Last update - 00:00 19/03/2008
Rubinstein Piano Competition / A perfect Haydn in stage II
By Haggai Hitron, Haaretz Correspondent
A possible alternate headline for this report could be "Sasha Grynyuk's night, Irina Zahharenkova's night," but more on that later, after my report on Vladimir Milosevic.
On the one hand, now I feel like swallowing the extravagant praises I showered on the Serb pianist last week. On the other hand, I may have been right, both then and now. Who said that a pianist has to perform at the same level and manage to impress at the same level in pieces that express completely different musical worlds?
The participants in the Rubinstein Piano Competition are required to perform one piece from the classical period in at least one of the two recitals. Milosevic chose Beethoven's Sonata Opus 111 and this choice was an "own goal." Within seconds it became apparent that this piece was foreign to his spirit, but it appeared that he himself did not realize that, otherwise, he would have avoided it. Milosevic played the notes, bored me, disappointed me. This was not an easy miss. A pianist taking part in a prestigious international competition is supposed to be immune from tactical mistakes like these.
In contrast to the pianist's mistake stands the collective mistake made by the judges, who decided to advance Denis Zhdanov to stage two of the competition. Their mistake was sorely apparent Tuesday night immediately after the 19-year-old Russian opened his recital with three arrangements by Franz Liszt to Schubert's well known "Lieder" and sounded like a student. Later, he played Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" at a low level, relative to previous performances of this piece in competitions of years past, as far as I remember.
And to the good new: the playing of the Estonian Irina Zahharenkova's, whose "Kreisleriana" (by Schumann) included stirring moments, and the performance by Sasha Grynyuk who played a stunning Haydn sonata with such preciseness and authority it sounded like a recording made up of a mix of several takes. Grynyuk was the winner of the night.