Product Description Kemal Gekic is one of the outstanding pianists on the world stage today. His affinity for Liszt is legendary, and this DVD gives life to the legend. Gekic has a technique that devours the piano and makes the most difficult works seem child's play, but physical prowess is far from being the raison d'etre of Gekic's art - it is merely a means to an end. Since his landmark recording of the Transcendental Etudes in 1994, Gekic has continued to explore Liszt's entire oeuvre. He often seems like Liszt incarnate: the power, freedom and charisma of his interpretations carry so much conviction, and his willingness to extend the boundaries of expressive freedom gives the works on this DVD a startling freshness. This DVD comes with a high fidelity CD version as well, so the viewer can listen to these performances away from the television or computer and with the highest possible sound quality. Review Gekic plays Liszt with ebullient fire, drama, lyricism The transcendental etudes by Liszt have long been virtuoso calling cards, but the music behind the display has all but been forgotten in our era as we aknowledge Liszt with faint praise. Into the midst of all this "yes, but ..." opinion arrives pianist Kemal Gekic. He has legitimate cultural claims to Hungarian authenticity; with a piano tone that is at once crystalline and thunderous. Right off, in the first etude, Gekic establishes his virtuoso credentials. His tempo alone would leave many an aspirant disqualified in the first elimination rounds. The fact is, he takes off in the first etude like a rocket. A listener may fear that he is using himself up in the first etude without leaving much for the next etudes. But as the succeeding etudes reveal, Gekic is much more than a speedster who can amaze with fast times around the track. He has a genuine feel for long, lyric lines ... which can often fall apart into disconnected phrases in lesser hands. In his hands, these lovely meldies inflect and breathe as Gekic catches and holds and shapes your musical attention across a page or more of singing line. He uncannily clarifies accompaniments and helter-skelter textures without losing sight of the larger narrative wholes. Display serves dramatic ends in playing that commands the whole keyboard. Individual etudes are characterized with the poetry or drama that their erstwhile literary origins may suggest. Almost superhuman feats of playing at first amaze with their sheer imperious command, and simultaneously yield to musical values of phrasing, rhythm, tone, and high romantic style. Empty figurations are strikingly revealed as rhetoric, and mercurial background filigree comments interestingly on the musical foreground. Gekic wanders easily in among all the considerable lights and shades that this music may cast. The transcendental etudes by Liszt have long been virtuoso calling cards, but the music behind the display has all but been forgotten in our era as we aknowledge Liszt with faint praise.Into the midst of all this "yes, but ..." opinion arrives pianist Kemal Gekic. He has legitimate cultural claims to Hungarian authenticity; with a piano tone that is at once crystalline and thunderous. Right off, in the first etude, Gekic establishes his virtuoso credentials. His tempo alone would leave many an aspirant disqualified in the first elimination rounds. The fact is, he takes off in the first etude like a rocket. A listener may fear that he is using himself up in the first etude without leaving much for the next etudes. But as the succeeding etudes reveal, Gekic is much more than a speedster who can amaze with fast times around the track. He has a genuine feel for long, lyric lines ... which can often fall apart into disconnected phrases in lesser hands. In his hands, these lovely meldies inflect and breathe as Gekic catches and holds and shapes your musical attention across a page or more of singing line. He uncannily clarifies accompaniments and helter-skelter textures without losing sight of the larger narrative wholes. Display serves dramatic ends in playing that commands the whole keyboard. Individual etudes are characterized with the poetry or drama that their erstwhile literary origins may suggest. Almost superhuman feats of playing at first amaze with their sheer imperious command, and simultaneously yield to musical values of phrasing, rhythm, tone, and high romantic style. Empty figurations are strikingly revealed as rhetoric, and mercurial background filigree comments interestingly on the musical foreground. Gekic wanders easily in among all the considerable lights and shades that this music may cast. Gekic compels us to remember that oral traditions of insight and deep communication preceeded written ones. Forget anaysis, just listen. --Dan Fee, Berkely CaliforniaKemal Gekic has a genius for playing the piano, so you re free to dislike anything he does and it doesn t matter what you think. The Croatian pianist, now in his mid 30s, was eliminated in the final rounds of the Chopin and Montreal Competitions in 1985 and 1988, and you can hear how his playing would split judges right down the middle while driving audiences crazy: His playing owes everything to instinct, and little to scholarship (someone should show him Charles Rosen s argument for including the opening of Chopin s B-flat Minor Sonata in the repeat), the historically informed performance movement (he brought Handel into the middle of the 19th century), or polite good taste. All great pianists are unique and therefore eccentric, but Gekic belongs to the more extreme end of the spectrum he belongs in the tradition of such pianists as Vladimir Sofronitzky, Samson Francois, Glenn Gould, Georges Cziffra, and Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, with Vladimir Horowitz himself at the head of the class, all of them unlike each other, each of them incomparable. Gekic has made a few extraordinary recordings that are uninformative about one of the most impressive aspects of his playing, his command of tonal color and shading. Still living and teaching in Novi Sad, Gekic plays widely in Europe in increasingly prestigious circumstances; over the last couple of years he s begun playing a fair amount in America, although he has strategically steered clear of New York, which can make careers or break them; strongly individual artists take a big risk by playing there. In the sartorial department, the long-locked Gekic can rival Jean-Yves Thibaudet, the heavily promoted French pianist Gekic can easily outplay. His platform manner is deceptively calm until he leaves the stage he almost hops off. Gekic offered a colossal program for his New England debut recital presented by the Taubman Institute at Williams College Tuesday a Handel suite, Beethoven s Moonlight Sonata, two Chopin impromptus and two polonaises in addition to the sonata, three Liszt transcriptions of Schubert songs, and four of Liszt s Transcendental Etudes , with another one as an encore. The Liszt etudes were as staggering in terms of imagination, scene-painting, and storytelling as they were in speed, accuracy, power, color, and every other aspect of virtuosity. Gekic plays the last etude, Chasse-Neige , better than anyone who has ever recorded it you can feel the plod of foot, the lash of wind and cold, and see the snow as it falls and flurries upward. And in Gekic s hands, this etude, dimissed by Sviatoslav Richter as horrible traces a journey as profoundly disillusioning as Schubert s Winterreise . Gekic went for broke in Mazeppa , a wild ride to the death, while Paysage presented a landscape at once sad and consoling. The Schubert-Liszt transcriptions were on a comparable pianistic level but not as persuasive musically because Gekic left the songs behind. When Gerald Moore played Liszt s transcription of Erlkoenig , he created the characters and told the story as vividly as any of the great singers he had accompanied; you could fit the words onto his playing. Gekic offered lots of Sturm und Drang, but not as much specificity. --Richard Dyer, Boston GlobeThe other pianists of the younger generation will simply have to move over to make room for Kemal Gekic. The Croatian-born artist, now 38 offered his underheralded and often incendiary San Francisco recital debut Saturday evening at the Herbst Theatre, under the auspices of Four Seasons Concerts, his is a name and talent to remember. His ponytail and casual outfit suggested a contemporary sensibility, but make no mistake. This is a virtuoso of the old school. Like Ivo Pogorelich before him, Gekic earned his reputation by loosing, rather than winning, a prestigious competition in his case, two, the Chopin international in Warsaw in 1983 and the Montreal International in 1988. His recordings are still few though a live Yugoslavian recital on VAI Audio and his contribution to Naxos continuing Liszt project are worth exploring. Saturday s recital, at which one spotted none of this community s impresarial movers and shakers, impressed to a point. Manner rather than matter were the prevailing aesthetic for the evening, yet it was very much a manner that compels the listener. Range of repertoire did, however, present a problem: Gekic declined to perform any works later than Schumann, and even those were not top-rank. Handel s Keyboard Suite No.5 in E Minor and Beethoven s Sonata No.14 in C-Sharp Minor, Op.27 No.2 ( Moonlight ), opened the evening on a conventional note. A short Chopin group (Nocturne in C Minor, Op.20) preceded the Schumann. A series of Liszt transcriptions and a tremendous encore seemed to engage the pianist s imagination most completely. What one responded to, despite the sometimes recalcitrant instrument, was the sheer beauty of the playing. Gekic relishes a singing quality and evidently feels no need to break with his aesthetic to make a point, no need to highlight a passage with ungainly attacks. Further, he commands a range of dynamics that takes listeners by surprise. To encounter the first movement of the Moonlight arising from the keyboard like an exhalation is a rare and wonderful experience. That Gekic uses dynamics as an essential building block in his architecture rivets the attention. This was a performance rooted in contrasts. There were moments of self-effacing perversity in the Allegretto, but the crisp chording and whirlwind tempo of the concluding Presto agitato sealed the argument. Gekic s Handel is what one might expect from a pianist with 19th century orientation. Extensive pedaling in the Prelude cloyed, and one noted a tendency to blunt rhythmic figures in the dancey Courante and to split chords, too. Yet, in the Air and Variations (the familiar Harmonious Blacksmith ), Gekic festooned the melodic line with embellishments that sounded utterly persuasive. The Chopin and Schumann, however, catered to the pianist s excesses. Gekic favored dreamy phrasing over cogency for the Nocturne, and the poetic impulse dominated at the expense of structure. The urgent dispatch of the Scherzo made partial amends. Schumann s Presto passionato is the rejected finale of the Sonata No.2 in G Minor, Op.22, and Gekic served notice of why the composer discarded it. The onerous pyrotechnical demands were met in a dazzling out burst of staccato passage-work, but this is a schizoid piece at best. The melting legato in the Op.28 Romanza imposed its own logic. But then came the Liszt arrangements, a repertoire that engages Gekic to the point of inebriation. The reworkings of Rossini s Soireés musicales are savory, witty affairs, and the pianist relished every last flight of fancy. He sustained a subtle barcarole rhythm in La Gita in Gondola . He also tantalized his listeners with La Danza , that much-loved Neapolitan tarantella, resisting a full statement of the theme until the audience virtually cried uncle . --San Francisco Chronicle P.when('A').execute(function(A) { A.on('a:expander:toggle_description:toggle:collapse', function(data) { window.scroll(0, data.expander.$expander[0].offsetTop-100); }); }); About the Actor Flamboyant, daring, provocative, exciting, seductive and sensitive are some of the words used to describe one of today s most formidable pianists, Kemal Gekic, whose playing has been acclaimed worldwide by public and critics alike. Born in Split, Croatia in 1962, Gekic amazed his family by accurately picking out melodies on the piano at age one and a half. The young prodigy received all his early musical training from his aunt, Lorenza Batturina. In 1978 he entered the class of Prof. Jokuthon Mihailovich (a graduate of Moscow Conservatory) at the Art Academy of Novi Sad, Yugoslavia. He graduated in 1982 with the highest mark ever granted a diploma exam recital, and was immediately given a faculty appointment by the piano department which he eventually directed until 1999. During his school years he won prizes at the Franz Liszt Competition in Parma (1981), the Viana da Motta in Lisbon (1983) and the Yugoslav Artists Competition in Zagreb (1984). He earned his Masters degree in 1985, the same year he created a sensation at the Chopin Competition in Warsaw. Although panned by the jury he won the hearts of audience and critics alike, and began receiving many invitations to perform abroad, including several from the Chopin Society of Hannover, Germany which had awarded him a special prize for best sonata performance at the competition. A recording of his Warsaw performances sold 60,000 copies in Germany by the end of the year, and the Victor Entertainment Corporation, Japan (JVC) sold 80,000 copies of a CD version in their home country. The Warsaw Philharmonic invited Gekic to perform the Chopin E minor Piano Concerto in Philharmonic Hall in their regular series that season. In the same hall, with the same orchestra as he would have done in the competition finals, Gekic wowed the Warsaw audience once more, and for an encore gave Chopin s Third Sonata in B minor in its entirety! During the early 1990 s Gekic drastically curtailed his concert activity, going into seclusion for a further period of intensive study, seeking even higher levels of perfection in his art. The first fruits of this retreat was the landmark recording of the complete Liszt Transcendental Etudes, generally considered as the best recording of the set ever made. In 1999 he was invited to perform at the Miami International Piano Festival. Minutes before he was to walk on stage, a chance glance at a television showed houses burning in his hometown of Novi Sad. It was March 24th; the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia had begun. Instead of canceling, he went out on stage and played what many consider to be the best recital he ever gave, one that launched his current re-emergence as one of the major pianists of our century. Over the past few years, Gekic s appearances worldwide have consistently generated frenzied audience enthusiasm. There are concert recordings from Japan where audible weeping can be heard among members of the normally reserved Japanese public. His sound is constantly evolving, setting a new standard for other pianists to aspire to. His daring approach to interpretation is often perceived as provocative or quixotic, but this is the price he pays for breaking new ground to boldly go where no pianist has gone before might well be taken as his motto. Of one thing you can rest assured at a Gekic recital you will not receive standard interpretations but renditions of the great masterworks that have been subject to his razor-sharp musical scrutiny, his flamboyant imagination, his amazing digital dexterity, his stunningly colorful, wide and varied tonal palette and his ever-deepening comprehension of the spiritual elements of these works. Gekic sees the process of musical communication as something even more: as the transmission of spiritual material. In this as well he is sure to give you an unforgettable experience. About the Director The virtuoso is not a mason, chiselling his stone conscientiously according to the sketches of the architect. He is not a passive tool for reproducing feelings and thoughts, without adding anything of his own. He is not a more or less experienced interpreter of works which leave him no scope for his own comments . . . For the virtuoso, musical works are in fact nothing but tragic and moving materializations of his emotions; he is called upon to make them speak, weep, sing and sigh, to recreate them in accordance whit his own consciousness. In this way he, like the composer, is a creator, for he must have within himself those passions that he wishes to bring so intensely to life...(Franz Liszt) See more
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