Tag #127908 - Interview #89861 (Dan Mizrahy)

1980 remains a capital year in my career as a soloist. It’s the year of my first – and only! – tour as the soloist of a symphonic orchestra. In 14 days I gave 13 concerts which included two of Gershwin’s pieces for piano and orchestra: the Concerto in F and ‘Rhapsody in Blue.’ The orchestra that accompanied me was the ‘Moldova’ State Philharmonic conducted by Ion Baciu, and the country we toured was Italy. The tour was organized by a Polish-Argentinian-Jewish-Italian agent and pianist named Valentin Protchinsky. We started in San Marino and went through: Sondalo in the Alps, Pescara, Sulmona, Frosinone, Campobasso, Lecce, Lamezia Terme, Cosenza, Messina in Sicily, San Severo, Bari, and Foggia. As you can see, there’s almost no ‘famous’ city. However, in all these places, the concerts were held in perfect concert or opera halls, with excellent pianos – Steinways most of the time – in front of educated audiences that filled the halls entirely. I had some unforgettable evenings. My companions were nice people. They had gone touring many times and had developed all sorts of ‘habits.’ One of them was to go in the morning to marketplaces no one else knew and buy cheap things – blue jeans, skirts from the same fabric or other items of clothing – which they sold when they returned to Iasi. Another arrangement consisted of the following: several colleagues gave up their entire allowance and donated it to one of them, a different person in every tour; when the tour ended, the one whose turn had come to collect the money could afford a more serious investment, like buying furniture or a refrigerator, or even pay an advance for a new apartment. It was impressive!