A conversation with Joseph I. Horowitz

“Every University in US has a piano studio, so I knew we would have a piano studio with very talented young people, young people who had been eager to leave the Soviet Union for a long time and whose departure now became possible with a loosening of the borders. The first to arrive was Sasha Korsantiya, who had already won several major competitions. Then came Max Mogilevsky, and George Vatchnadze. It just grew from there. Very soon I had a number of enormous piano talents on my hands, which necessitated finding suitable concert activity for them.

I never specifically envisioned that the studio would play concerts as a team all around the world – in Italy, Germany, England, Edinburgh, St. Petersburg. This was a development that more or less created itself. We benefited from ideas from people like Joe Horowitz and John Ardoin concerning how and what to organize for this remarkable group of pianists. And then we gradually evolved from a performing entity into a broader role that is not easy to define. With our one-composer marathons, we are able to touch very deeply a sense of the composer’s presence throughout the evening. Our programs are carefully organized. They typically include talks – by myself, or by Joe or Andrew Clark or Valery Gergiev. And most of the time we furnish program notes not only about the pieces we play, but about the composer’s world and his broader political, social, and cultural importance.

A turning point was our concert at the Steinway rotunda in New York on November 30, 1994. I practically cancelled this concert several times because I was unhappy with the playing or was simply too nervous to start out in such an important space. But it went well. Of course, the program was nothing to talk about – a potpourri of showpieces. The talent was undeniably there, however.

Meanwhile I had been constantly talking to Valery Gergiev. Two days later I played with him at Carnegie Hall. He was already very much aware of the studio’s possibilities. A year later he asked us to perform with him in Stravinsky’s Les noces. This conversation was telling. It took place in the basement of my home in South Bend. “I need four pianists for Les noces,” he said. I said, “OK.” What about you?” he asked. I said I would play the Stravinsky concerto. “What else?” he asked. “Well,” I answered, “what do you want? The entire Stravinsky?” He said, “the entire Stravinsky?!” I said, “Why not? It would take maybe three, maybe four hours to perform everything he composed for solo piano, or two pianos, or piano duet.” “How can you do that?” “We’ll just play it all.” And we did.


So this became our first monothematic program – the complete Stravinsky, at the White Nights festival in St. Petersburg, in June 1995. We began with two movements from the Sonata in F-sharp minor of 1904, which had last been played in St. Petersburg in 1908 – and with a Japanese pianist, Yo-Me. There is a story that when Stravinsky was told that this score had turned up in a public library in St. Petersburg, he responded, “Not again!” He hated the piece. But there are things in it that are undeniably Igor’s.

So Yo-Me played the F-sharp Sonata, and George played the 1924 Sonata. Max (Maxim Mogilevski), George (Vatchnadze), Sveta (Svetlana Smolina), and Sasha (Alexander Korsantya) played Les noces. And there were many, many other pieces. Max also played the Three Movements from Petrushka. George and Vakho Kodanishvili – who was then 18 years old – played the four-hand version of Le sacred u printemps.

We had a smashing success in Philharmonic Hall. Valery couldn’t make the concert but he arrived right after we finished. We actually played a good 20 to 30 minutes of the program for him right then and there – because he didn’t know most of the music. The Concerto for Two Pianos, for instance, was completely new for him. Same with me – notwithstanding my devotion to Stravinsky, I had never encountered the 1924 Piano Concerto or the Concerto for Two Pianos. In Russia, we knew only certain things. Even such a formidable musician as Lev Naoumov, who was my teacher at the Moscow Conservatory, thought only of the early Stravinsky.

After Yo-Me’s performance an eminent Russian Stravinsky scholar, Mr. Smirnov, was weeping like a baby, he was so moved to have finally heard this music in live performance. Another musicologist, Mr. Bialek, immediately organized a repeat performance of the program at the St. Petersburg Conservatory two days later. And since that moment Valery has regularly programmed Les noces and the Piano Concerto, and also the Capriccio with George Vatchnadze. We’ve now done Les noces with him with many different combinations of pianists – including one performance featuring only members of the Mogilevsky family: Max and his wife Svetlana, and Alexander and his wife Ulia.

So that was the first comprehensive composer marathon. Since then, we’ve applied the same approach to other composers as well: Rachmaninov, Scrjabin, Prokofiev, Dvorak, Shostakovich. The programs are always chronological, which is very rewarding. You would not want to hear anyone play all the Scrjabin sonatas in one sitting. But this becomes “listenable” when so many young talented artists are involved, each with their own sound, their own perception. Sometimes we have three generations on stage, ranging from myself to players in their teens.

The Rachmaninoff marathon, in its various permutations, is our most-played project. We’ve done it in New Jersey, in Italy at the Stresa Festival, at the Gilmore Festival, at the Ruhr festival. Now we’re touring it in Italy and taking it to the Salzburg Festival. This project began with the New Jersey Symphony’s 1999 Rachmaninov festival, for which Joe Horowitz was artistic advisor. He wanted to make a separate program of the complete Rachmaninov music for two pianos, which comprises an early Russian Rhapsody that nobody knows, the two famous suites, and the Symphonic Dances -- a colossal masterpiece which Rachmaninov originally intended as a two-piano vehicle for himself and Vladimir Horowitz. This program provides an amazing snapshot of Rachmaninov’s stylistic evolution – even though many people insist Rachmaninov was a composer who didn’t evolve. In America, his reputation is tainted by all those films that use him for mood music – Americans don’t appreciate the religious devotion Russians feel for this composer. It’s a curiosity that both his Second Symphony and Second Piano Sonata are so overplayed, and the First Symphony and First Sonata so neglected. I find the First Sonata by far superior to the second. And there are the Variations on a theme by Chopin, a piece which is completely neglected. That also needs more attention. We also do a set of six-hand pieces by Rachmaninov, one of which is an early version of the theme of the slow movement of the Second Concerto.

Our biggest Rachmaninov marathon was at the Ruhr festival in 2003. It lasted seven and a half hours, and there were at all times at least 1,500 people in the audience. By 1:30 am, which is when we finished, some seven or eight thousand people had heard our concert. And nobody, but nobody wanted it to end. I’m so happy that 11 young musicians experienced the power of music on that occasion.

We’ll need next visit the Ruhr festival with our Scrjabin program, which includes lighting design by Dean Tom Miller of the University of Indiana at South Bend. The concept of a “light organ” was only applied by Scriabin to Prometheus. And it was also intended for use in the Mysterium, which he never completed. But lighting can be employed carefully and effectively to the sonatas, beginning with No. 5 – where he uses the so-called “Prometheus chord” for the first time. We do all ten sonatas, plus the Piano Fantasy, plus two early sonatas preceding “No. 1.” And we close with Prometheus in a version for three pianos. Scriabin himself authorized a two-piano reduction of Prometheus, which is actually scored for piano, orchestra, and chorus. But when I was preparing the solo part for performances with Gergiev, I needed to rehearse it and there was no reduction just of the orchestral part. So I took the two-piano version and simply scratched out the solo part from the score. I mainly rehearsed with Max and Gennady (Zagor). Now I perform Prometheus with Max and Svetlana.

The Scrjabin trajectory is very satisfying. I would speculate that Scrjabin himself would not have minded hearing such a program because it illuminates how he gradually evolved from one sonata to the next, pursuing his vision of an enlightened or heightened state of being. It has a magnetizing effect. When you have three and half hours of nothing but Scrjabin, it’s about as close to Mysterium as you can get.

Of Serguey Prokofiev, we play the nine sonatas plus two earlier sonatas that have been completely neglected. Again, this is extremely gratifying – you experience the huge traversal of his spirit, the different places and different times through which he passed. Last time we have performed this in Summer 2003 in Italy, at the Ravenna Festival and in Germany, at the Ruhr Festival. But I cannot forget the early experience we had in Milan back in Novembre 1996 when we performed all – I am saying all – what Serguey Serguevich wrote for piano, from op. 1 to the first 40 bars of Sonata nr. 10. It was an incredible journey that myself, and few friends who were there, experienced as something really unique: after more the 7 hours of piano music, Serguey Prokofiev was really like a member of our family. Some of the playing was incredible – I still remember the Visions fugitives performed by Vakho or Sonata nr. 8 played by Sasha Korsantya, or Sonata nr. 9 in the immense interpretation of George Vatchnadze – but in general the level was very high.

It was one of our first visits abroad and I remember that, for the first time, I was really thinking : “It works… and it will work even better in the future!”

Alexander Toradze – a conversation with Joseph I. Horowitz (2004)