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Alexander Toradze, a Georgian American pianist and Soviet defector whose idiosyncratic and bravura performances of Russian composers had been both liked or hated, died on Could 11 at his house in South Bend, Ind. He was 69.
The trigger was coronary heart failure, his well being having deteriorated since 2019, his supervisor, Ettore F. Volontieri, mentioned.
Mr. Toradze was additionally stricken with coronary heart failure, because it was later identified, on April 23 throughout a efficiency with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra in Washington State. Although he needed to be helped onstage at first due to weak spot, he accomplished the live performance and was hospitalized afterward, Mr. Volontieri mentioned.
Mr. Toradze specialised in Tchaikovsky, Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff and different Russian composers. His concert events this spring had been to incorporate a efficiency of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3 with the Illinois Philharmonic, scheduled for Could 14.
Mr. Toradze, whom buddies and colleagues known as Lexo, received the silver medal on the 1977 Van Cliburn Worldwide Piano Competitors in Fort Value, although members of the jury had been divided, with some discovering his taking part in disturbingly percussive.
The critic Peter G. Davis, nonetheless, was amongst his followers: He wrote in The New York Instances two years later that “his taking part in had the perfect form of éclat and brilliance in that it stemmed straight from the character of the music fairly than from a need to point out off.”
“His tone,” he added, “was glittering however by no means clattery; the poise and precision of his interpretation had magnificence in addition to great visceral pleasure.”
In a 1984 overview, Donal Henahan of The Instances wrote of Mr. Toradze’s taking part in, “It’s the distinctive Russian model of an older technology, nonetheless alive on this period of stamped-out worldwide virtuosos.”
Mr. Toradze defected to america in 1983, presenting himself on the American Embassy in Madrid for asylum throughout a tour with the Bolshoi Symphony Orchestra. In response to the critic and writer Joseph Horowitz, an in depth good friend and creative adviser to Mr. Toradze, it was a dramatic defection that concerned freeway chases in Spain and an tried kidnapping by the Ok.G.B. in a restaurant.
Three months later, Mr. Toradze launched into an American tour with the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Throughout his profession he carried out with main U.S. orchestras, together with the New York Philharmonic, in addition to the Berlin Philharmonic and the London Symphony Orchestra, amongst others.
In 1991, he was appointed to a newly endowed professorship in piano at Indiana College South Bend, the place he created the Toradze Piano Studio, impressed by the extreme, all-encompassing coaching of Soviet music colleges. His studio consisted of former and present college students, who offered largely Russian repertory in marathon concert events in america and Europe.
His college students additionally performed soccer, and the Toradze Studio crew received the college championship three years in a row. “Soccer isn’t superb for the palms,” Mr. Toradze informed The Instances in 2002, “but it surely’s nice for the mind.”
A gregarious host, he loved giving late-night dinners and boisterous events for his college students, a lot of whom he recruited from Russia and Georgia. He retired from the college in 2017.
Whereas he was extensively admired, Mr. Toradze’s individualistic strategy “was not for everybody — or for all repertoire,” Mr. Horowitz wrote in an appreciation revealed after Mr. Toradze’s demise. “Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto was one piece that might not survive a Lexo onslaught.”
The Instances critic Bernard Holland, reviewing a efficiency of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in 1988, wrote that Mr. Toradze’s “customary extravagance would have ailing match this music’s classical restraint, so his tactic was to hunt the opposite excessive.” The outcomes, he mentioned, “alternated between the bizarre and the inaudible.”
Mr. Toradze acknowledged such responses. “I all the time anticipate outraged assaults,” he mentioned in an interview with The Baltimore Solar in 1992.
Alexander Davidovich Toradze was born on Could 30, 1952, in Tbilisi, Georgia, to the composer David Toradze and the actress Liana Asatiani. He attended the Particular Music College for Gifted Youngsters in Tbilisi and the Moscow Conservatory, graduating in 1978.
Whereas he was a scholar in Moscow, Mr. Toradze listened to illicit broadcasts of the Voice of America program “Jazz Hour.” To him, he mentioned, jazz represented creative freedom. When performing in Portland, Ore., throughout a Soviet-sponsored tour in 1978, he realized that Ella Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson had been to carry out twice the following day. A lot to the irritation of his supervisor, he determined to skip a rehearsal in Miami to attend the concert events. Ms. Fitzgerald invited him onstage, the place he informed her that she was a “goddess for folks within the Soviet Union.”
Mr. Toradze’s small catalog of recordings features a 1998 disc of Prokofiev’s 5 piano concertos, with Valery Gergiev and the Kirov Orchestra, and Shostakovich piano concertos, with Paavo Järvi and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony.
Mr. Toradze, a working towards Orthodox Christian, suggested younger artists to get within the behavior of praying earlier than performances. Talking about Liszt’s variations on a theme of Bach, he informed The Instances in 1986: “Bach’s cantata describes worrying, complaining, doubting and crying. Many of those emotions had been a part of my life. However the piece strikes steadily and closely towards a improbable last chorale in main, with the phrases, ‘What God does is nicely achieved.’ That’s my credo.”
His marriage to the pianist Susan Blake led to divorce in 2002. He’s survived by his sons, David and Alex; a sister, Nino Toradze; and his longtime associate, the pianist Siwon Kim.
After defecting to america, Mr. Toradze lamented the imposition of strict union guidelines concerning rehearsal instances that might stop an orchestra from working towards to the top of a concerto, even when the musicians had been just some bars quick. However he appreciated the high-quality devices on supply.
“In Russia, I might play many instances on pianos with damaged strings or damaged keys,” he informed the radio host Bruce Duffie in 2002.
However, he added, “there are occasions when the piano isn’t nicely, or you aren’t nicely, however you go on anyway.”
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