Dear friends, I'm sending you three links with the music recently recorded by me:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTLTzGOvuTQ
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THRNpO6dWYc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HTDImlCQNk8
I'm looking forward to have your opinion!
Sincerely yours - Valentin Bogolubov.

Hi Valentin,

I just listened to the Etude (the first link), and also to a Chopin Waltz on your channel. You play beautifully! In the Etude, I love the way the focus of attention keeps shifting from one hand to other and how well you "sing out" what's important.

Excellent technique, live performance done flawlessly, and your own music to boot. Best of all, this is playing that is deeply felt. As a composer, you certainly have integrated nicely the language of Chopin and managed to write some expressive music with it.

What's scarey to me, as a fellow musician, is the talent (like you) that's out there, and (judging from your modest YouTube views) how hidden it often is.

Congratulations on this!

Bruce

Amazing inspiration!
Extremely inspired playing!
Sublime performance!

Maestro Bogolubov,

I listened to the Étude: I had never noticed that this piece could be so deep. Then I listened to the Nocturne and your rendition of this weel-know piece was a new experience for me. Of course I listened to the mazurka and once again it was a discovery. I was captivated.
I thank you so much,

Didier

PS The splendid mono sound of your recordings deserves better than the poor quality from youtube playback. Pianosociety would be much honoured if you would upload here the soundtracks.

Hello again, Valentin. I listened to all of your mazurkas and can only echo what everybody else already said, which is that you play very well!

If you'd like to become a member of Piano Society, we just need your recordings in mp3 format ( we want good, clean sound-quality and under 220 kbps) and also a photo and bio for your personal page. We do hope you will join us here and we strongly encourage you to participate on our forum. We are not so interested when members come here only to submit their own recordings; we want you to also take a little time to listen and comment on other members' recordings. That is how we all learn and grow as musicians, and some people (like me ) need a little help more than others! So again, I hope you will stay here with us for a long time.

One more thing....please only submit a few recordings at a time - like no more than three or four. Thank you!

Hi Valentin,

I just listened to your "Suggestion diabolique" of Prokofieff. It was superb. Bravo!

David

Ya gotta love the devilish Breemeresque irony

I must say I find it a bit pathetic as well as obscene to see such hyperbolic encomiums printed besides one's own name, even if it is on Youtube, the world's "all about me" destination.

Be that as it may, having listened to the mazurka and the nocturne, I find there to be nothing praiseworthy here, even setting aside the subpar sound quality. The outer sections of the nocturne seem blurred in pedal and pretentiously phrased and milked. I couldn't help but laugh at the sudden and unnatural emergence of the triplets from this haze, reminiscent to me of an unpleasant tickling, one in all the wrong places. The sixths in the tempestuous middle section, in addition to being unclear, are pounded, and are followed by a rather gross near-stopping where Chopin has only indicated poco rit. in the return to subtheme A. Certainly I hear little of the Polish master's heavenly legato or ethereal side in any of this. This pianist would do well to listen to A. Bertazzi's performance of this on the site, which much better captures, for this listener, what the piece is about.

Frankly, I think the mazurka is a ridiculous mockery. I need go no further than to say there's no tempo, and without tempo, one cannot dance. Pretty sound and stylized posturing does not a mazurka make.

Or hate it

Ayup, that puts me off right away. There's no reason why a pianist should hide his light under a bushel but this is just plain silly.


I found these performances rather weird and mannered, too. It's clear that many people like this style of playing but I hate the music being so distorted and pulled apart - "just listen to what I can do with Chopin".

Good pianist. Personally I enjoyed the recordings, though they probably are a bit mannered. However, the treble of the piano (particularly in the upper half of the second octave) bothers me on occasion: some notes don't seem to be sound very pure.

Hi Monica,

I thought that fixed bit rate was required. The standard fixed bit rates for MP3 (available from the LAME encoder) are 128, 160, 192, 224, 256 kbit/s and lower and higher ones not suitable here. I thought that 192 was the authorized maximum. Would you mean that it is actually 224 ? I did not find any rule about the mp3 rate in the 'Recording tips' thread of this forum.

Thanks in anticipation for your enlightening,

Didier

OK—I missed two things here, because I'm new to both YouTube (only started really using it in the last month), and your humor, Chris.

I missed the sarcasm completely, and also the significance of the "Amazing inspiration" thing on Valentin's site. It looked to me as though someone else (besides Valentin) had set up the site, in which case the hyperbole is more understandable.

It reminds me a bit of the artist pages here, in which most of us—including me but not Chris, to his credit—talk about ourselves in the third person, giving the impression that someone else is saying all sorts of nice things about us.

Actually, I'm happy to give Valentin the benefit of the doubt here, and say that maybe he doesn't yet understand the ins and outs of the YouTube mindset.

Hi Didier,

Sorry, I meant 224, but I really want to say 192! So please stay under 192kbps. And actually we specify three different numbers in various places on the site. I'll have to clean all this up one of these days....



That's what I thought at first too. Seemed outrageously egocentric and so I thought he couldn't have put those words in there himself... Valentin - can you please respond to all these comments on your thread? You can post right here - just go to the last person's post and then click 'reply'.

My dear friends, I'm so sorry to put you in such an anger! The "big" words like "Amasing inspiration", "Divine" etc. I hear after every concert, so when my friend put these ones in YouTube I saw in this nothing special - only the words! You know - the alignement of Spirit-Mind-Body is so difficult to achieve, that you must be completely absorbed by this process and to be the most severe judge to yourself - so the opinion of the others became not so important, but not the opinion of the collegues! However I proposed you my music and I'm still waiting your comments about it! If the words in YouTube annoy you I can ask my friend to remove them.
Sincerely yours - Valentin.

........ .......................

Divine, wow... can't get much better than that !

So you have achieved what is not given to many people, the Buddha-like alignment of spirit, mind, and body. And yet you have remained modest enough to see 'nothing special' in the words of worship people throw at you all the time ! I guess one can get used to that.... We are not angered or annoyed by this in any way, only amused. By all means, present yourself on YouTube any way you want to ! It's better that people know upfront that they will be listening to extremely amazing and sublime interpretations - lest they might want to make up their own minds.

As a long-time reader of Gramophone magazine I must have read tens of thousands of piano recording reviews. But I can't recall ever having seen things like "divine" or "amazing inspiration". If such hyperbole occurs at all, it is usually reserved for the likes of Gould, Argerich, Horovitz, etc...