L’Adige,02.09.2010
Kravtchenko: her talent charms Bolzano
The pianist’s recital at the Monteverdi Conservatory followed by a large audience.
Virtuosity combined with brio in performance of great sensitivity.
The audience showed all their affection in participating in great number to her concert and pianist Anna Kravtchenko reciprocated generously with a performance that will linger for a long time in the memory of them all. After a period of forced absence owing to the study and the enormous commitment in the preparation of Busoni’s impervious Fantasia Contrappuntistica (later played ex novo with great success in a duo with Alexander Kobrin), last night at the Monteverdi Conservatory Kravtchenko was able to pour her soul into the largely new programme presented to the audience of “Musica in aulis”. Hers is a soul that has the traits of a formidable inner depth and a sharp and noble musical sensitivity.
In the Ciaccona by Bach/Busoni the pianist priviledged the extremely refined interplay between a severe control of counterpoint and a new magnetic sound colouring. The enchantment persisting in Bizet’s Carmen Fantasia clearly revealed one of the main features of Kravtchenko’s piano-playing: “a virtuosity of elegance” – as someone justly said – which fully realizes one of Busoni’s dogmas, according to whom “technique will never be the alpha and omega of musical interpretation”.
The programme developed in a crescendo of aesthetic emotions with three Chorales by Bach/Busoni, where the artist reached heights of spirituality and meditative skill (“Nun komm…” and “Ich ruf’ zu dir”) as well as giddy extasies in the Chorale “Nun freut euch…”. While the performance went on, Anna Kravtchenko reached a closer a closer symbiosis with the excellent Steinway tuned up by Passadori with a passionate concern for the specific technical needs of the pianist. After Liszt’s three transcriptions of Schubert’s Lieders, culminating in the amazing virtuosity of love-death frenzy in the famous “Erlkoenig” and Liszt’s beautiful version of Schumann’s “Widmung”, the performance drew to an end with two sublime compositions by Rachmaninoff, “Vocalise” and “Polka V.R.”: the former played with moving poetic compliance, the latter with a display of virtuosity, nonchalance, stylistic propriety and contageous brio: qualities that only great artists possess and are able to communicate at the appropriate moment with immediacy and character.
Two wonderful encores, a Nocturne by Chopin and “October” from Tchaikowsky’s “The Seasons” were the worthy seal of an evening that belongs to the most magic moments of all the editions of the Busoni and the Bolzano Festivals.