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Artist
Leo Svirsky
12+ albums
pianojazzcontemporary classicalmodern classicalcontemporary jazz
about
Leo Svirsky (b. 1988, USA) is a Russian-American pianist and composer currently based in the Hague, Netherlands. His music explores the instability of listening and the disorientation of memory and affect while remaining grounded in history and symbol, song and story. His varied musical interests have led to performance situations as diverse as Richmond VA's Cat Mansion, the Kremlin Armoury, and the Cathedral of Nantes. Raised in the suburbs of Washington DC, at age 9, he began piano studies with the eminent Russian pedagogue Irena Orlov, herself a student of Nathan Perelman, one of the last representatives of the philosophical and free-spirited St. Petersburg (Leningrad) “school” of piano playing. The study of piano led to an interest in Soviet and post-Soviet “unofficial” culture, “forgotten” pieces from the 20s like Shostakovich's Aphorisms, and avant-garde music of the 70's and 80's like the Sonatas of Tatiana Voronina and Galina Ustvolskaya, always with a wealth of personal stories and anecdotes, most of which were not public information. Irena was married to the preeminent Soviet musicologist, Genrikh “Henry” Orlov, one of the first to publicly discuss the 4th Symphony of Shostakovich in the USSR. Following his death in 2007, Irena gave Leo the unpublished English language manuscript of Orlov's philosophical work, The Tree of Music. The encounter with this book led to an even sharper divergence from the typical American musical education. The focus became the search f
