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Alexander Toradze, mercurial pianist who played ‘louder and faster than anyone’ – obituary

Alexander Toradze: ‘as a pianist he was loved or loathed... But his warmth and intellect, his gift for friendship and for original conversation, forged exceptional loyalties’ - PAUL BERGEN
Alexander Toradze: ‘as a pianist he was loved or loathed... But his warmth and intellect, his gift for friendship and for original conversation, forged exceptional loyalties’ - PAUL BERGEN

Alexander Toradze, the Georgian-American pianist who has died aged 69, was a representative of the pile-driving, knuckle-busting, steel-fingered school of Soviet pianism; his big-boned approach to muscular works by composers such as Liszt, Prokofiev and Tchaikovsky left audiences open-mouthed in wonder and critics amazed and appalled in equal measure.

Subtlety was not Toradze’s forte and his impulsive, stabbing style meant that his thrilling performances were often far from note perfect. In more gentle passages of music he struggled to achieve a pianissimo that did not sound mannered or contrived.

On one occasion he attacked Prokofiev’s Fifth Piano Concerto with such gusto during a concert in Birmingham that a string broke on the poor instrument. Mid-performance he reached under the piano lid, grabbed hold of the loose end and ripped the hapless wire from its fastening, stuffing it into his jacket pocket.

Toradze first shattered the eardrums of western audiences in 1977 when he finished second to Steven de Groote from South Africa in the fifth Van Cliburn competition in Fort Worth, Texas, having awoken the audience and jury from their slumbers with his blistering attack on the keyboard. “He played louder and faster than anyone I’ve ever heard,” gasped a local critic at the time.

A flurry of western dates followed, during which he had a chance meeting at a French airport with Mstislav Rostropovich, who had left the Soviet Union in 1974. “When you go back, kiss the land and ground of our country,” the cellist told him. “Kiss it because I miss it. But when are you going to do something?”

The answer came six years later when Toradze, whose western visits had been curtailed by the cultural freeze that followed the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, was increasingly frustrated by his low fees at home. In August 1983 he arrived at Gijón in northern Spain with a Moscow orchestra, only to be told by their Russian management that he would not be performing.

He dropped out of sight on August 25, but his disappearance was overshadowed two days later by the suicide of Boris Karsakov, the orchestra’s 57-year-old leader, who was found hanged in his hotel bathroom.

Karsakov had been responsible for monitoring Toradze’s movements for the KGB and, according to contemporary reports, took his own life rather than face the music back in Moscow. Three months later the pianist resurfaced in the US to begin a nine-city tour of the country with the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

With the collapse of communism Toradze was able to return to his former Soviet homeland. There he formed an alliance with the conductor Valery Gergiev, who is now effectively banished from the west because of his ties to President Putin. They had known each other since their student days in Moscow.

Alexander Toradze performing Shostakovich's Concerto in C minor for Piano, Trumpet and Strings - Hiroyuki Ito/Getty Images
Alexander Toradze performing Shostakovich's Concerto in C minor for Piano, Trumpet and Strings - Hiroyuki Ito/Getty Images

Toradze made his British debut in 1984 playing Prokofiev’s fiendishly difficult Second Piano Concerto at the Royal Festival Hall with the Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Ashkenazy. He performed the same work in his Proms debut in 1996 with the Rotterdam Philharmonic conducted by Gergiev.

A Daily Telegraph critic who observed him playing Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto in 1993 with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Simon Rattle found his interpretation bizarre, with distorted rhythm and dynamics.

“Toradze’s manner at the keyboard – legs flailing, body twisting – was distracting, but it was curiously infectious,” wrote Geoffrey Norris. “I would not care to hear anything so extreme all that often, but there was something in its originality which, at the very least, made the music surge with new passions.”

Alexander Toradze, known as Lexo, was born in Tbilisi, in Soviet Georgia, on May 30 1952 the son of David Toradze, a leading Georgian composer, and his wife Liana (née Asatiani), an ophthalmologist and former film actress.

He entered the central music school in Tbilisi aged six and made his first appearance with an orchestra aged nine in a concert to honour Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space.

By 19 he was studying at the Moscow Conservatoire where at night he and his friends used a shortwave radio to tune into Voice of America’s jazz programmes. “Of course you were in danger if you listened to these broadcasts,” he said, adding that doing so “gave us a sense of freedom”.

After his defection Toradze spent some years as a jobbing pianist, living near Lincoln Center, New York, in a tiny apartment barely larger than his grand piano. In 1991 he was appointed professor of piano at Indiana University South Bend, recruiting gifted pianists from around the world to recreate the intense mentoring environment he had known in Moscow and the communal social life of Tbilisi.

According to the cultural historian Joseph Horowitz, Toradze was a study in excess: “He drank, he smoked, his weight fluctuated widely. As a pianist he was loved or loathed. His personal life lacked stability. But his warmth and intellect, his gift for friendship and for original conversation, forged exceptional loyalties.”

Last month he suffered heart trouble during a performance of Shostakovich’s Second Piano Concerto with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra in Washington state. Despite feeling “utterly weak”, he played on and was taken to hospital immediately afterwards.

In 1990 Toradze married Susan Blake, a pianist from Florida who was 16 years his junior. The marriage was dissolved in 2002. They had two sons, David and Alexander.

Alexander Toradze, born May 30 1952, died May 11 2022