1996
REVIEW
Karen Kammerer
RUSSIAN PIANIST
Yuri Rozum honored a rapt audience in Beall Concert Hall on Wednesday night
with an unusual program of Tchaikovsky and Liszt, played with such passion and
control that it took your breath away.
Beall Hall has the intimacy of a
parlor, and Rozum let us listen quietly while he thundered, soared, whispered
and flashed through two hours of absolutely spellbinding piano playing.
His mastery of the music and his audience is total. He
needed no introductions, no explanations, no program notes. He just played, and
the listeners just knew that the first group of five works by Peter Tchaikovsky
were a set, didn’t clap between them, and heard them as a suite.
He didn’t have to tell us that. He stretched our
attention spans with sheer physical presence, and accepted the enthusiastic
cheering almost with surprise. It was just us, him, and Tchaikovsky.
When he played the Pletniov’s arrangement of three pieces from “The
Nutcracker,” the instrumental colors that rolled out of the Steinway were as
close to a full orchestra as you can get. We forget that Tchaikovsky was a
pianist first, then everything else, and this setting comes as a magnificent
reminder of how pianistic his compositions are.
I watched closely for the extra hand that Rozum surely
employed - there must have been more than the usual 10 fingers to make all
those notes - but it was all done with just two hands, a prodigious musical
mind and splendid technique unparalleled in recent memory.
After intermission, Rozum gave another reminder that
Franz Liszt, who supposedly invented the solo recital and its format, was the
first musical matinee idol, a 19th century rock star.
Stripped down to
black shirt and formal white tie, Rozum spun vast sonic landscapes from the
cycle “Harmonies poetiques et religieuses.” The three pieces, invocation,
andante lagrimoso and funerailles, were played without break and the last
section, a campanologist’s dream, rang bells that were thunderous, relentless,
exhausting. At the end, the audience exhaled together in an audible sigh.
Liszt’s
“Reminiscences de Don Giovanni,” after Mozart’s opera, gave a taste of how a
magnificent showman can serve up a popular theater work, variations to a
fare-thee-well. Rozum played, apparently without straining anything,
unbelievable runs of tenths in the left hand (an octave plus a third) and
handfuls of zooming chromatic intervals in the right hand.
Rozum uses the damper pedal to sweeten the tone - Horowitz
did that, and it was called blurry, but it worked like magic - and gets more
sound and color out of a piano than anybody. His three encores (by Chopin and
Schubert) were exquisite, familiar and incredible.
Yuri Rozum is a
treasure, an aristocrat of the keyboard, a musician of the highest order, a
black belt in piano. His American orchestral debut is this Saturday in the Hull
Center with the Oregon Mozart Players, playing the Shostakovich Piano Concerto
No. 1. Don’t miss it.