Youri EGOROV

Inquirer Music Critic Courtesy: David Patrick Stearns. Reprinted with permission of David Patrick Stearns. Recalling a pianist's fleeting brilliance Classical music's shooting star. By David Patrick Stearns INQUIRER MUSIC CRITIC POSTED: August 19, 2008 BY DAVID PATRICK STEARNS Though the 1970s are recent history amid the passing centuries of classical music, the new EMI boxed set Youri Egorov: The Master Pianist arrives like something out of a time warp (Oh yeah! Remember him?), from the era when this young artist was making critics reach for new superlatives and being mentioned in the same exalted breath as Yo-Yo Ma. Cute as a puppy dog and blessed with a glistening sonority often compared to the legendary Dinu Lipatti, Egorov entered all the top contests (Queen Elisabeth, Tchaikovsky) and finally made his name by not winning the Van Cliburn Competition - he was never that kind of pianistic racehorse. Still, a band of incensed admirers collected an alternative cash prize, allowing him to make an extravagantly acclaimed New York debut in 1978. Ten years later, at age 33, he died, already on the way to being forgotten: He hadn't played in the United States since 1986 (his local visits being a recital in West Chester and a concerto date with the Philadelphia Orchestra), while his EMI recording contract concluded with a 1985 visit to Abbey Road for Mozart concertos with Wolfgang Sawallisch. He'd had one of the great five-year careers in piano history, but even devoted fans never quite knew what happened. Bits of his story have come out over the years, and the considerable quality of the seven-disc EMI box, with early recordings he made in Amsterdam for the Peters International label, will raise questions anew. At first, Egorov devised long, ambitious programs - one had the Bartok Piano Sonata plus both books of Chopin etudes - and his Schumann recordings were compared to the best of the old masters. His Carnival and Kreisleriana show him at his most demonic, fueled by a technique that didn't seek to dazzle the ear but took you down a fantastical rabbit hole, through Schumann's inner psyche and into the world of E.T.A. Hoffmann tales that inspired the music. No wonder he was one of the few Russian pianists to escape being typecast in repertoire of his own nationality. Indeed, the ethereal, almost liquid sonority he brought to the final pages of Schumann's Papillons, Op. 2 presaged what would be his finest recordings of all - the Debussy preludes. It's here that Lipatti comparisons were replaced by those with the also-legendary Walter Gieseking, though Egorov's performances show greater concentration and more subtle characterization of the music's abstract imagery. Such qualities weren't initially apparent in his 1983 Debussy LPs: Recorded in early, dry digital sound, they captured maybe half the aura he created in concert. Luckily, the newly remastered CD versions are greatly improved, projecting an unnervingly complete identification with the music in which performer and composer merged completely. As in Egorov's Schumann, individual musical components dissolve into a larger panorama of humanity and imagination. That's partly why his inhibited, emotionally detached later recordings - Mozart Piano Concertos Nos. 17 and 20 plus Schumann's Bunte Blatter - seem disappointingly unlike him. Though his interpretive fantasy wasn't dead - live recordings from his last year are fearlessly personal - it was half slumbering. Having observed Egorov in numerous concerts, a few interviews and a reception or two, I believe his decline came from an inability to navigate the music industry's need for consistency and guile. He'd grown up in provincial Kazan (which explains his Tatar-esque looks) and been educated in Moscow, where his parents had him live in a monastery to keep him out of trouble (unaware that feast days involved mandatory around-the-clock drinking, which Egorov said he relished). The combination of bad habits and sheltered existence perhaps explains why, on seeking political asylum during a tour in Italy, he cluelessly took his case to the Communist police. Somehow, he was treated sympathetically, and made his way to Amsterdam (a fine place for practicing bad habits), where he's said to have been discovered sleeping on a park bench by the man who later became his partner. Though Egorov's stated reasons for emigrating were political, they in fact had more to with sexual politics. "Gay bashing" wasn't a common term then, but muggings he described in Moscow more or less amounted to that. The West's party mentality of the 1970s, however, didn't bring out the best sides of his character - or the smartest career decisions. He broke with the U.S. manager, Maxim Gershunoff, who had discovered him. He was so intimidated by acclaim for his Paris debut that he said, "I can never go back there again" - meaning admirers had to schlep to places like Elmira, N.Y. Though he was often seen with entourages of various sizes, friends seemed keenly interested in protecting him from himself. Upon checking into a hotel, he joked about having to immediately move lamps from tables to the floor for fear of knocking them off later in the evening. Nice laugh line, except that Egorov's concerto dates were drying up due to his memory lapses. Venerable Artur Rubinstein could be forgiven such things, but Egorov wasn't asked back. His death was widely assumed to be from AIDS. Gershunoff, however, wrote a memoir stating that Egorov, knowing he had AIDS, chose euthanasia after a farewell dinner in Amsterdam with friends. It's sad to imagine him making a decision that implies so little faith in the future and so much despair in the present. One thinks of harpsichordist Scott Ross, who died of AIDS in 1989 but spent his final years with a home recording studio, taping d'Anglebert on days when he felt well enough. But then, Egorov lacked the fallback mechanisms of many seasoned artists. He didn't have the Midas touch that allows performers to put an ingratiating gloss even on works they haven't lived with for long. Though all performances are different from each other in theory, if not in fact, Egorov's were varied more than most, almost to the extent that, within certain boundaries, he seemed to reinvent a piece with each encounter. The weight and color he gave to a phrase could never be predicted. But even a coughing audience could leave him undone, in what seemed like a fragile, complex musical mechanism. It can't have been easy to live with. But without it, we would never have had his Debussy. Contact music critic David Patrick Stearns at dstearns@phillynews.com