Release Date: 2006

Label: Deutsche Grammophon

Product Manager: David S. Butchart

Total playing time: 2 CDs [2 hours, 22 minutes]

Copyright: © 2006 Deutsche Grammophon

2006

When Deutsche Grammophon released a double CD titled The Genius of Pogorelich in 2006, the accompanying documentation featured not the usual booklet but a poster showing a good-looking youth with dark eye-brows and dark hair, wearing jeans and trainers and sitting nonchalantly, with a vaguely melancholic expression in his eyes. Anyone not knowing that this was a photograph of the young Ivo Pogorelich might have been forgiven for thinking that the sitter was a member of a boy band. By the same token, the image on the front of the present box may also reveal a little more of the phenomenon that is Pogorelich. In 1980 he conquered the world of music in part by means of his unusual and highly controversial performances, but also by appealing to a far wider public than the traditional fans of classical music, an appeal that he owed to his fashionably cool appearance. And while some observers hailed him as a new star in the classical musical firmament, others suspected that he was a shooting star who would very soon burn himself out. But Pogorelich, who was born in Belgrade on 20 October 1958, is now fifty-six years old and as controversial as ever. Even so, many of his recordings currently enjoy the status of benchmark interpretations. The youthful rebel has become a point of reference, a process that seems to have taken place without anyone noticing.

 

© Gregor Willmes / Deutsche Grammophon