Music Rehabilitated
“Music history numbers hundreds, thousands of names of musicians and composers belonging to all ages, all periods in the development of mankind, which many either don’t know or simply don’t want to know,” says artistic director Suk. “We lack the whole picture. For example, we know Chopin but we don’t know what was happening around him. And then it transpires that he spoke in the language of his epoch. Suffice it to listen to Hummel’s piano concertos to understand where Chopin was coming from. Becoming curious, I collected a certain amount of information. On the other hand, I wanted to do Kyiv, and Ukraine, a good turn. I think that the more people get to know the better for everybody. Heinrich Neuhaus noted once that a person who knows Beethoven’s 32 sonatas is an entirely different person compared to a person who knows just one sonata,” throwing in that there was little one could add to such authoritative opinion.
Project participants come from the Vladimir Horowitz International Contest for Young Pianists, both laureates and those selected by Mykola Suk as a member of the jury, who agreed to participate in his project. One of the concerts will be called Romantic Piano Music for One, Two, Three, Four, Five, and Six Hands. The title itself is intriguing. The concert will include compositions by Teodor Leszetycki, Sigismund Thalberg (who in a famous rivalry concert with Franz Liszt, in France, played a fantasia based on Rossini’s Moses and which composition will be performed in Kyiv), and Carl Czerny’s six- hand variations from Eugen d’Albert’s opera Fiancee, and so on.
Little-known Piano Music will feature compositions by Charles-Henri-Valentin Alkan, Karl Tausig, Feruccio Benvenuto Busoni, Leopold Godowsky, Moritz Moszkowski, Eugen d’Albert (whose Klavierstucke, Mr. Suk assures, is music at the level of Brahms’ level), and Mykola Kolessa (in whose preludes the maestro guarantees “places at Schumann’s level”).
The Piano Concertos program with the National Symphony will star soloists such as Viktoriya Yermolieva (playing Serhiy Butkevych’s concerto, whose name is seldom mentioned even by musicians), Iryna Sapozhnikova (Franz Liszt’s arrangement of Beethoven’s Die Ruinen von Athen). And Czerny’s four-hand piano concerto (as Liszt’s and Leszetycki’s teacher) will be performed by Mykola Suk and Dmytro Tavanets.
Mr. Suk say everything they do is in support of the Ukrainian- US program to prevent birth defects. It is an attempt to supply Ukrainians with information showing that early diagnosis and available medications can substantially lower the risk of such defects. It is a very long, complicated process and entirely new to Ukraine. Yet someone must start it, somewhere sometime.
The physically challenged are not the only ones requiring rehabilitation, so does undeservedly forgotten music.
Mykola Suk is convinced that the younger creative generation can cope with the Herculean effort of performing such complicated classical pieces — who else but those attracted by and representing the Horowitz Contest? The young performers will discover a host of “new” composers for themselves and we will learn to treasure creative personalities as such, rather than just say who is better than who.
