Like a long-anticipated gathering of friends: Come feast at our fall table with Boris Giltburg!
Like doting parents with a large brood of children, we at PPI take great pride and joy in each and every one of our artists. So many unique perspectives, personalities and predilections, so much endless variety within the scope of pianistic excellence. While we truly hold a special place in our hearts for each and every pianist we host and don’t play favorites, we cannot help but feel that profound surge of “look at our first baby walking!”-pride when our curator takes the stage. The individual crafting the season is, after all, the creative force behind the narrative arc and artistic vision of all the individual recitals.
When Boris Giltburg visits Portland, it really is a little bit like having all one’s favorite people around a dinner table: Things simply feel right. When he arrives in town this Saturday, he’d have just completed a grueling tour of eleven different concert programs in seven countries – and that’s just counting back to August 2025. How he does that, and still manages to be so ultimately professional, collegial, accommodating and downright fun to be around is remarkable. His musicianship is, to our ears, unrivaled, and if you ask us, it’s precisely his insatiable appetite for learning, his constant navigating of cultures and time zones and his dexterity at being at home in the music, first and foremost, that informs his unique interpretations of beloved repertory.
Thinking about this idea of living between worlds, this sense of not-quite-belonging-in-one-place-only is what could also serve as an entryway into Sunday’s program. Yes, Chopin and Rachmaninoff are familiar names to anyone with any knowledge of classical piano whatsoever, and certainly, there is surface-level sensory delight in practically anything ever written by Chopin, especially his ballades. There is also a reason why Rachmaninoff is often called “the last of the Romantics”: His melodies are rich and beautiful and highly emotional, the kind of music that you don’t have to understand to simply feel.
With that said, there is more to this music than just big, resonant chords and pianistic pixie dust. Both Chopin and Rachmaninoff infused their music with their national musical traditions while living elsewhere (Chopin in France, Rachmaninoff in the US) and drew immense creative solace from a profound sense of longing, loss and melancholy in a world that at times felt bewildering and hostile to them. Yes, there is simple beauty – but also wild contradiction and serious grappling in the music. We’ll hear both composers’ second sonatas: Chopin’s severely criticized during his lifetime for its lack of structural coherence; Rachmaninoff specifically revising his to be more concise, like Chopin’s. We’ll hear the glitter and shimmer of Chopin’s Scherzo no. 4 in E Major and the thundering reverberations of Rachmaninoff’s magnificent preludes – a menu of sound intended not just to captivate, but also to nourish our very beings.
Come sit at our table, shake out your napkin, fill your glass and prepare for a delectable feast. There are no empty chairs. This is quality time, at its very best!
If you want to listen to Boris’s excellent recording of all 24 Rachmaninoff Préludes in preparation for Sunday’s recital, you can find the album on iTunes or Spotify.
If you’ve ever been curious about what Chopin’s piano sounded like, there is a fabulous video on YouTube of Boris playing the Mazurka op. 17 no. 4 in A Minor on an 1849 Pleyel piano. What a delight!