Virtuoso Starting the Season

Master concert in Oetkerhalle

Bielefeld. There are certain musical compositions that make you addictive and Rachmaninov’s piano concertos are among those types of music that go straight into your heart and soul. One of them is Rachmaninov’s 2^nd piano concerto in C minor, which was performed as one of the series of master concerts to start the season at Oetkerhalle. The pianist was a well-known true virtuoso Yuri Rozum. The performance was a wonderful mixture of late romantic reflections, end-of-the-century feel and sometimes unjustified decorativeness, which Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943) sends directly deep inside you. This music had a lot of power, lust, depth, dimension and full breath, which was going up and up, from strength to strength – that’s how Yuri Rozum presented it at Oetkerhalle last night. This piece was composed by a genius pianist S. Rachmaninov for himself to play and it takes another genius of a pianist to interpret it. And Yuri A. Rozum (we would like to know what “A” stands for) showed everything he was capable of in this concerto: brilliance with nothing left to be desired, power of his left hand, which many pianists lack, his left hand has a marked contrast, and what is often called “a Russian soul”, which is a bit of a cliché; he also showed a very good taste in his interpretation of this music. In the finale he opened up a whole range of feelings. At the end of the concert the public had a chance to take a plunge into the music of lust and deep feelings.

Eckhard Britsch