2023-10-26 20:00:13
Pianist Ivo Pogorelich, at Lancut Castle, Poland, in 2021. ANDREJ GRIL
Blue hat, red scarf, large fleece jacket thrown over his shoulders, a man plays the piano in the great synagogue of Novi Sad. The audience that is flocking is not for prayers, but for the recital given by Ivo Pogorelich at the opening of the Nomus festival, this October 18, in Serbia’s second city. On the stage, the Vojvodina Symphony Orchestra (region in the north of the country) began to set up. No more than the noisy agreement of the instrumentalists, the noise of the men affects the concentration of the artist whose fingers travel over the keyboard of the great Kawai in concert. The pianist will only leave the stage to go backstage at the very last moment. Already, the baton of conductor Aleksandar Markovic is raised for the symphonic thriller by Modest Mussorgsky (1839-1881), A night on Bald Mountain (1867). Fifteen minutes later, it is in the traditional black coat with tails that the Croatian musician will reappear for a Second Concerto (1900-1901), by Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943), of such magnetic power and so resolutely personal and fascinating that the absence of the ritual encore will not frustrate anyone.
Read the review: Article reserved for our subscribers The piano appassionato of Ivo Pogorelich
The next morning, same blue hat, same red scarf and large fleece jacket, a man smokes a Montecristo cigarillo in front of the stairs of the Matica Srpska Gallery, the city’s great cultural institution. Ivo Pogorelich turned 65 on October 20. He kept his mutant blue-green gaze. But we would look in vain in this mature man with close-cropped hair for the romantic young man with devastating beauty who appeared on the covers of magazines after the scandal of his elimination at the Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 1980. An incident which provoked indignation jurors such as Nikita Magaloff and Paul Badura-Skoda, without forgetting the resignation of Martha Argerich (herself a winner in 1965), who launched a resounding press attack “Pogorelich is a genius! », before leaving the city at dawn. Notoriety that arrived too quickly, too soon. “I was 24 years old, points out Ivo Pogorelich. In England, I was presented as the pop star of classical music. I wasn’t ready. »
If the affair constituted an undeniable springboard for the artist, signed by the record company Deutsche Grammophon in 1981, it remains for him, even today, a source of a painful misunderstanding to the point that, while passing through Warsaw in 2008, Ivo Pogorelich will ask – without success – to know the truth, “in order to lift the shadow of this failure”. An opacity behind which the silhouette of Soviet authorities emerges. After his victory at the Montreal International Musical Competition the same year, was he not promised first prize at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, on the condition that he gave up Warsaw?
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