Stars align to honor human-rights champion Sakharov at Carnegie
by David Wright
What would it take to bring international stars such as violinists Gidon Kremer and Maxim Vengerov, pianists Evgeny Kissin and Lera Auerbach, cellist Steven Isserlis and the Emerson String Quartet together on one afternoon to make chamber music in Carnegie Hall?
On Sunday, the question was not what, but who. And the answer was Andrei Sakharov (1921-1989), the nuclear physicist sometimes called the “father of the Soviet hydrogen bomb,” who soon saw the need for a world of international peace and recognition of human rights, and who spoke and wrote about it tirelessly, in spite of official repression, earning the Nobel Peace Prize in 1975.
“Sakharov was my hero for as long as I can remember,” Kissin has said. In 2020, with the physicist’s 100th birth anniversary approaching, the pianist began organizing a tribute concert in collaboration with the human-rights-oriented Andrei Sakharov Foundation and Carnegie Hall.
A pandemic intervened, but on May 21, 2023, which would have been Sakharov’s 102nd birthday, the musical tribute came off, with a near-capacity house taking in nearly three hours of lively music-making with ten musicians performing works by six composers. And almost no speeches.
There were a few welcoming remarks from Arkady Ostrovsky, the Russia and eastern Europe editor for The Economist in London, at the invitation of the Sakharov Foundation. Pianist-composer Auerbach recited “The Pain of Others,” a human-rights-themed poem of her own in both Russian (understood by a sizable portion of Sunday’s audience) and English….
read more at New York Classical Review
Concert in honor of Andrei Sakharov
