Piano virtuoso Toradze visits Chapman for Shostakovich festival

Russian piano virtuoso Alexander Toradze, fresh off the debut concert of the inaugural Global Arts Festival, where he wowed a Segerstrom Hall audience with his blazing, intense and sensitive performance of Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2 with Pacific Symphony, touches down at Chapman University this week for more performances — and we highly recommend you don’t miss him!

The Global Arts Festival, January 30 – February 8
, a partnership between Chapman University and Pacific Symphony presented through the generosity of the Kay Family Foundation, focuses on the Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975) this year. “Decoding Shostakovich,” the festival theme, promises to delve deeply into the life, art and psyche of this fascinating and complex composer, with a multi-pronged schedule of live performances, panel discussions, art exhibitions, films and more, all week on the Chapman campus.

Toradze will appear twice at Chapman. On Tuesday, Feb. 4, he will perform Shostakovich’s Sonata for Viola and Piano with Chapman viola professor (and Pacific Symphony principal violist) Robert Becker for the keynote event of the festival, which will also feature a dialogue between Chancellor Daniele Struppa and musicologist Solomon Volkov, whose book
Testimony
is considered the authoritative work (collecting a series of interviews with Shostakovich himself) that vindicated the composer from being considered merely a tool of the Soviet arts structure, delineating Shostakovich’s oppression by Stalin over many decades.  The  Viola Sonata is Shostakovich’s valedictory work, composed just a few weeks before he died in 1975.  Dark, brooding and intensely emotional, it is a masterpiece that deserves to be heard as these two great artists will play it. In addition to the performance of the Viola Sonata and the Struppa-Volhov discussion, the event will also feature a multimedia presentation on Shostakovich produced by Chapman music composition professor Vera Ivanova and music composition alumnus Adam Boreki. The keynote event will begin at 7 p.m. in Memorial Hall, and is free and open to the public.

On Thursday, Feb. 6, Toradze returns to perform in the President’s Piano Series, along with fellow Russian pianist
Vakho Kodanashvili
.  They will perform in duo on the brief Concertino for Two Pianos, written in 1954 by Shostakovich for him and his son Maxim, who was then a student at the Moscow Conservatory, to play together, and filled with brilliantly virtuosic passages.  The rest of the recital will be devoted to piano works by Shostakovich’s contemporary, Sergei Prokofiev (1891-1953), who similarly struggled under Stalin’s dictatorship (and who, ironically, passed away on the same day Stalin died: March 5, 1953).  The recital will include a discussion with Toradze on Prokofiev in Soviet Russia and during World War II.  The President’s Piano Series recital begins at 7:30 p.m. in Salmon Recital Hall, Bertea Hall, and tickets are $25.  For tickets,
purchase online
or call 714-997-6812. If any tickets remain on Thursday, they can also be purchased at the door.

Toradze
is universally recognized as a masterful piano virtuoso in the grand Romantic tradition. With his deep, poetic lyricism and intense emotional involvement, he clearly places his personal stamp among the lineage of great Russian pianists. Toradze’s recordings of all five Prokofiev concertos with Valery Gergiev and the Kirov Orchestra for the Philips label are acclaimed by critics as “historically the best on record.”

There is more, much more, on the Global Arts Festival agenda – check out the
website for the complete schedule
, and definitely avail yourself of this amazing musical and cultural opportunity right here on the campus.