Vladimir Sofronitsky
Vladimir Sofronitsky |
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Vladimir Vladimirovich Sofronitsky (or Sofronitzky, Russian: Владимир Владимирович Софроницкий, Vladimir Sofronitskij; May 8 [O.S. April 25] 1901 – August 26, 1961) was a Russian pianist, best known as an interpreter of the Russian composer Alexander Scriabin, whose daughter he married.
Biography
Vladimir Sofronitsky was born to a physics teacher father and a mother from an artistic family. In 1903 his family moved to Warsaw, where he started piano lessons with Anna Lebedeva-Getcevich (a student of Nikolai Rubinstein), and later (from age nine) with Aleksander Michałowski.
From 1916 to 1921, Sofronitsky studied in the Petrograd Conservatory under Leonid Nikolayev, where Dmitri Shostakovich, Maria Yudina, and Elena Scriabina, the eldest daughter of the deceased Alexander Scriabin, were among his classmates. He met Scriabina in 1917 and married her in 1920. Sofronitsky was highly appreciated as an outstanding pianist by the composer Alexander Glazunov and the musicologist and critic Alexander Ossovsky.[1]
In 1920, Sofronitsky married the oldest daughter of Scriabin, Elena. While he had already divulged a sympathy for the piano music of the recently deceased mystic composer -- as attested by Yudina -- he now had a greater intellectual and emotional connection to Scriabin's works through his wife, also a talented pianist, and through the Scriabin in-laws.
He gave his first solo concert in 1919, and his only foreign tour in France between 1928 and 1929. The only other time he performed outside the Soviet Union was at the Potsdam Conference in 1945, when he was suddenly sent by Stalin to play for the allied leaders.
Sofronitsky taught at the Leningrad Conservatory from 1936 to 1942, and then at the Moscow Conservatory till his death.
He gave many performances at the Scriabin Museum in Moscow, especially during the latter part of his career. He gradually developed alcohol and drug addictions, and in his last years his pianistic skills declined noticeably.
Sofronitsky made a fair number of recordings in the last two decades of his life, but a relatively paltry number compared with the efforts of Sviatoslav Richter and Emil Gilels. Not surprisingly, Sofronitsky recorded a large number of Scriabin works and also compositions by Chopin, Rachmaninov, Schumann, Prokofiev, and others. His recorded performances from the 1940s are generally more representative than those from the last decade.
Repertoire
Being Scriabin's posthumous son-in-law, Sofronitsky never met the composer. Nevertheless, the composer's wife vouched that the pianist was the most authentic interpreter of her late father's works. Indeed, his Scriabin recordings are considered by many to be unsurpassed.
The other composer with whom Sofronitsky had the greatest affinity is Frédéric Chopin. He once told an interviewer: "A love for Chopin has followed me through the course of my entire life." Beyond Chopin and Scriabin, Sofronitsky had a wide repertoire spanning major composers from Johann Sebastian Bach to Nikolai Medtner, with focus on 19th-century Romantic composers and early 20th-century Russians.
Recognition and Recordings
Little known in the West as a result of never having toured or recorded there, Sofronitsky was held in the highest regard in his native land. Sviatoslav Richter and Emil Gilels looked up to Sofronitsky as their master, and famously, when Sofronitsky once drunkenly proclaimed the former to be a genius, Richter toasted him and proclaimed him to be a god. Upon hearing of Sofronitsky's death, Gilels was reputed to have said that "the greatest pianist in the world has died."
Few of Sofronitsky's recordings are available in the West. One noteworthy release, in BMG's "Russian Piano School" series, contains a complete concert, including a mercurial account of Robert Schumann's Piano Sonata No. 1, Op. 11. His issue in Philips' Great Pianists of the Twentieth Century features Chopin mazurkas and waltzes on the first CD, and some of his legendary Scriabin on the second, including the 2nd (first movement), 3rd, 4th, and 9th sonatas and a performance of Vers la flamme. Denon Classics' (Japan) Vladimir Sofronitsky Edition is a series of 15 CDs, ten of which remain in print.
Notes
- ^ "Leading musicians and cultural figures like Alexander Glazunov, Alexander Ossovsky, Vsevolod Meyerhold, and Petr Konchalovsky had already given the young artist glowing testimonials" see [1].