Family Business – Father and Son Ashkenazy Take on Impressionists
Vladimir Ashkenazy, one of the twentieth century’s greatest pianists has done virtually everything. A man with nine musical lives.
So his recent duo-disc and international duo-performances come as no surprise to us when he returns to the piano with his son Vovka in rarely recorded French Impressionist duets.
“Debussy & Ravel: Music for Two Pianos” – Vladimir and Vovka Ashkenazy, pianos. Featuring music written for two pianos, or arranged for two pianos and performed by father and son team Vladimir and Vovka Ashkenazy. Works include Debussy’s “En blanc et noir,” “Jeux,” and “Lindaraja.” From Ravel, “Entre cloches,” “Rapsodie Espagnole,” and “La Valse.” (Decca)
It’s music for two pianos that appears on this recent disc (Decca).
One of the players is Vladimir Ashkenazy, who’s one of the great pianists of the last decades (and who turned 70 in 2007), and the other player is his son Vovka. This release is the first full-length recording from father and son Ashkenazy, although Vovka did sit in on a couple of tracks on Vladimir’s 2002 release of Rachmaninov transcriptions. Vovka has said that while being the son of Vladimir Ashkenazy has had both its benefits and its drawbacks, his father deliberately stood back so that he could find his own path as a pianist –a path that now converges with that of his father in this celebration of what two pianos can do. Composers were particularly fond of two pianos when it came to versions of orchestral compositions. It was a way for folks to become acquainted with a new orchestral work, or to remind themselves of one they’d already heard and loved. The pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, himself a revelatory Debussy interpreter, has made the two-piano arrangement [of Jeux] that the Ashkenazys play on this disc.
Vladimir Ashkenazy’s own father was a professional pianist, but he never taught his son. It was his mother who found Ashkenazy his first teacher at age six. After his debut in Moscow at the tender age of eight, Ashkenazy was subsequently put on track for a musical career and enrolled in Moscow’s Central Music School.
His regular piano teacher there was Anaida Sumbatian. In 1955 he entered the Moscow Conservatory, studying with the great pianist Lev Oborin. In the same year he won second prize in the Fifth Warsaw International Chopin Competition.
The following year he won the Gold Medal in the Brussels Queen Elizabeth International piano competition and then toured the United States in 1958.
In 1961 he married an Icelandic pianist who was studying in Moscow, Sofia Johannsdottir. He won first prize in the Second Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow in 1962, sharing that honor with British pianist John Ogdon. In 1963 Ashkenazy and his wife, travelling on their Soviet passports, went to London, where he made his debut in an orchestral concert at Festival Hall, a great success. He stayed on in England and centered his life and career there, beginning a long association with
England’s Decca (London) records. He quickly made a reputation as one of the most brilliant pianists in the Russian tradition. In 1971 he moved with his family to Reykjavik, where he was awarded Iceland’s Order of the Falcon. In 1972 he took Icelandic citizenship and later established a home base in Switzerland. Vladimir Ashkenazy is renowned for his performances of Romantic and Russian composers. He has recorded the complete 24 Preludes and Fugues of Shostakovich, Scriabin’s sonatas, Chopin and Schumann’s entire works for piano, Beethoven’s piano sonatas, as well as the piano concertos of Mozart, Beethoven, Bartók, Prokofiev, and Rachmaninoff. He has also performed and recorded chamber music. Vladimir Ashkenazy´s piano playing displays exceptional control over tone color. It is bright and
incisive with clear articulation and intellectual depth that does not interfere with the production of warm feeling.
In the Tjajkovskij competition in Moscow in 1962:
He took up the conductor’s baton in the 1970s and steadily increased his activity in that sphere, becoming principal guest conductor of the Philharmonic Orchestra of London (1981), music director of the Royal Philharmonic of London (1987), principal guest conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra (1987), and chief conductor of the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra (1989). Between 1998 and 2003, he was the Czech Philharmonic’s chief conductor, and he took up leadership of Japan’s NHK Symphony Orchestra in the 2004-2005 season, while continuing as music director of the European Union Youth Orchestra. With the end of the Soviet Union, he has made triumphant return concerts in Russia. He continues to record and perform internationally and is active in both careers.
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