Stuttgarter Nachrichten, Germany

29 May, 2004

 

Review

Jürgen Holwein

 

 

PLAY THE FAZIOLI FOR ME

 

Heaven’s Gate-Crasher, Hellraiser: Yuri Rozum’s Piano Playing Smashes Boundaries

 

Enough already. The piling-on of pumped-up superlatives doesn’t help. The comments of a certain Prince von Sayn-Wittgenstein, that “whoever does not know or has not heard Yuri Rozum, has not lived,” are not the best means of generating attention for the pianist. Such unintentionally strange exaggerations (“Romantic genius, universal virtuoso, and milestone in the history of the piano”) do more damage than good. One would be better off to throw them into the dust bin of clichés.

 

Remain in your seats. Yuri Rozum is a great pianist. That he is turning 50, but is hardly well-known for a pianist of his caliber, does not mean much. Rozum’s case shows how little fame has to say about merit.

 

It is the end of April, and Rozum is playing Liszt. A refined crowd in their evening best, who appear to know each other, sip champagne, and make small talk in the Wilhelma Theater. It is a magical space with exotic ornaments in bright colors; a place where locals gather to enjoy its boisterous sensuality. It is Stuttgart’s most cheerful art temple. It does, however, smell like animals. African hoofed animals, I’d say. The smell of undomesticated nature from the zoological department next door fills the performance space where the traces of nature are civilized.

 

Yuri Rozum walks easily onto the small stage, sits himself down, and wipes the keyboard with a handkerchief. He plays “Litanei,” the first of six arrangements of Schubert lieder. Room-filling song emanates from the right hand. The left hand, normally dedicated to an accompanying role, is freed and explores the shaded depths of the sound space, setting the notes of the other side of the keyboard against a dark, mirrored light. Then comes the “Erlkönig,” unusually biting and fast. Exhalation follows as the heavy, rose-scented “Ave Maria” is breathed out. Too much of this, even with Rozum’s sacredly sober, ecstatically glowing interpretation, can turn the stomach.

 

In the first of the five CDs for his German record company, Mediaphon-Madacy in Leinfeld-Echteringen, Rozum presented himself as a Liszt interpreter with an immense radius of expression and capacity for articulation. He was born to play a Fazioli piano. Rozum knows the secrets and quirks of this machine, and there are many. It modulates in tone, its colors oscillate, it floats in liebestod-like intensity. When played forte, the treble register explodes. Otherwise there is nothing wrong with it. In truth, the Fazioli is a jet of the concert stage with terrifying proportions (more than 10 feet long and 120,000 Euros). The piano, the longest of any regularly produced concert piano on earth, is made by Signor Paulo Fazioli in Sicily.

 

Back to Rozum. Seven years ago, when he was unknown in the West and working as a piano tester for the Stuttgarter Pianohaus Fischer, he played a Liszt program at the Pianohaus on a Fazioli and drove it to the point of rattling, made the acoustics collapse, and finally exploded the space. There was something harassed and disturbed a la Woyzeck about him then. The way he dove at the keyboard and started playing before he had sat down showed the absolute conviction with which he wanted to prove to the world that he could do it. He showed it a little too much. As the top student in his class at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, he had survived the humiliations and bullying of the Soviet regime, he was harassed, conscripted into the military, and forced into a work camp. His crime was that he had shown interest in activities “hostile to the communist ideology,” namely practicing yoga, going to church, and secretly reading The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who in 1953 had been banished “for eternity.”

 

Rozum tells stories that contain his own story. Liszt’s “Venezia e Napoli” from “Anées de Pelerinages” tells of pure lights, of sound that wants to cross boundaries and subjugate itself to self-control, of the self-dissolution of the material into a myriad of color fragments, of the hard pounding of the machine age. He played “Harmonies du Soir,” one of the D flat major meditations, and the diabolical “Réminiscenes de Don Juan,” based on the novel of the artist in the 19th Century and the thrill of speed in the 20th. In the intensifications and drama lies the eroticism of Rozum’s playing, regardless of how coldly determined it may sound (Rachmaninov, Tchaikovsky, Chopin on the CD). His playing sounds like carefully dosed drugs. And the pedal technique: his vibrating right foot prevents oceanic blurring, but the tone is not stalled. It is allowed to soar back to where it came from.

 

Sound fantasy, breathing, consciousness of form, and spatial thinking distinguish the student of Lev Naumov, a student of the legendary piano teacher Heinrich Neuhaus, and Yevgeni  Malinin, an assistant to Neuhaus.

 

Intimacy with a Moorish ambience: In the Wilhelma Theater one can come close to it. It was as though Rozum were playing for invited guests—like Liszt in a salon. It is possible to dream of it like that, anyway. A maelstrom spilled out of this ascetic man, with five encores, leaving the listener slightly dazed.