Alexander Toradze 1952-2022

The pianist Alexander Toradze, who died yesterday of heart failure at the age of 69, was much more than a friend.

Lexo enjoyed telling the story of our first encounter – a story of American naivete. This took place in a small room at Carnegie Hall. He was touring as a Soviet artist; the year must have been 1979. The meeting was arranged by Mary Lou Falcone, the publicist of the Van Cliburn Piano Competition, in which Lexo’s second-place finish had stirred a national controversy. Mary Lou doubtless envisioned a lively exchange. I was eager to know how Alexander Toradze felt about the Soviet suppression of Alfred Schinittke and other “forbidden” Russian composers. He replied, without skipping a beat: “When was the last time John Cage’s prepared piano pieces were performed at Carnegie?” This took place in the presence of a man sitting silently in a corner – Lexo’s Soviet handler, of whom I was oblivious.

Lexo was in all things original. I have not met anyone more gifted at thinking while speaking – his remarks were never generic. For him, conversation was an art – doubtless a skill he acquired in his native Tbilisi, where toasting is a competitive creative act. Because his father was the leading Georgian composer, and his mother a prominent screen actress, he enjoyed access to the highest precincts of Soviet culture – including meetings of the Composers’ Union – at an early age. It showed.

In my book The Ivory Trade, I documented the youthful aplomb, the intensity of charm, of Lexo at full throttle at the 1976 Clibrun competition:

“Round-faced and pudgy, sociable, demonstrative, he was a born performer. Earnestly searching for an errant English word, he would purse his lips and knit his brow, and shut his eyes in a hard squint. In repose, his features turned vulnerably soft. Pleasure crinkled his eyes, puffed his cheeks, and stretched his mouth into a broad smile. . . .

“From the moment he sat down to play, Toradze was an adrenaline machine, arms ifidgeting, torso twisting, legs twitching, as he nervously glanced at the orchestra and the conductor. In action, eyes clamped, jaw clenched, he crowded the keyboard like a pugilist, bowing his head, curling his back, spreading his elbows. He beat time sharply with his left foot. His powerful hands, with their surprisingly long fingers, stood tall, tickling the keys or punishing them.

“Everything Toradze touched sounded different. His Bach was Gothic. His Haydn was relentless, formidably dour. He traversed a Scarlatti sonata in an eerie, mountful slow motion . . . “

Many years later, an attempt to implant Toradze in a documentary film for American public television proved a predictable fiasco. His discourse could not be captured in soundbites. A subsequent film by Behrouz Jamali recorded Lexo telling three stories over the course of one hour; it is the one to see.

The Toradze approach was not for everyone – or for all repertoire. Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto was one piece that could not survive a Lexo onslaught. I thought he made his deepest statement in Prokofiev’s Concerto No. 2, which he read – Lexo always needed a story – as a requiem for Maximilian Schmidthof, who committed suicide. This detailed reading – a traumatic narrative of loss — transforms and amplifies the music in surprising ways. In music, an “agogic” accent is achieved not via loudness, but a slight delay. In his commercial recording of this work, partnered by his lifetime friend Valery Gergiev, the tremendous agogic accent Toradze interpolates at 11:42 (just after the first movement cadenza), and which Gergiev thunderously absorbs, is not to be found on the page. 

My son Bernie, who knows such things, believes Toradze’s supreme recorded performance is a 1990 version of the concerto he was practicing in the days preceding his death: Prokofiev’s No. 3, again with Gergiev. Hear it.

As a Moscow Conservatory student, Lexo listened clandestinely to the Voice of America “Jazz Hour.” He was not the only one for whom jazz signified American freedoms. Jazz informed Lexo’s thundering syncopations in Prokofiev and Stravinsky. Possibly his favorite story was meeting Ella Fitzgerald in Portland, Oregon. Touring as a Soviet artist in 1978, he discovered that Fitzgerald and Oscar Peterson were about to perform a Portland concert. When he refused to take a scheduled flight for a Miami rehearsal, his American manager, Shelly Gold, told him he was jeopardizing his career. Lexo stayed in Portand and wound up onstage with Ella Fitzgerald. He dropped to his knees and kissed her hands. He told her that she mattered more in Russia than she could possibly matter to any American. Her photograph was always on his piano. (A full telling of this story begins at 18:16 here.)

Once, during a panel conversation in Washington D.C., Lexo heard an American music historian sarcastically demean Tikhon Khrennikov. The longtime head of the Soviet Composer’s Union, Khrennikov was initially appointed by Stalin, whom he faithfully served. When the Khrennikov lecture was over, Lexo casually remarked: “I knew Khrennikov. I also knew his wife, who was Jewish.” Without heat, he redrew Khrennikov as a flesh and blood mortal, fending as best he could. It was a Woody Allen moment. 

Like other Soviet emigrants I have known, Lexo looked back without illusions or ideological blinders. He saw no cartoons. But America – I must say — proved something less than he had hoped or expected. 

His 1983 defection was characteristically novelistic. Touring with a Moscow orchestra in Spain, he was forbidden to perform. It was a last straw. He entered the American embassy and requested refugee status. Two days later, the orchestra’s concertmaster hung himself in a hotel bathroom. Russian intelligence agents attempted to kidnap Lexo in a restaurant. There were high-speed chases on Spanish highways. Three months later, he began a nine-city tour with the Los Angeles Philharmonic: his first American concerts in more than four years.

Lexo eventually wound up in South Bend, Indiana, occupying an endowed Piano chair at the University of Indiana there. This was not the big IU music school in Bloomington, but a much smaller operation looking for prominence. It seemed an incongruous move, but Lexo capitalized on the opportunity at hand and created a singular artistic phenomenon: the Toradze Piano Studio. Single-handedly, he recreated the intense mentoring environment he had known in Moscow, as well as the communal social life he had known in Tbilisi. Composed of students and former students, the Studio toured widely, especially abroad, purveying thematic festivals many of which I partnered. There were marathon programs of Shostakovich in Paris, Prokofiev in Edinburgh and St. Petersburg, Stravinsky in Rotterdarm, Rachmaninoff in Salzburg. For the Ruhr Piano Festival, the Studio performed the entire solo output of Alexander Scriabin as an eight-hour marathon. 

Lexo’s suburban South Bend home was the site of innumerable gargantuan dinners and post-concert parties. His Russian and Georgian students ate pizza, played basketball, and barbecued salmon in their backyards. They shopped for steak and vodka in the early hours of the morning in vast twenty-four hour food marts. It was all a testimony to Lexo’s personal magnetism; the warmth of his nature, his depth of experience.

In my book Artists in Exile I reported Lexo observing in 2006:

“From the standpoint of nourishing cultural needs, South Bend may not be the ideal place for young artists to grow up. And it may not be true that we actually enjoy in this country all the ‘open society’ benefits that we’ve been told about. But for my generation – in Soviet Russia, at the Moscow Conservatory and also in Tbilisi – this notion of American freedom is still powerful, and I’m sure it’s still powerful for the world at large. . . . Willis Conover’s jazz hour on the Voice of America — that was the talk of my generation and also of my parents’ generation. Of course you were in danger if you listened to these broadcasts. We often listened in a basement, where an older friend of ours had a very powerful shortwave receiver. That gave us a sense of freedom. Then life goes by and you actually get to this country and you carry this notion with you, even if you grow disappointed. Even if everyday life can be pretty harsh and difficult, still that can’t spoil the dream. It’s a dream so strongly associated with your youth that you’re just saturated with it. You can smell it, taste, it, touch it. You can’t kill it and you don’t want to kill it. This dream is one of the things that bonds our group, in America. It’s a condition of hope associated with a faraway place. It’s actually a dream stronger than any reality. . . .

“I mean, I can’t envision a group of perforemers in which 80 per cent are not native born succeeding anywhere else. Can you imagine something like that in Russia? In Germany? In France? You need an open, accepting environment, you need the attitude: ‘Let it be.’ I feel this in South Bend.”

But it’s all gone now, and not only because Lexo himself is gone. Lexo’s odyssey was as complex and unfathomable as Lexo himself.

***

In Behrouz’s film, Lexo performs Prokofiev’s Seventh Piano Sonata in a manner unknown to Prokofiev and yet conveying its own kind of truth. Lexo’s interpretation is wholly invested in the experience of wartime – of Prokofiev and World War II. The first movement is reconceived without barlines, as if improvised in the heat of the moment. Its second theme, with repeated notes, is for Lexo “drops of tears.” The entire second movement is performed with the soft pedal down. The finale is performed without pedal. 

In The Ivory Trade, Lexo says: “l can’t just look at a score and think: ‘Gosh, what a beautiful concerto; I’m going to make it just delicious.’ That doesn’t interest me. Composers, if they are expressing something, they do it because they cannot express it in other ways, because there is something they need to get out of their system. You don’t need to get out of your system pure happiness and joy. You need an element of discomfort, or irritation . . . That’s where our real differences are – in pain. Tolstoy, at the beginning of Anna Karenina, says, ”All happy families resemble one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” So I have to find this element. I have to find two or three pages of pain. Then I use that, because I can associate with that, and elaborate. I can use my own experience. And fortunately, my own experience with pain is quite considerable.”

In Behrouz’s documentary, I comment that Toradze interprets the Prokofiev Seventh Sonata via a process of “infiltration” of thought and feeling. “You can’t just surrender to the composer,” I suggest, “or you surrender yourself.” Referencing the scenarios he adduces in this sonata, and also in Beethoven’s Op. 109, I further tell him: “It’s not important whether your story is true. It’s true for you. It’s an instrument of interpretation; it lets you inhabit the music.” In the interpretation of music, there are different varieties of “fidelity” and “authenticity.”

Lexo possessed a special capacity to extract subjective truths binding his personal experience with notes on a page. Essentially, it was a special capacity to probe himself.

Lexo was like a brother to me and to my wife Agnes. He was like an uncle to my two children. I count knowing him, for more than four decades, among the most privileged experiences of my life.