A few weeks ago, Boulder pianist David Koorevaar talked to a Chicago colleague who mentioned that the once-heralded Ivo Pogorelich was coming for a recital.
Koorevaar assumed that meant an appearance at a prime venue such as Orchestra Hall. But his friend said no, the concert was scheduled at Wheaton College in the city’s suburbs.
That’s how things have gone in recent years for Pogorelich, who is set to appear Saturday evening on the University of Denver’s Newman Center Presents series as part of a kind of comeback tour focused on college campuses.
Pogorelich’s once-moody temperament and unconventional dress gave him rock-star appeal during the peak of his popularity in the 1980s, but he has since devolved into a kind of keyboard oddity and largely disappeared from the scene.
After hearing the first half of Pogorelich’s controversial New York recital in late October and refusing to stay for the rest, Jay Nordlinger, the New York Sun’s music critic, wrote:
“I will only say this: If the people around Mr. Pogorelich have any influence at all, they should dissuade him from playing in public. If they are actively encouraging him, they are doing him a grave disservice.”
Anthony Tommasini, a New York Times music critic, penned a similar critique:
“His incoherent and interpretatively perverse playing defies description. The first minutes of the opening work, Beethoven’s Sonata No.32 in C minor, were weirdly fascinating. Before long the performance was just plain weird. And so the evening continued.”
Stephen Seifert, executive director of the Newman Center for the Performing Arts, has seen those damning reviews. But he sticks by his decision to book Pogorelich, noting that other reviews from the pianist’s tour have been more positive.
“Presenting an individualistic artist is always an interesting proposition, because you’re giving the artist an opportunity to express himself on stage, and people can have bad nights,” Seifert said.
“I don’t know whether Tommasini had a bad night or whether Pogorelich had a bad night or both of them. I am going to be fascinated to see what happens here.”
Pogorelich, who was born in Belgrade in 1958, captured the music world’s attention in 1980 not by winning the International Chopin Competition in Warsaw but by being infamously dismissed from it in the third round.
One member of the competition’s jury, famed pianist Martha Argerich, clearly saw in the young pianist some of the mercurial tendencies that fueled her own success. She called Pogorelich a genius and resigned in protest.
The ensuing brouhaha – not to mention Pogorelich’s unorthodox, anti-establishment demeanor in general – made him a sensation, especially with young fans.
Pogorelich was booked in major halls worldwide, and his recordings quickly sold hundreds of thousands of copies – big numbers in the classical realm.
“He was a startling pianist with a brilliant technique, a flashy metallic sound of real depth and flamboyant way of playing Chopin that caused listeners of every stripe to swoon,” Mark Swed, music critic of the Los Angeles Times, wrote in November 2004.
“He was mysterious. He married his Russian piano teacher. He seemed to both crave stardom and snub it.”
From the start, his idiosyncracies included a penchant for canceling concerts. Nordlinger noted that before hearing Pogorelich in October, he had previously tried to hear the pianist four times since the early 1980s, and each time the concerts were called off.
Indeed, Saturday’s concert seemed to be in jeopardy when Playbill’s website announced in July the pianist was canceling all his remaining concerts for 2006 for “health reasons.” Apparently that announcement only referred to his European dates.
The star pianist of 1980s has evolved into performer who plays up his cult status with a shaved head and disdainful looks at the audience.
Pogorelich’s amazing technique has never been questioned, but the pianist’s approach was always considered visionary or offbeat, depending on one’s point of view.
But in recent years, what seemed like originality and inventiveness before has turned into something self-indulgent and even bizarre. His exaggerated tempos and other eccentricities led Korevaar to compare the pianist to Glenn Gould, a maverick artist who eventually gave up performing in public.
“In Beethoven’s visionary final sonata, which begins in stormy complexity and ends in mystical bliss, Mr. Pogorelich’s timings were stretched to the point that the music lost forward motion and structural coherence,” Tommasini said.
“Consider this: The recordings of this work by Artur Schnabel, Richard Goode and Rudolf Serkin each clock in at about 26 minutes. Mr. Pogorelich’s performance lasted 41 minutes.”
Pogorelich is scheduled Saturday to perform that same sonata – No.32 in C minor, Op.111 – along with an earlier Beethoven sonata and works by Alexander Scriabin and Sergei Rachmaninoff.
How he will fare is anybody’s guess. Indeed, that very unpredictability might be a big part of what lures audiences to the pianist’s concerts these days.
| Ivo Pogorelich, pianist
Classical music|University of Denver, Gates Concert Hall, Newman Center for the Performing Arts, 2344 E. Iliff Ave.; 7:30 p.m. Saturday|$25-$55 |303-357-2787 or ticketmaster.com
