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Pianist Ivan Gusev treated a small audience to thoughtfully conceived and beautifully rendered performances of two Mozart sonatas (K. 332 and 333) and Schubert’s final sonata (B-flat Major, D.96) on Saturday at the First Church of Christ, Scientist in Winchester, In the Mozart F Major Sonata, K. 332, Gusev displayed his alertness to Mozart’s weaving of so many motivic elements into the fabric of the work. He opened lyrically, transitioned almost instantly (4 bars later) into a teasing ‘rou...
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2023 Artists in Residence Announced Apr 16 Aaron Shragge Quartet: Honoring Jon Hassell Aizuri Quartet Akana AKOYA Alora Crucible Amo Brass Arnie Tanimoto & Friends Arun Ramamurthy & Trina Basu Ashni Dave aTonalHits Aventure Piano Duo Balourdet String Quartet Bardin-Niskala Duo Bearthoven Bert Seager Blackman-Murray-Russo Trio Caroline Davis Caroline Owen, Badie Khaleghian & Kyle Sharkey Celia Hatton Choreosonic Cristina Valdez & ...
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Concerts are held at the Ashburnham Community Church/New Dawn Arts Center, 84 Main Street (Rte.12) at the corner of Chapel Street, Sunday at 4:00 PM. Admission is $15.00, students and children, free. Season passes available: Six concerts for the price of five ($75.), with a free quest pass to introduce a newcomer to this concert series. Any unused balance may be counted as a tax-deductible donation to Historical Piano Concerts, Inc., a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. Written acknowl...
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Interview With Pianist Ivan Gusev A charming and affable young man, pianist Ivan Gusev says he's very happy to be living at New York's International House, as it has such fine pianos on which to practice. I interviewed him there in the ornate Soros Room, formerly known as the Mural Room. Born in 1988 in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, he moved with his family to Russia when he was four years old. He comes not from a family of musicians, but of teachers and engineers. (His grandparents were profess...
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Pianist Ivan Gusev, a relatively unknown player, delivered a recital better-played and more worth hearing than many from some famous names. The Saturday night concert at First Church in Boston for SoundWays revealed a limpidist from Kazakhstan (via Moscow Conservatory and Mannes) who took great care, in a well-mixed but also well-connected program, to make gorgeous sounds and voice with exquisite care. Visually, Gusev almost disappeared in the grey drear of the inartfully lighted sanctuary...
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The Mallery Concert Series, a longstanding free series featuring a wide range of soloists and chamber music groups, welcomes the return of in-person audiences this fall. All performances begin at 11:20 a.m. in the Mallery Music Room in the Fine Arts Building, 314 Linden Street. Members of the public are allowed to attend, but they must show proof of vaccination and wear a mask at all times when indoors. Oct. 13 Milena Zhivotoskaya, piano, and Louis Arques, clarinet Oct. 20 Diane Go...
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A charming and affable young man, pianist Ivan Gusev says he's very happy to be living at New York's International House, as it has such fine pianos on which to practice. I interviewed him there in the ornate Soros Room, formerly known as the Mural Room. Born in 1988 in Karaganda, Kazakhstan, he moved with his family to Russia when he was four years old. He comes not from a family of musicians, but of teachers and engineers. (His grandparents were professors of Russian literature.) His int...
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ASHBURNHAM — Historical Piano Concerts’ 36th Fall Season presents pianist Ivan Gusev in a program of works by Sergei Rachmaninoff, at 4 p.m. Sunday, Sept. 12, in Ashburnham Community Church, 84 Main St. Gusev will perform a program of Rachmaninoff’s Etudes-Tableaux and Preludes on a piano by Bluthner, made in Leipzig, Germany in 1907, from The Frederick Piano Collection. Like many pianist-composers — Debussy, Mahler, and Shostakovich, among others — Rachmaninoff loved Bluthner pianos; h...
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Ivan Gusev: Rachmaninov, Paganini-Liszt Rachmaninov’s Études Tableaux in A minor (“The Sea and the Seagulls”) is one of the composer’s crowning achievements. Gusev’s performance was mesmerizing. I looked for a comparable performance on the Internet and found just one, by Vladimir Ashkenazy. The work opens in a dream-like state. The right hand crosses the left to punctuate Rachmaninov’s reflective arpeggios with a slow bass motif.. This morphs into waves of excruciating collapse at...
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After the brilliant Mendelssohn came the relatively quiet lull of Rachmaninoff’s Étude -Tableau in A minor, [..]Op. 39, No. 2. This is a piece which, though emotionally powerful with its slow trance-like minor triplets, is extremely hard to sustain for many artists. What impressed one about Ivan Gusev’s performance was that it had the perfect spaciousness for its long introspective opening – and yet without ever dropping the thread of continuity that holds the listener. He demonstrated excell...
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