A. I.

It never made headlines. And I don’t know if anyone remembers.  Back in 2013, Classic Mornings introduced A. I.  No, not AI. Are you kidding?  I still scratch things out and doodle with ink pens and paper all the time. And I’m grateful for a fair amount of natural intelligence. The A. I. I’m referring to is the Russian violinist, Alina Ibragimova.

When I introduced her to Classic Mornings audiences, I mentioned that it was no surprise that she became a musician. Her mother Lutsia Ibragimova is a violinist and violin teacher.  These days, she’s on the faculty of the Royal College of Music in London. Alina Ibragimova - A. I. - began playing the violin at age 4 in her native Russia. Yes, her mother was her first teacher. At 5, she began studying in Moscow.  The following year, she was performing with orchestras.

The family moved to London when Alina was 10. Her father, Rinat Ibragimova, was the principal double bass of the London Symphony Orchestra.  He died in 2020. In 2005, Alina, a BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist, met another BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist: the French pianist Cédric Tiberghien. They’ve been performing and recording as a duo ever since – for 20 years.

All of this came to mind when I discovered just over the past week that Alina Ibragimova celebrated her 40th birthday near the end of September. Somehow, I missed it.  But I’ve since written the date on a slip of paper, using my ink pen. And belatedly, I played one of the pieces I presented when I first introduced A. I. on Classic Mornings back in 2013: a little scherzo from a sonata by Franz Schubert, which she recorded with Cédric Tiberghien.

I didn’t overlook Stephen Kovacevich’s 85th birthday on October 17.  And it was baseball cards and record covers that came to mind.

Record covers are nothing like baseball cards. Those paper-covered cardboard envelopes were meant to protect the enclosed LPs - long playing records. But they were large enough to attract the creativity of artists. And lots of records were judged by their covers and sold because of record cover artwork or photos of performers.

If you’re a baseball card collector, it’s only natural that you’d be drawn to the cards from various stages of a player’s career, particularly a superstar who may have played for more than one team. You’d want the photos with the uniforms and caps of all of those teams. Some of those cards might be valuable.

Well, if you go looking through stacks of old classical records, you’re bound to find some of Stephen Kovacevich’s recordings under different names. His father was Croatian. And so is the family name: Kovacevich. But when he was a child, his mother remarried, and they changed the family name to that of his stepfather: Bishop.

His earliest recordings were made under the name Stephen Bishop. Does that name ring a bell? If you’ve listened to pop music over the years, or oldies stations these days, you may have heard the singer-songwriter-guitarist Stephen Bishop. His popularity prompted the pianist to change his name to Stephen Bishop Kovacevich. And indeed, there are recordings with the dual family name. Eventually, he decided upon Stephen Kovacevich.  

I did a little searching to see whether having records with all three of Kovacevich’s names is a collector’s prize. It doesn’t seem to be. If anybody has written about the various stages of Kovacevich’s career, it’s about his playing, not his name. I was glad to see that.

Vladimir Horowitz talked about his own playing. In the CD booklet of a re-packaged set of Horowitz recordings, a short quote was included. They enlarged the print so that it filled an entire page. You can’t miss it. I passed it along to Classic Morning listeners on October 1, the birthday anniversary of Horowitz, who was born in 1903 and died in 1989: “The most important thing is to transform the piano from a percussive instrument into a singing instrument – a singing tone is made up of shadows and colour and contrast. The secret lies mainly in contrasts.” 

While intrigued by the quote, I found it amusing that the music selection that caught my attention was one that indeed celebrates the percussive qualities of the piano.  It’s Carl Tausig’s arrangement of the famous Marche Militaire No. 1 by Franz Schubert, written originally for piano 4 hands.  Horowitz’s playing reminds you that it’s a military march!  And It reminded me of why I go out of my way to ignore the art work and the notes until after I’ve auditioned a recording. It’s not that I don’t appreciate them. But for the purposes of radio, it’s all about judging what’s of auditory interest. Call it a.i. if you’d like.