Vyacheslav Gryaznov

There was a time when the most remote place on earth was captured in the name “Ultima Thule,” a Greek mythological place beyond the bounds of the known world. These days we all have our idea of “the boonies,” remote places that suggest loneliness and isolation. Siberia calls up that image, a very real place where Russians who were troublesome to the powers that be were banished, often never to return. But Siberia can’t hold a candle to the island of Sakhalin, off the coast of Siberia. It takes eight hours and five minutes to fly to Moscow, direct, from Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the main town. From 1905 until 1945 it was called Toyohara, the name the Japanese gave it when they colonized it as part of Japan’s “Northern Territories,” and shipped off troublesome Koreans. It couldn’t have been that bad a place, though. When the island reverted to Russia, 20,000 Koreans decided to stay on, rather than be repatriated to Korea. I want to focus on other things here, so I don’t want to be distracted here by the fate of the Sakhalin Koreans, which makes fascinating, if chilling history. If you want to read about it, you might start here.

Vyacheslav Gryaznov - “Slava” for short - was born in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk to an engineer father and a mother who was a German-language teacher. I’ve commented before on the Russian propensity for nurturing child prodigies, and evidently these folks recognized that they had, if not a prodigy, at least a seriously talented musician on their hands. They managed - I don’t know the story - to uproot themselves and move to Moscow so their son could get the schooling and musical training he would need to become successful. At great cost. Slava’s father died when Slava was only eleven, in the financial chaos of post-Soviet Moscow, as Slava tells the story. But their efforts have paid off. Slava, who credits his mother and father for everything that has happened to him, has thrived. Today he is a first-rate concert pianist, thanks to his training at the Moscow Conservatory, and is becoming known world-wide. Not just for his concert performances. His decision to display his talent on YouTube led to his being hired, in 2014, by Schott Music Publishers as an arranger and transcriber and today he works, as well, as a piano teacher.

I won’t fill the page with all the links to his performances, which you can find by the dozens by going to YouTube and typing in Vyacheslav Gryaznov. But to get just one sample of his talent, here’s a performance of Rachmaninoff’s Italian Polka, for which he has written his arrangement.

And if there are any of you out there who doubt the difference there is between music played proficiently and accurately, but mechanically, and music played by a human being with a soul, even one with a bad haircut, listen for a minute or two - actually thirty seconds will suffice - to the same Italian Polka, programmed for a player piano, and then go back and listen to Slava again.

Player piano: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NFJGKU-IrGM 

Slava again: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tj8vzloRKQ0

photo credit