Any student wishing to enroll at EDHEC to pursue the various courses offered must first convince a jury of the seriousness of their “business project,” their multiple “talents,” and their “sense of excellence.” This last concept permeates this prestigious business school, even in the artistic events organized outside its premises, located near the Nice-Côte d’Azur airport. This was indeed the case on Tuesday, November 25, 2008, when two young virtuosos — the word is certainly not overused — performed on the stage of the Apollon auditorium at the Acropolis in a program dedicated to Marie-Paule Dallier, the founder of the association “Les nouveaux virtuoses.” Supported by members of “Juniors Entreprises Conseil EDHEC” and generous patrons from the private sector, this association offers a series of classical music concerts aimed at promoting exceptional young musicians, both French and foreign. At EDHEC, the cultural dimension integrates harmoniously with the business world and finance. An example, no doubt, to ponder during these times of management crisis.
A challenging program awaited cellist Dimitri Maslennikov and his piano partner Christie Julien. Born in St. Petersburg, the city of artists on the Baltic, the former trained in Russia with Yuri Bashmet and Vladimir Spivakov before unanimously obtaining the first prize at the Paris National Conservatory. As for his accompanist on the piano, invited by the famous pianist Leon Fleisher to the Peabody Conservatory, she was quickly invited as a jury member at the Marguerite Long-Jacques Thibaud International Competition before being named a member of its artistic committee last year. Therefore, they didn’t embark unprepared!
Even though the 1700 cello bow required some adjustments to acclimate to the room, the latter was indeed not disappointed from the very first notes of Sergey Prokofiev’s Sonata op. 119, where classicism mingles with distinctly more contemporary accents: true to its musical writing, and perhaps due to the composer’s transition from Russia to the United States before returning to his native country, poignant melodic phrases suddenly break off to segue into more chaotic sections before finally adopting more traditional tones. This demands an exacting balance, in these acrobatic, safety net-free transitions, between piano and cello. No rhythmic flaw from either artist.
By way of introduction, Dimitri Maslennikov took the opportunity to say a few words about Prokofiev’s hardships in Soviet society before recalling the original connections of this Sonata with the famous cellist Mstislav Rostropovich: this piece stems from the meeting between the two Russian composers. This clarification was doubled with a nod to the commitment to freedoms of one who would, one evening in November 1989, play at the foot of the Berlin Wall. In the second part, the famous Sonata in A major by the French composer César Franck — originally for violin and piano — allowed a return to a more romantic inspiration, enriched by genuine generosity in performance and interpretation by the two musicians towards the audience: if it weren’t EDHEC, one might barely daresay they were fully “invested” in their “performance.”
