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On Saturday April 7th 2018 Marina left the earthly dimensions. In silence she remains connected alive forever with everybody.
07.04.2018

Review from Germany - Poetic sovereignty

18.05.2012

Upon return from Hong Kong I found in the post the review from the Feuchtwangen concert:

International Piano Festival Feuchtwangen

Poetic sovereignty

Marina Horak with works by Debusy and Franck

 

The jubilee lustre hovers over the Piano Festival in Feuchtwangen, as least to some extent. As a jubilee celebration we must consider that Professor Peter Feuchtwanger has given his master course in Feuchtwangen for the 25th time, yet we could not even imagine the three years younger festival without the master courses, it would not exsist without Peter Feuchtwanger and his students. The concert series and the master course belong together.

It is nice, that for this occasion the piano in the City Hall Kasten sounded so well as it did not for a long time. Marina Horak presented it in the opening concert with a programme that commands respect.

After it had been renovated  the piano has gained throughout all registers on volume and colours, compared to previous years. Marina Horak certainly presented herself as a pianist who follows the individual capacities of the instrument and never sacrifices the beauty of the tone. She did not force the piano to its limits, even when the music would have warranted it. She played with it, gently, kindly, like with a cat. And the piano purred.

The Slovenian pianist named her programme »Fascination Paris«. The central  pieces by Debussy and César Franck were flanked by by music of Slovenian composers: an exciting Sonata by Lucijan M. Škerjanc, in which an echo of Debussy's influence could be sensed, and six salon-like innocent characteristic pieces by Jurij Mihevc. These were filigree shaped by Marina Horak with such nobleness that they appeared as pretty, different colourings within an otherwise most demanding programme, in which Marina Horak mastered all technical difficulties with poetic sovereingty. Franck's solemn, organ-like »Prelude, choral et fugue«  was well pin-pointed with saturated basses and a sound that had body. Spellbounding, how she condensed the energies in the fugue.

 

In Debussy's »Estampes« she drew refined atmospheric images from a shimmering night mood to grey rainy rumbles onto which she set tones like droplets of light. Soflty subdued colours and mysterious parts were then splendidly uncovered also in the choice of preludes (among them »Ce qu'a vu le vent d'ouest«, »La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune« and »Feux d'artifice«). Immensly intense was above all Marina Horak's lost-to-the-world rendering of »Steps in the Snow«. 

 

Fränkische Landeszeitung, Westmittelfranken, 12th April 2012 (Thomas Wirth)