“A unique pianist. A passionate, generous, demanding, and visionary teacher. Extremes united in one and the same person. I owe him everything. I was so lucky to have a guide in my life! ”
It is in these terms that the young pianist from Nice David Kadouch greeted this Monday morning, on Twitter, the disappearance of his former teacher Dmitri Bashkirov.
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The
Terrible Children
of the Piano
Winner of the Long-Thibaud competition in 1955, Bashkirov was born in Tbilisi, Georgia, some twenty-four years earlier.
If his career as an international soloist was marked by his meetings and collaborations with conductors such as Daniel Barenboïm
,
Wolfgang Sawallisch or Zubin Mehta, and by his interpretations of the Germanic romantic repertoire, it is above all as a teacher that he will be recognized during of the following decades.
A teaching career that began in 1957 at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, and which will continue just as intensely in Madrid in the 1990s, where he will direct the Piano Chair at the Queen Sofia Conservatory in Madrid from its creation in 1991. The The establishment has also expressed
"its pain"
on social networks, deploring the loss of an
"essential figure in the functioning of the school in its 30 years of existence."
In Russia as in Europe, he will have trained many future piano stars: from Nikolai Demidenko to the sensational Arcadi Volodos, including David Kadouch and Kirill Gerstein.
Many praised his sense of the smallest detail, but above all his attention to the construction of sound.
He did not suffer compromise, with him,
"it was all or nothing,"
insisted Martin T. Engstroëm, director of the famous festival in Verbier, Switzerland, where Bashkirov had given
masterclasses
for many years.
Father of pianist Elena Bashkirova, he was also the grandfather of violinist Michael Barenboïm, son of the latter with the famous Argentinian maestro.
At 89, he undoubtedly leaves a powerful artistic legacy, through all those he has trained and inspired.