Two years after winning the silver medal at The Gurwitz International Piano Competition in San Antonio, pianist Tatiana Dorokhova is a regular visitor to our area, having continued to perform for Musical Bridges Around the World, and this week with the Symphony of the Hills, where she played Sergei Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 3.
“I’ve already played it with an orchestra,” she told us during a visit with Barry Brake on KPAC’s Classical Connections before the Kerrville concert. “But I would play it as many times as I can. I like Prokofiev very much. I like his energy, his imagination, and he has a strong theatrical vision.”
Coincidentally, Prokofiev’s most famous stage work, ballet music for “Romeo & Juliet,” anchors Dorokhova’s latest project, her debut album,
“Liebestod,” now available on KNS Classical.
Dorokhova brought a signed copy of the album to us at KPAC this week, and explained she chose “Liebestod” as the title of the disc after Richard Wagner’s passionate piece of the same name.
“I was always interested in the question [of] when we feel life the most intensely, and the answer for me was when we love, and when we step beyond the boundaries of ordinary existence,” Dorokhova said.
The album includes Franz Liszt’s transcription of the famous Wagner piece, as well as the aforementioned Prokofiev suite of music, and pieces by Christoph Willibald Gluck and another Liszt transcription of operatic music, by Giuseppe Verdi.
Dorokhova said her next mountain to climb is learning and recording all 32 of Beethoven’s piano sonatas. It’s a project that she says seems perpetually out of reach.
“The deeper I get, the further it gets from me,” she said.
We’ll be listening and waiting for the next visit!
