"The art of directing is an author’s art not a performer’s one. But you have to have a right to do it. Is Sofronitsky really a performer? Who would have the heart to say it? But he has the right!" - Vsevolod Meyerhold “The best method of talking about music is to be silent about it.” Robert Schumann’s famous aphorism unwittingly crosses your mind when you try to “substantiate,” embrace with words the phenomenon of Vladimir Sofronitsky. It is not because this Musician “…is beyond any classifications and above any definitions” (E. Fedorovich), not because he cannot be compared or, rephrasing the thought of Giacomo Lauri-Volpi, we cannot draw a “pianistic parallel” between him and any other masters of piano art (the 20th century gave us so many great pianists!). This phenomenon is one of those that Afanasy Fet described in simple words: “My friends, the words are helpless…” Just as much as Osip Mandelstam was “at home in music,” according to Marina Tsvetayeva, Sofronitsky was absorbed in the world of Russian literature, poetry and modern theatre, but he completely disliked the “colloquial” genre, and wrote neither articles nor books with very rare exceptions. A professor of the Leningrad and Moscow conservatories, he was not a founder of a “school” like Heinrich Neuhaus, Alexander Goldenweiser or Yakov Flier (Igor Nikonovich, Sofronitsky’s only follower in a way and a remarkable pianist who did so much to preserve his legacy, was not his pupil in a formal sense of the word). Sofronitsky, who was practically not permitted to travel abroad after his concerts in Warsaw and Paris in 1928 and 1929, toured very seldom within the Soviet Union as well, confining himself to recitals in Moscow and Leningrad (though on Stalin’s instruction he entered the group of Soviet artists who performed at the Potsdam Conference in 1945). An extreme antagonist of the recording process, he felt really free only he played concerts, but the way they were recorded on tape at the time was so imperfect. Even his closest friends were at times unable to predict whether his nearest recital would be a success - Sofronitsky, an extremely emotional and impulsive man, never overcame the syndrome of stage fright and was known for his artistic unevenness. And still, not only the public and critics but the most distinguished contemporaries such as Heinrich Neuhaus, Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Gilels, Maria Yudina and Alexander Goldenweiser spoke about him as an absolutely unique phenomenon without a shadow of jealousy. “…A seal of something unusual, sometimes almost supernatural, mysterious, unexplainable and imperiously attractive is always on his play,” Heinrich Neuhaus wrote. “When we listened to him, we sort of got in a different world which was decidedly nothing like we had seen or heard,” Yakov Milstein, an eminent historian of piano music, described his impressions. It is no mere chance that Vsevolod Meyerhold, an equally enigmatic and inexplicable genius of domestic theatre, who dedicated his last production (The Queen of Spades by Tchaikovsky) to the pianist, was one of the spiritually close people who managed to discern Sofronitsky. “I’ve tried to be better all my life… I’ve learnt all my life,” Vladimir Sofronitsky said a year before his death. He was lucky to have good teachers: when a child, he studied with Anna Lebedeva-Getsevich, one of Nikolai Rubinstein’s pupils; at the Warsaw Conservatory, with Aleksander Michałowski, a pupil of Ignaz Moscheles and Carl Tausig; and finally, he went to study with Leonid Nikolayev, an eminent professor of the Petrograd Conservatory who also taught Dmitri Shostakovich, Maria Yudina and Pavel Serebryakov. By the early 1920s, Sofronitsky, an already conservatory graduate, was a mature musician with his own performing style and a broad concert repertoire unanimously acknowledged in this country and overseas. At the same time, his nearly 40-year career was a continuous artistic ascent, a search, at times hard and poignant, an aspiration for supreme perfection. In the late 1930s, he played a grandiose cycle of twelve historical recitals, a feat that can be compared with Rubinstein’s cycles. Sofronitsky’s recitals during the years of the Great Patriotic War, in besieged Leningrad in 1941 and in Moscow in 1942 and 1943, were engraved on the memory of the contemporaries. “…How they listened to me, and what a mood I was in for playing!” the pianist remembered. At that hard time, his performing art gained a new strength and dramatic grandeur. After the war, he played extensive monographic programmes dedicated to Schubert, Schumann and Chopin. During the last decade of his life, Sofronitsky had to interrupt his concert activity for a while because of deteriorating health, and then he went through a period of “rebirth” achieving new, previously unseen heights. He hated to be referred to as “Scriabinist” as he tolerated no clichés. However, he could not help but realize that he held a very special key to Scriabin’s music - when he played it, he would achieve something that the most celebrated musicians were unable to achieve. Sofronitsky never heard Scriabin play, but those who happened to listen to both of them pointed out a surprising affinity of their interpretations. Whatever the case may be, Sofronitsky never copied even the best examples and worked his own way to all his achievements (so, he played Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev completely outside the influence of their interpretations). A fragile and dreamy flight and mighty concentration of Scriabin’s will, the large-scale concepts of the sonata cycles - Sofronitsky played everything so differently but always with a feeling of some common centre of attraction of this mystical sonic universe. The way he played the composer’s last, 70th opuses was absolutely incomprehensible - that is where he most likely never had and will never have equals. Among the romantic composers, Sofronitsky was particularly fond of Schumann’s music with its stormy emotional impulsivity. As Tchaikovsky said, that music reflected “mysteriously deep processes of our spiritual life… doubts, despair and bursts toward the ideal.” The same “mysterious depth” and “despair and bursts toward the ideal” are heard in his renditions of Schubert, Chopin and Liszt. Sofronitsky performed Beethoven’s sonatas in different periods, but especially often during his last years. That is also when he expressed a particular interest in Bach and the recently composed preludes and fugues of Shostakovich. Mozart’s selected fantasias and sonatas sounded with a tragic depth and a colossal internal tension. He was also interested in Prokofiev’s angularly graphic yet crystal clear pieces and sonatas, as well as music of some other contemporary composers (Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky, Nikolai Myaskovsky, Dmitri Kabalevsky and Boris Holz). Many things were never recorded on tape and even remained outside the concert programmes - the incredible self-demand told on. Even the things that existed in his repertoire for decades were never meant to sound identically. One of Sofronitsky’s permanent listeners recalled Pushkin’s poem The Poet in this context (“While the poet is not required for holy sacrifice unto Apollo”): “Each performance was that holy sacrifice to him… the stage was his altar.” That is why Sofronitsky, unlike Glenn Gould, “recognized” concert playing only and referred to his studio recordings as “my dead bodies.” He selected a programme of each recital with great care. Although he didn’t always stick to the chronological principle (so, he never performed Scriabin’s cycle of 24 preludes, Op. 11, completely, and out of two poems of Op. 32 he would often play the second one first), he freely confronted and contrasted the pieces, styles and eras. In the course of time, he found that “big” venues more and more burdensome preferring them to more intimate spaces like the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatory or the House of Scientists. But a special, inexpressible atmosphere existed at his recitals at the Scriabin Memorial Museum, in its small and stuffy rooms, on the composer’s half-untuned piano. “In their time, those performances were described as ‘musical hypnosis’, ‘poetic nirvana’, ‘spiritual liturgy’. Sometimes they would leave after his recitals in silence, self-absorbed with concentration as if they had to do with something mysterious,” Gennady Tsypin wrote. Firma Melodiya and the “Andrei Konchalovsky Studios” have prepared a unique set with live recordings made at the Grand and Small Halls of the Moscow Conservatory and at the Scriabin Memorial Museum during the pianist’s last decade, as well as a documentary on “Geniuses: Vladimir Sofronitsky” filmed by the outstanding director Andrei Konchalovsky. It is the only film from the “Geniuses” series that was dedicated to a great performer, not a composer. Numerous archival letters and photographs, remembrances of Sofronitsky’s friends and pupils unveil the pianist’s life and personality. - Boris Mukosey
Thank you so much for this documentary. I've been searching and listening Sofronitsky because Yunchan Lim. I admire Sofronitsky so much and I don't know how I lived all my life without his music. I think Sofronitsky will be happy to hear Yunchan as well.
Я потрясена... до слёз... и в который раз...! Всем: и фильмом, и музыкой, и самим Софроницким! Мне 75 лет, я музыковед, всегда любила работать со студентами, бесконечно люблю рассказывать о музыке, побуждать всех вникать в неё, слушать и слышать, но... Очень давно Софроницкий вошел в моё сердце и всегда при его музыке возникает потрясение! Это удивительно, непонятно и восхищает! Спасибо тебе, Боже, что дал возможность мне узнать это чудо! И спасибо всем, кто разделяет со мной это восхищение!!!
Светлая память Дорогим людям.Тигран Абрамович,Вас тоже уже нет....я училась вЦМШ ,тогда же училась дочка В.Софроницкого- Вивиана...где она теперь? Мне 62,Виве должно быть примерно столько же...привет тебе,где бы ты ни была.
A classic INFP, according to Andrei Konchalovsky and other accounts of Sofronitsky's personality. Absent gazed , focused not on his senses but in a transcendental world of possibilities and ideas. Ironically ISFPs claimed Sofronitsky which is absurd.
"The art of directing is an author’s art not a performer’s one. But you have to have a right to do it. Is Sofronitsky really a performer? Who would have the heart to say it? But he has the right!"
- Vsevolod Meyerhold
“The best method of talking about music is to be silent about it.” Robert Schumann’s famous aphorism unwittingly crosses your mind when you try to “substantiate,” embrace with words the phenomenon of Vladimir Sofronitsky. It is not because this Musician “…is beyond any classifications and above any definitions” (E. Fedorovich), not because he cannot be compared or, rephrasing the thought of Giacomo Lauri-Volpi, we cannot draw a “pianistic parallel” between him and any other masters of piano art (the 20th century gave us so many great pianists!). This phenomenon is one of those that Afanasy Fet described in simple words: “My friends, the words are helpless…” Just as much as Osip Mandelstam was “at home in music,” according to Marina Tsvetayeva, Sofronitsky was absorbed in the world of Russian literature, poetry and modern theatre, but he completely disliked the “colloquial” genre, and wrote neither articles nor books with very rare exceptions. A professor of the Leningrad and Moscow conservatories, he was not a founder of a “school” like Heinrich Neuhaus, Alexander Goldenweiser or Yakov Flier (Igor Nikonovich, Sofronitsky’s only follower in a way and a remarkable pianist who did so much to preserve his legacy, was not his pupil in a formal sense of the word). Sofronitsky, who was practically not permitted to travel abroad after his concerts in Warsaw and Paris in 1928 and 1929, toured very seldom within the Soviet Union as well, confining himself to recitals in Moscow and Leningrad (though on Stalin’s instruction he entered the group of Soviet artists who performed at the Potsdam Conference in 1945). An extreme antagonist of the recording process, he felt really free only he played concerts, but the way they were recorded on tape at the time was so imperfect. Even his closest friends were at times unable to predict whether his nearest recital would be a success - Sofronitsky, an extremely emotional and impulsive man, never overcame the syndrome of stage fright and was known for his artistic unevenness. And still, not only the public and critics but the most distinguished contemporaries such as Heinrich Neuhaus, Sviatoslav Richter, Emil Gilels, Maria Yudina and Alexander Goldenweiser spoke about him as an absolutely unique phenomenon without a shadow of jealousy. “…A seal of something unusual, sometimes almost supernatural, mysterious, unexplainable and imperiously attractive is always on his play,” Heinrich Neuhaus wrote. “When we listened to him, we sort of got in a different world which was decidedly nothing like we had seen or heard,” Yakov Milstein, an eminent historian of piano music, described his impressions. It is no mere chance that Vsevolod Meyerhold, an equally enigmatic and inexplicable genius of domestic theatre, who dedicated his last production (The Queen of Spades by Tchaikovsky) to the pianist, was one of the spiritually close people who managed to discern Sofronitsky. “I’ve tried to be better all my life… I’ve learnt all my life,” Vladimir Sofronitsky said a year before his death. He was lucky to have good teachers: when a child, he studied with Anna Lebedeva-Getsevich, one of Nikolai Rubinstein’s pupils; at the Warsaw Conservatory, with Aleksander Michałowski, a pupil of Ignaz Moscheles and Carl Tausig; and finally, he went to study with Leonid Nikolayev, an eminent professor of the Petrograd Conservatory who also taught Dmitri Shostakovich, Maria Yudina and Pavel Serebryakov. By the early 1920s, Sofronitsky, an already conservatory graduate, was a mature musician with his own performing style and a broad concert repertoire unanimously acknowledged in this country and overseas. At the same time, his nearly 40-year career was a continuous artistic ascent, a search, at times hard and poignant, an aspiration for supreme perfection. In the late 1930s, he played a grandiose cycle of twelve historical recitals, a feat that can be compared with Rubinstein’s cycles. Sofronitsky’s recitals during the years of the Great Patriotic War, in besieged Leningrad in 1941 and in Moscow in 1942 and 1943, were engraved on the memory of the contemporaries. “…How they listened to me, and what a mood I was in for playing!” the pianist remembered. At that hard time, his performing art gained a new strength and dramatic grandeur. After the war, he played extensive monographic programmes dedicated to Schubert, Schumann and Chopin. During the last decade of his life, Sofronitsky had to interrupt his concert activity for a while because of deteriorating health, and then he went through a period of “rebirth” achieving new, previously unseen heights. He hated to be referred to as “Scriabinist” as he tolerated no clichés. However, he could not help but realize that he held a very special key to Scriabin’s music - when he played it, he would achieve something that the most celebrated musicians were unable to achieve. Sofronitsky never heard Scriabin play, but those who happened to listen to both of them pointed out a surprising affinity of their interpretations. Whatever the case may be, Sofronitsky never copied even the best examples and worked his own way to all his achievements (so, he played Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev completely outside the influence of their interpretations). A fragile and dreamy flight and mighty concentration of Scriabin’s will, the large-scale concepts of the sonata cycles - Sofronitsky played everything so differently but always with a feeling of some common centre of attraction of this mystical sonic universe. The way he played the composer’s last, 70th opuses was absolutely incomprehensible - that is where he most likely never had and will never have equals. Among the romantic composers, Sofronitsky was particularly fond of Schumann’s music with its stormy emotional impulsivity. As Tchaikovsky said, that music reflected “mysteriously deep processes of our spiritual life… doubts, despair and bursts toward the ideal.” The same “mysterious depth” and “despair and bursts toward the ideal” are heard in his renditions of Schubert, Chopin and Liszt. Sofronitsky performed Beethoven’s sonatas in different periods, but especially often during his last years. That is also when he expressed a particular interest in Bach and the recently composed preludes and fugues of Shostakovich. Mozart’s selected fantasias and sonatas sounded with a tragic depth and a colossal internal tension. He was also interested in Prokofiev’s angularly graphic yet crystal clear pieces and sonatas, as well as music of some other contemporary composers (Valerian Bogdanov-Berezovsky, Nikolai Myaskovsky, Dmitri Kabalevsky and Boris Holz). Many things were never recorded on tape and even remained outside the concert programmes - the incredible self-demand told on. Even the things that existed in his repertoire for decades were never meant to sound identically. One of Sofronitsky’s permanent listeners recalled Pushkin’s poem The Poet in this context (“While the poet is not required for holy sacrifice unto Apollo”): “Each performance was that holy sacrifice to him… the stage was his altar.” That is why Sofronitsky, unlike Glenn Gould, “recognized” concert playing only and referred to his studio recordings as “my dead bodies.” He selected a programme of each recital with great care. Although he didn’t always stick to the chronological principle (so, he never performed Scriabin’s cycle of 24 preludes, Op. 11, completely, and out of two poems of Op. 32 he would often play the second one first), he freely confronted and contrasted the pieces, styles and eras. In the course of time, he found that “big” venues more and more burdensome preferring them to more intimate spaces like the Small Hall of the Moscow Conservatory or the House of Scientists. But a special, inexpressible atmosphere existed at his recitals at the Scriabin Memorial Museum, in its small and stuffy rooms, on the composer’s half-untuned piano. “In their time, those performances were described as ‘musical hypnosis’, ‘poetic nirvana’, ‘spiritual liturgy’. Sometimes they would leave after his recitals in silence, self-absorbed with concentration as if they had to do with something mysterious,” Gennady Tsypin wrote. Firma Melodiya and the “Andrei Konchalovsky Studios” have prepared a unique set with live recordings made at the Grand and Small Halls of the Moscow Conservatory and at the Scriabin Memorial Museum during the pianist’s last decade, as well as a documentary on “Geniuses: Vladimir Sofronitsky” filmed by the outstanding director Andrei Konchalovsky. It is the only film from the “Geniuses” series that was dedicated to a great performer, not a composer. Numerous archival letters and photographs, remembrances of Sofronitsky’s friends and pupils unveil the pianist’s life and personality.
- Boris Mukosey
Thank you so much for this documentary. I've been searching and listening Sofronitsky because Yunchan Lim. I admire Sofronitsky so much and I don't know how I lived all my life without his music. I think Sofronitsky will be happy to hear Yunchan as well.
Я потрясена... до слёз... и в который раз...! Всем: и фильмом, и музыкой, и самим Софроницким! Мне 75 лет, я музыковед, всегда любила работать со студентами, бесконечно люблю рассказывать о музыке, побуждать всех вникать в неё, слушать и слышать, но... Очень давно Софроницкий вошел в моё сердце и всегда при его музыке возникает потрясение! Это удивительно, непонятно и восхищает! Спасибо тебе, Боже, что дал возможность мне узнать это чудо! И спасибо всем, кто разделяет со мной это восхищение!!!
Я росла, слушая записи Софроницкого. Их в нашей семье было очень много, думаю даже - все. И это сказалось на всей моей судьбе, уверена.
Absolutely awesome. I have no words- thank you for your generosity!
You are welcome, my pleasure :-)
Светлая память Дорогим людям.Тигран Абрамович,Вас тоже уже нет....я училась вЦМШ ,тогда же училась дочка В.Софроницкого- Вивиана...где она теперь? Мне 62,Виве должно быть примерно столько же...привет тебе,где бы ты ни была.
OOOOH ! THANK YOU VERY MUCH !!!!
You are welcome. My pleasure
Thank You!!
This is one of my favorite videos ever!!!
Wowowowowow so wonderful thanks!
I am completely speechless, thank you so much for this documentary (and the description)
You are welcome ;-)
Thank you for sharing this amazing documentary! Can anyone identify the music in the background beginning @ 4:15? I would be so grateful...
Schumann's Carnaval, Op.9: 12. Chopin
@@pianomasters3752 This is wonderful! Very kind of you. This film is one to watch and re-watch - what a treasure!
Him and Pletnev....Russian born and raised Giants of Classical Piano...that's all.
What is the name @ 9:50
Schubert-Liszt: Aufenthalt (from Schwanengesang)
A classic INFP, according to Andrei Konchalovsky and other accounts of Sofronitsky's personality. Absent gazed , focused not on his senses but in a transcendental world of possibilities and ideas. Ironically ISFPs claimed Sofronitsky which is absurd.