Dmitry Ablogin traces piano's experimental roots for Canadian debut
Russian virtuoso’s passion for pianoforte revives original voice of such legendary 19th-century composers as Beethoven and Mendelssohn
Dmitry Ablogin.
Early Music Vancouver and the Vancouver Chopin Society present Dmitry Ablogin in concert at the Vancouver Playhouse on March 29
FOR MOST CLASSICAL MUSIC enthusiasts, historical pianos exist solely within the confines of museums and the faded pages of history books. But for Moscow-born keyboard artist Dmitry Ablogin, performing with historically accurate instruments has created a deeper connection with each composer and the instrument builders who made their musical evolutions possible.
Jointly presented by the Vancouver Chopin Society and Early Music Vancouver, Ablogin is set to make his Canadian debut with a carefully curated program at the Vancouver Playhouse on March 29. He will be performing on a Conrad Graf fortepiano made by master instrument builder Paul McNulty, a model that reflects what composers and performers would have used in the 19th century.
“The time is 1819, and this is exactly the time where we have the end of the classical era, the so-called Viennese Classic where Beethoven composed his last opuses for piano, and the beginnings of the Romantic period with the first piano pieces of Mendelssohn,” Ablogin explains over a Zoom call. “There are two other great composers in the program, Hummel and Field. They were not young by this time, and you could describe their music as something like [a] transition between classical and Romantic. I knew early enough that I would be playing this particular Graf, and I decided to build my program around this instrument and this time.”
Ablogin’s program includes Beethoven’s Six Bagatelles, Mendelssohn’s Sonata in E major, Hummel’s Sonata in F-sharp minor, and nocturnes by John Field. Rather than focusing on their historical nature, Ablogin hopes to capture the energy of rapid expansion and cross-pollination that propelled the classical movement into the Romantic era.
“It’s actually quite a common impression of this time that we have great and well-known composers and they are like lonely mountains,” Ablogin says. “They were all connected. Hummel was a friend of Beethoven and he taught Mendelssohn piano. Chopin was the one who played Field a lot and who admired his work, so everything is connected. I just love seeing this network and how they influenced each other.”
Arguably, this network continues to this day, with Ablogin as one example of its long-standing influence. After graduating from the Gnessin Academy in Moscow and the Frankfurt University of Music and Performing Arts, he remained passionately focused on the study of fortepianos and historically informed performances. He was the first winner of the International Chopin Competition on Period Instruments, and was named a professor of fortepiano at the Cologne University of Music and Dance last October. His most recent album, Frédéric Chopin: Last Works, was performed on a historical Pleyel fortepiano, Chopin’s last instrument.
“I also play a lot on modern pianos and this is also part of my musical life and career, but I must say, when you go from one piano model to another, you don’t experience many differences between them,” Ablogin admits. “Back then, [piano makers] experimented like Mendelssohn did with his Sonata. The number of keys, the shape of the body, the number of pedals, the action itself, the size of the keys—everything was completely different.”
Commissioned by Early Music Vancouver for its 50th anniversary, the fortepiano Ablogin will be using is modelled on Austrian-German piano maker Conrad Graf’s design, originally intended for Beethoven. Offering a 6.5-octave range, compared with the pre-existing 5-octave fortepiano range, the instrument was a notable achievement born of Beethoven’s demands as a composer and Graf’s visionary skills. Through his work, Ablogin highlights the often unacknowledged kinship between pianists and piano makers, including the German piano maker and composer Nannette Streicher.
“At this time, for a woman, it was very difficult to achieve this position and to do something like making pianos herself with her own hands,” Ablogin admits. “I was talking earlier about the network of composers, but these piano makers also belong to this network. For example, when she was eight, [Streicher] played for Mozart himself. After she grew up and founded her own piano-making workshop, she became a close friend of Beethoven. Her son, Johann Baptist Streicher, was also a great piano maker and worked together with the next generation of composers. He married the favourite pupil of Chopin, Friederike Müller.”
With a pre-concert chat scheduled for the evening of his performance, Ablogin invites listeners to put on a historical lens and revisit this time-honoured repertoire.
“We play a lot of literature written for very different instruments,” Ablogin says. “We all play them on modern pianos. Sometimes, this kind of music-making sounds a little bit museum-like. For me, to play it on historical instruments, especially when they’re good, [and] they suit the music that was written for it, it’s like making them alive again.” 
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