She has been playing the piano since she was four years old. A little more than other children, a little more intense, more precise, more sophisticated. She’s more talented than others, that’s for sure. The pianist Alexandra Dovgan is now 14 years old and walks the line between child prodigy and star pianist. She was born into a Moscow family of musicians and at the age of five it was clear: her talent is extraordinary. She was taken to the Central Music School in Moscow, the most successful musical talent factory imaginable. Most applicants are rejected, five-year-old Alexandra Dovgan was accepted. And now she is at the beginning of a world career, as the current concert in Munich’s Prinzregententheater testified.
After just a few bars it was clear: the line between child prodigy and artist is a bit wider than expected. She is both. This is precisely what accounts for the artistic charm of this musician, who enters the stage resolutely but by no means briskly, bows briefly and immediately starts playing Ludwig van Beethoven’s Storm Sonata. It is not called that because it is more turbulent than other Beethoven sonatas, but because Beethoven’s secretary Anton Schindler rumored that the composer was thinking of Shakespeare’s magic-spirit drama “The Tempest”.
Dovgan thinks of melodies and chords, feels connections, dramatic climaxes, and her fingers are always thinking and speaking to the audience. Mostly very clear and direct, sometimes floating lyrically in other worlds. Whenever she breaks free and seems to forget the technique she has trained over the years, she is of course wonderful. And it’s only when she’s too focused on shaping every detail and grasping it as a whole in itself, like in the first third of the second movement, that glorious B flat major Adagio, that she forgets strict basic meter in favor of a perfectly designed little ornament. But suddenly everything flows in a broad stream, becomes melodic and highly dramatic – completely Beethoven. And also, it has to be said, all of Dovgan.
The musical freedom does not lead into the distance, but straight to oneself, into the open interior
Because here she opens up completely and shows such an irresistibly honest musicality in the encounter with the classical-romantic genius that is rarely heard. There is nothing artificial in her playing, nothing exaggerated or even didactic. The musical event seems to arise from itself and is not played. It’s enviably naive, but it’s also immature at times. At the moment it is not really known whether this unfinished state does not reflect the romantic aspect of Beethoven better than many mature versions or interpretations of his music. Nevertheless, the tension is missing a little, the dramatic tension, the lively tension in the slow, drawn out, delayed. Maybe that’s a thing of adulthood after all.
In return, Dovgan brings that crushing melodic sincerity that is as clear and feels as real as only a deeply subjective playing, while simultaneously abstracting from itself, can produce. That is the magic, that the performing artist is both with himself and with the work. The musical freedom does not lead into the distance, but straight to oneself, into the open interior. Beethoven is no longer the monstrous wretch here – which he probably wasn’t either, but only became in the last two hundred years – but the grumbling uncle who immediately turns to himself lovingly and a bit melancholically and at the same time is in distant visions loses.
A state of mind that Robert Schumann specifically composed, also in his “Faschingsschwank aus Wien”, which Alexandra Dovgan approaches a bit clumsily, but immediately reveals her sense of melodic weighting. Now the narrative is added, the parlando gestures, which will determine the second part of the evening, in which she will perform all four ballads by Frédéric Chopin. And what sometimes appears behind a milky gauze curtain in Chopin’s work has such a vivid and powerful effect in Robert Schumann’s tonal language that it almost seems encroaching. Alexandra Dovgan avoids this danger by working with extreme precision. Her technique is stupendous, which is always a great pleasure for pianists.
In this way she develops Chopin’s Ballad in G minor in a very personal way, even more so than Beethoven’s Tempest Sonata
Not because you enjoy the circus acrobatics, but because you can concentrate fully on the music without having to cheer on whether all the planned tones will come out cleanly. But the amazing thing is not her dexterity, but the fact that she also has something to tell in these parlando pieces. That she doesn’t shine in empty forms, but conveys concrete moods and small psychodramas, despair and joy. In this way she develops Chopin’s Ballad in G minor in a very personal way, even more so than Beethoven’s Tempest Sonata. Also idiosyncratic, of course, and here too you sometimes miss dramatic arcs, but she always plays in such a way that you can feel: she stands up for it, that’s how she is at this moment, there’s nothing wrong. And that’s what it’s all about. One not only wants to hear the composer, but also the artist of the moment, the performer, the pianist.
It is perhaps less important than you think that both agree. In a few years, Alexandra Dovgan will probably play these ballads very differently. She will possibly let the lurking beginning of the F minor ballad be followed by eccentric outbursts and act a bit in a rage, she will stage high tension, from which the sovereign liberation emerges that Chopin composed so captivatingly in his ballads. For now, however, Dovgan’s narrative of musical truth and greatness is a different one, no less intriguing. And maybe you only hear that from a fourteen-year-old who has temporarily set out with her parents and little brother from Russia to Spain to conquer the world from there.
Nevertheless, she wants to go back to Moscow to her great teacher Mira Marchenko and maybe and hopefully will be spared the cultural-political consequences of the Ukraine war. Because she actively stands for a different world that does not rely on violence, but on an awareness that can be formed and expanded at such a piano recital. The pianist’s special ability to congenially combine pure playing technique and musical poetry also contributes to this.
This is evident even in the composition of the evening’s encores: Rachmaninoff’s G sharp minor Prelude Op.32, 12; Alexander Siloti’s arrangement of Bach’s B flat minor Prelude BWV 855a; Rachmaninoff’s D major Prelude op.23,4. Here the playfulness goes hand in hand with the game of thoughts and feelings, which is just as cheerful as it is deeply serious. And when you look at the young pianist’s face, you see exactly that: the cheerfulness, the seriousness, the daring confidence.