Dariescu brings women forward - A program that takes the audience's breath away
“Dariescu brings women forward - A program that takes the audience's breath away
Women earn less and have a much harder time putting compositions or productions on the market. The music business is still dominated by male - also in classical music. In our interview, Alexandra Dariescu describes a shameful inequality in the concert and publishing industries. She herself has meanwhile become a real activist – there is hardly a concert in which she does not provide the great names in piano music with a female counterpart, in which she does not allow unknown, misunderstood or current composers to do their justice. On Tuesday, too, at the opening concert of the "International Autumn Days for Music", she placed the great old masters Chopin, Tchaikovsky and Debussy, who have been performed millions of times, in relation to works that, coming from female pen, have so far led a rather shadowy existence.
On stage, Alexandra Dariescu doesn't say a single word about this imbalance she is fighting against. Instead, in this humorous and very personable concert, she talks about the beauty of the selected pieces of music, which in the program all come from France or are closely associated with France.
Only in the case of the composer Lili Boulanger (1893-1918) does she note that this composer was the first woman to win the most important French composition prize, the "Prix de Rome", in 1913 at the age of 20 - almost 250 years after the prize was launched!
But then Dariescu lets the music speak for itself – and how she does it! Starting with the composer Camille Pépin, who was born in 1990 and lives in Paris, and her composition "Number 1", which is reminiscent of Keith Jarrett's jazz improvisations, it goes very far up into those atmospherically dense clouds of sound for which the impressionistic, visually stunning French music of the late 19th century, and which Lili Boulanger, as a younger contemporary of Debussy, also weaves into her music. It is absolutely worthwhile to get to know these composers better, as well as the big names.
Then came the already mentioned heavyweights: Chopin (Andante Spianato et Grande Polonaise Brillante), Debussy (the whole Estampes cycle and the L'Isle Joyeuse) and Tchaikovsky (a transcription of the Sleeping Beauty Variations). Rarely that one hears such virtuosic and hellishly difficult works, in which the hands just fly over the keyboard, rattle-fast arpeggios rattle in the high register and cascades of thundering octave runs in the low register - not only does it mesmerise the pianist, but also the audience, and in every piece the astonished and head-shaking eyes are directed anew at this extraordinary pianist in the safe expectation that more is not possible. And then it turns out differently again.
The highlight was certainly Tchaikovsky's Variations on the Sleeping Beauty. The ballet music is based on the French text version, which justified the entry into the French evening. And with that, Alexandra Dariescu linked very nicely to the classical concert evenings in Iserlohn: At her opening concert in 2017, when she was "Artist in Residence" in Iserlohn for the first time, she played the Nutcracker Suite at the same place, which is now like a circle lock.
And as an encore? A composer worth fighting for, of course: Florence Price (1887-1953), the first Afro-American composer to become known in the USA and is currently being rediscovered in Germany”
Ralf Tiemann Iserlohn Germany IKZ
