ekvilibrijum1
Head-Fier
- Joined
- Mar 27, 2017
- Posts
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- 12
how do you like this pianist?
It's recorded live and also cheap! Worth getting imo if not just for the collection.
What is his Liszt like? I find him the devoid of any interpretive depth, he just takes the Russian school of arm driven piano technique to its extremes, sounds impressive for the big romantic works but gets boring after hearing it once or twice.
I picked up Pletnev's Scarlatti last month, together with Zacharias's. I agree Pletnev's choices are more extreme, and I was disappointed at first, but yesterday I found myself enjoying some of them.
What is his Liszt like? I find him the devoid of any interpretive depth, he just takes the Russian school of arm driven piano technique to its extremes, sounds impressive for the big romantic works but gets boring after hearing it once or twice.
He played that as his 5th encore the first time I saw him--there were audible gasps in the audience. Mind you, he had already played Beethoven's Appassionata Sonata, Liszt's Mephisto Waltz, and Rachmaninov's 2nd Sonata! One of the other encores was Scriabin's Etude Op.8 No.12! We certainly got our money's worth of notes that night! Oh, and just to prove he isn't all blood and thunder, he opened with a lovely reading of a Schubert Sonata--the D minor, I think. (It's been a few years!) Anyway, there's really no point in debating his merits or lack thereof: you don't like him and I do--end of story!
I posted the video in jest, he's Putin's poster boy and so I wouldn't be surprised if he has a tendency to bash the piano once in a while.
I asked for your opinion just to see if there was other repertoire that he might excel at and you mentioned Schubert so I will check that out. I didn't find his usual romantic repertoire very moving, but I am wary about judging the Russian school of pianists solely on that, as they have often played it hundreds of times even before they are twenty...