As soon as, he entered a digital piano retailer sporting a protracted rubber coat that appeared to swallow his slight body, his hair in its attribute raveled state. The workers, taking him for a homeless individual, moved to usher him out. However then Mr. Ugorski sat down at certainly one of their devices and, to their awe, started to play “Footage at an Exhibition,” a piano suite by the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky. Mr. Ugorski didn’t cease till he had reached the top of the tenth and remaining motion.
That efficiency, such because it was, marked the start of a musical profession that had as soon as appeared foreclosed. Mr. Ugorski, who died Sept. 5 at age 80, was approaching 50 when he arrived within the soon-to-be reunited Germany. He had spent many years relegated — metaphorically and at instances bodily — to the hinterlands of the Soviet Union by authorities who considered him as suspect for his embrace of Western music of the avant-garde.
In Germany, the place Mr. Ugorski was found and positioned below contract with Deutsche Grammophon, he revealed himself to the broader classical music world as an artist of extraordinary expertise.
He was at house not solely within the music of recent composers akin to Stravinsky, Scriabin, Messiaen, Schoenberg and Berg but in addition within the extra classical works of Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann and Brahms. Even critics who objected to his typically eccentric fashion agreed that his recordings deserved to be heard, particularly as a result of he had been all however silenced for thus lengthy.
“My fashion comes from myself,” Mr. Ugorski as soon as informed the London Night Customary, “and developed by itself in my solitude.”
Anatolii Zalmanovich Ugorskii was born on Sept. 28, 1942, to a Jewish household within the Siberian metropolis of Rubtsovsk, the place they’d been evacuated throughout the Siege of Leningrad.
He almost starved throughout World Conflict II. After the battle, his household returned to Leningrad — modern-day St. Petersburg — the place he grew up. His father was an engineer. His mom, a gross sales clerk and usher at a cinema, sneaked Mr. Ugorski and his pals into the flicks, a uncommon pleasure for them amid the struggling of the postwar years.
Mr. Ugorski was the fourth of 5 youngsters and lived throughout his youth in a communal condominium, with a complete household to every room and a shared kitchen and loo. He had no entry to musical devices aside from a xylophone.
His mom, listening to him play and sing, divined his musical potential and took him at age 6 to audition on the Leningrad Conservatory, the place he was admitted to a college for musically gifted youngsters. He was assigned to play the piano, he later recounted, as a result of the form of his arms was deemed suited to the instrument.
Mr. Ugorski’s future appeared assured by 1967, when he received third prize on the George Enescu Pageant in Bucharest. (First prize went to the Romanian pianist Radu Lupu.) However his profession was primarily ended the identical 12 months when he attended a live performance of the BBC Symphony Orchestra throughout its go to to the Soviet Union.
The efficiency featured composer Pierre Boulez conducting a choice of modernist works not according to Soviet cultural dictates of the time. Mr. Ugorski, who was seen applauding with extreme enthusiasm, was thereafter banned from giving performances of any prominence. He labored as an accompanist for a youth choir and performed in recitals organized for employees, on no less than one event receiving cost within the type of cheese.
Ultimately he acquired a instructing put up on the conservatory, however his alternatives remained scarce.
Antisemitic threats towards his then-teenage daughter, Dina Ugorskaja, who turned an achieved pianist in her personal proper, prompted Mr. Ugorski to to migrate within the waning days of the Soviet Union. He selected to settle in Germany, he informed a good friend, as a result of he liked the works of Beethoven.
The conductor Thomas Sanderling, who was born within the Soviet Union and knew Mr. Ugorski from their faculty days, launched him to Irene Dische, a Berlin-based author who started serving to him — first by discovering clothes and different requirements for his household after which by introducing him to Deutsche Grammophon.
Throughout his first recording session with the label, Mr. Ugorski performed Beethoven’s “Diabelli” Variations. “After just a few hours, they began calling individuals to return to the piano studio — ‘you’ve received to take heed to this man play,’” Dische recalled in an interview. Quickly, she stated, the studio was “jammed with individuals.”
Mr. Ugorski’s full recordings with Deutsche Grammophon — together with works by Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Brahms, Chopin, Mussorgsky, Scriabin, Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky and Messiaen — had been launched in 2018. He additionally toured internationally.
Mr. Ugorski had an unconventional fashion that didn’t please all critics. He experimented with musical tempos, enjoying works at speeds a lot quicker or a lot slower than they had been historically carried out.
He rejected stasis, as soon as remarking that “the best hazard is to show into one’s personal recordings.” To make a chunk really feel new to him, he may play it sporting a jacket that lined his arms, or sit on the piano in a rocking chair relatively than on a bench.
“As a pianist, Ugorski [homed] in on the essence of a piece as he, uninfluenced by any performing custom, perceived it — after which he exhumed precisely that essence out of the notes,” music critic Jens F. Laurson wrote in a tribute after Mr. Ugorski’s demise. “To what extent this strategy succeeded in unveiling hitherto hidden musical particulars all the time depended very a lot on the listener’s subjective response. Those that responded to it by no means forgot a efficiency of his.”
Mr. Ugorski died at a hospital within the German city of Lemgo, close to his house in Detmold. He had most cancers, in line with his son-in-law, Ilja Kukuj.
Mr. Ugorski’s first marriage, to pianist Gabriella Talrose, resulted in divorce. His spouse of greater than 4 many years, musicologist Maja Elik, died in 2012. Their daughter, Dina, died in 2019.
A number of weeks in the past, Mr. Ugorski married pianist Minze Kim, his accomplice of 10 years. In addition to his spouse, of Detmold, survivors embrace a sister and a grandchild.
When Mr. Ugorski rose to fame in Germany, he captured the creativeness of Western listeners, lots of whom discovered the pathos of his music heightened by his deprivation within the Soviet Union throughout what might need been the prime of his profession.
“Don’t make me sound a sufferer,” Mr. Ugorski cautioned them. “I do know artists and scientists who had it a lot worse.”
