2023-09-11 17:25:36
Pianist Anatol Ugorski, in Paris, in 1993. THIERRY MARTINOT/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES
The Russian pianist, naturalized German, Anatol Ugorski, noted for his interpretations of Messiaen, Beethoven and Scriabin, died on September 5 at the age of 80 in the town of Deltmold (Germany), where he had lived since 1990.
Born into a poor family from the Jewish community, Anatol Ugorski was born on September 28, 1942 in Roubtsovsk, in Siberia, on the border with Kazakhstan. He emigrated three years later to Leningrad (Saint-Petersburg) with his parents and their siblings of five children. Exceptionally gifted, the young boy was admitted at the age of 6 to the music school of the city conservatory. In 1960 he entered the Leningrad Conservatory in the piano class of Najda Golubovskaïa, with whom he worked until obtaining his diploma in 1965, giving public concerts from 1962.
Anatol Ugorski was 25 when he won third prize in the George Enesco competition in Bucharest in 1968. It was the year that Pierre Boulez performed in Leningrad, exciting the young musician who had always been passionate about avant-garde music, whether that of his Soviet colleagues or Western composers, then banned by the regime. He will be one of its first defenders, creating some of their works in the USSR (like Schoenberg, Berg, Messiaen and Boulez). In 1987, through a friend, he notably discovered the bird catalogby Messiaen, of which he will leave a version that is always appreciated.
Confined career
But this taste has a cost: stigmatized by the regime, Anatol Ugorski is the victim of heavy disapproval, as he recounted in an interview published by Telerama in February 1993: Everything was subject to a political game. In the mid-1960s, the regime invited Boulez to prove its openness. But, after the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the programming had to revolve around the promotion of this country. The West was banished again. There remained this famous concert of Boulez, contracted well before… So, obviously, my enthusiasm gave them a headache. I suffered the consequences of their nervous breakdown. »
His career is confined: banned from concerts outside the Soviet bloc, Anatol Ugorski, who married the musicologist Maja Elik (creator with him of the Lunar Pierrot of Schoenberg, of which she interprets the vocal part), must devote herself to the education of the people. For ten years, he became an accompanist pianist for the Young Pioneers choir, playing for school audiences in remote provinces (he would say that his best Scarlatti concert took place in front of children from the industrial town of Asbest). However, the public praised his rare private concerts, and it was to this stubborn reputation that he was finally appointed in 1982 as a piano professor at the Leningrad Conservatory.
You have 37.9% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
#Death #GermanRussian #pianist #Anatol #Ugorski #interpreter #Messiaen #Scriabin #Beethoven