In Monday’s (7/6) Spectator (U.K.), Ismene Brown writes about last week’s Tchaikovsky competition, which “proved an utter astonishment…. In a country where ‘the Russian pianist’ is expected to personify world-beating capacity in everything from mighty technique to exquisite fantasy … the entire orthodoxy of piano training was upended by the emergence of a self-taught Frenchman. Lucas Debargue, a 24-year-old … who mostly plays in jazz clubs and learns vast Russian piano pieces by ear from other people’s recordings, captivated all with his individual, gossamer musicianship and ended up in the final…. You’d expect [the judges] to have preferred the perfect Russian product [finalist Daniel] Kharitonov above the unschooled maverick. Not a bit of it. Two Russian pianists on the panel, Dmitri Bashkirov and Boris Berezovsky, have said Debargue is a wonder, for all his flaws, and should have been higher in the prizes. They said it was the non-Russians on the panel … who had placed Debargue last…. Debargue … has as yet nothing like the dependability, self-confidence or repertoire to handle the workload that follows victory…. Two years more of solid work, said Bashkirov, and Debargue could become one of the greatest of all.”
Posted July 8, 2015
