Blue hat, red scarf, large fleece jacket thrown over his shoulders, a man plays the piano in the great synagogue of Novi Sad. The crowd that flocks is not that of prayers, but of Ivo Pogorelich’s concert at the opening of the Nomus Festival on October 18th in Serbia’s second largest city. The symphony orchestra of Vojvodina (region in the north of the country) began to assemble on the stage. Just like the loud approval of the instrumentalists, the noise of the men does not influence the concentration of the artist, whose fingers wander over the keyboard of the great Kawai during the concert. Only at the very last moment does the pianist leave the stage to go backstage. Conductor Aleksandar Markovic is already nominated for Mussorgsky’s symphonic thriller. A Night on Bald Mountain. Fifteen minutes later, the Croatian musician reappears for a while in the traditional black coat and tailcoat Second concert, by Rachmaninoff, of such magnetic power and so decidedly personal and fascinating that the absence of the ritual addition will not frustrate anyone.
The next morning, a man wearing a blue hat, red scarf and large fleece jacket smokes a Montecristo cigarillo in front of the steps of the Matica Srpska Gallery, the city’s major cultural institution. At 65: Ivo Pogorelich kept his mutated blue-green gaze. But we would search in vain for this mature man with close-cropped hair for the romantic young man with stunning beauty who appeared on the covers of magazines after the scandal surrounding his elimination from the Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 1980. An incident that caused outrage among judges such as Nikita Magaloff and Paul Badura-Skoda, without forgetting the resignation of Martha Argerich (herself a winner in 1965), who launched a fierce press attack “Pogorelich is a genius!” », before we leave the city at dawn. Fame that came too fast and too soon. “I was 24 years old, emphasizes Ivo Pogorelich. In England I was presented as a pop star of classical music. I wasn’t ready. »
If the affair was undeniably a springboard for the artist, who was signed by the record company Deutsche Grammophon in 1981, it remains for him to this day a source of painful misunderstandings, going so far that Ivo Pogorelich did the same in 2008 while passing through Warsaw will beg – without success – to know the truth, “To lift the shadow of this failure”. An opacity behind which the silhouette of the Soviet authorities appears. After his victory at the Montreal International Musical Competition that same year, wasn’t he promised first prize at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow on the condition that he give up Warsaw?
You still have 75% of this article left to read. The rest is reserved for subscribers.
