Mystic of the piano. The outstanding pianist Grigorijs Sokolovs / Diena will perform in Latvia

Grigory Sokolov’s solo concert, organized by the Herman Brown Foundation at the Latvian National Opera (LNO) on May 23, will be the musician’s only performance in the Baltics. The pianist, who is often called a piano mystic, will play the music of Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms and Robert Schuman in the evening of piano music in Riga. Beethoven’s wide range of piano music will feature 15 variations and a fugue on the same subject by Johannes Brahms. Three intermeco, op. 117, and Robert Schuman’s cycle of eight fantasies Kreisleriana, op. 16. With that program, the 72-year-old pianist has embarked on an extensive European tour which, starting in February, will continue unabated (performing every second or third day) until 28 August, when it will culminate in a concert in Oslo.

Olympus alone

“There must be one piano player in Olympia. Grigory Sokolov will not meet fellow pianists there. However, at this summit he has had personal meetings with all immortal composers,” says Peter Krauze of the German newspaper. The world. It will not be possible to ask the pianist himself about his art, because he does not give interviews. Grigory Sokolov says it all in music.

“He’s really a fantastic phenomenon. There’s no one else to put along. Grigory Sokolov doesn’t really play listeners. And not even for himself. But only for music, only for him,” the Swiss edition writes. The weather. If we consider Grigory Sokolov’s main audience to be music itself, it is as broad and diverse as the entire history of European and Russian piano music: from the polyphony of French and English harpsichord and baroque master Johann Sebastian Bach and his predecessors, Viennese classicism, European and Russian romanticism even to the opuses of Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, the legendary Komitas, and Boris Arapov. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the pianist has given up performing with orchestras and performing in the concert genre. He has decided this, seeing that there is still too little time in the orchestra’s work schedule for joint rehearsals, or even it is not possible to find an orchestra in which the musicians are interested in the result and they do not look at the clock. Rarity is also a conductor who is not only a very good musician, but also endowed with a special talent to understand music in the same way as Grigory Sokolov. By playing a piece solo, a pianist can design and develop it indefinitely, but with each orchestra and conductor, everything has to start over. Grigory Sokolov has chosen the responsibility of the artist, which depends only on him, not on a hundred people.

Phenomenon without borders

As a sixteen-year-old ninth-grader from then-Leningrad, Grigory Sokolov caused a sensation in 1966 by winning the 3rd International Tchaikovsky Competition. 16 out of 20 members of the jury voted in favor of awarding the first prize to Grigory Sokolov. As musicologist Aleksandrs Jablonskis, an eyewitness to the event, later recalled, word spread inside the competition that pianist legend Emil Gilels had insisted that Grigory Sokolov was entitled to the first prize. Although Gilels was not the only decision maker, he was better than anyone to appreciate the young man’s great talent and mastery and his only sense of his great future.

Since the 1970s, Grigory Sokolov has performed all over the world, preferably in Europe. In the late 1970s, he also performed in Latvia for the first time. “He played Bahu in such a way that I couldn’t breathe – I started coughing, tears. I was a teenager, I knew little, but it was magic. remembers Inna Davidova, director of the Herman Brown Foundation. She has been waiting for this spring’s concert in Riga for seven years and then for two more, because it was canceled twice due to a pandemic.

“Sokolov is a phenomenon that knows no boundaries. Everything is always on the brink. When I play Sokolov, I feel like I’m alive,” writes musicologist Leonid Hakel. Lithuanian pianist Aleksandra Jozapēnaite believes: “In Sokolov’s pianism, two worlds are intertwined: European sophistication, orderliness, harmony and internally controlled Slavic emotionality, which do not spill over and become noble.”

The volatile spirit

Twice in 2003 and 2004, Grigory Sokolov won the Franco Abyatti Prize of the Italian National Association of Music Critics. In 2008, he was awarded the Arturo Benedeti Michelangelo Prize. In 2009 he was elected a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Music. Magazine Gramophone recorded her in 2017 in her Hall of Fame.

“The pianist has once again proved that he is much more than a performer. Since he plays at the Champs Elysées in Paris once a year, we will listen to him, even on a stretcher, no matter what happens that evening. , “a bright individual pianist, but only one of them takes us so far towards the pinnacles of genius. It is in this context that we have to talk about Grigory Sokolov,” Le Figaro.

The pianist also returns to the Salzburg Festival every year. Grigory Sokolov’s disbelief in the ability to “preserve” the spirit of music and its interpretation led to the fact that for twenty years, from 1995 to 2015, no record had been made of it. However, in 2014, the pianist signed an exclusive agreement with the company German gramophonewho has been recording and releasing his concert recordings since 2015.

GRIGORY SOKOLOV

LNO 23.V at 19
Tickets www.hbf.lv EUR 50–150

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