Posts Tagged ‘Salonen’

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.”