Volcano, Lightning, And Fireworks on One Stage
Concerts by three laureates of most prestigious music contests — Mariya Kim (Ukraine), Ihor Chetuyev (Ukraine-Germany), winner of the Fourth Horowitz Young Pianists Contest and Ninth Rubinstein International Piano Contest, and Vadim Rudenko (Russia), laureate of the Eleventh Tchaikovsky Piano Contest — were held on the Summer Stage of Kyiv’s Central Park, July 6-8, as part of the festival called Kyiv Summer Music Soirees. Each concert was a great success and the pianists were accompanied by the National Academic Symphony Orchestra conducted by Volodymyr Sirenko.
“Quite recently they were called young talents, but now the musicians have reached performing summits,” stresses Maestro Sirenko. “The audiences love them and it is very interesting to work with Kim, Rudenko, and Chetuyev. They are so different. Mariya is like a volcano. When she plays her temperament ignites the orchestra and audience alike. She is an expressly gifted pianist.”
Mariya Kim was born into a musician’s family in Sevastopol and studied in Class T, Children’s Music School No. 1. Her first international success dates from 1994, when she won third place at a piano contest in Senigallia, Italy. Two years later, she won the Krainev young pianists contest, and this spring won first place at the Horowitz festival. She has vied in numerous international contests and toured Austria, Holland, Malaysia, Poland, Russia, and Turkey. Since 1998, she has been enrolled in Hanover’s Higher School of Music and Theater (Germany), attending Maestro Krainev’s classes. She already has CDs with her music.
At the festival, Mariya Kim was spectacular with Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, performed at the National Opera of Ukraine. Ihor Chuhuyev was also very good and his triumph came with Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and Sonata No. 2. There was a moment when the audience saw lightning.
“Ihor is an aristocrat with his own world view,” says Volodymyr Sirenko. “He is a very interesting person, not only on stage, but also in daily life. He is very serious, a philosopher seeking answers to eternal questions, and he is an extremely subtle musician.”
Ihor Chuhuyev is 21, also of Sevastopol, and his teacher was Tetiana Kim (Mariya’s mother). He has won numerous international contests and currently studies under Prof. Krainev in Germany. As a soloist, he has performed with the symphony orchestras of the Crimea, St. Petersburg, Nizhni Novgorod, and Israel, also with the Moscow Virtuosi, Saint Cecilia, Brittany (France), National Symphony Orchestra, and National Philharmonic of Ukraine. In 1998, he won first place, audience award prize, and a grand piano at the Rubinstein piano contest in Tel Aviv. He has toured Germany, Belarus, Latvia, Lithuania, Canada, the United States, and several Asian countries.
“As for Vadim Rudenko, his technique opens boundless opportunities in performing most sophisticated compositions,” muses Sirenko. “And the musician has a great deal of personal charm. We made friends after joint renditions at the Planet Stars festival in Yalta last September. I would say that Vadim is one of the latest discoveries of the Slavic piano school.”
Rudenko is a true Wunderkind. He started playing at four and gave his first solo concert at seven. He graduated from the Central Music School and then from the Moscow Conservatory of Music. At various periods his teachers included Anna Artobolevskaya, Vadim Sukhov, Dmitri Bashkirov, and Sergei Dorensky. Vadim is a laureate of the Queen Elizabeth Concertino Prague international contests and those of Paloma O’Chi in Spain, Giovanni Viotti in Italy, and Peter Tchaikovsky in the CIS states. He has toured all over the world and performed with leading orchestras conducted by Svetlanov, Fedoseyev, Sirenko, Temirkanov, Vedernikov, Katz, Sinaisky, Gorinstein, Dudarova, et al. He has several solo CDs and appeared in such prestigious festivals as the Menuhin (Switzerland), Mozarteum, and Carinthian Summer (Austria).
His renditions at the Kyiv summer festival were like fireworks. Vadim brilliantly performed the Concert Suite from Tchaikovsky-Pletnev’s Nutcracker,Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 7, Rachmaninoff’s third, and Saint-Sa С ns’ second piano concertos.
For three evenings the three musicians demonstrated their virtuosity, captivating the audience by their individual timbres, singular interpretations, dramatic flair, and lyricism in the performance of classical pieces. The future of the Ukrainian and Russian piano schools is inseparable from the names of Kim, Chetuyev, and Rudenko.
