08/17/2024
Commentary by Kitty Montgomery, freelance writer based in Woodstock, New York
Serhiy Salov – Pianist
Music and Arts Center of Greene County – Grazhda
"Let’s stray to the realm of fairytale and religion – myth – to convey the effect pianist Serhiy Salov had on his Grazhda audience, Saturday, , August third.
In print, we’ve called this intimate concert venue “hall of the mountain kings”, referring to the internationally acclaimed artists of Ukrainian/Ukrainian American descent, imported to the series over seasons by its founder, composer Ihor Sonevytsky. Among them are Grazhda’s current artistic director Vlodymir Vynnytsky, Alexander Slobodianek, Pavlo Gintov – piano - violinists Yuri Marzukevich, Oleg Krysa and Nazir Pylatyuk, and the queen of cellists – Natalie Khoma , in house winner of a Tschaikovsky gold medal and three Casals International competitions, who currently chairs Grazhda’s board.
Now we add Salov to this royal dynasty, or is it a pantheon . Saturday’s concert was not his first “rodeo” in the house -he was previously engaged by Sonevytsky, seventeen years ago - and says he still remembers the enveloping response of the audience at that performance.
Prodigy. What’s that? Some smart kid who’s a quick learner? “Amazing, Mozart was only seven when he wrote (whatever) symphony!” No, no - we’re with the mystic P.J. Travers, whose famous nanny Mary Poppins declares mortals are born omniscient, conversant with all species, and use or lose their gifts, depending on their “nurturers”. In vernacular wisdom words of famous American countryman Willie Nelson, who spent his boyhood picking cotton in Texas, I knew what I knew before I knew I knew it.
Does the light of “prodigies “ reflect lives past; is it a tap through to the universal unconscious, a “gift of God”? Whatever. How it is deployed in this world is a choice. Some, like Liszt and Mozart, were driven by jealous , hungry fathers to maximum productivity and exhibition. Some, terrified by the illumination they bear, soar, crash and burn, like Icharus.
Then, there’s Salov, who played Grieg’s piano concerto with the Ukrainian National Orchestra at eleven and his first solo recital at the Philharmonic Hall in Donetsk the subsequent year - a prodigy absolute. Omnivorous in the discovery/expansion of his talent, led by it, he traveled from Donetsk to Freiburg at fifteen, to study with Michel Beroff at the Musikhochschule, then on to London, to the Guildhall School of Music and Drama for a masters degree and a solo recital performance diploma.
International competition prizes, performances with conductors of eminence in about twenty symphonies, worldwide followed and are awesome achievements, but let’s not let the comet tail of Salov’s credentials divert from the living presence of the artist, so proximate to us in concert at Grazhda, we could have read notes from scores he played If he resorted to noted scores. Salov performs from memory,
More monk-prince than king, Salov, embraces his audience, humble before us, as part of his creative process.. What he conveys is not limited to an aural experience. That condition known as “synesthesia” where a player experiences music simultaneous with color? Something like that transpires in his non-cerebral, omni-sensual play, beyond mere“virtuosity”. We are immersed in three dimensional visions – the sensaround sonics of I. Shamo’s Morning in the Mountains– the voluptuousness of Debussy’s Les Nocturnes, encompassing the original symphonic version as writ by the performer, the engulfing pulse of Ravel’s La Waltz, the embrace of Skorik’s Melody, with sentiments gilded by Salov’s variations.
Following his opening mountain revery, celebrating the beauty of Grazhda’s surrounds, – Salov essayed twelve preludes by Chopin. How dare he? In this house that has endured ecstatic evisceration by Slobodianak’s siege of the composer’s Revolutionry Etude, and by Vynnytsky, sweeping us up with almost any composition by that Pole. So many moods, colors, lures, in Salov’s dance play, we forget past performances; the works seem new, improvised as Chopin conceived them."
