Keyed
up
Two young pianists take the BSO stage in November
Boris Giltburg
was born in 1984 in
Moscow, in what was then the Soviet Union, and
moved to Tel Aviv at the age of five, three months
after beginning piano studies with his mother. He
made his concert debut in 2005 with the Israeli
Philharmonic and last year won first place in the
prestigious Queen Elizabeth Competition.
You met Marin Alsop at the Queen Elizabeth
Competition in Brussels, where you were
one of 12 pianists competing and she was
conductor, right?
I don’t think I would have played the way I did
if not for Marin. Each day, she would have two
long rehearsals, then two long performances in the
evening. Not only was it the amount of work, but
she completely separated her approach for each one
of us. Each had their own interpretation, their own
ideas about the piece. I was filled with awe about
the way she worked.
One of your passions is writing about music
for a more general audience. How would you
describe the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto to
your readers (borisgiltburg.wordpress.com)?
One of the advantages of the blog is that sometimes I can describe pieces almost bar by bar. I can
talk about the opening, the entrance of the piano
and then the bridge. In this piece, the opening is