The Boston Globe‘s Jeremy Eichler writes:
Weinberg (1919-1996) is surely the most fascinating Soviet-era composer that most Western listeners, until a decade ago, had never heard of. He chose this Blok poem for a song cycle called “Beyond the Border of Past Days,” a title that also hints at the forces of memory that shaped Weinberg’s own life and his almost surreally prolific career writing music in the shadow of catastrophe.
Pro Musica Hebraica Resident Scholar, James Loeffler, writes in the The New Republic:
What are we to do with Wagner’s anti-Semitism? The recent Wagner anniversary has brought a predictable amount of equivocation and hand-wringing about the German master’s role in the history of hate. We know by now not to read history backward. A nineteenth-century composer who died in 1883 cannot logically be accused of personal complicity in a twentieth-century genocide. Yet that does not mean that the broader question of his responsibility for the spread of modern anti-Semitism can be simply ignored.
Anne Midgette of the Washington Post reviews Pro Musica Hebraica’s Spring 2014 concert featuring Evgeny Kissin:
One of the points of attending a live performance is to watch artists express themselves. Yet the concert hall experience has become codified in traditions that affect everything from how we dress to what we see on stage. Many artists have challenged these traditions, and to them, we tend to assign labels such as “experimental” or “avant-garde.”
But it almost never happens that a superstar gets up in his established context and does something completely different, without intending any challenge to the status quo at all, but simply to express something that is in his heart.
Evgeny Kissin, the pianist, did this — breathtakingly — at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall on Monday night.
Bev Fleisher reviews our Spring concert for DC Metro Theater Arts:
Pro Musica Hebraica ended its seventh season in the packed Kennedy Center Concert Hall with a moving evening of music and poetry, both rendered exquisite by pianist and lover of Yiddish poetry, Evgeny Kissin. Of note is the collaboration with The Kennedy Center with this presentation in the packed Concert. Kissin did not “perform” or “recite” — each note and word seemed to come directly from his soul.
Downey reviews our latest concert on his blog, Ionarts:
A recital by Evgeny Kissin is an unmissable event in my calendar.[….] Nothing prepared me, however, for the sensation offered by his latest performance[….]
The most unusual discovery was the second sonata of Alexander Veprik (1899-1958), from 1924, which was more expressionistic in style, a rumbling tempest of trills, repeated notes, downward-slashing tritones, jagged motifs, and brutal parallelisms. The slow section went a little more in the direction of Rachmaninoff, but here one was reminded most of the barbaric style of Bartók. It worked because Kissin made it into a rather dramatic, storm-tossed monologue, with great variation of touch.