Winner of the Latin GRAMMY® Award, nominated for the ICMA Prize, winner of "Best Recital of the Year" by the São Paulo Art Critics Association, the William Petschek Prize at the Juilliard School and First Prize in the International Artists Competition in New York, Sonia Rubinsky is a "deep, refined pianist who concedes nothing to showboating. Her Mozart is articulate, no less lilting and clear than that of Perahia or Uchida. His Scarlatti demonstrates imperial control of timbre. Like her compatriots, the late Guiomar Novaes and Nelson Freire, she has that genius for color that makes her an ideal interpreter of Debussy or Messiaen."
Born in Brazil to a Polish mother and Lithuanian father, Sonia Rubinsky began her musical studies at the Conservatorio Musical de Campinas with Olga Rizzardo Normanha. She gave her first recital at the age of 5 and a half, and by the age of 12 was performing as a soloist with orchestra. To further her education, she left to study at the RUBIN Academy in Jerusalem.
At the age of 16, she played in front of Arthur Rubinstein in the film "Arthur Rubinstein in Jerusalem", who admired her strong temperament. Encouraged by this extraordinary master, she obtained her doctorate at the Juilliard School in New York and performed in prestigious concert halls such as Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully Hall, Bargemusic, Merkin Concert Hall, Miller Theatre, Hertz Hall in Berkeley, Maison de la Radio, Sala São Paulo and Teatro Municipal de São Paulo, Recanati Hall, Cadogan Hall in London and AGA-Zaal in the Netherlands.
His multi-award-winning discography (Latin GRAMMY Award, ICMA Award nomination, Editor's Choice, to name but a few) has been hailed by the critics (Le Monde de la Musique, Diapason, Gramophone, BBC Music Magazine, ClassicsToday among others). Recordings include works by Bach, Debussy, Messiaen, Scarlatti, Mozart, Almeida Prado, Jorge Liderman, Gabriela Lena Frank, Mendelssohn, Rachmaninov, and the complete solo piano works of Villa-Lobos.
Since 2011, Sonia Rubinsky has been Murray Perahia's Artist in Residence at the Aldwell Center and the Jerusalem Music Center.
The evening program
W.A Mozart Sonata K282
L.v Beethoven Sonata Opus 109
C. Debussy Children's Corner
H. Villa-Lobos Excerpts from Carnaval das Crianças
Kreisler/Rachmaninov Liebesleid
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Goldfingers, Record presentation by Irineu Perpétuo
The title of this album is a tribute to the so-called Golden Age of the piano. This tribute is paid in several ways. One of them is a type of performance that refuses impersonal standardization. Each pianist of this era left his or her own individual mark, his or her own way of playing - unique, virtuoso, personal and colorful, involving many risks taken on stage.
The other is the choice of repertoire itself. Before the specialization imposed by the rise of piano competitions and the demands of the recording industry, pianists acted as curators of a vast musical museum, offering the listener a tour through centuries of history, from the 18th to the 20th century.
Sonia Rubinsky's recording program functions like a recital, unfolding in chronological order. It begins with one of the first keyboard virtuosos, Austrian Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756-1791). A prodigy who seduced the major European capitals with his pianistic talents from an early age, Mozart wrote his first piano sonatas at the age of 18, in 1774, while in Munich for the premiere of his comic opera La Finta Giardiniera. Among them, Rubinsky chose the fourth, in E-flat major, K. 282. Calm and lightness are the predominant affections of the work, making themselves felt from the opening Adagio, through the simple melodicity of the pair of minuets that make up its central movement, to the agility of the final Allegro.
From the subtleties of Mozartian classicism, let's move on to the man who gave birth to the tradition of twentieth-century pianist-composers: the Russian Sergei Rachmaninov (1873-1943). If we normally associate the era of modernism with ruptures, avant-gardes and experimentalists, leading to an open confrontation or denial of the tonal system, Rachmaninov above all represents the continuity of 19th-century aesthetics, interested in direct communication with the listener, lyrical melodies, tonal harmony and a piano inherited from Chopin, Liszt and his compatriot Tchaikovsky. (...)
Shortly after the 1917 Revolution, Rachmaninov left Russia. In the West, he devoted himself mainly to his career as a pianist, composing less and undertaking revisions of his earlier works. He once declared: "I look at my early works and see how much is superfluous in them. Even in this sonata, there are many voices moving simultaneously, and it's too long."
Thus, in 1931, the composer produced a reduced and relatively simplified version of the sonata. Sensing that something had been lost in the revision of the work, the virtuoso Vladimir Horowitz, one of the great names of the Golden Age of piano, compatriot and friend of Rachmaninov, attempted to merge the two texts, producing a new version in 1943, which undoes some of the cuts made by the composer. Also in search of the original Rachmaninovian grandeur, Sonia Rubinsky's recording is based on the original 1913 version of the sonata.
If we consider this album as a recital, after the Rachmaninov Sonata comes the intermission. We then hear a piece chronologically contemporary with the Sonata (they are separated by only five years), but referring to an absolutely different pianism. A pupil of Mauté de Fleurville (mother-in-law of the poet Paul Verlaine), who also claimed to be a disciple of Chopin, Claude Debussy (1862-1918) took after the Polish composer his taste for gentleness. (...)
In writing Children's Corner in 1908, Debussy apparently had no recourse to his memories of his troubled childhood as the son of a bankrupt porcelain store owner and a seamstress, at the time of his country's defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. Above all, he was moved by the transformative experience of fatherhood. The score bears the following dedication: "To my dear little Chouchou, with your father's tender apologies for what follows."
(...) Like Schumann's Kinderszenen, this is not a work for children, but rather a score for professional pianists, evoking a childlike world. The journey between technical keyboard exercises(Doctor Gradus ad Parnasum) and the world of ragtime(Golliwogg's Cakewalk, with a subtle, scathing allusion to Wagner's Tristan und Isolde ) includes mention of an elephant from the Paris zoo(Jimbo's Lullaby), the serenade of a porcelain doll,(Serenade for the Doll, with pentatonic scales marking its Chinese origin), an impressionistic description of snowfall(The Snow is Dancing) and the suggestion of the pastoral instrument par excellence, the flute(TheLittleShepherd).
This would mark the end of the recital - after which, of course, would come the encore. It was not uncommon for pianists of the Golden Age to include their own transcriptions. Rachmaninov was a chamber music partner of Viennese violinist Fritz Kreisler (1875-1962), with whom he recorded. He transcribed for solo piano one of his friend's most famous, melodic and nostalgic pieces: the waltz Liebesleid (Love's Sorrow). Horowitz looked to the gypsy ambience of the opera Carmen (1875), by Frenchman Georges Bizet (1838-1875), for inspiration for an encore in which all is brilliance and virtuosity. (...) Horowitz mobilizes all the resources of the keyboard to characterize Carmen's insolence and sensuality, making the pianist take extreme risks that remind us time and again that the opera's character is always on the razor's edge, on the brink of the abyss.
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Latest review of GOLDFINGERS (Libération)
"The new Rubinsky [disque] has arrived, and it's another piano lesson. The program includes Mozart's Fourth Sonata, sung with the simplicity and naturalness of Backhaus, followed by Rachmaninov's Second, in which the musician deploys an astonishing variety of colors, dynamics and sound planes without ever losing sight of course or line. Back to Debussy, then, with the Children's Corner, in which the Brazilian masters the alchemy of hurried irony and whimsical melancholy; a pinch of Mitteleuropa nostalgia with Kreisler's shimmering Liebesleid, and it's already champagne: Horowitz's formidable Variations on a theme from Carmen, sovereignly articulated and poised. Like no other today. "
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They liked it...
"Some compare his pianistic style to that of Eugene Istomin or Wilhelm Kempff, others praise his simple, calm Mozart 'that breathes and sings', still others admire his 'clear technique' his 'elastic phrasing', the 'infinite delicacy' of his Debussy Estampes, the 'musical sophistication' of his Messiaen Regards and the 'powerful, almost iron touch' of his Villa-Lobos. The New York Times, which regularly reports on his Carnegie Hall appearances, went so far as to speak of an "exceptional degree of power and precision." LIBÉRATION
"... Pianist Sonia Rubinsky possesses a phenomenal technique, an immeasurable palette of colors and an irrepressible temperament. She is reminiscent of her colleague Martha Argerich." KLASSIK.COM
"Constantly accurate.... Immanently seductive with its racy elegance." QOBUZ
"What a temperament! ARTHUR RUBINSTEIN
"Real talent, artistic flair, refined piano technique." LEON FLEISHER
"An exceptional talent" JAN EKIER
"...visceral impact and virtuoso excitement.... Great performance...tireless nervous energy.... Unusual degree of power and precision.... brilliant sonorities.... splendid and fiery energy...capable of lyricism...breathtaking speed, joyous energy." THE NEW YORK TIMES
"The pianist displays a rather remarkable vitality which does not prevent, when necessary, the finest nuances". THE WORLD OF MUSIC
Photo credit: Lyodoh Kaneko
Dates and Opening Time
On November 8, 2024
Location
Salle Cortot
78 Rue Cardinet
75017 Paris 17
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