Dear Gabriele,

Dranoff2 started its 2022-2023 season with a 2 piano celebration of Sergei Rachmaninoff’s 150th birthday, featuring Russian pianists Ilya Kazantsev and Asiya Korepanova. I had the pleasure of hosting Ilya while he was in Miami, and getting to personally know our talented artists is one of the great joys Dranoff has afforded me. 

Dranoff2’s mission has always been focused on presenting the two piano repertoire, discovering exciting new piano duos, like Ilya and Asiya, and commissioning new works for two pianos. We have continued the celebration of Rachmaninoff’s anniversary this season, widening the lens to promote an ensemble performance by Ilya Kazantsev with his Hermitage Piano Trio.

A beautiful series presented by Friends of Chamber Music features Asiya Korepanova in several installments of her virtuosic performance of all of Rachmaninoff’s compositions for solo piano. We are so delighted to share with you today the encore she gave at a program that ranged from early student pieces by Rachmaninoff to his later masterpiece, the Corelli Variations. 

I hope you enjoy it.

Warmly,

Maxine Long

Dranoff2 Piano Foundation Vice President

Asiya Korepanova

Concert encore

Korepanova played the complete opus, managing to sustain a contemplative mood and structural framework across the contrasting sections. She took the famous theme at a leisurely pace and brought elegance to the Chopinesque embellishments of the first variation. Turning dreamy, rhapsodic or impulsive, she imbued each of the variants with a specific aura and voice while maintaining momentum throughout the entire set.  

Her fluent articulation and contrasts of volume and tone contributed to a reading marked by authoritative depth and evenness of sonority and virtuosic agility. A repeat of the main subject emerged almost as a reverie. Korepanova brought heated abandon to the penultimate variation and a lyrical sense to the coda, for once not sounding like an anticlimax but a summation and epilogue to all that had come before it.

The audience was so attentive that one heard nary a cough nor cell phone. Korepanova responded to repeated curtain calls with a restrained, finely tinted encore of Rachmaninoff’s Elegie.  This rewarding evening makes one look forward to Korepanova’s continued exploration of Rachmaninoff’s output.

-Larry Budman, South Florida Classical Review

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