LDV74

22 PROKOFIEV_VISIONS FUGITIVES When he arrived inVasily Lobanov’s class in Cologne, however, he was pigeonholed as a well-behaved, nicely groomed youngster. For Lobanov had frequented all the great names of Soviet music in its twilight years, and it took more than that to impress him. It is true that Noack was the youngest in his class and that his classmates could not detect much frenzy in him. Was he not that impeccably polite blond child who played Chopin without any rubato? Which is probably why he focused on music that bore little resemblance to him. On opulent, ample, generous works; on the music of Sergei Lyapunov, who was to become his lucky star, to name but one composer. It was his wife Nare who encouraged him to reconnect with Prokofiev. She placed under his nose the score of the First Violin Concerto, rich in fairytale atmosphere and far removed from the implacable clockwork mechanisms he thought were the composer’s stock in trade. ‘I finally discovered other facets of Prokofiev, a tenderness, a sense of nostalgia that he seems to have inherited from Anatoly Lyadov and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.’ Along theway, he physically took possession of the Visions fugitives , inwhich he has immersed himself from head to toe and which became his primary motivation for making this disc.