Pianist Behzod Abduraimov will make his Tucson debut on Sunday — two years behind schedule.
Just days before his November 2012 concert with Arizona Friends of Chamber Music, Abduraimov slipped on some steps and broke his thumb in the fall. He had to cancel a handful of shows, including Tucson.
“Hopefully this time it will be OK,” he joked during a phone call from his Kansas City, Missouri, home.
His recital of works by Chopin, Ravel and Schubert opens the Friends’ 2014-15 Piano & Friends series.
“This program is highly romantic and consists of very popular works — Chopin’s Four Ballades played by every pianist and the Ravel’s ‘Gaspard de la nuit’ played by every pianist,” said the 24-year-old Uzbekistan native. “I think it will be interesting for the audience. In one way it’s all romantic and pianistic, of course, and also very contrasting.”
Tucson is the first of a handful of recitals of the program, including stops in France, Italy and Germany this month.
Abduraimov’s schedule has him hopscotching among his adopted home in America to Europe and Asia from now through early next year. He is set to tour China for several weeks with the London Philharmonic Orchestra beginning in late December before he returns to the U.S for an American tour.
“It’s a crazy schedule. I will have seven concerts in nine days and then Hong Kong and then an American tour,” he said last weekend, hours after he returned home from several concerts in Germany. “This is my life. Music is part of me now. This is what I do.”
Abduraimov has been playing the piano since he was 6, starting with lessons from his piano-teacher mother, who also trained his older sister.
“I didn’t have a choice. I was hearing piano music at home all the time because my mother she would teach her students and my sister also studied piano and played piano. It was all around,” he said.
He decided he wanted to make piano his career just two years later when he played his first public concert. He performed Mozart’s Rondo in D major with the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine.
“I loved being on stage,” he recalled. “I loved playing for people.”
In 2009 his career went into hyper overdrive when he snagged the grand prize at the prestigious London International Piano Competition. Since then he has played around the globe to glowing reviews. The Telegraph of London called him a “gift from God” who “delivered about the most enthralling roller-coaster ride of a Prokofiev Third Concerto imaginable.” The Los Angeles Times, also reviewing a performance of Prokofiev’s Third, compared it to a recent recording by Lang Lang, saying Abduraimov “took it to further extremes, with wider, dynamic contrasts and stronger, tougher accents and rhythms.”
Many critics also have compared him to piano great Vladimir Horowitz, which Abduraimov said was the highest compliment he could get at this stage of his career.
