Boris Berezovsky piano recital

Programme:

Franz Liszt. Venezia e Napoli, Mephisto Waltz, Transcendental Etudes

Frédéric Chopin. Sonata No.3, op. 58

Here, surely, we have the truest successor to the great Russian pianists.
Gramophone

... A player of dazzling virtuosity and formidable power.
The Times

Boris Berezovsky is a virtuoso of the Moscow school with an extraordinary, supernatural speed to his fingertips. Elegant, despite his ever-missing necktie and somewhat recalcitrant manner... The inherent flow of Boris' finger work is not something that is taught by any school, even the best. It is a gift from God, a kind of natural feature of the body. Nerve impulses run from the brain to the fingertips several times faster than with ordinary people, giving them their impossible versatility and effortlessness. Apropos, Berezovsky's pianism is noteworthy not just for his technique and virtuoso command of the keyboard. Berezovsky hears well known opuses in a somewhat different way from everyone else.
Nevskoe Vremya

Can you imagine the famous "Revolutionary" Etude played by left hand alone? Hard to believe. But there it was. And, as with everything else in this concert, it was beautifully shaped. That ability to transcend the physical challenges of such preposterously difficult music was part of Berezovsky's secret. And he sustained it throughout five of Liszt's Transcendental Studies. He moved very little; and his calm physicality seemed focused far more on listening, on holding onto a train of thought.
Virtuosity was more a tool rather than an end. And at the close, after a few impeccably shaped miniatures as encores, one was left thinking that Berezovsky is one of the greatest pianists of our time.
Irish Times

Franz Liszt. Venezia e Napoli, Mephisto Waltz, Transcendental Etudes

One of the greatest pianists who ever lived, Liszt wrought a veritable revolution in piano music. Before him, a piano evening for an audience of a thousand without an orchestra or other soloists was unheard-of. Liszt brought the piano from the drawing room to the concert hall stage, inspiring the great piano makers to build huge concert grand pianos that had not existed before.
Transcendental Étudesbear the dedication “To Carl Czerny with the deep respect of a grateful pupil”. Liszt started working on it as a fourteen-year-old boy, completing it only as a forty-year-old man. In its ultimate form, these Romantic poems were incredibly far from Czerny’s études, with which young pianists are terrorised at school. The title of “transcendental” points not just at the exceptional, superhuman technical difficulties but is also a hint at the loftiness cultivated by the Romantics and the supernatural nature of their content.
The cycle Years of Pilgrimage was written under impressions gleaned from travels to Switzerland and Italy when the twenty-four-year-old Franz Liszt had romantically fled Paris with the Countess Marie d’Agoult. The pieces Venezia e Napoli – Gondoliera, Canzone and Tarantella – appeared as an addition to the second, Italian year. The composer developed the melodies of three songs: the canzone of a certain cavalier called Peruchini, the gondolier’s canzone from Rossini’s opera Otello and a Neapolitan folk song. The dazzling piano score serves not for a demonstration of virtuosity but rather to create coloratura, or rather a fantastical aura of sound around Italian melodies.
The three Mephisto Waltzes (1861, 1881, 1883) are some of Liszt’s late works. The image of Faust never left the musician his whole life; his pen produced the Faust Symphony after Goethe’s tragedy and arrangements of highlights from Gounod’s Faust and Berlioz’ La Damnation de Faust. The Mephisto Waltzes were inspired by the poem Faust by Hungarian-born Nikolaus Lenau (1836), which is remarkable for the exaggerated Romantic interpretation of the theme. It is no surprise that with Lenau, the evil Mephistopheles is rendered more vivid than Faust himself.
Anna Bulycheva

Frédéric Chopin. Sonata No.3

Sonata No 3 is one of Chopin’s last works. It was written in the summer of 1844 when the composer was deeply suffering from the death of his father in Poland, comforted only by the arrival of his beloved sister Ludwika.
The Sonata is remarkable for its symphonic scale and, at the same time, its severity of style. There are no remaining traces of Chopin’s previously much adored salon genres, and the romantic fantasy is confined in a classical framework. It is an incredibly noble and aristocratic work with a powerful march as the main theme in the first section, the beautiful secondary theme inspired by Italian bel canto and the finale – a tarantella that rises to grandiose proportions.
Anna Bulycheva

Age category 6+