2010
Composers in Conversation
SHMF Concert was Enjoyable and Informative
From the very first measures of Chopin and Liszt’s Nocturne “My Joys” for piano, the Russian-born pianist, who lives in Berlin, displayed a wonderful culture of articulation and a rapport with the composition.
In Szymon Laks’s ballade Hommage à Chopin, the pianist made audible how Laks approached Chopin’s music. With a firm hold, he gradually intensified the drama. He played Chopin’s Minute Waltz seductively with a suggestively rendered rhythm. In Ravel’s La Valse he eruptively emphasized the strong breaks, made the despair and the compelled silence of Ravel’s memories of the First World War audible.
I have never before heard an audience applaud between movements at the Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival. Until now. Until the concert with Judith Ingolfsson and Vladimir Stoupel in Norderstedt. The first movement of Simon Laks’s Trois Pieces de concert had hardly ended before a number of listeners applauded enthusiastically. Enthusiastically with good reason. Because the duo played just fabulously.
Hamburger Abendblatt, 26 July 2010
Maurice Ravel as Guest in the Village Church
Thursday Concert with Judith Ingolfsson and Vladimir Stoupel
To the duo-couple Judith Ingolfsson, violin, and Vladimir Stoupel, piano, fell the honor of opening this year’s summer series of Thursday Concerts with their congenial playing. The main focus of their program was the piano version of Ravel’s La Valse and his Violin Sonata.
A gratifyingly large audience paid tribute to the excellent performance with hearty applause, which was recompensed with an engaging encore, a Nocturne by Frédéric Chopin in an arrangement for violin and piano by the violinist Nathan Milstein. The duo began with the Trois pièces de concert by the Polish composer Szymon Laks (1901–1983). His Trois pièces de concert (1935) pay homage to the neoclassical style and offer a subtle alternation between cantilena, dynamic outbreaks, and virtuoso passages.
The middle and focal point of the concert was La Valse. Technically perfect and energetic to the borders of the endurable, Vladimir Stoupel sounded out the tonal kaleidoscope, a biography of the waltz emerging from nowhere, ascending to its heyday, and subsequently falling into a void. Enthralling and grueling!
As a respite, so to speak, followed the great Violin Sonata in G major (premiered in 1927 in Paris). The second movement, in the style of the blues and intended as a homage to the jazz coming to Europe from America, was naturally the highpoint. The incredible Perpetuum mobile led to the acclaimed finale with Chopin’s Nocturne.
Jungfrau Zeitung (Switzerland), 17 July 2010
Liberating Outbreak of Sound
For the Season’s Finale the Philharmonic Orchestra played Music by Liszt and Shostakovich
Afterwards, Liszt was once again on the evening’s program. The soloist in his Second Piano Concerto was the pianist Vladimir Stoupel, who celebrated a brilliant success with his performance. He and the orchestra presented Liszt’s theme metamorphoses as transformations of character, and right from the first measures showed the potential inherent in the unassuming beginnings of the music.
Stoupel did not simply add filigree arabesques to the lyrical-soft chords in the woodwinds, but gave the tones weighted accentuations with which he already foreshadowed the heavily athletic developments of his piano part, where he later presented the octave and chordal passages sharply chiseled and angular. But Stoupel is also able to make music in a completely relaxed manner: in the lightly sketched leggiero, in lost-to-the-world, dreamy sections in which the participation of the orchestra almost seems forgotten, and also there where he caresses the cantilena of the solo cello with gently sparkling playing.
Mittelbayerische Zeitung, 14 July 2010
Hymn-like Finale
Chosen for the Chopin homage was the E-Minor Piano Concert, op. 11, to whose orchestral exposition the musicians lent a truly Beethovenian passion. The playing of soloist Vladimir Stoupel, who gave every tone astonishing resoluteness, was exceedingly powerful. Playfully light, but far from being kitschy, he proved himself to be a thinking, almost brooding Chopin advocate, who with his trill-rich passage work also did not disappoint in terms of virtuosity. Dreamily he mused through lyrical regions, thundered up pathos with keyboard bravura – in short, with his nuanced touch, from cotton-soft to muscular, and his unbridled will to shape things, he proved himself to be a contrast-loving, clearly contouring painter of moods. He sang the larghetto in enchanting, glowing beauty as a nocturne full of inner luminescence. Enthusiastic applause and a Schubert encore.
Märkische Oderzeitung, 15 March 2010