Draw a 200 kilometre-wide band on the map from Berlin to Moscow and you will capture the incubation region for most of the world's great pianists, certainly those of the 20th century. Gilels, Richter, Horowitz, both Anton and Arthur Rubenstein - all came from there. Alexander Tselyakov, while born in Azerbijan, studied there with Lev Naumov, the custodian of the Russian method of piano performance. Tselyakov's credentials are stunning and his concert on Sunday, March 8, in Pender Harbour is not one to miss.
He has performed at Wigmore Hall, Carnegie Hall, Moscow State Con-servatory, St. Petersburg's Shostakovich Philharmonic Hall and Glenn Gould Studio among innumerable other performance centres. He has performed with orchestras all over the world and is in demand as a soloist with the same enthusiasm. He has recently begun an exploration of the chamber music repertoire as music director for the Pender Harbour Chamber Music Festival. He is a professor of piano at Brandon University in Manitoba and makes his home there. Music lovers on the Coast have been fortunate to watch and hear Tselyakov move into the chamber music repertoire, and that has produced some wonderful moments, highlighted by most empathetic piano accompaniment. The audience will not soon forget Tselyakov's interpretation, with Joan Blackman and Tanya Prochazka, of Rachmaninov's Trio Elegaique in D minor last summer at the Pender Harbour Chamber Music Festival. The audience was so consumed by the last movement of the work that they remained totally silent for what seemed like minutes until Tselyakov himself broke the melancholy of the moment, simply saying "thank you," which was followed by thunderous applause. It will be great to have him back again, this time as a soloist.
Tickets for the 3 p.m. show are $20, available at John Henry's in Garden Bay, Harbour Insurance in Madeira Park, Sechelt Visitors Centre and Gaia's Fair Trade in Gibsons.
For more details, see www.penderharbourmusic.ca.
