Long suppressed by Soviet authorities, he immigrated to Germany in the early 1990s and revealed himself to the music world as an artist of extraordinary talent.
Once, he entered a digital piano store wearing a long rubber coat that seemed to swallow his slight frame, his hair in its characteristic disheveled state. The staff, taking him for a homeless person, moved to usher him out. But then Mr. Ugorski sat down at one of their instruments and, to their awe, began to play “,” a piano suite by the Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky. Mr. Ugorski did not stop until he had reached the end of the 10th and final movement.
“My style comes from myself,” Mr. Ugorski once told the London Evening Standard, “and developed on its own in my solitude.” His mother, hearing him play and sing, divined his musical potential and took him at age 6 to audition at the Leningrad Conservatory, where he was admitted to a school for musically gifted children. He was assigned to play the piano, he later recounted, because the shape of his hands was deemed suited to the instrument.Mr. Ugorski’s future seemed assured by 1967, when he won third prize at the George Enescu Festival in Bucharest.
He rejected stasis, once remarking that “the greatest danger is to turn into one’s own recordings.” To make a piece feel new to him, he might play it wearing a jacket that covered his hands, or sit at the piano in a rocking chair rather than on a bench. Mr. Ugorski’s first marriage, to pianist Gabriella Talrose, ended in divorce. His wife of more than four decades, musicologist Maja Elik, died in 2012. Their daughter, Dina, died in 2019.
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