with large orchestral works, allowing audiences to “clear their aural and visual palette.”<br />
A growing shortage of engagements for full-time orchestral musicians over the last decade combined with the enhanced elasticity of ensembles with flexible size has brought about a number of similar entrepreneurial initiatives throughout the ever-changing music scene and proven successful by other teams like <a href="http://www.theknightsnyc.com/" style="color: black;">The Knights</a> and <a href="https://metropolisensemble.org/" style="color: black;">Metropolis Ensemble</a><em>.</em> Challenging musical goals of large orchestras, such as performing with a unified sound, the characteristic of their specific orchestral tradition and similar objectives may have changed significance in light of opportunities to overcome restrictive barriers. Thanks to the large talent pool of their collaborative that allows for a multitude of productions in varying configurations on a standby budget, this flexible orchestral model has led to productive results both financially and artistically; it seems not being confined to and defined by “one’s designated seat,” may result in more original and sensitive musicianship, and interacting in varied group and program settings may lead to more numerous and diverse rehearsals that ultimately develop each musician’s own artistic voice more vigorously.<br />
Beyond their joint musicianship, Pegasus’ members distinguish themselves through their widely diverse heritage, representing a cultural element of international appeal. The ensemble somewhat resembles a musical UN assembly, each performer representing his or her own legacy. Hakobyan’s Armenian-American background, for example, has taught him the significance and benefit of communal loyalty. But more than winning supportive patrons (the orchestral debut concert is sponsored by the charitable Armenia Fund, USA) it is the prospect of collaborating with different communities, building social ties and connecting people through overarching programs – the infinite pool of possibilities – that really motivates him.<br />
Perhaps it is this shared passion to eliminate boundaries between artistic creativity and communal stimulation that brought Hakobyan the special opportunity of collaborating with Mana Contemporary, the rapidly expanding visionary arts complex in Jersey City. An offshoot of Moishe Mana’s moving and storage emporium, the locality developed through the influx of gallery and museum clients, who were interested in utilizing gallery space to show part of their stored collections and avoid costly transportation and upkeep of their work. In 2011, Mana’s vision to develop the huge cluster of warehouse and factory buildings into a communal platform for artists and the performing arts was realized with Mana Contemporary, which was soon followed by Mana Contemporary Chicago (2013) and Mana Miami (2015).<br />
With their debut music series branded ‘<a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/53c03a03e4b0284b83d4a698/t/59c1af43f7e0abf0fba08a3e/1505865540518/2017-Pegasus_PressRelease.pdf" style="color: black;">Pegasus at Mana</a>,’ Pegasus establishes Mana’s very first music residency. It will contain four piano and four orchestral performances. On September 28<sup>th</sup>, Hakobyan will be joined in performance by pianist <a href="http://www.nadejavlaeva.com/" style="color: black;">Nadeja Vlaeva</a>, the new co-director of the Pegasus piano series, in their shared <a href="http://manacontemporary.com/pegasus-piano-debut" style="color: black;">debut concert</a> at Mana. “Mana, our new home, is a one-of-a-kind venue where different types of art live under one roof in a symbiotic relationship. Such an environment is inspirational and stimulates creativity,” says Vlaeva. Hakobyan’s orchestral program series will follow with its debut performance at Mana on <a href="http://manacontemporary.com/pegasus-orchestra-debut" style="color: black;">October 21<sup>st</sup>.</a><br />
The partnership between Mana and Pegasus was engineered by Louis Meisel, Manhattan art dealer and music lover, who has been presenting young musicians in his Soho Loft and Gallery and beyond for the past two decades, among them Vlaeva and Hakobyan. <br />
As an active board member of a slew of performing arts institutions, among them Concert Artist Guild, Youth America Grand Prix and the Miami-based New World Symphony, Lou sees himself as a facilitator for the artists and cultural initiatives he engages with: “I help promote and make introductions,” he says, describing the dynamic process of his beneficial networking skills. “Mana’s complex is just mind-boggling. It occupies almost a million square feet. Each floor is about an acre, about 100 artists rent studio galleries, which are visually accessible to the public through giant glass doors. There are art supply stores, frame shops and even a foundry and restaurant, to meet and explore common ideas. There are also three major dance troupes, and then the architectural museum…”<br />
<img alt="" class="size-large wp-image-7475 alignleft" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/Image-1-1024x1024.jpg" height="400" width="400" />(Photo-montage with Photo Grid by Ilona Oltuski, location Mana contemporary)<br />
There is no doubt the venue is buzzing with great potential to showcase performances and exhibitions, and thanks to the literal transparency of its architecture, the structure is designed for viewers to attend rehearsals and experience educational outreach firsthand. Some of the studios are indeed equipped with glass fronts, turning public into an audience, which can entail a voyeuristic ‘peeking behind the scenes’ experience, with passers-by able to watch the artist at work (artists’ consent permitting). For onlookers, getting pulled into the creative process can also make for a unique rapport with the artist and his work. Viewers can relate to art not only as the finished product on display, but rather to the work in progress, and this process stimulates intimacy and engages interest. <img alt="" class="size-large wp-image-7476 alignright" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/JD0A0403-1024x683.jpg" height="266" width="400" /><br />
(Photo credit: Ohad Ashkenazi, members of Pegasus with Yigal Ozeri, center, location: Mana Contemporary)“I represent the work of Yigal Ozeri, an excellent artist, at my gallery. Together with Moishe Mana and Eugene Lemay, Mana’s chief executive and CEO, Ozeri is one of the three leading men at Mana,” Meisel says. “Five years ago I said to him, ‘so with all the great visual art and dance that’s developing at Mana, what about music?’ About six months later the concert hall was built! This is how they work at Mana. That area did not have any concert hall of that size, accommodating 250 to 300. There was nothing in the community. Two years ago we started talking about a residency music program, and then three months ago, it happened.” There appears to be a remarkable amount of investment in Mana as a developing music venue. According to Meisel, the concert grand piano for the Pegasus at Mana 2017/18 series is entirely sponsored by Yamaha. He says, “Pegasus’ residency will encourage others to reach out and create more events.”<br />
<img alt="" class="alignright size-large wp-image-7477" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/JD0A0782-1024x683.jpg" height="266" width="400" />(Photo credit: Ohad Ashkenazi, Eugene Lemay with musicians of the orchestra, location: Mana Contemporary)<br />
Mana’s community network has grown into a potent mailing list, and with its convenient and complementary parking conditions, new PATH stations and shuttle service from Manhattan, Mana will reach a larger and larger audience willing to cross the state line. It is the community aspect, though, that is at the core of Mana’s investment and vision. As with Pegasus’ own mission, the space is based on the artist as society’s stimulus. Committed to building a unique platform for music at Mana, Pegasus hopes to foster a creative environment for musicians and provide educational opportunities for local communities. With support from Mana, in their 2018 season Pegasus will expand their programs to incorporate Jazz, Chamber Music, and even a Youth and Outreach series. <br />
By Ilona Oltuski – GetClassical.orgIlona Oltuski http://www.blogger.com/profile/18182444676865000920noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7586933906412828614.post-17393717236895870282017-01-07T09:21:00.000-08:002017-01-07T10:08:41.195-08:00The Israel Philharmonic Orchestra - Happy 80th Birthday and Happy New Year!<div style="font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', 'bitstream charter', times, serif; font-size: 16.0698738098145px; line-height: 19.2838497161865px;">
<span style="color: white;"><span style="color: #333333;"><span style="height: auto; margin-bottom: 0.5em; margin-right: 1em; margin-top: 0.5em;"><img alt="" class="size-large wp-image-7404 alignleft" data-mce-src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/IMG_2124-1-1024x671.jpg" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/IMG_2124-1-1024x671.jpg" height="671" style="float: left; height: auto; margin: 0.5em 1em 0.5em 0px; max-width: 100%;" width="1024" /></span><span style="color: white;">It</span></span><span style="background-color: black;">’s a season of celebration for an exceptional orchestra, in an extraordinary land full of music. Yes – against all odds, the soil that saved so many from the ashes of the Holocaust and inherited the soulful tradition of Russia’s virtuosi as they fled communist repression harvests its musical talent in an embrace of its own individual flavor with the best of what international music culture has to offer. Originating as The Palestine Orchestra under Huberman, Maestro Toscanini called the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra, which has been intimately intertwined with the history of the State of Israel, “the most extraordinary orchestra in the most extraordinary place in the world” during its inauguration. (photo: memorial plaque at the Charles Bronfman auditorium)</span></span><br />
<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">Just returning from a visit during which I sampled some of the extraordinary concert season’s highlights held at the Philharmonic’s newly renovated concert hall, I am still in awe and eager to share my impressions.</span><br />
<img class="alignright wp-image-7388 size-large" data-mce-src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/DSC00092-1024x703.jpg" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/DSC00092-1024x703.jpg" height="703" style="float: right; height: auto; margin: 0.5em 0px 0.5em 1em; max-width: 100%;" width="1024" /><span style="background-color: black; color: white;">In the midst of Hanukkah, the spiritual Jewish festival characterized by seemingly timeless buoyancy, everlasting in the face of oppression and persecution, each of the concerts on the holiday’s eight nights commenced with an inclusive candle-lighting ceremony. Sometimes lit by young artists and on one occasion Reuven Rivlin, Israel’s President, the lighting of the candles sets the festive framework of the evening accompanied by the beautiful Hanukkah hymn “Ma'oz Tzur,” at times regally accompanied by Zubin Mehta, and the orchestra.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">Mehta, the orchestra’s longtime companion and its international leading figure since 1961, when he began at the Orchestra in an advisory role that evolved into a lifelong championship of Israel and its musical talent, incidentally also celebrated his 80th birthday.</span><img class="alignleft wp-image-7389 size-large" data-mce-src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/IMG_2068-1024x768.jpg" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/IMG_2068-1024x768.jpg" height="768" style="float: left; height: auto; margin: 0.5em 1em 0.5em 0px; max-width: 100%;" width="1024" /></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">His announcement of his retirement for the 2019 season reminded audiences of their part in a historic, almost bygone era. (photo: Maestro Zubin Mehta)</span><br />
<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">The series’ 7th concert featuring star pianist Evgeny Kissin in Rachmaninov’s Concerto No.2 in C minor, Op.18 marked Kissin’s second performance this season, following his solo piano recital of German classics and Spanish Romantics some days before. Given the fact that his programs are conceived each year and performed around the globe, it seems absolutely mind-boggling how his revelatory Beethoven Appassionata, for example, that had already sent audiences at his Carnegie Hall rendition earlier this year into a trance, proved here to be equally sublime.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">This is Kissin – the exceptional artist – convincing, time after time, with his straightforward, yet truly poignant touch. His Rachmaninov II that evening was nothing short of riveting. Some die-hard fans, who never fail to beleaguer the patient and generous artist backstage after his performances on a regular basis, are familiar with his 1989 recording of the inimitably romantic concerto with former performance comrade Valerie Gergiev on the Red Seal label. Kissin’s nuances have not changed all that much, except perhaps for his maturing full-fledged outlook, which does not seem to lose any of its fresh excitement over time.</span><br />
<img class="alignright wp-image-7395 size-large" data-mce-src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/IMG_2148-1024x768.jpg" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/IMG_2148-1024x768.jpg" height="768" style="float: right; height: auto; margin: 0.5em 0px 0.5em 1em; max-width: 100%;" width="1024" /><span style="background-color: black; color: white;">When Kissin entered, performing within the context of the orchestra’s free-leaning kinship under Mehta, it became clear at once that two forces of nature met on stage, both maestros in their field. The number of collaborations between Mehta and Kissin, which arch back in time to Kissin’s first emergence as a prodigal pianistic talent, his reputation quickly surmounting the iron curtain, were palpable in their warm and supportive musical embrace. Mehta once had pointed out to me his personal appreciation for Kissin’s art, when saying: “[Kissin] has this almost unattainable musical gift; like almost no other artist alive he can play the notes in-between the bar-lines.” And Kissin, who, throughout his commanding career has performed with literally every renowned conductor alive, appreciates Mehta in return. As he mentioned once with warm admiration at a rehearsal with Mehta some years ago: “[Mehta] is such a joyful and wonderful accompanist; we click immediately.”</span><br />
<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">This performance was certainly one to remember – significant and elevating, its best moments exalting and exemplifying all that the classical genre has to offer. I had been wondering if Kissin, who identifies greatly with Israel and has taken on Israeli citizenship, feeling truly at home, would offer some of his own compositions as an encore; instead he kept it close to context with a Rachmaninov Prelude and a Tchaikovsky Waltz. Returning to composing recently, after only some initial, early compilations of his youth means Kissin has added yet another creative outlet in addition to his publicly acclaimed recitations of Yiddish poetry, and writing novels and poems of his own. But modestly smiling, he protests: “No Ilonushka, this has not even crossed my mind.” (photo: taken by Kissin's mother)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">A concert with a very different dynamic, yet equally wonderful when it comes to artistic energy of ingenious dimension and zeitgeist, was the prior evening’s performance by pianist Yuja Wang, who was just named Musical America Artist Of The Year, in collaboration with percussion virtuoso extraordinaire Martin Grubinger Jr. and his Percussive Planet Ensemble.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">In rehearsal, Yuja, a powerhouse at the piano with an electric personality, transcended perceptive musicality in precise communication with Grubinger Jr., whom she later introduced as an internationally renowned “wizard of percussion” during a concert. A film crew of Germany’s Bayrische Rundfunk, led by Alexander Hellbrűgge, the TV station’s journalist for classical programs, follows Grubinger on tour, for their klick klack documentary series on artists’ perspectives.</span></div>
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<img class="alignright wp-image-7397" data-mce-src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/DSC00097-300x202.jpg" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/DSC00097-300x202.jpg" height="430" style="float: right; height: auto; margin: 0.5em 0px 0.5em 1em; max-width: 100%;" width="640" /><span style="background-color: black; color: white;">Born in Salzburg, Grubinger’s strong Austrian accent is personable. His father is part of the ensemble, and every member, including Alexander Georgiev and Leonhard Schmidinger, works equally hard. The virtuoso brings informality to the stage while maintaining excellence, demanding different takes on various passages, which seem to work for the others. Yuja similarly is all business. “I can’t hear myself,” she complains to the sound engineer. She is focused on trying to follow the cues while blending with the percussion sounds immediately surrounding the piano in close proximity. Thanks to her fingers, which seem to be made from steel one moment and velvet the next, Grubinger in turn complains: “The piano is so loud, at times,” as they figure out how to adjust to each others’ soundscapes. </span><img class="alignleft wp-image-7398 size-large" data-mce-src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/IMG_2089-1024x768.jpg" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/IMG_2089-1024x768.jpg" height="768" style="float: left; height: auto; margin: 0.5em 1em 0.5em 0px; max-width: 100%;" width="1024" /><span style="background-color: black; color: white;">But when it works, it’s all fireworks.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">Addressing the audience unassumingly, Grubinger expresses thanks for the invitation to perform. He conveys the dilemma of a percussionist’s typically sidelined visibility within the classical orchestral setup, noting his experience studying at the Bruckner Conservatory in Linz and at the Salzburg Mozarteum, and explaining his desire to create transcriptions that offer more vociferous displays of percussive instrumentation. With the transcription of Bartok’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (for one piano and percussion here), Grubinger makes it clear how exciting it can play out when percussion plays an equally important role. </span><img class="alignright wp-image-7399 size-large" data-mce-src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/IMG_2095-1024x768.jpg" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/IMG_2095-1024x768.jpg" height="768" style="float: right; height: auto; margin: 0.5em 0px 0.5em 1em; max-width: 100%;" width="1024" /><span style="background-color: black; color: white;">In a brand new transcription of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, originally conceived for piano and orchestra, both Grubingers, Jr. and Sr., displayed the full potential of orchestral dimension with such a novel blend. Not only did this performance showcase the incredible range of the percussive idiom to a much broader harmonic end, it also brought out the interest of the piano’s percussive character – a commanding feat in Yuja’s hands – to its full realization.</span><img class="alignleft wp-image-7400 size-large" data-mce-src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/IMG_2103-1024x768.jpg" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/IMG_2103-1024x768.jpg" height="768" style="float: left; height: auto; margin: 0.5em 1em 0.5em 0px; max-width: 100%;" width="1024" /><br />
<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">Yuja, who like the iconic Lang Lang graduated from the Philadelphia Curtis Institute of Music under the tutelage of their mutual mentor Gary Graffman, has built a remarkable international career, fusing dazzling mastery of the piano with a uniquely captivating stage presence. While her insistence on revealing, sexy stage attire has provoked some negative clichés associated with her by traditional critics, her pianistic dexterity has managed to convince even reluctant followers of her trending celebrity, which in itself proves to be an asset in bridging the gap between the generations in audiences of classical music.</span><img class="alignright wp-image-7401 size-large" data-mce-src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/IMG_2106-1024x768.jpg" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/IMG_2106-1024x768.jpg" height="768" style="float: right; height: auto; margin: 0.5em 0px 0.5em 1em; max-width: 100%;" width="1024" /><br />
<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">At Tel Aviv’s Charles Bronfman Auditorium, at least, audiences were ecstatic, clapping and stomping for more as Yuja changed outfits and Grubinger’s ensemble designed the stage to fit the mood and instrumentation for the following encores. Assorted groupings were arranged to incorporate different percussive modes, from pots and pans to marimbas, for varying genres ranging from Piazzola’s Libertango to jazz improvisations. It was an evening quite unlike any other, filled with a tremendous virtuosity and the high energy of a truly electric artistic exchange. Captivated, Zubin Mehta watched this one from the auditorium, next to the orchestra’s leading man, Avi Shoshani, Secretary General of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra: a seat the eminent maestro will take more often following his 2019 retirement. (photo: backstage right after the phenomenal performance, Yuja, Maestro Zubin Mehta and Avi Shoshani, who always got his artists' back.)</span></div>
Ilona Oltuski http://www.blogger.com/profile/18182444676865000920noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7586933906412828614.post-59327635094920800242017-01-07T09:20:00.001-08:002017-01-07T10:39:37.055-08:00Jewish identity in music – pianist Elisaveta Blumina explores Mieczyslaw Weinberg's oeuvre, and her own heritage in the process<div style="font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', 'bitstream charter', times, serif; font-size: 16.0698738098145px; line-height: 19.2838497161865px;">
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">Multilingual, with a vivid personality and eyes that bare her soul, the prodigal pianist born in St. Petersburg (Leningrad at the time), has built her career as performance and recording artist in Germany and beyond, and serves as artistic director of the Hamburg Chamber Music Festival since 2012<em>. (Photo Credit: Frances Marshall)</em></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">When it comes to new discovery, Blumina’s creativity as curator and performer unite, combining skilled professionalism with passionate investigation and expression. In a highly idiosyncratic manner, she follows her instincts and curiosity. Certainly such passion is grounded in her deep motivation to express diverse musical facets, which, like little puzzle pieces put together, are larger than the sum of their meaningful morsels. Time after time, she closes the gaps, shedding as much light on her finds, as on own identity as woman artist of Jewish heritage.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">Growing up in a family of Holocaust survivors, yet in an environment rooted in high brow culture – the Russian school of piano, which dominated the St. Petersburg conservatory and idolized Germany's music tradition – certainly left a strong emotional imprint on her personal and musical identity.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">At age 19, Blumina moved to Hamburg all by herself to advance her piano studies, and there was no looking back. Several years in Florida followed, where her older son was born, then Rome, Geneva, and Madrid, where her younger son was born, and finally Dublin, where she spearheads a music school. Among her teachers she counts Andrἁs Schiff, Evgeny Koroliov, Radu Lupo and Bruno Canino.</span><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-7356" data-mce-src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download-1.jpg" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download-1.jpg" height="540" style="float: right; height: auto; margin: 0.5em 0px 0.5em 1em; max-width: 100%;" width="720" /></div>
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<em><span style="background-color: black; color: white;">(Photo Credit: Mathias Mayer, Laetzhalle from Hamburg Chamber Music Festival, Elisaveta Blumina, Noah Bendix-Balgley, Sennu Laine, Andrei Gridchuk)</span></em></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">She became a frequent guest performer at international festivals, like the Schleswig-Holstein, Colmar, Verbier and Lockenhaus festivals and gained a distinct reputation as pianist, chamber musician and lecturer. While she settled in Germany and did not revisit Russia during the twenty years after she had left her hometown, her connection to Russian music culture grew stronger as she grew more conscious of her personal background. That awareness translated into her drive to bring back some of the pearls of that almost lost traditional Russian Jewish inheritance.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">While Blumina's multifaceted pianistic interests include repertoire that ranges from Russian masters and moderns, to Brahms, to French music - her 2014 CD with the <em>Ensemble Blumina Trio</em> (with Kalev Kuljus, Oboe, and Mathias Baier, Bassoon) features works of French chamber music from the 20<sup>th</sup> and 21<sup>st</sup> centuries and garnered the Echo Price of that category - it became her passion to help composers who had remained unjustifiably unknown to the public, be heard anew.</span><img alt="" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-7357" data-mce-src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download-2.jpg" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download-2.jpg" height="960" style="float: left; height: auto; margin: 0.5em 1em 0.5em 0px; max-width: 100%;" width="540" /></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">It is no coincidence that her special focus on Jewish composers received an engaged reception throughout Germany, especially with the second postwar generation.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">Founded by Blumina in 2014, the <em>Giluim</em> Festival in Schoenebeck – Hebrew for ‘discoveries’ – became an additional platform to expose such lost art with a Jewish component, pairing unheard performers like George Dreyfus with the work of renowned Jewish composers, like Gershwin and Mendelssohn.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">In 2014, Blumina also devoted much attention to the composer Grigori Samuilowitch Fried, a contemporary of Weinberg. Blumina also became fascinated with thecompendium of female Jewish composers, many of them cultural icons of their time, who found a special place in Blumina's heart. She has devoted diverse programs ofher Hamburg Chamber Music Festival to these Jewish musical heroines, planning to expand the exposure of their works and continue to explore their challenging cultural roles as women, musicians and Jews in society. (photo: courtesy of artist)</span></div>
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<img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-7358" data-mce-src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download-3.jpg" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download-3.jpg" height="1152" style="float: right; height: auto; margin: 0.5em 0px 0.5em 1em; max-width: 100%;" width="1153" /><span style="background-color: black; color: white;">Broadening her “exponents'” presence with her curatorial ambitions has become as important as Blumina’s performances as a pianist and chamber musician, which in the meantime, also brings her annually to Safed, as participant at the <em>Israeli Klezmer Festival</em>. (photo: courtesy of artist)</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">Perhaps none of Blumina’s efforts, though, has taken on such panoramic volume and broad follower-ship than her rediscovery of Polish-Jewish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg. With her continued championship of Weinberg's brilliant work, Blumina has managed to play a central role in a recent perpetual Weinberg Renaissance.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">And her enthusiasm is contagious.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">Blumina was in New York when Weinberg’s work was first brought to her attention in 1995 by Russian Cellist Yosif Feigelson, who had already recorded some of Weinberg's works.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">It was then she realized she had been familiar with Weinberg's music all along, as had most everybody growing up in Russia at the time, through his compositions for films including the beloved cartoon <em>Winnie the Pooh.</em></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">Upon further research, she was surprised to find that this favorite melody from her childhood was just one of sixty-five film scores Weinberg produced next to his prolific output of twenty-six symphonies, seven concertos, seventeen string quartets, twenty-eight sonatas for various instruments, seven operas and ballets and various other works, including a requiem and countless songs.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">Sixteen albums of Weinberg's music were released on the Olympia label between 1994 and 2000, many of them releases of Soviet-era recordings of live premiere performances; this recorded repertoire gives a representation of the composer’s oeuvre, alas with differing recording qualities (Reilly 2000). An important force behind these recordings was Tommy Persson, and subsequently releases on the Chandos label followed.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">When Blumina started to explore the substantial musical material, she fell in love with his <em>Children Note Books, I-III, Op. 16, 19, and 23, </em>consisting of 23 pieces for piano, which had been written in 1944 for his daughter Viktoria.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">Just recently, Blumina had a chance to meet with Viktoria in person in Israel, where she had emigrated with her mother Nataliya (Weinberg's first wife) in 1972. The meeting was momentous, remembers Blumina: “An important personal connection for me was the fact that perhaps the most beautiful of Weinberg's works, which also incidentally started my big recording project with <em>CPO</em>, was dedicated to her.” Blumina had the opportunity to interview Viktoria in her native Russian language, hearing about her close relationship with her father, and her memories of listening to her father's compositions before they were played through for his close friends: Dmitri Shostakovitch, Boris Tschaikowski and Volik Bunin. Viktoria used to add the page numbers by hand into her father's manuscripts, and she accompanied him to rehearsals of his new works. Music remained in the forefront of Weinberg’s daily routine, just like it had dominated his youth in Warsaw, where his father practiced violin and composed for a Jewish theater company, he also conducted. (photo: Deutschland Radio Kultur, Berlin)</span><img alt="" class="alignleft size-full wp-image-7359" data-mce-src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download-4.jpg" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download-4.jpg" height="960" style="float: left; height: auto; margin: 0.5em 1em 0.5em 0px; max-width: 100%;" width="540" /></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">Interestingly, it was Weinberg's Jewish identity, which initially had led to his persecution, subjugationand neglect, that brought him the renewed interest he so well deserved.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">“His music is overflowing with Jewish spirit and sentiment, and his melodies carry in them the essence of Jewish pain and melancholy,” says Blumina, who, several years ago, began a series of recordings for the <em>CPO </em>label which upon completion will span Weinberg's complete collection of Solo Piano and some of his Chamber Music works. “Once I started to occupy myself with his work, I realized I just had to go deeper and deeper. His work is full of individual idioms, diverse and multifaceted, it just did not let me go.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">Others feel equally engaged after making the acquaintance with Weinberg's talent. Star violinist Gidon Kremer once thanked Blumina personally for having infected him with her “feverish passion” for the composer, and since has performed Weinberg on a regular basis. In 2015, he and rising star pianist Daniil Trifonov put Weinberg on Carnegie Hall's stage. This season under the title: “Masks and Faces,” Kremer and his exalted Baltic chamber group, <em>Kremeratica</em>, will present works by Weinberg, Tschaikovsky, Mussorgsky and Arvo Paert at New York's 92Y, during his US tour, placing Weinberg's presence firmly within Russia's artistic heritage. (photo: Gidon Kremer with Elisaveta Blumina, courtesy of artist)</span><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-7360" data-mce-src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download-5.jpg" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download-5.jpg" height="453" style="float: right; height: auto; margin: 0.5em 0px 0.5em 1em; max-width: 100%;" width="682" /></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">Weinberg [sometimes appears also in print as Vainberg or Vajnberg – New Grove Dictionary] was born 1919 in Warsaw and lost his entire family during the Holocaust. Escaping Nazi occupation, he fled his native Poland to the Soviet Union, and following a personal invitation from the famed composer Dmitri Shostakovitch to perform for him in Moscow after receiving the score of his First Symphony, settled there, in close proximity. Suffering arrest, interrogation and imprisonment in 1953 under Stalin's Anti-Semitic persecutions, Weinberg only barely escaped deportation to Siberia thanks to Shostakovitch's intervention on his behalf and Stalin's timely death. Official recognition was only slow to follow in his life in form of honorary titles: “Honored Artist of the Russian Republic” in 1971, “People's Artist of the Russian Republic” in 1980 and “State Prize of the UDSSR” in 1990, but he died in1996 in poor health and largely forgotten, his legacy almost lost behind the Iron Curtain.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">“While often engaged with and inspired by some of the tragic events surrounding his life, Weinberg's artistic imagination stands above his life's biographic accounts, standing the test of time. While uniquely present, his personal idiom rises above any biographical data, connecting it to a larger artistic truth and humanistic experience,“ says David Fanning in his autobiography, which was published in 2010, partially based on materials collected by Per Skans, who passed away in 2007 before finalizing publication.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">Blumina, who is currently assembling her own collective of interviews for her upcoming Weinberg compendium with musicians who directly collaborated with Weinberg and include among others Pavel Kogan, Thomas Sanderling and Michail Jurowski, aims to dig deep:“Despite his immense productivity during his Soviet years, Weinberg continuously suffered from Antisemitic sentiments, affecting both his work and personal life. During all of his life he remained an outsider within Soviet society, keeping his strong polish accent and a low profile, often missing out on opportunities, which were given to others instead.” she says. When Fanning mentions that Weinberg never allowed himself to be “victimized by oppression,” Blumina feels he was rather “deeply affected” by it. “His solace were those rare triumphant moments, when his work was championed by established artists like violinists David Oistrach, Rudolf Barshaj and Leonid Kogan, cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, pianist Emil Gilels, the Borodin Quartet and conductors Kirill Kondrashin and Vladimir Fedoseyev.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">The conductor Thomas Sanderling, another great champion of Weinberg's works, with whom Blumina also recorded her latest, much lauded CD of works by post-Soviet composers Ustvolskaja, Silvestrov and Kanchelli with the Stuttgart Chamber Orchestra, (released in September of 2016 on Naxos' Grand Piano label) describes Weinberg as:</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">” A human being of incredible purity; he did not live in a country – not in the reality that surrounded him.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">Weinberg found his most powerful and fervent advocate, friend and inspiration during his life in Dmitri Shostakovitch, who, already impressed by Weinberg's promising early work, engaged on behalf of the young composer with the KGB, safeguarding him from deportation, and commended his work in public. While never enrolled as his pupil, Weinberg deeply admired Shostakovitch's work and persona, (according to Fanning) declaring himself as his “pupil, his flesh and blood.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">But there are certainly many other influences observable in Weinberg's work, like those of Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Bartók and Mahler for example.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">“Both Shostakovitch and Weinberg worked across a wide range of genres and in a gamut of styles, from folk idioms (including Jewish ones especially for Weinberg) to twelve-note elements. Yet for all the unmistakable echoes of his revered role model, Weinberg,” observes Fanning, “retained a higher level of independence than many of his Soviet colleagues wanted to believe, distancing himself both from official academic conservatism and, in the 1960s and after, from the younger generations' fervent embrace of Western-style modernism.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">And Robert R. Reilly, music critic of Crisis Magazine, points out: “Like Shostakovitch, Weinberg wrote expansive music with big gestures and extraordinarily long-lined melodies...both composers were classical symphonists who wrote essentially tonally oriented music... and [certainly], each composer in tribute, liberally quoted the others works. [But] the similarities with Shostakovitch, may cause one to overlook Weinberg's own significant melodic gift and his extraordinary ability to develop [highly original] themes. Weinberg, [at times ridiculed as ‘the little Shostakovitch]’ worked with traditional harmonic and tonal expectations and rarely failed to meet them in satisfying and novel ways. He could sustain a sense of expectancy over long spans of time with vast melodic and contrapuntal structures. Weinberg was more romantic than Shostakovitch, and wrote with irony, sometimes humor, instead of Shostakovitch's sardonic bombast and cutting edge. Of Weinberg's Sixth Symphony, Shostakovitch had exclaimed: ‘I wished I could put my own name to this symphony,’ and he dedicated his tenth string quartet to Weinberg. “</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">“Terminally ill, in March of 1975, Shostakovitch attended all of the rehearsals for the premiere of Weinberg's opera <em>The Madonna and the Soldier,”</em> writes Martin Anderson (Classical.net 1996).</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">He also knows about Weinberg's role as collaborating pianist with Shostakovitch: “When Shostakovitch presented his latest works to the Composer's Union and to the Soviet Ministry of Culture , it was generally in four-hand versions, in which Weinberg was his habitual accompanist. In 1967, Weinberg replaced the ailing Shostakovitch in the premiere of his <em>Seven Romances on Poems</em> by Alexander Blok, with Vishnevskaya, Oistrakh and Rostropovich.”</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">In the last years, some of Weinberg's operas have received live performances to high acclaim in Germany and Austria.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">In 2015, The Lyric Opera of Chicago presented David Pountey's production of Weinberg's opera "The Passenger" Op.97 (1967-68) under Sir Andrew Davis; certainly further confirmation for the increased appreciation of Weinberg's idiom internationally. (photo credit: Weinberg by Tommy Persson © Olga Rakhalskaya)</span><img alt="" class="alignright size-full wp-image-7361" data-mce-src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download-6.jpg" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/download-6.jpg" height="349" style="float: right; height: auto; margin: 0.5em 0px 0.5em 1em; max-width: 100%;" width="620" /></div>
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<span style="background-color: black; color: white;">But despite all recent activity, Weinberg can still be regarded as a composer whose work leaves room for revelation to performers, concert producers and new audiences alike. Hopefully, more passionate champions of his work like Blumina will follow suit, inspiring further emanation of his work.</span></div>
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Ilona Oltuski http://www.blogger.com/profile/18182444676865000920noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7586933906412828614.post-41118859571776738702016-12-04T18:42:00.001-08:002016-12-04T18:42:36.024-08:00AICF - In Support Of Israel's Talent Network<div style="color: #333333; font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 16.431676864624px; line-height: 26.2906818389893px;">
<img alt="dsc00064" class="alignright size-blog-large-image wp-image-7291" data-mce-src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/DSC00064-848x300.jpg" height="300" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/DSC00064-848x300.jpg" style="float: right; height: auto; margin: 0.5em 0px 0.5em 1em; max-width: 100%;" width="848" />An astounding display of musical talent was offered to guests and supporters at the festive 77th America-Israel Cultural Foundation Gala last Tuesday evening, held at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater under the auspices of Israel’s Consul General in New York, Dani Dayan. (Photo: Ilona Oltuski -Prize ceremony David Stern for Ivry Gitlis )<br />Honoring the memory of Vera Stern, the musical program unified three generations of virtuosi, all of whom had received support from AICF at the start of their careers. The partaking artists were friends, colleagues, students or protégés of the influential music power couple Vera and Isaac Stern, and included world-renowned performers Itzhak Perlman and Yefim Bronfman. The Sterns’ three children, David, Michael and Shira, guided audiences through the program, which was compiled according to Vera’s musical taste spanning works by Prokofiev, Schubert, Beethoven, Mozart, Bloch, Chopin, Bach and Brahms; the trio of siblings shared personal remarks and historic memories in between performances by ensembles of interchanging sizes and configurations.<br />After saving Carnegie Hall and inspiring its development as one of the premier music institutions under his presidency, Isaac, the great performer and educator and the ever-energetic Vera, left their cultural legacy and a remarkable imprint that still holds its impact on today’s classical music scene.<br />Vera became involved with AICF in 1960, realizing the dire need for support for local talent in Israel. Through AICF’s dual corresponding activities in Tel Aviv and New York, American patrons are able to actively support music and art education in Israel, making it possible to train aspiring talent “chuz la aretz,” outside of Israel, ultimately introducing new artists to international audiences, while helping them to forge the networks careers are built upon.<br />In turn, some of its great artists return for performances in Israel, keeping the cultural exchange fluid.<br />Although the opportunities to develop their talents and continue to build careers abroad represent an ideal for many capable Israeli musicians, the musical import of Israel’s talent - many of Russian heritage - to the US and Europe has also created a bit of a newly exiled generation. Less obvious perhaps in a profession that requires so much touring, but Israeli talent still aims to prove career-worthy outside of their native borders, which of course in Israel’s case spans a comparatively minuscule region, creating a difficult scenario for a performer.<br />Given its small population, the amount of talent emerging in Israel is quite impressive, and many of the artists serve as Israel’s “ambassadors,” taking on the responsibility of presenting Israel’s strong embrace of international culture, while others rather distance themselves from being labeled.</div>
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Under the leadership of its New York director, David Homan, AICF has expanded its outreach into all creative areas, including dance, fine art, theater, and to the media and production side of curating and performance, which made this year’s inaugural ‘Vera Stern King Solomon Award’ especially meaningful.<img alt="dsc00068" class="alignright wp-image-7292 size-large" data-mce-src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/DSC00068-1024x683.jpg" height="683" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/DSC00068-1024x683.jpg" style="float: right; height: auto; margin: 0.5em 0px 0.5em 1em; max-width: 100%;" width="1024" /><br />Photo; Ilona Oltuski Alon Goldstein ( piano) Vadim Guzman ( violin)</div>
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The prize was presented by Peter Gelb, General Manager of the Metropolitan Opera, to media expert, producer, and President and CEO of WNET, Neal Shapiro, to reward visionary programming in support of the arts. The other award this evening, the ‘William A. Schwarz Aviv Award’ named for AICF’s previous longtime president William Schwarz, was presented by Vera Stern’s son, David, to a much-beloved figure of the music world, the violinist and perpetual enfant terrible, Ivry Gitlis, who embraced the audience saying: “Je vous aime le plus (you are my very favorite),” bringing the evening’s sentimental touch into the foreground.<br />The opening work of the evening, Prokofiev’s Overture on Jewish Themes, op.34 provided an early ample outlook on the caliber of the evening’s performers, with Alexander Fiterstein (clarinet), Vadim Gluzman and Itamar Zorman (violins), Shmuel Katz (viola), and Yefim Bronfman at the piano.<img alt="dsc00077" class="alignright wp-image-7293 size-large" data-mce-src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/DSC00077-1024x683.jpg" height="683" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/DSC00077-1024x683.jpg" style="float: right; height: auto; margin: 0.5em 0px 0.5em 1em; max-width: 100%;" width="1024" /> Other highlights included a perceptive rendering of Ernest Bloch’s From Jewish Life – Baal Shem: Nigun by pianist Alon Goldstein with Vadim Guzman, a velvety performance by soprano Rinat Shaham in Bach’s Erbarme Dich from St. Matthew Passion, with a trio accompaniment by Itzhak Perlman (violin), Amit Peled (cello) and Alon Goldstein, as well as the scorching finale of Brahm’s Piano Quintet in F minor with Yefim Bronfman, Itzhak Perlman, Vadim Guzman, Shmuel Katz, and Amit Peled, closing with another Opus 34.<img alt="dsc00088" class="alignright size-blog-large-image wp-image-7294" data-mce-src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/DSC00088-848x300.jpg" height="300" src="http://www.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/DSC00088-848x300.jpg" style="float: right; height: auto; margin: 0.5em 0px 0.5em 1em; max-width: 100%;" width="848" /><br />Pianist Tomer Gewirtzman represented the new generation of young Israeli artists. As winner of the Young Concert Artists International Auditions, Gewirtzman makes his New York recital debut on December 13th at Merkin Hall. He received the Audience Price at the AICF Aviv Competition in 2013.</div>
Ilona Oltuski http://www.blogger.com/profile/18182444676865000920noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7586933906412828614.post-40690178280141501632016-11-18T08:14:00.001-08:002016-12-01T19:56:58.549-08:00Collected Counsel – Steven Isserlis revisits Schumann’s Advice to Young Musicians<div style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 13.1453409194946px; line-height: 19px;">
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<span data-mce-style="font-size: 13px;" style="font-size: 13px;">Steven Isserlis meets the pearls of wisdom in Robert Schumann’s </span><em data-mce-style="font-size: 13px;" style="font-size: 13px;">Advice to Young Musicians</em><span data-mce-style="font-size: 13px;" style="font-size: 13px;">, originally meant to accompany the master’s renowned 1848 piano suite, </span><em data-mce-style="font-size: 13px;" style="font-size: 13px;">Album for the Young</em><span data-mce-style="font-size: 13px;" style="font-size: 13px;">, with directness and allure. Isserlis relates guidance from his vast experience as a performer, educator and writer/broadcaster, which, while closely based on Schumann’s precious aphorisms, adds his own didactic playfulness. His revised suggestions and bonus chapter, which outline his personal interpretations on Schumann’s original work in a light-hearted and humorous tone, avoid the trap of haughty weightiness while managing to address high-minded ideals with the seriousness of the matter at heart.</span></div>
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With recommendations like the importance “to stay true to one’s convictions, courageous in facing adversity and to never lose the love for music itself,” Isserlis keeps the conversation simple, real and encouraging, counterbalancing much of the anxiety-provoking frenzy that generally dominates the competitive scenes typical of music institutions.</div>
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With many contradicting opinions on the subject available, Isserlis does not underestimate the importance of putting things into perspective, especially when it comes to overzealous practice habits: “Genuine technical command allows us to play the music we’re performing without having to think about the [technical] difficulties; it gives us the freedom to listen to ourselves. The point of scales and exercises, ultimately, is to help our fingers/voices acquire the precision they need in order to produce the interpretation we hear in our heads/hearts.”</div>
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With his don’ts striking wit more often than his dos, he may just prevent another generation’s disastrous misconstruction of the craft: “…Don’t turn your performance into a lecture-recital! How many times does one play Bach, for instance and we hear from their playing what they’ve learned about double-dotting, ornamentation, etc.; and we also hear that they know when the music is changing key, because they take time over every modulation. The music will modulate whether you point it out or not…Ideally there should be no sense that you’ve made decisions in advance – more the impression that you are (re)creating as you perform. That way, the music you play will always sound alive – and new.”</div>
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Intrigued by the composer’s musical genius, Isserlis, an acclaimed British cellist, has devoted much of his illustrious career up to this point to Schumann’s oeuvre, making him a recipient of the Schumann Prize of the City of Zwieckau, where Schumann was born. The cellist’s chamber cycles have been staged internationally and include programs about varied aspects of the fascinating composer’s life and work, revealing a keen understanding and personal kinship to the fantastical world of the master’s imagination, musical idealism and purity.</div>
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Especially noteworthy are Isserlis’ efforts in ‘recovering’ the masters’ lesser-known works as part of a vehement effort to promote Schumann. In 2010, Schumann’s bicentenary, he wrote Grammophone (with <em>Philistines</em> in mind):</div>
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“Schumann's music is curiously alive today. One cannot pigeonhole him (perhaps that's why critics have difficulties); he is too experimental, too close to the edge of the known sound world. Harmonically, rhythmically, emotionally he is way ahead of his time – outside of time, in fact, looking simultaneously into the past and the future…In short, he is a genius, unlike any other, one who can lead us into worlds undreamed of by anyone else. Every time I work on his music (as I am now doing for my upcoming residence at the Cheltenham festival), I marvel afresh, not just at the power of his imagination, but also at the brilliance of his mind. It is so exciting to follow his thought patterns as he moulds formal conventions into new, half-hidden shapes: miracle after miracle,” he offers, explaining his ongoing fascination with Schumann, the man his work.<br />
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“This bicentenary is the chance for more of us to engage with him (concert promoters, record companies and performers permitting). Far be it from me to be fanatical – but if you catch anyone being condescending about any aspect of Schumann's music or personality this year, please feel free to gently, but firmly, shoot them. For their own good.”</div>
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Isserlis’ examining of the master’s directions on how to implement artistic goals into routine principals could open up a slew of possible reflections on the creative process. He presents thoughtful critique on the role of the musician within society, the tradition of music education and the goal of music performance to a higher end, leaving room for a more in-depth evaluation of the creative experience of young musicians. While Isserlis could clearly analyze such matters in a wider context, he rather chooses here – in tune with Schumann’s inflections – to adhere to the more concrete approach, giving comprised, practical ‘how-to’ directions, and addressing the nascent musician in this intimate discourse.</div>
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Bestowed with a direct lineal heritage of musical tradition, as well as a code of ethics, by his great mentors Jane Cowan, Sándor Végh, György Kurtág and Ferenc Rados, each of whom inspired Isserlis the musician and helped shape Isserlis the cellist in their own personal manner, Isserlis the educator is in turn consistently reaching out to the next generation. About the teachers in his life he has said: “I think I am right in saying that all four of these unique visionaries, different as they were/are, shared a basic set of musical values. In every lesson I took or observed with any of them, there was an over-riding goal: to help the student realize the composer’s vision. It hardly needs saying that none of them were interested in career for its own sake – in treating music like a competitive sport, in fact, which alas is the case in all too many institutions around the world today. These sages followed their musical ideals, and tried to help others do the same; what is the point in being a musician if one is not an idealist?” (Quoted from his 2014 speech at the Prussia Cove Chamber Music Festival).</div>
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One of the fascinating discoveries of Isserlis’ mentorship may lie in his recognition that disciplined timing is everything. A set routine – a crucial element for the fostering of inspiration – builds a central aspect of his illustrated children books: <em>Why Beethoven Threw the Stew</em> and its sequel, <em>Why Handel Waggled his Wig</em>, both published by Faber and Faber in 2001 and 2006 respectively. Implementing good habits from the beginning, Isserlis describes the minutely detailed daily schedule of Tchaikovsky, for example, explaining the importance of making time for the mundane to the process of achieving the sublime: “Tchaikovsky will work from 9.30 until one o’clock. After that will come lunch, the main meal of the day, and then a walk of exactly two hours. (An hour and fifty-five minutes isn’t enough. Tchaikovsky is sure that he needs precisely two hours for the sake of his health.) He has to be alone for this, because he’s still composing in his head. The only problem is that the local children know that he’s a soft touch, because he loves children, and also because he loves to give his money away; so they will probably ambush him and beg for coins until he gives in and they run off, satisfied.” (Quoted from <em>Why Handel Wagged his Wig</em>).</div>
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Isserlis delivers his commentary with a particular ‘soft touch,’ always reflective of the joy he takes in passing his love for music and Schumann on to the next generation.</div>
Ilona Oltuski http://www.blogger.com/profile/18182444676865000920noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7586933906412828614.post-20092771456789741532016-11-10T09:12:00.001-08:002016-12-01T20:05:11.640-08:00ASPECT Foundation for Music and Art – classical concerts building on cultural and communal context<div style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">
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From its 2011 beginnings in London’s bustling concert scene, the classical music series ASPECT embraced presentations that integrate classical music programs in a specific cultural framework. With its syllabus of accompanying talks surrounding its traditional classical music programs, examining everything from composers’ lives and the historic relevance of their works, to connections between musical expression, art and poetry, the not-for-profit foundation became widely frequented, especially within London’s large community of actively engaged amateur musicians.</div>
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A brainchild of Russian-American culture devotee and former pianist Irina Knaster, the series has now – parallel to Irina’s move to New York – found a new musical home at Columbia University’s Italian Academy. ( Photo credit: Andy Filimon - Irina Knaster surrounded by collaborating artists )</div>
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The series’ New York debut on October 5<sup>th</sup> featured a sold out one-off concert, exploring little known links between Mozart and Bach, whose works were performed by stellar artists. Violinist Dmitry Sitkovetsky, cellist Sergey Antonov, violist Dov Scheindlin and pianist extraordinaire Ignat Solzhenitsyn collaborated in various combinations with remarks interjected by Yale’s renowned professor, musicologist Paul Berry to the evening’s thematic: “Bach and Mozart, a lasting influence.” Clearly caught up in his calling, his elucidations might have fared better with a little less lecturing from the page, but his remarks were informative and thoughtful; if perhaps a little too academic for most of the audience members’ tastes. Any disappointment, though, was more than made up for by the stellar musicians who performed with great excellence and passion. Also delightful was the socially openhanded reception in the venue’s substantial foyer following the concert; many of the attending audience members knew some of the musicians, the organizers, or each other, and the crowd’s chemistry and enjoyment clearly evidenced the value of one of ASEPCT’s attractions: a cohesive, active community of musical people and fans of the artists. The attendance of Dmitry Sitkovetsky’s famed mother Bella Davidovich, renowned as one of Russia’s iconic pianists and teachers, was a special bonus, and it did not take long for her to become surrounded by a flock of former students and admirers.<span style="font-size: 13.1453409194946px;">( Photo credit: Andy Filimon, violinist Dmitry Sitkovetsky and Paul Berry)</span><br />
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An important facet of the series’ inspiration though lies in its alliance with musicians who are not necessarily favored by mainstream audiences. Says Knaster: “Many of the greatest musicians are not interested in or just not invested enough to create a huge PR following around them, but they are the true ‘bread and butter’ musicians, dedicated to music for the sake of music. They devote every minute of their time and effort to their work, learning new repertoire, teaching and well, playing with musicians they enjoy working with already, not necessarily looking out for opportunities that will further their own careers. For me, those are the real kind of artists who deserve support and these are the kind of artists that should be featured in the series.” Knaster’s criterion for choosing performers for her series is neither following in-demand “young and sexy” performers, nor is she exclusively looking for artists who are hugely renowned. She says, “even though artists that have an interesting following are geared to bring along some attractive collaborations, every concert is different. Sometimes programming is conceived around a specific artist; sometimes artists bring a whole concept or a specific presentation along.” Thematic choices of the series have been open ended themes, like “Composers on Composers,” Musical Capitals,” “Great Muses,” or” Words on Music,” with performers touching on a specific angle.<br />
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Sometimes it’s either the charismatic speaker who can have an enlightening impact, or the artist who connects particularly well with the audience. Thanks to the great support of the foundation’s sponsorship, Knaster has presented twenty-seven London concerts, pamphlets of each she collects in a big folder that she affectionately refers to as her ‘bible,’ flipping through the pages reminiscing, and a little bit in awe. She has received some positive press, including an article in <em>The Strad</em>, which she feels impacts her audiences less than it does her artists. “It’s a lot of trial and error that makes the series grow, and apparently the more parts there are to an event, the more there is that can go wrong,” she says. It is a risk, however, that the petite yet vigorous young woman, who admits to being somewhat of a perfectionist, is willing to take. “When it all comes together, it’s exhilarating,” she explains, “one of my favorite ones was actually the last concert in London; it just worked perfectly.”</div>
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She refers to a concert that centered on the love triangle of Shostakovich, Rostropovich and Britten, presented by BBC’s Lain Burnside, a concert she feels had exactly the right balance of instruction, music and personal input, and also benefitted from being presented in the amazing venue, she found after trying other locations for the series concerts: Notting Hill’s recently renovated 20<sup>th</sup> Century Theatre, which fit the ideal audience of 200 that Knaster had in mind. That last London evening was also enhanced by the presence of a former classmate of Rostropovich, equipped with old photos of him with Britten. “It was just special in every aspect, but projects are likely to take on a life of their own,” says Knaster.</div>
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Clearly the orchestration of every detail becomes much more important in an overall experience that focuses on music, but does not end there. “In the concert hall, people come to listen to the music, often holding their coat on their lap and then are getting up and leave without talking about their experience much, nor connecting with others. Here, you check your coat at the wardrobe, and you hopefully come away with an all-around meaningful encounter.”</div>
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Bringing the audience and the artists together, it seems the reception does fulfill an important objective, perhaps by balancing the emotional impact of the music, perhaps by affirming that audience members have become individual members of this newly-created social environment, or perhaps just by allowing that audiences continue to nourish and nosh.</div>
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While Knaster counts on the help of some of her former London collaborators, especially that of her former Art Professor, Patrick Bade, as well as longtime friend and BBC producer Misha Donat, getting started in New York brings a whole slew of new players onto her team.</div>
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Knaster’s versatile experiences are certainly a plus in her new endeavor. In addition to her education as a pianist, Knaster absolved a master’s program in art history and studied law, working as a corporate lawyer for an American company in Russia for many years during Russia’s phase of opening to the Western World. For personal advice, she has turned to New York’s legendary Edna Landau, co-founder of IMG and former personal manager of piano prodigy Evgeny Kissin. Edna, whose experience and endless knowledge of everything musical in the city, currently disperses career advice to conservatory students and musical talent throughout the country and knows just about every musician.</div>
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It looks like even if all the kinks haven’t been ironed out before Aspect’s next concert, it won’t take another twenty-seven concerts to land Knaster’s programing in the public eye as a local institution. New Yorkers may not be able to rely on a community of amateurs as huge and engaged as that which London has to offer, but the New York music scene is quick to pick up on refined programming and solid performers, and not one to dismiss socially accommodating presentations. With political worlds separating society increasingly, perhaps New York needs an active music community more than ever.<br />
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ASPECT’s next concert, titled “Romantic Vienna,” will take place on January 26<sup>th</sup> and will present works by the Austrian capital’s musical pillars that frame either end of the Romantic Movement: Schubert and Brahms. It will feature Arnaud Sussmann, violin, Paul Neubauer, viola, Rafael Figueroa, cello and Vsevolod Dvorkin, piano, emceed with an illustrated talk by BBC broadcaster Stephen Johnson. You can read more about this event and about the ASPECT Foundation at <a data-mce-href="http://www.aspectfoundation.net/" href="http://www.aspectfoundation.net/">www.aspectfoundation.net</a>.</div>
Ilona Oltuski http://www.blogger.com/profile/18182444676865000920noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7586933906412828614.post-2050526682980744452016-10-18T21:04:00.001-07:002016-10-18T21:04:58.834-07:00Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra opens the 92Y season with two life-affirming works: a premiere by George Tsontakis and Mozart’s Concerto No 23, in A major with pianist Jeremy Denk. <div style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', 'Bitstream Charter', Times, serif; font-size: 13px; line-height: 19px;">
<a data-mce-href="http://english.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/IMG_1820.jpg" href="http://english.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/IMG_1820.jpg"><img alt="" class="alignleft wp-image-3480" data-mce-src="http://english.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/IMG_1820-1024x768.jpg" height="538" src="http://english.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/IMG_1820-1024x768.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: left;" title="IMG_1820" width="717" /></a>Opening night of this season at the 92Y featured its two rather contrasting highlights in the first half of the evening: George Tsontakis’ New York premiere of <em>O MIKROS, O MEGAS</em>, and Mozart’s <em>Concerto No.23 in A major</em> with pianist extraordinaire, MacArthur Fellow Jeremy Denk, performing as soloist with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra (SPCO).</div>
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Photos: Ilona Oltuski</div>
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In its 58<sup>th</sup> season, the SPCO certainly may be regarded as a very remarkable chamber ensemble of its kind, consisting of a virtuoso cast of musicians of vast versatility primarily performing without a conductor. The ensemble is devoted to a broad spectrum of repertoire, possessing a dynamic and much-lauded interest in innovative contemporary works (to date, the SPCO has commissioned 146 new works).</div>
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This affinity shone in Tsontakis’ adventurous four-part composition, which the composer himself described as: “…a reflection on recent world circumstances including the tumbling world, loss of friends and [his] own personal advancement into the foothills of an ageless maturity.” The American-born Greek composer is currently composer-in-residence at the Bard Conservatory and Aspen Music Festival, and has formerly been affiliated with Oxford Philomusica, Albany Symphony and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.<a data-mce-href="http://english.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/IMG_18161.jpg" href="http://english.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/IMG_18161.jpg"><img alt="" class="alignright wp-image-3482" data-mce-src="http://english.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/IMG_18161-768x1024.jpg" height="430" src="http://english.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/IMG_18161-768x1024.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: right;" title="IMG_1816" width="323" /></a></div>
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The virulent showcased piece, the title of which while announced personally by Tsontakis sounded vaguely more like an antioxidant remedy than a contemporary composition, offered a vibrant sonic spectrum of all strings within a life-affirming cosmic cycle. The title is in fact loosely inspired by the opening lines of <em>Axion Esti</em>, by contemporary Greek poet Odysseus Elytis: “<em>Attos O Kosmos, O Mikros, O Megas,</em>” (This tiny world, this enormous world).</div>
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Says Tsontakis: “It is to me that within the quietest and most inwardly moments of the work, the world seems to fully impose its power and enormity. At the same time, the figurative ‘flip-side’ of my work’s title could well be ‘This tiny fleeting life, this huge eternal life…’ There are faster movements among the four and imploding episodes, but the heart and largeness of the work are made manifest in the second and last. All movements end quietly, and the last with my most preferred ending, an [open ended] ‘dot dot dot’ figure…”</div>
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SPCO has previously collaborated with the composer on three of his works’ world premieres, earning a 2005 international Grawemeyer Award and Grammy nomination. It is this kind of artistic continuum – a special mark of the ensemble and fundamental criteria of its creative outlook, as well as a pursuit of mutual growth with its associated artists – that has inspired many musicians, and has in turn had a significant impact on the ensemble’s advancement. Artistic partners of the ensemble throughout the years have included renowned soloists like Pierre-Laurent Aimard, Christian Zacharias, Joshua Bell and Dawn Upshaw.</div>
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Among the current flock of collaborating artistic partners are Martin Fröst, Patricia Kopatchinskaja, Thomas Zehetmayer and Jeremy Denk, who, in a most sparkling interaction brought out the full range of Mozart’s concerto to the stage – very different from Tsontakis’ piece, yet equal in energy and power.</div>
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<a data-mce-href="http://english.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/IMG_1831.jpg" href="http://english.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/IMG_1831.jpg"><img alt="" class="alignleft wp-image-3483" data-mce-src="http://english.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/IMG_1831-1024x768.jpg" height="277" src="http://english.getclassical.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/IMG_1831-1024x768.jpg" style="border: 0px; float: left;" title="IMG_1831" width="368" /></a>The intense and gratifying interface between the pianist and the ensemble’s own Alexander Fiterstein is particularly worthy of note; Denk often leaned in sideways to listen closely to the essential clarinet part. The musicians know each other well. Since 2014 the pianist partners with SPCO in collaborative performances. Named one of the best of 2012 by <em>The New Yorker</em>, his debut recording for Nonesuch paired old and new masterworks; Beethoven's Piano Sonata No.32, Op.111, with Gyŏrgy Ligeti’s Études.</div>
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This juxta-positioning tends to not only highlight the immense differences between two worlds, but brings out many new sounding idioms in the traditional pieces, while giving gravity to the new. It seem to lend the listener a different perspective and outlook, leading to a deeper understanding of both - a comparative listening course.</div>
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As was felt in the evening's performance, there were connecting elements but also keen differences, sharpening the ear and mind. What comes before matters, setting up a different mood for what is to follow; programming matters. And if what follows is as lively and refined as it was here, that also impacts how one feels about what had come before - making this a complete experience.</div>
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Touring nationally and internationally, SPCO has recently fortified its local presence with its own Ordway Concert Hall, but the orchestra’s dedication to community outreach, evidenced by its educational and family-oriented programming and notably affordable ticket subscriptions, has also motivated the organization to program accessible concerts in venues throughout the various neighborhoods of the Twin cities’ metropolitan area. Rather than investing in a grandiose orchestral format requiring highly-funded conductor posts, under the leadership of Managing Director and President Jon Limbacher, SPCO invests into its instrumental performers and nourishes wider audiences, “expanding accessibility even further by inviting children and students to attend unlimited SPCO concerts for free.” This, of course, is an approach shared by the 92Y with its many benefits and special offers like the “Majors for Minors” program, which allows for kids and teens aged 8-18 to attend concerts for free with only one adult ticket purchase.</div>
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It has been five years since SPCO performed at New York’s Carnegie Hall, and the orchestra was welcomed to the 92Y enthusiastically by a sold out hall; only few audience members left after intermission before the Schubert <em>Symphony, No.2 in B-flat major</em>, which while proficiently performed, did not live up fully to the elated exhilaration of the evening’s first half.</div>
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Ilona Oltuski http://www.blogger.com/profile/18182444676865000920noreply@blogger.com0