Behrouz Jamali has created the kind of film I had always hoped to see about Alexander Toradze.
I permits Toradze to speak for an hour without abridgement or abbreviation. It abjures soundbites.
I believe it should be seen by all devotees of the piano, and to fledgling pianists at music schools and conservatories.
Born in Tbilisi in 1952, Toradze graduated from the Moscow Conservatory, toured the West as a Soviet artist, defected to the United States in 1983, and has since taught and lived in the US while maintaining an international career. His father, David, was the leading Georgian composer.
In sixty minutes, Toradze tells three stories.
The first is about why his father had to quit playing jazz in a famous Moscow restaurant in 1940. This is a story about Russian pedagogy and the generosity of Reinhold Gliere.
The second story (at 18:16) explores how jazz represented American freedoms to Soviet musicians of Toradze’s generation, and how as a touring Soviet artist in 1978 he refused to fly to Miami from Portland, Oregon, because he insisted on hearing Ella Fitzgerald (“a goddess”) and Oscar Peterson.
The third story – and, to me, the most important – is about how Toradze applies stories to music to achieve a kind of “authenticity” having nothing to do with literal adherence to the score. The focus is Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata (33:43), which Toradze performs in a manner unknown to Prokofiev and yet conveying its own kind of truth.
Toradze’s reading is invested in the experience of wartime. One repeated-note theme, for instance, is for Toradze “drops of tears” (41:00). I comment that Toradze interprets the Prokofiev sonata via a process of “infiltration” of thought and feeling. “You can’t just surrender to the composer,” I suggest, “or you surrender yourself.”
Typically, Toradze needed to find a “story” when returning to Beethoven’s Op. 109 Piano Sonata (52:00). I tell him: “It’s not important whether your story is true. It’s true for you. It’s an instrument of interpretation; it lets you inhabit the music.”
If you want to hear more Toradze, I recommend his singular recording of Prokofiev’s Second Piano Concerto with Valery Gergiev and the Mariinski Orchestra. Here Toradze’s story is that the concerto remembers and mourns Prokofiev’s friend Maximilian Schmidthof, who committed suicide. This detailed reading transforms and amplifies the music in surprising (and controversial) ways. In music, an “agogic” accent is achieved not via loudness, but a slight delay. The tremendous agogic accent Toradze interpolates at 11:42 (just after the first movement cadenza), and which Gergiev thunderously absorbs, is not to be found on the page.
A superb recent zoom interview with Toradze by the conductor Gerard Schwarz may be found here.
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