Roman Rabinovich at Tippet Rise
ROMAN RABINOVICH 2
3 ROMAN RABINOVICH
ROMAN RABINOVICH 4
Roman Rabinovich by Peter Halstead
I first met Roman, Michael, and Adam because our mutual friend, the master
technician Tali Mahanor, had invited me to their joint recording session at the legendary American Academy of Arts and Letters in New York. Tali had arranged sessions there with the great engineer Leszek "Lesh" Wojcik, then the director of the Carnegie Hall recording studio. As they always did, Roman, Michael, and Adam critiqued each other’s playing note by note, phrase by phrase, while also paying attention to the overall shape and logic of each piece. There was no escape. You couldn’t have more truthful advice, more devastating judgments, more knowledgeable suggestions. This was the most productive and fulfilling application of friendship I had ever seen. It was a great honor to be able to kibbitz on the sidelines of this Socratic symposium, out of which so many albums and concerts have sprung, as the lives, careers, and intellectual quests of all three young pianists have bounced off one another at the highest of levels. You can hear the music which has resulted from these enlightened dialogues, but the underlying process is equally as impressive. 5 ROMAN RABINOVICH
Roman, Michael, and Adam are a new generation of masters, even at an early age, who simply do not make mistakes, as each note is part of an inexorable and considered jigsaw. As my teacher Russell Sherman said to me, when I asked how to play some difficult notes, “You simply cannot afford to miss any of them.” Roman has been playing Haydn all his life, but most recently at the Bath Festival in England, at ChamberFest in Cleveland, at the Lammermuir Festival in Scotland, and at the Tel Aviv Conservatory, so that the sonatas here have been filtered through the lens of years of public performance. Pianists learn from their audiences. You feel the way certain sallies work or fail, you begin to understand which intonations are valid for the high-wire work of concert halls, and which nuances can only be played privately. On a recording, you can mix these discoveries. A Haydn sonata is part archaeology, unearthing voices from old London and lost afternoons in Viennese drawing rooms, and part necromancy, summoning up ancient mariners from the gas lamps of foggy evenings on the Thames to astonish new, rapt audiences with the immediacy of their travels.
ROMAN RABINOVICH 6
7 ROMAN RABINOVICH
ROMAN RABINOVICH 8
A pilgrimage through Haydn’s long career encompasses houses in Vienna, Eisenstadt, and London, but also Esterháza, the Versailles of Hungary (in whose “jewel box” Haydn wrote and performed his chamber music, and on whose ideal acoustics the Olivier Barn is based), and the Schloss Esterházy in Eisenstadt, the summer residence of Prince Nikolaus I, with its own Haydnsaal, a three-story grand salon covered with frescoes and deep window alcoves, where the conductor Adam Fischer has made a witty traversal of all of Haydn’s 104 symphonies on 33 CDs with the Austro-Hungarian Haydn Orchestra, formed especially for these recordings from first-bench players in the Vienna Philharmonic and the Hungarian State Orchestra. Haydn, who taught Beethoven and played with Mozart, composed in an era of formal structures. He subverted and altered them, using deferred expectations to point to a world beyond them. He also can be quite antic in the tricks he plays on the accepted conventions of the day. The leading composer of the age, he spent his time isolated from it in Nikolaus’s Hungarian swamp, a distinction not lost on him. His famous “Farewell” Symphony let the orchestra members leave the room as their parts finished, until only Haydn and Nikolaus were left in the salon. Nikolaus got the point, and they all left the next week for the cafés of Vienna. 9 ROMAN RABINOVICH
While mocking the symphony and chamber music, Haydn also became the father of both. It was his looseness with musical traditions which became their epitome. This is plainly evident in his sonatas. As Keats said, “This Haydn is like a child, for there is no knowing what he will do next.” Haydn wrote 17 operas, 104 symphonies, and 62 sonatas, of which 55 have been preserved. Roman and Michael produced Adam’s Beethoven sonatas at Tippet Rise on January 2–10, 2019, released on First Hand Records, which also released Roman’s and Michael’s records, recorded that same week at Tippet Rise. They all chose CD-18, a process which they document in the podcast “Two Pianos in One” on our website: https://tippetrise.org/podcasts/two-pianos-in-one That week Adam recorded Beethoven sonatas, Michael recorded the Beethoven Eroica Variations, and Roman recorded Haydn sonatas. ROMAN RABINOVICH 10
11 ROMAN RABINOVICH
ROMAN RABINOVICH 12
In August 2019, Roman played at Tippet Rise with the Escher String Quartet. It was one of the last concert weekends at Tippet Rise before the pandemic. Little did any of us realize…. Volume One of the Haydn sonatas was recorded at the Academy of Arts and Letters in New York, and Volume Two at Tippet Rise. Roman has written of the Haydn Sonatas: Haydn composed them for amateurs and connoisseurs. The distinction is import- ant. Sonatas for professional musicians are works in which the player was expected to embellish and improvise in the proper style, to fill in the blanks, so to speak. On the other hand, amateurs did not know how to compose or add ornaments. As the middle class was growing and people could afford musical instruments at their homes, the number of amateur musicians grew. Haydn, being very practical and pragmatic, understood the potential for a new market for his works and changed his notation to a more simplified style so everyone could read his compositions without compromises.
13 ROMAN RABINOVICH
Roman brings more than Haydn to his Haydn: for his debut recoding, he made his own solo piano arrangements of three orchestral ballet classics: Ravel’s Daphnis and Chloe, Stravinsky’s Petrushka, and Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. As my teacher Russell Sherman often pointed out, without knowing where music was heading, you can’t understand where Haydn or Mozart were tempted to go. And you need to be able to imagine what they’re thinking when they stray from the narrow path…. We are grateful to Roman for the opportunity to present a small part of his vibrant and enormous project here in high-quality downloads. As the BBC Music Magazine put it, “His sound is bright, muscular and clean, and he brings out all the wit and delicacy of Haydn’s invention; his articulation is immaculate no matter how fast he goes; and he responds imaginatively.” FURTHER READING H.C. Robbins Landon, David Wyn Jones: Haydn: His Life and Music, Thames & Hudson, 1988. Daniel Heartz: Haydn, Mozart, and the Viennese School: 1740–1780, W.W. Norton, 1995. Christopher Hogwood: Haydn’s Visits to England, Thames & Hudson, 2009.
ROMAN RABINOVICH 14
15 ROMAN RABINOVICH
Roman Rabinovich Biography
The eloquent pianist Roman Rabinovich has been highly lauded by The New York
Times, BBC Music Magazine, the San Francisco Classical Voice, and others. He has performed throughout Europe and the United States in venues such as Wigmore Hall in London, Carnegie Hall and Lincoln CentER in New York, the Great Hall of Moscow Conservatory, the Cité de la Musique in Paris, and the Terrace Theater of Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Rabinovich has participated in festivals including Marlboro, Lucerne, Davos, Prague Spring, Klavier-Festival Ruhr, and Mecklenburg-Vorpommern. An avid chamber musician, he is also a regular guest at ChamberFest Cleveland. Rabinovich has earned critical praise for his explorations of the piano music of Haydn. At the 2018 Bath Festival, he presented a 10-recital 42-sonata series, earning praise in The Sunday Times. Prior to that, in 2016 as artist in Residence at the Lammermuir Festival in Scotland, he performed 25 Haydn sonatas in 5 days, and over two seasons, in 2016 and 2017, he performed all Haydn’s sonatas in Tel Aviv.
ROMAN RABINOVICH 16
17 ROMAN RABINOVICH
ROMAN RABINOVICH 18
During the pandemic Rabinovich and his wife, violinist Diana Cohen have been playing free weekly concerts outside from their front yard. Dubbed “a true polymath, in the Renaissance sense of the word” (Seen & Heard International, 2016), Rabinovich is also a composer and visual artist. Rabinovich’s 2019-20 solo recitals highlights include International Piano Series at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Ruhr Piano Festival, Liszt Academy, Union College, and ProMusica Detroit. The last two seasons saw Rabinovich’s critically acclaimed concerto debut with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and Sir Roger Norrington, as well as with Meiningen Orchestra, Orquestra Sinfónica do Porto Casa da Música, the NFM Leopoldinum and Szczecin Philharmonic in Europe, and the Seattle Symphony, the Sarasota Orchestra, Des Moines Symphony, the Sinfonia Boca Raton, and James Judd in the United States.
19 ROMAN RABINOVICH
Solo recital appearances include Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall and Walter Reade Theater, the Houston Society for the Performing Arts, the Washington Performing Arts Society, Vancouver Recital Society, Chopin Society in St Paul, Minnesota, the Philip Lorenz Piano Series in Fresno, the Janáček May International Music Festival, and the Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama in Cardiff. As a chamber musician, Rabinovich appeared with violinist Liza Ferschtman in, among others, the Concertgebouw Amsterdam, the Baden-Baden Festspielhaus, and the Beethoven-Haus Bonn. Roman Rabinovich made his Israel Philharmonic debut under the baton of Zubin Mehta at age 10. He was a top prizewinner at the 12th Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition in 2008, while in 2015, he was selected by Sir András Schiff as one of three pianists for the inaugural “Building Bridges” series, created to highlight young pianists of unusual promise. Born in Tashkent, Rabinovich immigrated to Israel with his family in 1994, beginning his studies there with Irena Vishnevitsky and Arie Vardi; he went on to graduate from the Curtis Institute of Music as a student of Seymour Lipkin, and earned his master’s degree at the Juilliard School where he studied with Robert McDonald.
ROMAN RABINOVICH 20
21 ROMAN RABINOVICH
ROMAN RABINOVICH 22
In Roman's Words I entered the winter through the Beartooth Mountains.
Through the sparse landscape, inhaling cold, embracing solitude, listening to the wind. A space is created in which creativity blossoms. Of an uncluttered mind. Relieved. A window opened up inside my chest. I came here with two pals. Our friendship marked by sharing music. Our jokes and constant poking rhyme with Papa Haydn’s playfulness.
23 ROMAN RABINOVICH
The cold becomes comforting, stimulating, and eventually flows into the unmanifested. I still hear the gushing of the wind inside the Olivier Music Barn through the passages of that “chicken” sonata that brought short tension. Was it a battle of egos? or just a misunderstanding fueled by exhaustion and adrenaline? The voices come through the microphones. Now that the chaos of the world has subsided it’s just you and the sound. Now the bubble is unburstable The window inside your chest is now open. — Roman Rabinovich
ROMAN RABINOVICH 24
25 ROMAN RABINOVICH
Joseph Haydn Sonata No. 35 in A-flat Major, Hob.XVI:43 - Roman Rabinovich
Produced by Adam Golka and Roman Rabinovich Engineered, edited, and mastered by Monte Nickles, assisted by Jim Ruberto Please click on the adjacent photo to play.
ROMAN RABINOVICH 26
27 ROMAN RABINOVICH
Technical Specifications Recorded: 01/02/2019–01/10/2019 Recording Engineers: Monte Nickles assisted by Jim Ruberto Sound Editor: Monte Nickles Denoised by: Jim Ruberto Mixed and Mastered by: Monte Nickles Performer: Roman Rabinovich, Piano: Steinway, 1940, Istomin-Horowitz CD-18, SS# 300124 Piano Technician: Mike Toia Producers: Micheal Brown, Adam Golka Recorded in Auro3D format for immersive playback in 32bit 384kHz DXD. Microphones used: Main array: Left: DPA 4006a Right: DPA 4006a Center: DPA 4006a Sur L: DPA 4041a Sur R: DPA 4041a Height FL: Schoeps MK2 ROMAN RABINOVICH 28
Height FR: Schoeps MK2 Height RL: DPA 4041a Height RR: DPA 4041a Spot Microphones: DPA 4060a in Piano Schoeps MK2H for A/B Stereo pair Microphone preamps: Grace m108s Converters: Merging Technology’s HAPI and HORUS with Premium converter cards DAW: Merging Technology’s Pyramix
Photography: Alex Coyle, Eric Petersen, Emily Rund Text: Peter Halstead, Roman Rabinovich Flip Book Design: Craig M. White
29 ROMAN RABINOVICH
Roman Rabinovich at Tippet Rise