Grigori Sokolov and Alexandra Dovgan: the magisterium of the piano

As tradition dictates, when a Russian pianist meets another with whom he wishes to share experience or teaching, two pieces are exchanged as a greeting.

It is a gift that implies that show of respect where there is no room for other words or other truth than the one that music carries.

Vladimir Horowitz did it with Rachmaninov, Grigori Sokolov with Rubinstein and, just over a year ago, Alexandra Dovgan with Sokolov himself.

This is how the maestro became his guide in a world as fragile as it was ruthless in its levels of demand. In the case of the former, we speak of a living legend of the piano.

Probably, along with the Polish Krystian Zimerman, the most sublime among the living and active.

A distant guy whose only devotion is his own instrument, to which he spends nine hours of practice a day.

The rest of the day is spent preparing for the next nine.

And so it has been for most of the 70 years since he was born in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) in 1950.

His compatriot Alexandra Dovgan is much younger.

He came to the world in 2007 and at the age of 13 he has already won five international competitions.

He does not know what it is and does not watch Netflix, but he does YouTube, where his videos caught the attention of Sokolov himself one day when they invited him to take a look at a number of new talents.

One or two pieces served to fixate on four or five of them.

But she listened to Dovgan for two hours.

"It's not that I think the others were worse, but, in their case, I discovered a bond that links their musical world to mine," says Sokolov.

From that discovery, the teacher wanted to know her.

And since then they share joint sessions in various cities where the musician stops for his recitals.

Alexandra Dovgan listens to him and then they get together to prepare some pieces: “They are not classes, she has her own teachers and they train her very well.

It is an exchange relationship between two colleagues ”, says the pianist.

That's how he takes it.

But Alexandra probably sees it differently.

Like a true mentor.

In fact, she is an exception.

Sokolov, lonely, devoted like a monk to his own constant improvement, does not spend much time training other pianists.

Something undoubtedly exceptional sees in her.

In their first meeting in Amsterdam, they hardly exchanged many words.

The second time they dedicated it to something crucial: knowing the secrets of the piano they must play.

Their guts.

How old it is, its manufacturers, its materials.

The soul and the body that must express the music.

Later, with a little more confidence, they went on to the conception of tempo in compositions: “The maestro tells me that I must be honest in any circumstance.

Not only as a person and as a performer, be very careful, be faithful to the scores and study the tempos thoroughly, ”says Dovgan.

There are situations in which that tempo does not exist and you must create it yourself, says the pianist.

How?

“That's where the magic is and that's how I'll manage to keep the audience's attention.

According to him, it is about transferring music created in another time to this era and making it seem that it is being conceived at that very moment.

Sometimes, not always, I feel it and a kind of connection appears, of current, between the audience and the piece that I interpret ”.

She tells it surrounded by instruments to choose from at the Hinves Pianos headquarters in Madrid, where Sokolov dedicated two hours to study together the afternoon of the day after his last recital prior to the pandemic.

Dovgan is on the path of dedication - devotion too - that Sokolov himself undertook as a young man in the Soviet Union.

After winning the Tchaikovsky Competition in 1966, at the age of 16 and with a jury - chaired by Emil Gilels - who unanimously awarded him the gold medal, he could have left his country to build an international career.

But he hardly did.

It was after the fall of communism that he dedicated himself to crossing borders and showing the world who he was.

Today he lives in Italy, like Franco Panozzo, his manager, and whom Sokolov also showed the power that Alexandra Dovgan treasures for the future.

He did not show him a video, says the musician's assistant, Nadia Zhdanova, but a recording.

When the pianist challenged him to guess who he was, Panozzo said that he must surely be a great man.

Then he showed her the video of a 12-year-old girl nailing Mendelssohn's Concerto Number One for Piano and Orchestra.

"It can't be," said the agent.

And, needless to say, he signed her.

Such is Sokolov's faith in the young woman that the pianist still does not grant interviews to talk about him, but he has no objection to praising her, as he has done for this report and on previous occasions: “At 13, he can hardly to be called a child prodigy, since although she is a prodigy, it is not child's play.

What you hear when you see it is the performance of an adult.

It is a special pleasure for me to praise the art of your remarkable music teacher, Mira Marchenko.

However, there are things that cannot be taught and learned.

Alexandra Dovgan's talent is exceptionally harmonious.

His way of playing, honest and focused.

I predict a great future for him ”.

That statement has launched Dovgan's career, who has already acted alongside directors such as Valery Gergiev, Trevor Pinnock and Vladimir Spivakov, among others.

The future that Sokolov refers to must already leave the contests behind.

For him they represent a necessary evil that is part of the system when it comes to discovering new talents, but which is an experience that he does not wish for any young pianist.

"To nobody.

Neither to her nor to anyone who starts ”, he assures

El País Semanal.

Still, Dovgan has won five at his young age: among others, Moscow's Vladimir Krainev, Astana International and television's The Nutcracker.

In May 2018, when he was not yet 11 years old, he won the Grand Prize at the Second Moscow International Competition for Young Pianists created by Denis Matsuev.

But what he wants to teach you will not be found in the corridors where the rehearsals of that nerve crusher that are the competitions resound, nor in the palm groves or among the often attentive observations and disquisitions of the juries.

Curiosity and systematic questioning of his surroundings ... That is what Sokolov strives to convey to Alexandra Dovgan.

“The importance of relentlessly asking why.

This is how you find the answers that make you grow fast as a musician and as a person: why the piano works in a certain way;

what is the potential difference in our instrument since Haydn's time and now;

why Chopin thought this and that ... In short, a way of discovering the world and realizing what we ignore ”, says the pianist.

Between trips, Dovgan applies the story, and if she goes to visit the Prado Museum in Madrid, she says, she sees paintings with religious motifs that help her "to better understand Bach's music."

Or study mathematics and ballet with optics where explanations are sneaked in that open up the mysteries of other scores.

He concentrates on the search, but still does not understand why some tell him that he is special: “I don't know what they mean.

What I do know is that I have to strive to find a level where people believe it. "

For this, beyond the control that the set-up requires to go out on stage and not fail, what he wants is to convey happiness: “At that moment, all the study, the thought, the preparation must emerge in the music, and that's when both me and the listener can feel happy about it ”.