Iván Fischer and Anna Vinnitskaya

Be it Bach or Shostakovich: Anna Vinnitskaya only plays, in her own words, music about which she has something to say interpretatively that she can pass on to her audience. Despite her astounding piano technique, virtuosity for its own sake is not what interests this personable artist, who is acclaimed around the world for sensitive interpretations by both concertgoers and critics. After being awarded First Prize for piano in 2007 as the second woman in the history of the Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussel, Anna Vinnitskaya has in the meantime proven on all the world’s significant concert stages that there’s a whole range of composers about whom she has “something to say”. At the heart of her wide-ranging repertoire are masters of Russian and Soviet music such as Sergei Rachmaninov, Sergei Prokofiev and Dmitri Shostakovich. But Johann Sebastian Bach, Frédéric Chopin, Johannes Brahms, Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel are also congenially interpreted by Anna Vinnitskaya.

The artist, who was born in Novorossiysk on the Black Sea in 1983 and has been playing piano since the age of six, owes the ability to do justice to such a stylistic range to two mentors above all: she learned to “sing on the piano” from Sergei Ossipenko, with whom she studied between 1995 and 2001 at the Rachmaninov Conservatory in Rostov-on-Don, Anna Vinnitskaya disclosed recently in an interview; Evgeni Koroliov, whose master class at the Hamburg Hochschule für Musik und Theater she attended in later years, was the one who then taught her to develop a musical independence. These qualities – a cantabile touch and an independent and fresh expressive power – already characterized the piano recital with which Anna Vinnitskaya made her Philharmonic debut in October 2017.

At these concerts she can be experienced as soloist in a work that played a decisive role in her career: after all, with her interpretation of Sergei Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto, a work that oscillates between musical Romanticism and avantgarde that premiered in 1913, Anna Vinnitskaya won the final round of the Concours Musical Reine Elisabeth in 2007. Her musical partner conducting the Berliner Philharmoniker is Iván Fischer, Music Director of the Budapest Festival Orchestra and Honorary Conductor of the Konzerthausorchester Berlin, who stands in for Mikko Franck.

Van Gogh, Botticelli and Other Aural Landscapes

Works by Rautavaara, Prokofiev, Debussy and Ravel

Sites auriculaires – roughly translatable as “aural landscapes” – is the name of an early diptych for two pianos by Maurice Ravel. This evening’s four works, composed between 1887 and 1992, can also be experienced as aural landscapes, bathed in a play of changing tonal colours and chiaroscuro effects: musical pen drawings, watercolours and oil paintings of real or imaginary places which you can “visit” with your ears.

Einojuhani Rautavaara: Apotheosis

In Apotheosis by the Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara, it is the glistening sunlight of a summer landscape: fields of yellow-gold corn or sunflowers, the intense blue of the sky, the dark green shadows of trees at the edge of the road leading into a small town with houses clustered round the Romanesque church of Notre-Dame-de-l’Assomption. Or, to be precise, the town of Auvers-sur-Oise, some 35 km north of Paris, on 29 July 1890: the day on which Vincent van Gogh shot a bullet into his chest in a field outside of Auvers and breathed his last in the Auberge Ravoux, attended by his brother Theo and the doctor Paul Gachet. In the third act of Vincent, the fifth of his nine operas, which had its premiere in Helsinki in 1990, Rautavaara gives the dying painter a final monologue in praise of the sun, summer and life. This Apotheosis, two years later, became the orchestral finale of the sixth of Rautavaara’s eight symphonies.

A protégé of Sibelius, Rautavaara was one of Finland’s leading composers in the second half of the 20th century. His style developed from neo-classicism via serialism to what could be called “neo-Romantic mysticism”. In its almost intoxicating tonal opulence, Apotheosis typifies that stylistic ideal, which merges dodecaphony and triad harmony.

Sergei Prokofiev: Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, op. 16

A wholly different type of scenery awaits discovery in the Second Piano Concerto of the 22-year-old Sergei Prokofiev: that of pre-Revolutionary Pavlovsk, one of the summer residences of the Russian tsars, some 30 km south of St. Petersburg (of which it is now a part). After the country’s first railway line opened in November 1837, outdoor concerts were presented in the pavilion belonging to the station building, directly adjacent to the palace, featuring famous musicians such as Johann Strauss, Franz Liszt – and the young Prokofiev.

“The summer concerts in Pavlovsk were conducted by Alexander Petrovich Aslanov, another enthusiast for new music,” Prokofiev later recalled in his autobiography. “The first performance of the Second Concerto took place in Pavlovsk on 5 September 1913, with Aslanov conducting. It proved quite sensational, in that half the audience hissed and the other half applauded. The press was also divided. Vyacheslav Karatigin wrote a flattering article; other reviewers mocked me.”

In contrast to the single-movement Piano Concerto No. 1 in D flat major, op. 10, Prokofiev’s second contribution to the genre has four movements and (with a Scherzo and Intermezzo placed second and third) corresponds more closely to the model of a symphony than to that of a classical three-movement piano concerto. It must also be noted, however, that the solo part is so dominant and virtuosic that, as Prokofiev remarked, “the orchestra exists only as an afterthought”. The first movement’s lengthy and murderously difficult solo cadenza, the perpetuum mobile Scherzo, the grotesque march in the Intermezzo and the wild Finale, marked Allegro tempestuoso, all reflect much of that stile barbaro which is not dissimilar to Igor Stravinsky’s Sacre du printemps.

Claude Debussy: Printemps

Debussy’s two-movement “suite symphonique” Printemps for orchestra, piano and chorus is an aural landscape inspired by painting and nature: by, respectively, Sandro Botticelli’s La primavera and the Villa Medici, where he spent two years after being awarded the Académie des Beaux-Arts’ Prix de Rome. Having won first prize for his cantata L’Enfant prodigue, Debussy arrived in Rome in January 1885 without much interest or inclination. Nevertheless, he fulfilled his obligation of sending at least one new piece a year back to the Académie in Paris: first the (lost) “ode symphonique” Zuleima, then Printemps.

The modal turns, post-Wagnerian harmony and elegant orchestration of this piece, which plays for just over a quarter of an hour, anticipate what Debussy would bring to perfection seven years later in the Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune. In spite of his ambivalence towards César Franck and Camille Saint-Saëns, their influence is still clearly detectable, though that did not soften the harsh criticism of his music by the Académie (of which Saint-Saëns was a member): “M. Debussy seems to be preoccupied wholly with creating the strange, the bizarre, the unintelligible, the unplayable,” was the commission’s verdict on Zuleima, and it is unlikely to have passed a more favourable judgement on Printemps.

Maurice Ravel: Daphnis et Chloé – Orchestral Suite No. 2

The last aural landscape is the ancient Greek writer Longus’ evocation of Arcadia in his pastoral romance Daphnis and Chloe, written in the second or third century AD and the basis for Maurice Ravel’s ballet of the same name: “My intention in writing it was to compose a vast musical fresco in which I was less concerned with archaism than with faithfully reproducing the Greece of my dreams, which is very similar to that imagined and painted by the French artists at the end of the 18th century. The work is constructed symphonically, according to a strict key scheme and using a small number of themes, whose development ensures the work’s symphonic homogeneity.”

The music Ravel wrote for Daphnis et Chloé is a virtual fireworks display of instrumental effects, juxtaposing the powerful expressivity of the tutti passages with sounds of wonderful transparency, like the rippling break of dawn (Lever du jour) with muted strings divided into 20 parts as background to the rustling demisemiquaver (32nd-note) triplets of the woodwind and harps. Brief motifs, in part reduced to a bare interval, organize the work and characterize the protagonists and the threads of the action. This approach clearly distinguishes Ravel’s score from a composition like Le Sacre du printemps (premiered a year later): whereas Stravinsky attempts to realize rhythmic freedom through constantly changing metres, Ravel sticks to clear and incisive rhythms and lets his orchestra revel in genuinely orgiastic sonorities – freedom of sound rather than freedom of form.

Perhaps that was why even the arch-conservative Vincent d’Indy, who otherwise hadn’t a good word to say about Ravel, could not resist the magic of this score and admitted that, with Daphnis et Chloé, “Ravel’s art – at least for the moment – was proceeding directly towards real music”.

Michael Stegemann

Translation: Richard Evidon

Iván Fischer, born in Hungary, studied piano, violin and cello in Budapest, continuing his education in Vienna where he was in Hans Swarowsky’s conducting class. For two years he was Nikolaus Harnoncourt’s assistant. His international career took off in 1976, when he won the Rupert Foundation conducting competition in London. In 1983, together with Zoltán Kocsis, Iván Fischer founded the Budapest Festival Orchestra, an ensemble for which he still serves as musical director. Fischer has been a regular guest in major opera houses of the world (e.g. London, Zurich, Paris and Brussels). He has been principal conductor of the Konzerthausorchester Berlin from 2012 until 2018 and is now their honorary conductor. As a guest conductor he works with the finest symphony orchestras of the world, like the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, the New York Philharmonic and the Cleveland Orchestra, the Orchestre de Paris, the Munich and Israel Philharmonic. In 1989 he gave his debut with the Berliner Philharmoniker and has returned several times since; his last performance with the orchestra was in December 2018 when he conducted works by Dvořák, Wolf and Schubert. Fischer is also successful as composer: his works have been performed in the US, the Netherland, Belgium, Hungary, Germany and Austria. He is a founder of the Hungarian Mahler Society and patron of the British Kodály Academy. Iván Fischer received the Golden Medal Award from the President of the Republic of Hungary and the Kossuth Prize. The French Government named him Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres, and in 2013 he was made honorary member of the Royal Academy of Music in London. In addition, he is an honorary citizen of Budapest.

Anna Vinnitskaya was born in Novorossiysk, Russia in 1983 to a family of musicians. At the age of six she received her first piano lessons from her mother. As a nine-year-old, she first appeared in public in a concert. After studying at the Rostov State “Rachmaninov” Conservatory (Rostov-on-Don), Anna Vinnitskaya was then a master student of Evgeni Koroliov at the Hamburg University of Music and Theatre from 2002; she has also taught there as a professor since 2009. The First Prize at the Concours Reine Elisabeth in Brussels in 2007 and the Leonard Bernstein Award of the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival in 2008 were preludes to an international career for the pianist, taking her to renowned orchestras such as the Munich Philharmonic, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra London, the City of the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra and the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande. She has worked with conductors such as Marek Janowski, Andris Nelson, Kirill Petrenko, Mirga Gražinytė-Tyla and Krzysztof Urbański. Vinnitskaya’s repertoire ranges from Bach to Gubaidulina. She has a special affection for the great composers of her homeland such as Rachmaninov, Prokofiev and Shostakovich, and also for French piano music, such as that of Ravel, Debussy and Chopin. In October 2017 she gave a recital in the Chamber Music Hall at the invitation of the Berliner Philharmoniker Foundation. In these concerts, Anna Vinnitskaya makes her debut as a soloist with the orchestra.