Ignat Solzhenitsyn’s Stellar Career’s Focus in Philadelphia

Ignat Solzhenitsyn remembers his first piano – in fact he still has it. The instrument itself is a dark brown baby grand Sohmer. It came with the farmhouse in Vermont to which his family moved 1976, two years after his father, Russian Nobel Prize-winning author Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was exiled from the Soviet Union. 

“It is a piano I’m very fond of, sentimentally, because it gave me a beginning,” Solzhenitsyn reminisces. “I don’t remember the first time I played it, but I remember being interested in it, and I remember exploring it.”

Solzhenitsyn was born in Moscow in 1972, his family moving to Zurich in 1974 and then to the United States. His parents raised him and his brothers to explore the world intellectually.  The boys attended public schools, and were immersed in language, history, astronomy, even chemistry at home.  While no one else in his family had been formally trained in music performance, classical music was an integral part of his young life.  Classical music played from radios and records throughout his home. Solzhenitsyn remembers one particular day walking into his father’s study while Aleksandr listened to Beethoven.

“It was an important moment for me,” he says. “It was then that I fell in love with orchestral music – what a world, what a cosmos! That moment planted the germ, the genesis of the beauty of music.”

His interest in classical music was thus engrained, and though he says he has an appreciation of other musical forms such as jazz, he never had an interest in performing other genres.

“I grew up listening to 99 percent classical,” he says. “Eventually some classic rock got in – Black Sabbath – a terrifying name but very good music for rock & roll – Led Zeppelin. That was also the product of what was popular. I remember in the ‘80s the popularity of Prince and Michael Jackson … in my area they were considered ‘wimpy.’ To this day I don’t know anything about Prince or the artist formally known as….”

Solzhenitsyn was taught the basics of sight reading by a neighbor, and received some training from a school teacher, but it wasn’t until he was 9 years old that he began formal lessons.

“I decided very quickly after taking those first lessons, within a year - year and a half, that my life had to be immersed in music,” he said. “I had no doubts that it couldn’t be. At that age, in a healthy family environment, one doesn’t have many doubts. A strong family, and supportive mother and father nurture only possibilities, and my parents were nothing but supportive, once they belatedly realized what it was. Music wasn’t tradition, and when I was experimenting on the piano … when a kid picks up a baseball bat you don’t immediately expect him to be a baseball player. But once they realized the talent and desire and drive, they were very supportive.”

He studied under Chonghyo Shin for three years, a teacher specializing in young pianists, and took intensive lessons with Louis Batlle for three years. At 14, Solzhenitsyn took his studies and budding career to London, working with famed pianist and instructor Maria Curcio, whom he considers his mentor to this day.

“Many great pianists can trace their “genealogy” to Beethoven. There’s sort of a ‘Six Degrees of Separation’ in the world of piano teaching,” he jokes. “Maria studied under Artur Schnabel, who studied under Theodor Leschetizky, who studied under Karl Czerny, who studied under Beethoven.”

He went on to enroll at the Curtis Institute, studying both piano and conducting, a dual major that was time consuming, but rewarding.

“I made my life crazy by adding conducting, at the loss of recreation or sleep,” he smiles. “Many factors played into my work toward becoming a conductor. I had the desire to do it, and also, I realized that intentions aren’t worth much unless I try to turn them into reality – it comes down to are you going to do it or simply talk about it? I knew that at some point I wanted to conduct, and with conducting there is so much knowledge, so much practice required. I realized that I had a great chance and was in a perfect environment at Curtis to learn what I needed.”

While studying at Curtis, Solzhenitsyn was invited by the founder of the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia to become the assistant conductor 1994. He was named principal conductor in 1997, and music director in 2004.

Though he says he had planned to return to his homeland, Russia, when he was younger, he now calls Philadelphia home. He lives with his wife, Carolyn, a psychiatrist, and their two children, Dmitri, 6, and Anna, who is almost 5, in Chestnut Hill.

“By the fall of communism, I had so much of life and career tied to the west—not just America, but Europe as well—it didn’t feel right to go back. But I love Russia today in a more real way than I ever have, and I spend two or three months there each year touring and visiting family,” he says.

In addition to touring as a conductor and pianist, and his duties as the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia’s Music Director, Solzhenitsyn works as an instructor at Curtis.

“It is a great honor to be asked to teach at Curtis, just as it is a great honor to be asked to be a student,” he says. “It is the best school in the world, in my opinion, certainly there is none better. To be associated with Curtis, to have a chance to nurture rising stars is exciting. But beyond that, it is an honorable duty. In our field, so much of tradition is oral.

“Traditions endure. Because I had phenomenal training, I’m committed to passing it along. Maria talked about passing the torch of knowledge. She was humble about it. She’s a legend, today, I’m just one of her many, many accomplished students. She said ‘I just try to tell people what Schnabel taught me.’ She taught me most everything I know about piano. I try to pass that truth to students.”

To further his personal growth, he listens to his past performances on his iPod, utilizing them as a reference to see how he interpreted the music, and how it changes for him as time passes.

Solzhenitsyn says he is lucky to be in his position, both as a conductor and a performer, because he has the opportunity to explore music he enjoys; though he does have to consider his musicians and patrons while making his program selections. Currently, he says he is interested in the music of Mendelssohn, whose work he once did not favor but which has become more appealing to him in past few years.

“I don’t know why. I change, we change. Music, it’s didactic. To say music doesn’t change is, to a certain point, true, especially music from composers who are dead. But in some mystical way, it does. A human wrote it, a human is interpreting it. It’s in flux.

“I have many ideas, plans in terms of repertory, it’s just music I want to do. Music that excites me, music I love becomes music I want to play and work hard at - penetrate its mysteries  The audience senses that and then the audience falls in love with it. I don’t understand quite how it happens.”

 Susan Haine is editor of LifeStyle Magazine.