Side B of great chess players III
Mark Taimanov, World-Class Chess and Piano Player
Jewish-Russian pianist and chess player Mark Taimanov were born in Kharkiv, Ukraine on 7 February 1926, and the family moved to St Petersburg when he was six months old. He was introduced to music by his mother, a piano teacher. At the age of eleven, he took the part of a young violinist in the 1937 Soviet film Beethoven Concerto.
Taimanov played in a piano duo with the first of his four wives, Lyubok Bruk, and some of their recordings appeared in the Philips/Steinway series Great Pianists of the 20th Century, they trained together under the Leningrad pedagogue Samari Savshinsky and were among the best-known exponents of the two-piano repertoire in the Soviet Union. If their names are unfamiliar in the West today, that’s large because they had only just begun to tour outside Iron Curtain countries when they separated and dissolved their duo in the early 1970s.
Any raised eyebrows at their inclusion in Philips’s prestigious series can certainly be countered by the best of their playing. In Rachmaninov’s First Suite, they are at one not just with each other but with the spirit of the music. Theirs is a unity of artistic purpose founded on shared culture and totally unruffled by the ensemble problems of two-piano playing. The two Arensky Suites, though musically less rewarding, have a certain piquant charm, and again these artists play them as to the manner born.
Elsewhere the limitations of Soviet recording technology are a serious obstacle to enjoyment. The Second Rachmaninov Suite is over-resonant, Poulenc’s deliciously urbane Concerto is bedeviled by an oscillating background swish, and his more thoughtful Sonata sounds horribly acidic. Even the 1968 Scaramouche, the most recent of the recordings, is overbright and glassy. Nor do the orchestral contributions do much to enhance the attractions of the set, the Mozart accompaniment being particularly stiff and formal. He also knew Shostakovich, Rostropovich, and Sviatoslav Richter, but he was mainly known as a chess player.
Mark Taimanov died in St Petersburg on 28 November 2016, aged ninety.
My life with chess and music
Interview with Mark Taimanov
This interview was conducted by Joel Lautier on the 18th of May 2002 at the NAO Chess Club in Paris. Mark Taimanov is an exceptional storyteller, and this interview has taken on larger proportions than usual. Nevertheless, it would have been a pity to present a truncated version of it, it is therefore given here in full.
Please follow the link
https://en.chessbase.com/post/my-life-with-che-and-music
