Modest Mussorgsky: Pictures at an exhibition
Fazil Say: Own works (like Paganini-Jazz, Alla-Turca-Jazz, G. Gershwin: Summertime, etc.)
With his extraordinary pianistic talents, Fazıl Say has been touching audiences and critics alike for more twenty-five years in a way that has become rare in the increasingly materialistic and elaborately organised classical music world. Concerts with this artist are something else. They are more direct, more open, more exciting; in short, they go straight to the heart. Which is exactly what the composer Aribert Reimann thought in 1987 when, during a visit to Ankara, he had the opportunity, more or less by chance, to appreciate the playing of the seventeen-year-old pianist. He immediately asked the American pianist David Levine, who was accompanying him on the trip, to come to the city’s conservatory, using the now much-quoted words: ‘You absolutely must hear him, this boy plays like a devil.’ |