By George Loomis
January 30, 2004
The Moscow Times

The ever-growing ranks of expatriate musicians who return to Russia to perform now include the violinist Maxim Vengerov, who on Friday in the Great Hall of the Tchaikovsky Conservatory gives his first Moscow recital since emigrating to Germany 13 years ago, at the age of 16. At the piano will be the Turkish virtuoso Fazil Say for a program of works by Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. The recital is part of an international tour that began last week in Berlin and will end in March in New York's Carnegie Hall.

Vengerov has won unstinting praise for his performances in the West, with critics heralding his musical sophistication, technical skill and gorgeous tone. The New York Times observed that his "real magnetism lies in his restraint and subtle inflection and in the profundity of ideas thus illuminated." His playing has an emotional depth and a soulfulness that binds it to the Russian tradition. Vengerov sees this aspect of his playing as stemming from his studies with cellist and conductor Mstislav Rostropovich, who served as his mentor and imbued him with a sense of tradition, and from his grandparents' accounts of war and personal hardship.

Likewise, the quality of his tone reflects his conviction that the sound of the violin resembles the human voice. In performance, he has said, he strives to sing. He finds listening to singers helpful and is especially fond of the mezzo soprano Cecilia Bartoli, with whom he is planning a concert.

At the height of his performing activity in his early 20s, Vengerov gave as many as 130 concerts a year, but since then has been careful to protect himself against burnout. He has cut back substantially on engagements and supplements his playing with other activities. Many musicians turn to teaching later on in their careers, but Vengerov, though not yet 30, has already become a faculty member of Musikhochschule des Saarlandes, near Frankfurt.

He has also taken up composition, looking back with admiration to a time when musicians such as Sergei Rachmaninov -- a composer, pianist and conductor -- were more versatile. He is making headway as a conductor, too.

Vengerov was born in Novosibirsk in 1974 to musical parents, and started playing the violin when he was 4. He has recalled that he typically started practicing the violin after dinner and continued until the early hours of the morning, when he would relax by riding his tricycle in the courtyard of his apartment building. At the age of 7, he moved to Moscow with his grandparents to continue his education at the Tchaikovsky Conservatory's Central Special Music School but returned to Siberia due to the illness of his grandfather. Three years later, he followed his teacher, Zakhar Bron, to Germany.

The recipient of numerous prizes and awards, Vengerov won the Junior Wieniawski Competition in Poland at the age of 10 and the Carl Flesch International Violin Competition in London at 15. He was named Gramophone magazine musician of the year in 2002.

Seven years ago, Vengerov became the first classical musician to be appointed Envoy for Music by UNICEF. He has played for abducted child-soldiers in Uganda, disadvantaged children in Harlem, children suffering from drug addiction in Thailand, and children on both sides of the fighting in Kosovo.

Having recorded most of the familiar violin concertos (along with much else), he turned to two lesser-known concertos for his latest disc, a pairing of Benjamin Britten's Violin Concerto and the Viola Concerto by William Walton. Rostropovich, who conducted, originally suggested coupling the Britten, an emotionally shattering piece that Vengerov in an interview in Gramophone magazine called "one of the greatest musical creations of the 20th century," with Walton's Violin Concerto, but Vengerov felt that the Viola Concerto is a stronger piece. The only problem was that he didn't know how to play the viola, so he set out to learn it. Nine months later, they recorded the concerto, and he sounds as good on the viola as on the violin. The technique of playing the Baroque violin is something else that he has mastered. Indeed, it looks as though he may be on the path toward attaining the versatility he admires so much in Rachmaninov.