{"id":3667,"date":"2025-10-09T12:46:48","date_gmt":"2025-10-09T16:46:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/?p=3667"},"modified":"2025-10-09T13:10:19","modified_gmt":"2025-10-09T17:10:19","slug":"lexos-journey","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/2025\/10\/lexos-journey.html","title":{"rendered":"Lexo’s Journey"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n
\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

A new CD pays tribute to Alexander Toradze and his father, the composer David Toradze. For those of us who loved Lexo, this feels like a necessary way of keeping his memory alive. I am personally grateful to Ettore Volontieri for making this happen, and to Behrouz Jamali for permitting us to excerpt audio from <\/em>his exceptional film<\/a> “An Hour with Alexander Toradze and Joseph Horowitz.” For the CD booklet, I wrote:<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have never met anyone more gifted at thinking while speaking than Alexander Toradze. It was doubtless in his native Tbilisi, where toasting is a competitive creative act, that Lexo acquired his understanding of conversation as an art. A Toradze story required an introduction, a climax, and a coda, suitably interspersed with digressive footnotes and annotations. At the piano, his mettlesome intellect engaged in fraught interaction with a volcano of feeling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a Toradze tale could not possibly be abridged or excerpted, a Toradze \u201cinterview\u201d was invariably a false experience. For years I attempted to sit him down to speak, unimpeded, in front of a camera. Finally, during a Shostakovich festival in Washington, D.C., with my PostClassical Ensemble, I shoved him into a cramped office in which Behrouz Jamali awaited with his equipment. My goal was to have Lexo tell only two stories \u2013 one about his father, one about Ella Fitzgerald \u2013 and then to describe the manner in which he interpreted  Prokofiev\u2019s Seventh Piano Sonata (which he was performing that week).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Behrouz phoned the next day to inform me that there was no possibility of editing this  footage into a film. This did not surprise me; the tempo of Lexo\u2019s discourse, its ebb and flow, accelerations and diminuendos, was inviolable. I told Behrouz to take a deep breath. He phoned the next day and announced that he now discovered that the film was already there. And so it was. Behrouz proceeded to elegantly undertake some snipping, then to add some supplementary footage, and it was done. You can see it, all 59 minutes, on youtube. And you can hear two excerpts on the present CD.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first excerpt is a story about Lexo\u2019s father. The second is an exegesis on Interpretation. Initially, Lexo focuses on the first movement of the Prokofiev sonata, in which he heard the sobs of wartime mothers. Lexo always required a story \u2013 even for Beethoven\u2019s Op. 109 Piano Sonata, his eventual topic here, in which he glimpses Beethoven\u2019s vicissitudes in love. As he once told me: <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI can\u2019t just look at a score and think: Gosh, what a beautiful concerto; I\u2019m going to make it just delicious. That doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t need to get out of your system pure happiness and joy. No, because it\u2019s comfortable. So you need an element of discomfort, of irritation, certain spiritual urges that make you create this or that. That\u2019s where our real differences are \u2013 in pain. Tolstoy, at the beginning of Anna Karenina<\/em>, says, \u2018All happy families resemble one another; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.\u2019 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. It has been enough.\u201d [Quoted from The Ivory Trade<\/em> (1990), p. 100]<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Ella Fitzgerald story that Lexo told Behrouz, missing from our CD, is about the urgency of jazz in Soviet Russia \u2013 and how jazz vitally infiltrated the Toradze piano style. All this pertains to his interpretation of his father\u2019s Piano Concerto (which Lexo premiered and performed three times). Its jazzy pages are electrified by the physicality of Lexo\u2019s stabbing accents and syncopations. And doubtless Lexo found a story in the narrative pages. If he is no longer around to tell us what that story happened to be, and if the story actually coincided with what his father told him about the piece, it really doesn\u2019t matter \u2013 what matters (as I remark on film) is that Lexo\u2019s stories mattered to him.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

                                    ***<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Notwithstanding Lexo\u2019s enduring passion for the piano works of Ravel, his repertoire concentrated on four Russians: Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Shostakovich. They have in common Russian turmoil. The first two lived in an exigent condition of exile they differently negotiated. The third quit his exile to return, controversially, to Mother Russia. The fourth experienced a kind of internal exile as a people\u2019s artist, a beneficiary and victim of the state. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The turmoil of Lexo\u2019s own exile was intermittent but cruel. He was born in 1952 to a family anchored in art. At the Moscow Conservatory, he thrived on the support of inspired pedagogues, but loudly feuded with others. Touring as a Soviet pianist, he was enthralled by new experience and infuriated by restrictions placed on his activities. He defected suddenly, in Spain in 1983, when he discovered himself travelling with a Russian orchestra and yet not permitted to perform. He wound up, incongruously, in South Bend, Indiana, where he created the Toradze Piano Studio. It toured widely, only to implode. His prolonged American honeymoon ultimately stranded him, a stranger in a strange land. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The final chapter of Lexo\u2019s life transpired in relative self-seclusion: in loving partnership with Siwon Kim, his final protege. When Vladimir Putin\u2019s Russia invaded Ukraine, Lexo\u2019s response was unique: he instantly foresaw that the Russian artistic environment in which he had been raised, and which had been his cherished inheritance for more than half a century, would be poisoned for decades to come. I have no doubt that this intuition hastened his death in 2022.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It was the magnitude of Lexo\u2019s presence \u2013 his particular breadth of experience and understanding \u2013 that ultimately sealed his contribution to the tumultuous decades he inhabited.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

To read my eulogy for Lexo, click <\/em>here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A new CD pays tribute to Alexander Toradze and his father, the composer David Toradze. For those of us who loved Lexo, this feels like a necessary way of keeping his memory alive. I am personally grateful to Ettore Volontieri for making this happen, and to Behrouz Jamali for permitting us to excerpt audio from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-3667","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry","8":"has-post-thumbnail"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2QLHN-X9","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3667"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3667\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3688,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3667\/revisions\/3688"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/uq\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}