Klassik Heute, Germany

28 June 2004

Yuri Rozum plays Chopin-Skriabin-Rachmaninov

Live Recording ● Concert Recital

CD Review

Peter Cossé

In 1975 the highly gifted student Yuri Rozum was intending to travel to Brussels to take part in the Reine Elisabeth piano competition. Three years earlier this pupil of Gilels had won the Valery Afanassiev - in the best Russian tradition if one remembers a previous successful countryman such as Mogilewski. But he was refused permission to leave the country - and even his career within the Soviet Union encountered difficulties during the following long years. His thinking and his philosophy provided the authorities with sufficient grounds to keep the artist on a short ideological leash. Under these circumstances any trips to the West were unthinkable. The musician already popular in his own country was therefore only able to gain recognition in the West through competition successes in Spain, Japan and Canada at a later date - more precisely at the age of 27. In the mid-nineties the Supreme Soviet granted him the title “Recognised Russian Artist”. In the meantime Putin awarded him with the official title of “Outstanding Russian Artist”, whereby, given the situation (and Putin's lack of interest in music), it is difficult to suppress certain aesthetic and artistic-social misgivings. Such decorations taste just like those excessive regulations under which the person honoured had previously been suffering.

If one now hears Rozum on recorded media one is impressed by an unusually powerful almost steely style of piano playing somewhat reminiscent of the young Krainew. In the ballads of Chopin; in the now bitter, now saccharin details of Scriabin; in the enthrallingly consciously shaped and enhanced G-minor prelude of Rachmaninoff and in the final Nutcracker treatment by Pletnev reworked by Rozum it tells of an interpreter always acting to clarify and accentuate uncomfortably, who does not make things easy for his public. Rozum lives and promotes a style of playing which is one of reflective, furiously controlled unobligingness which presumably stems from painful experiences and an attitude to life oriented towards higher idealistic values and not the criteria of easy, short-lived success.

These are recordings of a concert reliably produced by SWR in Freiburg in April 2003. Regarding the sleeve and accompanying leaflet I would like to point out that future editions should have titles printed somewhat more legibly. Not everything which appears graphically attractive necessarily meets the consumer’s requirements.