The pianist Alexander Toradze, born in Tbilisi in 1952, graduated from the Moscow Conservatory, toured the West as a Soviet artist, defected to the United States in 1983, and has since taught and lived in the US while maintaining an international career. Toradze’s father, David, was the leading Georgian composer. This hour-long conversation between Toradze and Joseph Horowitz begins with a story about David Toradze’s relationship to his famous composition teacher, Reinhold Gliere - who paid him not to play jazz in a restaurant.
The next topic (18:16) is jazz in the Soviet Union as a symbol of “freedom.” Touring the US in 1978, Toradze refused to fly to Miami for a rehearsal in order to hear and meet Ella Fitzgerald (“a goddess”) and Oscar Peterson, artists more worshipped in Russia than America.
Prokofiev’s performance and interpretation of Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata is the next topic (33:43). His singular reading is invested in the experience of wartime. One repeated-note theme, for instance, is for Toradze “drops of tears” (41:00). According to Horowitz, Toradze interprets the Prokofiev sonata via a process of “infiltration” of thought and feeling - a different kind of “authenticity” than literal fidelity to a text (46:00). “You can’t just surrender to the composer,” Horowitz says, “or you surrender yourself.”
Typically, Toradze needed to find a “story” when returning to Beethoven’s Op. 109 Piano Sonata (52:00). Horowitz comments: “It’s not important whether your story is true. It’s true for you. It’s an instrument of interpretation; it lets you inhabit the music.”
PRODUCED, FILMED AND EDITED BY: BEHROUZ JAMALI
17 окт 2024
