Sony Classical released a Chopin CD by legendary pianist Ivo Pogorelich on February 18. For the first time in 25 years, the music of this artist, who seemed definitively lost and damned, carries with it a glimmer of hope.
The unspeakable pain of Ivo Pogorelich will never go away, but the pianist is back, the musician begins to structure his thoughts and the human seems to have found his bearings.
All this is not in a score, it is not written in a booklet, but can be heard when one knows the discography and the career of the pianist who won the 1980 Montreal Musical Competition, whose elimination in half -final of the Chopin competition, the same year, had caused a scandal, Martha Argerich slamming the door of the jury.
The real Ivo Pogorelich, dazzling, had a 15-year career. If he was unique — Pictures at an exhibition of Mussorgsky, 6and Sonata by Prokofiev, English Suites of Bach and Gaspard of the night by Ravel in mind — it is because his magic fingers were the expression of the musical thought of Aliza Kezeradze, with whom he had studied since the age of 17. He had married in 1980 the one who, in his words, “radiated on everything”, even if she was 21 years his senior. After Aliza’s death in 1996, Ivo became a real zombie. Added to this was the Balkan war and the identity tears of the son of a Croatian father and a Serbian mother.
The violence and the length of the reconstruction process are recorded in a response to an interview with Manuel Brug in Die Welt in August 2006, ten years later: “Even in death, she was still the princess she was at birth. She had liver cancer. When she died her liver exploded and in her last kiss she covered me in black blood. I looked like the Phantom of the Opera. My hair was completely stuck together. I didn’t want to wipe anything off. When we were offered condolences with champagne, I was still covered in his blood, but everyone understood: it was like Jackie Kennedy, who didn’t want to change her suit soiled by her husband’s brain. »
Need love again
Pogorelich then admitted that it took him a while to “become active again”. But this activity was a decoy, and time stretched out into infinity. In all directions, moreover: a composition of twenty-five minutes suddenly spread out over forty.
Ten years later, again. Here we are in 2015. A remark of a very rare sensitivity of a recital in London dared the following words which summarize all that one could seize here and there of his concerts of the last twenty years: “I am sad because that I feel that Ivo is sad. […] What I will take away from this recital is that it proved how much one can love, and how loss is one of the most destructive feelings for a human soul. […] What I found most irritating was the complete lack of structure. This total chaos, I’ve never heard anything like it before. […] Where is his faith in music, and especially in himself? The author concluded: “I don’t have much else to say: Ivo needs love again, at all levels. »
Idagio, by having him record the Sonatas nbone 22 and 24 of Beethoven in 2016, then Sony, taking up these Beethovens, and adding the 2and Sonata by Rachmaninoff in 2019, tried to bring Ivo Pogorelich back into the circuit. But these recordings bore all the marks of wandering.
This CD Ivo Pogorelich – Chopin captured in September 2021 changes the game. It brings together the Nocturnes op. 48 noh 1 and op 62 notoh 2the Fantasy op. 49 and the Sonata noh 3. Pogorelich says, screams, his pain soonOp.48 noh 1 in strong struck by a piano that is unfortunately a bit metallic, but (and this is why recalling the commentary of the 2015 London recital was crucial), despite some mannerisms, the structures are no longer dismantled, and magical moments of touch illuminate the speech (Fancy !).
Pogorelich has just found the coherence of the music. Those who admire him and have sympathized with his suffering as an artist and as a human being will be overwhelmed by a singular record which sees the return of a great pianist to a world which makes him intelligible to the most sensitive of his fellow human beings. Welcome back !