Live review of ARIA award-winning pianist Tamara-Anna Cislowska‘s performances of Prokofiev’s piano concerto no.2 with the Canberra Symphony Orchestra, in their 2018 Season opening concerts at Llewellyn Hall, Canberra.
“the audience welcomed one of the busiest concert pianists around, Tamara-Anna Cislowska. What a treat to be able to hear such a fantastic, sensitive and agile pianist navigate Prokofiev’s intense and lengthy cadenzas.
The composer wrote this, his second piano concerto while still a student at the St Petersburg Conservatory, and the work is full of all the angst, emotion and power one would expect of a young Russian virtuoso in the years preceding the Revolution.
Cislowska’s playing was impeccable. She was in turns immensely powerful and charmingly vulnerable, channelling the young Prokofiev as the pianist battles with pressures and forces internal and external, all sonified by the (sometimes tyrannical) orchestral accompaniment… thunderous applause”
– The Age (live review, February 2018)
“a thrill to hear [Cislowska] performing the technically demanding Prokofiev “Piano Concerto No 2 in G minor’… wonderful control and contrast in her playing style – one moment delicate and sublime then suddenly heavy, solid and demanding and in powerful control of her keyboard.”
– Canberra CityNews, February 2018
… Still to come in 2018, Tamara performs the Gorecki piano concerto with Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra (recorded on her latest CD, ‘Into Silence’), Elena Kats-Chernin’s new piano concerto no.3 with the Queensland Symphony Orchestra and Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra, and Shostakovich’s piano concerto no.2 with The Metropolitan Orchestra.