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Q&A International Piano meets Katya Apekisheva CANET T Y-CL ARKE IM S Which solo piece would you most love to learn but haven’t yet got around to playing? It would have to be the Goldberg Variations and the last two Beethoven piano sonatas. I hope I get to find the courage and dedication to tackle these masterpieces. Who were your principal teachers? My first teachers were Ada Traub and Anna Kantor at the Gnessin School in Moscow. Then I studied with Irina Berkovich in Jerusalem. After that I moved to London, where I studied with Irina Zaritskaya at the Royal College of Music. Beyond your teachers, who have been the biggest musical influences on you? While at the Gnessin School I studied with Anna Kantor, who was also teaching Evgeny Kissin at the same time. He was a big inspiration for me: his musical genius was apparent from such a young age, with a maturity and creativity that was hard to grasp! I was at the famous concert at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory when he played both Chopin concertos at the age of 13. I also have to mention my parents: both are pianists and they inspired me a lot in my childhood; we used to sight-read piano duets regularly and I learned a lot of repertoire this way. If you could take just one recording to a desert island, what would it be? It would probably have to be Glenn Gould’s second (1981) recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. I can picture it fitting perfectly with the desert island! And this is one of very few pieces that I can’t imagine ever getting tired of listening to. What was your most recent musical discovery? Bartók’s Piano Quintet. I had to play this at the North York Moors Chamber Music Festival two years ago. Bartók wrote it when he was very young, and its musical language is so different from his mature style. It’s a romantic, vibrant work full of luscious harmonies, beautiful folky tunes and lots of youthful drive – a monumental piece that requires a lot of virtuosity and rehearsal! Which piano concertos should be heard in concert more often? I personally love Rachmaninov’s First and Fourth Piano Concertos, which are played not nearly enough; normally we hear only his Second and Third Concertos. I am also very fond of Gershwin’s Piano Concerto, another that we don’t hear often. Which composers are the most underrated or wrongly neglected? First, Saint-Saëns: his chamber works are hardly played and they always impress me with their creativity and imagination. For some reason only a handful of Saint-Saëns’s pieces are well known. There is so much more than The Carnival of the Animals and the Introduction and Rondo capriccioso for violin! I am also a big fan of Frank Bridge and think his music deserves much more attention. Also, Nikolay Medtner wrote beautiful, complex and exciting music for piano that should be heard more often. What was the last thing you were practising? Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto. This is the concerto I have played the most and it is very dear to my heart. What are the major works you’re playing over the coming months? I ’m performing some wonderful music. In August, October and November I will immerse myself in Fauré’s Nocturnes and Impromptus. I am looking forward to learning some new repertoire, including pieces by Mel Bonis, whose music I have admired for a long time. I am going to revisit some of my old repertoire, including Mussorgsky’s famous Pictures at an Exhibition, which never ceases to amaze me with its unique musical language. I am also performing Mozart’s A major Piano Concerto, K414, in its chamber version with the Carducci Quartet and Stacey Watton at the London Piano Festival in October. Do you have a personal favourite of your own recordings? It’s difficult to talk about my own recordings because once I ’ve recorded something I hardly ever listen to it again … I usually find that as time passes my interpretation and approach changes. My first solo recording, of Grieg’s piano music, has a special place for me. I recorded it shortly after performing at Grieg’s house on the edge of Bergen in Norway – the most magical place, which gave me a lot of inspiration. Do you have any concert memories that especially stand out? Many memorable concerts come to mind. One of the recent ones was the concert I did in October 2023 with my dear friend and colleague Charles Owen at Kings Place as part of the London Piano Festival. We played all of Rachmaninov’s works for two pianos. It was a very challenging concert, both pianistically and stamina-wise. We put our hearts and souls into rehearsals, trying to create something special, which hopefully we managed to achieve. 6 Autumn 2024 International Piano www.international-piano.com
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NEWS NOTES Igor Levit teams up with Christian Thielemann Igor Levit has recorded the two Brahms piano concertos with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor Christian Thielemann, which will be released by Sony Classical on 4 October and will be reviewed in the next issue. Levit and Thielemann first performed together in 2015 – when Levit stood in for an indisposed colleague to play Mozart’s C major Concerto, K467, with the Staatskapelle Dresden in Munich – and have since further developed a strong musical connection. During a walk together near Berlin the conversation turned to Brahms, and they conceived the plan to record the two piano concertos as part of an upcoming Brahms cycle with Thielemann and the Vienna Philharmonic. Thielemann commented: ‘I ’ve always been fascinated by how this orchestra can react to conductors and assimilate even the smallest details. And then there is the concert hall, the Wiener Musikverein, with its acoustic properties that Brahms knew so well.’ Levit adds: ‘And what a sound! I was sitting in the first rehearsal and the horn began to play. You do not really want to start playing, but rather to say to the hornist: Can you please play that again? It was so beautiful.’ For the same album, Levit has also recorded Brahms’s late pieces, Opp 116-119, which he has been playing in concert to widespread acclaim. The programme finishes with Levit and Thielemann playing a four-hand rendition of Brahms’s Waltz, Op 39 No 15. © A M A R M E H M E D I N O V I C Forthcoming piano box-sets Eloquence is releasing two ‘Piano Library’ box-sets – a 21-disc ‘Westminster & American Decca Edition’ and a 22-disc ‘Deutsche Grammophon Edition’. The contents are fascinating, including many pianists who have since faded from the limelight, others caught in the early stages of glittering careers, and some little-known gems that never secured a lasting place in the catalogue. Spanning 1950 to 1963, the recordings in the Westminster and American Decca set document the end of some distinguished careers (notably Benno Moiseiwitsch and Egon Petri) and the early flourishing of others, such as Jörg Demus and Nina Milkina. It includes the four solo LPs for Westminster recorded in 1956 by Raymond Lewenthal, which marked his return to the studio after an assault that had left him unable to play for several years. Also included are the August 1961 New York sessions of Benno Moiseiwitsch (Beethoven, Schumann and Mussorgsky) and a first-time CD release of Egon Petri’s Moonlight Sonata, alongside its original LP couplings of the Pathétique and Appassionata, plus the Hammerklavier and Busoni’s Fantasia contrappuntistica from the same sessions in June 1956. There is also the first publication of a major archival discovery – 1951 recordings of three Chopin Mazurkas by Youra Guller. The ‘Deutsche Grammophon Edition’ features 20 hours of recordings made between 1951 and 1980. Vladimir Ashkenazy’s live performances from the 1955 Queen Elisabeth Competition – issued on DG, before he signed for Decca – are included, as is a Rachmaninov selection by Ashkenazy’s teacher, Lev Oborin. There are recordings from the ‘Concours’ and ‘Debut’ sub-labels on DG, which launched an array of pianists including Boris Bloch, Youri Egorov, Steven De Groote and Zola Mae Shaulis. At the other end of the spectrum, this box also reissues Beethoven sonata recordings made by Elly Ney at the end of her long career. Both sets will be reviewed in the next issue of International Piano. In November a 26-disc box-set of the complete recordings for Decca by Jorge Bolet will be released. As well as all of Bolet’s previously issued Decca recordings, this set will also include a disc of Chopin (a selection of nocturnes and the Berceuse) that the pianist recorded in Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco on 23 and 24 February 1990, eight months before he died, which were edited but never released. In the next issue we present a feature on Jorge Bolet, placing his Decca legacy in the context of his career as a whole. www.international-piano.com International Piano Autumn 2024 7

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Q&A

International Piano meets

Katya Apekisheva

CANET T Y-CL ARKE

IM

S

Which solo piece would you most love to learn but haven’t yet got around to playing? It would have to be the Goldberg Variations and the last two Beethoven piano sonatas. I hope I get to find the courage and dedication to tackle these masterpieces.

Who were your principal teachers? My first teachers were Ada Traub and Anna Kantor at the Gnessin School in Moscow. Then I studied with Irina Berkovich in Jerusalem. After that I moved to London, where I studied with Irina Zaritskaya at the Royal College of Music.

Beyond your teachers, who have been the biggest musical influences on you? While at the Gnessin School I studied with Anna Kantor, who was also teaching Evgeny Kissin at the same time. He was a big inspiration for me: his musical genius was apparent from such a young age, with a maturity and creativity that was hard to grasp! I was at the famous concert at the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory when he played both Chopin concertos at the age of 13. I also have to mention my parents: both are pianists and they inspired me a lot in my childhood; we used to sight-read piano duets regularly and I learned a lot of repertoire this way.

If you could take just one recording to a desert island, what would it be? It would probably have to be Glenn Gould’s second (1981) recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations. I can picture it fitting perfectly with the desert island! And this is one of very few pieces that I can’t imagine ever getting tired of listening to.

What was your most recent musical discovery? Bartók’s Piano Quintet. I had to play this at the North York Moors Chamber Music Festival two years ago. Bartók wrote it when he was very young, and its musical language is so different from his mature style. It’s a romantic, vibrant work full of luscious harmonies, beautiful folky tunes and lots of youthful drive – a monumental piece that requires a lot of virtuosity and rehearsal!

Which piano concertos should be heard in concert more often? I personally love Rachmaninov’s First and Fourth Piano Concertos, which are played not nearly enough; normally we hear only his Second and Third Concertos. I am also very fond of Gershwin’s Piano Concerto, another that we don’t hear often.

Which composers are the most underrated or wrongly neglected? First, Saint-Saëns: his chamber works are hardly played and they always impress me with their creativity and imagination. For some reason only a handful of Saint-Saëns’s pieces are well known. There is so much more than The Carnival of the Animals and the Introduction and Rondo capriccioso for violin! I am also a big fan of Frank Bridge and think his music deserves much more attention. Also, Nikolay Medtner wrote beautiful, complex and exciting music for piano that should be heard more often.

What was the last thing you were practising? Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto. This is the concerto I have played the most and it is very dear to my heart.

What are the major works you’re playing over the coming months? I ’m performing some wonderful music. In August, October and November I will immerse myself in Fauré’s Nocturnes and Impromptus. I am looking forward to learning some new repertoire, including pieces by Mel Bonis, whose music I have admired for a long time. I am going to revisit some of my old repertoire, including Mussorgsky’s famous Pictures at an Exhibition, which never ceases to amaze me with its unique musical language. I am also performing Mozart’s A major Piano Concerto, K414, in its chamber version with the Carducci Quartet and Stacey Watton at the London Piano Festival in October.

Do you have a personal favourite of your own recordings? It’s difficult to talk about my own recordings because once I ’ve recorded something I hardly ever listen to it again … I usually find that as time passes my interpretation and approach changes. My first solo recording, of Grieg’s piano music, has a special place for me. I recorded it shortly after performing at Grieg’s house on the edge of Bergen in Norway – the most magical place, which gave me a lot of inspiration.

Do you have any concert memories that especially stand out? Many memorable concerts come to mind. One of the recent ones was the concert I did in October 2023 with my dear friend and colleague Charles Owen at Kings Place as part of the London Piano Festival. We played all of Rachmaninov’s works for two pianos. It was a very challenging concert, both pianistically and stamina-wise. We put our hearts and souls into rehearsals, trying to create something special, which hopefully we managed to achieve.

6 Autumn 2024 International Piano www.international-piano.com

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