Nikita Lukinov in Lyddington
“If music be the food of love, play on … and on”
A master on a voyage of discovery
Just three days before his 20 concert tour of Scotland Nikita Lukinov treated Lyddington to a taste of what the people in Scotland can look forward to over the bleak winter months when live music is much more than a rarity. It reminds me of the tours in the remotest parts of Canada that Angela Hewitt, Janina Fialkowska, Marc Andre Hamelin and Jon Kimura Parker, would undertake to bring music into the remotest parts of that vast country. Hats off to Nikita who has organised this tour that will bring the message of music and fill the lives of so many people in some of the remotest parts of Scotland.
A programme of Brahms, Debussy, Mussorgsky finishing with the pinnacle of the Romantic repertoire Liszt’s mighty B minor Sonata. I have heard Nikita play it quite a few times since he took us by surprise at the Bluthner Piano Centre in London with playing of an intelligence and a scrupulous attention to what the composer actually wrote! Leslie Howard the legendary Liszt expert interviewed him afterwards and of course the Keyboard Trust has been honoured to help a young musician who has all the ingredients to bewitch and beguile audiences around the world. In fact he has gone on to play in Switzerland, Italy and Germany with ever more success. A graduate and now fellow of the Royal Scottish Conservatoire in Glasgow where he studied with Petras Genusias. Having studied in Russia with Svetlana Semenkova, a student of Dmitri Bashkirov before winning a scholarship to the Purcell School where he studied with another disciple of Bashkirov ,Tatiana Sarkissova – Alexeev. It is enough to listen to the first page of the Liszt Sonata to realise that we are in the hands of a master who with maturity and mastery can show us an architectural monument full of sublime poetry and passionate declarations.
