Posts Tagged ‘Independent’

Yefim “Fima” Bronfman does not look like a pianist. He looks like a Russian. Like a Russian bear. And in fact, he did ascend in the classical music world amidst the last stages of the Cold War as a kind of Prokofiev savant. Which he of course is, yet so much more.

According to the Independent and the Jewish Week, he is also the son of two Jewish musicians, one a Polish pianist and one a Russian violinist, both of whom were forced to flee their homes at the start of World War II. His father was captured by the Nazis as a POW, but, during a march between camps, managed to escape into a nearby ditch, where he proceeded to spend the entire night. A month-long trek to Moscow, a brush with starvation, and a brief prison stint later, Yefim’s father met and settled down with Yefim’s mother in Tashkent, where their young son was “accepted” into the Soviet conservatory as a portion of the two-percent maximum quota for Jews.

This kind of anti-semitism led Yefim and his family to eventually emigrate to Israel. There, Bronfman enrolled at the Rubin Academy of Music at Tel Aviv, where he quickly excelled and won a scholarship—the same scholarship that Itzhak Perlman once won—to be able to study at the Curtis Institute in Philadephia under the great Leon Fleisher.

I only mention all this past, because somehow when you see Bronfman play, even on YoutTube, he seems to be exorcising his roots. It’s no wonder he became so well-known for his renditions of Russian composers; within them, he must have found the way to tell his own beginnings of his own story.

And today, he continues telling that story, one which has become all the more complex and varied as he has grown, become a US citizen, and renowned all over the world. On Wednesday, March 9th at 8:00 PM, he returns to Los Angeles at the Walt Disney Concert Hall with a “kaleidoscopic program pairing the world premiere of Salonen’s Humoreske with Schumann’s Humoreske, plus works by Haydn and Chopin.” To win two tickets to see Bronfman’s powerful presence in person, simply enter your first name, last name, and e-mail address into the form below. If you do so, you will also automatically be entered into
the running for our next three FineArtsLA ticket giveaways as well.

As the writer Phillip Roth once wrote about Bronfman:”With a jaunty wave, he is suddenly gone, and though he takes all his fire off with him like no less a force than Prometheus, our own lives now seem inextinguishable. Nobody is dying, nobody – not if Bronfman has anything to say about it.”

8 days. 6 art fairs. 8 museums. 6 panels. 1 studio visit.

Touted as the most important art week of the year in New York, collectors, curators, and artists descended upon Manhattan for Armory Arts Week and the city did not disappoint. With a plethora of satellites, fairs boasting more galleries and more square footage than ever before, and the ADAA Art Show scheduled to coincide with the Armory, this was a big test for the art market and, at least anecdotally, it seems to have passed with flying colors. The aisles were filled with the who’s who of the art world: the Mugrabis, Margulies, Carolyn Christov Bargiev, Beatrix Ruf, Don and Mera Rubell, Jerry Saltz, etc. The walls at all the fairs, but particularly the Armory, declared that painting is alive and quite well: Yayoi Kusama and John Korner at Victoria Miro, Mel Bochner at Two Palms, Hernan Bas and Angel Otero at Lehmann Maupin, and at White Cube painting reigned supreme with Gary Hume, Gabriel Orozco, Georg Baselitz, and one of the much-hyped Damien Hirst blue paintings. Sculptures with glitz or reflective surfaces—often best sellers in Miami—made appearances at Jack Shainman (Nick Cave and El Anatsui), Hauser & Wirth (Isa Genzken), Lehmann Maupin (Nari Ward), Lisson (Anish Kapoor), Toby Webster Ltd. (Jim Lambie) and 303 (Jeppe Hein).

As you’d expect, each fair had a few stand out pieces that transcended the rest of the visual noise:

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