KEY POINTS:
Lithuanian pianist Muza Rubackyte opens two major concert seasons this week. Tonight, she plays Chopin's E minor Concerto with the Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra in the first of its APN News & Media Premier Series; on Sunday she is first up in Auckland Museum's 2008 Fazioli International Piano Recital Series.
Based in Paris, she is a musician with an international reputation, particularly for her CD releases. But back in Lithuania in the 1980s, times were grim. "Our National Academy of Music was right next to the KGB," Rubackyte says. "In one building, we were studying the very best idealistic and spiritual things; in the other, people were suffering and being tortured. One door led to paradise; the other to hell.
"They were terrible times. My grandfather was labelled an enemy of the people just because he was from the intelligentsia."
Rubackyte was a prodigy, winning a place in the Moscow Conservatory by the age of 13. "It may have been the leading school in the whole Soviet Union, with the best of the best of the best, but for the next seven years I was only able to play within the Soviet bloc as I was not allowed to have an international passport."
On Sunday, Rubackyte will give us one of the Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues she recorded two years ago for Brilliant Classics. This composer was very much a symbol of hope for what Rubackyte describes as the oppressed artists of the 80s.
"Shostakovich's music goes from enormous darkness and depression through to an almost religious ecstasy which was certainly forbidden at the time," she explains. "Yet we musicians and our audiences could feel this very clearly. I was too young and healthy to feel the deep depression of my older colleagues."
When she was able to relocate to Paris in the late 1980s, "it was like a renaissance. The only way to go."
Winning the Paris International Piano Competition in 1989 ignited her international career and she is quick to defend the value of such events. Now, as one of the jurors for Utrecht's International Liszt Competition, she has been auditioning young hopefuls in Shanghai, New York and Utrecht, in The Netherlands. "Pianists must work so hard and even the mere preparation of the huge programme that is required becomes a victory in itself."
Rubackyte herself is an ardent Lisztian. On Sunday, Aucklanders can hear a selection from Liszt's Annees de Pelerinage, a massive three-volume collection of virtuoso pieces that Radio France commissioned her to perform complete, on one day.
"It's an extreme marathon," she laughs. "You must take the audience on a journey from Liszt the young lover to Liszt the old priest."
She is most taken with what she describes as the generosity of the Hungarian composer and his freely expressed emotions. The Petrarch Sonnets of the set are "real declarations of love", she asserts. "The message is so important and so clear: without love you can't do anything in life."
Tonight, Chopin is on the bill with the Auckland Philharmonia under the baton of Christian Knapp. She may have 40 concertos in her repertoire but Chopin's First is her favourite.
"It's such extremely subjective and personal music that you can really breathe your own personality into it. It is real poetry and, like an actor, every pianist can find something new in its music."
What: Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra.
Where and when: Auckland Town Hall, tonight at 8pm.
And: Fazioli International Piano series, Auckland Museum, Sunday at 7pm.
On disc: Muza Rubackyte, Shostakovich Preludes and Fugues (Brilliant LC 09421, through Ode Records).
