Yevgeny Sudbin: Golden Boy of a Golden Age

Buzz with Yevgeny Sudbin following his Singapore recital

20^th Singapore International Piano Festival.  School of the Arts Concert Hall.  Singapore.  June 20, 2013.  We are living in the golden age of piano playing.  Emmanuel Axe said precisely this recently, and Anthony Tommasini of the NYT agrees.  I, myself, have heard many of the past pianists usually included in the mid-20^th century pantheon of the golden age of piano playing (e.g., Rubinstein, Horowitz, Richter, Gieseking, Bachauer, Myra Hess, etc.), and I’ve known for some time now that right now is the golden age of piano performance.  Precisely why this should be so, I’m not sure, but it is indisputable that today, virtuosos are commonplace; everyone plays the Liszt Paganini Variations or the Rach 3, usually by age 16 or younger.  All of today’s performers are in the Olympics.

This democratization, if you will, of piano playing presents a lot of problems for those many aspirants to the big time; after all, none of them can claim to play faster, cleaner, more powerfully, more virtuosically (I know there’s no such word), than any of the others.  A few have been successful in becoming media personalities of sorts, chief among them being the Chinese pianist Lang Lang, who now has contracts to endorse sports shoes (I forgot the brand that he works for) and BMWs.  Winning major piano competitions is a chance to separate from the crowd, but it is amazing how many major winners fade into relative obscurity, and how many top pianists have successfully avoided the competition route completely.  

So what does one do?  Easy to answer: one makes beautiful music.  But, in order to make beautiful music, one has to have something to say.  In order to have something to say, one has to first lead a life that has some inner meaning.  That meaning might not be obvious from the details of existence (we know a lot about Rubinstein, not so much about Richter), but it expresses through the medium of the keyboard.  Why play Beethoven’s Appassionata again if one has nothing new to say about it?  The genius of the great composers is that they permit endless interpretations, so the raw material from which to construct a new interpretation or a great performance, is at hand.  Why play the Appassionata like Rubinstein?  I’d rather listen to Rubinstein, rather than someone who plays like Rubinstein. 

 

Yevgeny Sudbin, now in his early 30’s, has the magic.  His technique is as good as anyone around (and that’s saying a lot), but he doesn’t play like anyone else:  he plays like Sudbin.  I didn’t have to listen to him play for long (I first heard Sudbin live four years ago) to know that he was trying to say something about the music---not just play it.  Exactly what that “something” is, is beyond my analytic ability to express.  It is too trite to say that it is poetic, or deep, or original, or whatever professional writers say about performances they review.  But, many years ago, I heard the great Broadway team of Betty Comden and Adolph Green tell what makes a Broadway show a hit;: they said, “it works.”  That’s it---Sudbin’s performances of whatever he’s playing “works.”

As for Sudbin’s performance on June 20, which I found to be one of the best piano evenings I can remember, I will leave that to the very excellent reviewer, Chang Tou Liang, writing in The Straits Times, a review with which I totally agree and could not say nearly as well.  Chang’s review follows in full: 

This review was published in The Straits Times on 22 June 2013

Sudbin Amazes at Piano Fest Opening

By Chang Tou Liang

The 20th edition of the venerated Singapore International Piano Festival opened with a recital by a pianist that reflects the spirit and ethos of the nation’s premier keyboard event. Young Russian Yevgeny Sudbin is on the rising arc of a considerable concert career. He is an artist unafraid to take on unusual and adventurous recital programmes to challenge and to provoke.

Although the underlying theme of this festival was “Music and Movement”, with an acknowledged nod to the dance genre, Sudbin centred his recital on varying states of mood and mind. With it, he pondered on life, with its joys and toils, and mortality. An entire half of Franz Liszt’s music encapsulated this viewpoint.

Opening with Funerailles (from the cycle of Poetic And Religious Harmonies), its tolling bells were deliberately oppressive rather than exultant. Through this arose an air of nobility, representing his downtrodden Hungarian kin and their call to arms. The hair-raising episode of stampeding octaves was judged to perfection, which was later echoed by the Tenth Transcendental Study in F minor that closed the set.

In between both works was pure poetry, flowing lyricism in Petrarch’s Sonnet No.104 which decried Pace non trovo (I Find No Piece), and the ever-expanding chords of Harmonies du soir (Evening Harmonies) which reassured all was well in the world. The audience’s insistence of applauding between each piece must have distracted, interrupting Sudbin’s train of thought for the beginning of the closing etude in order to take a bow. A minor memory lapse was an unfortunate result.

There were thankfully no such intrusions in the second half, which began with a portrayal of grief in two minor key Scarlatti Sonatas – beautifully realised - and Sudbin’s own transcription of the Lacrimosa from Mozart’s Requiem. In the latter, he explored harmonies and resonances more far-ranging than Liszt himself.

The final part of the recital was devoted to the pleasurable state of ecstasy. Debussy’s L’Isle Joyeuse delighted in series of trills and rhythmic thrills, exhibiting an innocent happiness with a rapturous tumble to the bottom of the keyboard. Quite different was Scriabin’s Fifth Sonata, sometimes called “The Poem of Ecstasy”, for its fulminant, carnal outbursts and flame-throwing to the highest registers.

Sudbin possessed the requisite technique and rapier-quick reflexes to make both pieces work. Comparisons with the legacies of Richter and Horowitz are not out of place here. Three encores, by Scriabin, Scarlatti and Sudbin’s own tongue-in-cheek and uproariously vulgar conflation of Chopin’s Minute Waltz (by way of Hungarian show-boater György Cziffra and Ravel’s La Valse) had the audience in stitches.

The reaction of amazement and sometimes disbelief is one regularly encountered in this festival over the last two decades. Long may that continue.