Fast-rising B.C. pianist Jaeden Izik-Dzurko joins Spain’s Casals Quartet in Vancouver for a winning performance
Trained at Juilliard, the Salmon Arm native reunites with the esteemed ensemble from Barcelona for a Friends of Chamber Music concert
Jaeden Izik-Dzurko. Photo by Mark Mushet
Friends of Chamber Music presents the Cuarteto Casals (Casals Quartet) with guest pianist Jaeden Izik-Dzurko on February 28 at 7:30 pm at Vancouver Playhouse
TO SAY 2022 was a knockout year for pianist Jaeden Izik-Dzurko is an understatement. Born in Salmon Arm, the fast-rising artist—who earned his bachelor’s degree in music at The Juilliard School and is now obtaining his master’s at UBC—won a slew of high-profile competitive events, including the Hilton Head International Piano Competition in the U.S., Barcelona’s Maria Canals International Piano Competition, and the Shean Piano Competition in Edmonton. Also last year, at the 20th Paloma O’Shea Santander International Piano Competition in Spain, he won first prize, the Canon Audience Prize, and a special award for best chamber-music performer.
In Santander, Izik-Dzurko played Johannes Brahms’s grand Piano Quintet in F Minor, Opus 34 with the Cuarteto Casals (Casals Quartet), an eminent ensemble based in Barcelona. The performance proved so transformative that it led to two subsequent collaborative engagements with the Spanish group: one in November 2022 at London’s Wigmore Hall and one coming up this month in Vancouver via Friends of Chamber Music.
It's an elite match-up: Casals has been described as “a quartet for the new millennium if I ever heard one” by The Strad, while a New York Concert Review critic called Izik-Dzurko “one the most refined tonal palettes I have ever heard, combined with a polished close-to-the-keys technique and a certain basic humility in the service of the music”. Together, the artists will revisit that winning Brahms piece.
“It’s a beautiful work,” Izik-Dzurko says in a phone interview with Stir from UBC’s Green College, the campus residence in which he lives. “It’s a very grandiose work. It’s large in scale, it’s over 35 minutes; it almost has the proportions of a piano concerto or a symphony—there’s such remarkable dialogue between the parts…and the different players. It’s some of Brahms’s best chamber music writing, and he’s one of the great chamber music composers there is.
“It has such a broad spectrum of moods,” he adds. “It starts out in quite a brooding manner. The first movement is full of fire and climaxes punctuated by moments of almost lighthearted beauty. The second movement is a gorgeous, intimate, songlike expression; it’s very tender, very lyrical. The third movement returns to very fiery, occasionally almost apocalyptic energy. The last movement is really a journey that begins very softly, very suspensefully; it gradually picks up steam and almost has a folk-song quality. Then it has this fantastic coda—very exciting, very fast, very fiery—to close.”
In its Vancouver debut, Casals Quartet will also perform Joseph Haydn’s String Quartet Opus 20, No. 6 in A Major and György Ligeti’s String Quartet No. 1 ”Métamorphoses Nocturnes”.
Izik-Dzurko is well-known to Friends of Chamber Music; he was one of the winners of the organization’s Young Musicians Competition last year. Now 24, he was surrounded by music while growing up in the Shuswap. Both of his parents studied piano, and his father, who now teaches band in public school, was Izik-Dzurko’s first piano instructor. “I always loved music, but I was not as disciplined as I am now, and my parents had to push me to practise,” he says. “I’m very grateful that they did.”
As passionate about Canadian contemporary music as he is about works by Bach, Brahms, Schumann, Rachmaninov, and Nikolai Karlovich Medtner, Izik-Dzurko says moving from B.C.’s Interior to New York City to attend Juilliard was a dream, with so many performing-arts events to go to. A highlight was seeing legendary Argentine pianist Martha Argerich perform Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto, one of the virtuoso’s personal favourites, at Carnegie Hall after a nine-year absence. Izik-Dzurko figures he went to close to two dozen operas during his time there. While the location gave him unparalleled exposure to arts and culture, he wanted to return to B.C. to study at UBC with Corey Hamm, professor of piano and chamber music and co-director of UBC Contemporary Players. Izik-Dzurko admires his mentor’s enormous enthusiasm for music: “His passion for it and his devotion to it come through whenever he’s teaching. I also find him to be a very rigorous, principled teacher. He has certain aesthetic priorities, like rhythmic coherence, clarity of expression, and balance that he’s very consistently concerned with. He has really instilled a lot of interpretive standards that I find very valuable.”
With a string of performances coming up this spring and summer, Izik-Dzurko is enjoying his mix of study, concerts, and recitals. What he loves most about pursuing music as a profession is that there are no limits. “It’s an endless, boundless pursuit,” Izik-Dzurko says. “There’s no level of attainment that feels sufficient. It’s a lifelong process of learning. There’s a quote of Rachmaninoff’s that I think perfectly expresses this, where he says ‘music is enough for a lifetime, but a lifetime is not enough for music.’
“It demands the very best of you, and there’s always room to improve,” adds the musician, who will perform locally anew next season with Vancouver Recital Society. Where does he practise if he’s living in residence at UBC? The lounge in his building happens to have a grand piano, and he’s the only music major living there at the moment. While he finds pure peace in playing music for himself, he considers performing on stages all around the world a privilege.
Jaeden Izik-Dzurko performing in the final round of the 2022 Maria Canals International Music Competition.
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