Lille, 5 July 2003

When I arrived, Elena Kushnerova was rehearsing in the beautiful hall Eduard Lalo of the Conservatoire de Lille, a hall in Napoleaon III style (I have been told one of the two halls with some of the most remarkable acoustics in France, the other being the hall of the Old Conservatoire de Paris), admirably restored after it was completely destroyed in a fire.
It is always fascinating to hear an artist rehearse, move from one fragment to the other and not necessarily play the whole works to be performed in concert. Elena moved from Beethoven’s Variations on a theme of Salieri via Brahms’s opus 116 to Pétrouchka, where she astonished a few people wo were present in the hall when she played the glissando in the Danse russe with the thumb of the right hand (Her explanation for this was as simple as it was effective: “All the tips of my fingers were sore, so I had to ....”).

The first thing she said after she finished practising was that she quite liked the Yamaha piano of the Hall, which was however replaced by a Steinway D rented for this recital shortly afterwards. She seemed quite relieved when she heard the interview could be held in German. We moved to another room, where Elena replied with kindness to my questions. During the interview, Dmitry Garanin (Elena’s husband), Loic Serrurier and Denis Simandy (both involved in the festival Clef de Soleil as président de l’association and directeur artistique) and Charles Couineau ( a friend of Loic and myself) were present.

Willem Boone (WB): Concerning tonight’s programme, how do you “compose”a recital?

Elena Kushnerova (EK): It is difficult to compose a recital programme if it is not to be a single composer programme, sometimes I really suffer from it. I try to set up a diverse yet coherent programme, thus it is important to find relations between separate works concerning their keys, moods, etc. It should be a constellation of known and lesser known pieces. In Germany at least part of a recital is desired to be Russian, I understand why it happens.