David Greilsammer receives fantastic reviews in the New York Times and the NY Daily News.

David Greilsammer received fantastic reviews in the New York Times and the NY Daily News last week after his recital at the Walter Reade Theater, NY, on 21 February 2010. Below you will find relevant extracts from the reviews as well as links to the press articles if you wish to read them fully. 

Two young pianists, forging connections, by Anthony Tommasini
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/26/arts/music/26greil.html?ref=music

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The inquisitive, elegant Israeli pianist David Greilsammer, 32, presented a recital at the Walter Reade Theater, part of Lincoln Center’s Sunday Morning Coffee Concerts series, in which programs of roughly 60 minutes are followed by a coffee-and-muffin reception with the artists in the lobby. Mr. Greilsammer, also the music director of the Geneva Chamber Orchestra, is fascinated by musical connections. His program, “Gates,” offered works by composers from Rameau and Monteverdi to Ligeti and John Adams, with stops through Scarlatti, Janacek and more.

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For Mr. Greilsammer, the potential risk from programs that leap around is that the experiment can seem gimmicky. In his recital here, the choices of pieces and the musical connections among them were striking and provocative. Most important, the playing was exquisite.

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Afterward, the audience gathered in the lobby to have coffee and meet the artist, who signed copies of his Naïve label recordings. His latest offers him as pianist and conductor in sensitive, articulate accounts of Mozart’s Piano Concertos 22 and 24, with the Suedama Ensemble.

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Mr. Greilsammer is a standout musician who has it in him to challenge, inform and delight audiences. During the reception I overheard one person saying that he thought Mr. Greilsammer’s experiment did not go far enough, that there was too much “sameness” in the pieces, especially the first few. When a listener asserts that Rameau, Ligeti, Mozart and Satie sound similar, I think Mr. Greilsammer can claim success at showing the connections among seemingly disparate music.

David Greilsammer, by Howard Kissel

http://www.nydailynews.com/blogs/culture/2010/02/daniel-greilsammer.html

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In the program notes Greilsammer said he began thinking about programming a recital this way when he attended a show in an art museum where the entry into each room evoked its own mood, its own sense of beauty. The works he programmed, with the exception of the Janacek, were brief. Greilsammer asked that applause be held until the very end of the recital, which lasted slightly over an hour. One had the sense the audience was absolutely rapt throughout. They applauded with intense warmth at the end. One felt we had truly made a great journey together.

Although the Walter Reade is among the most comfortable theaters in New York, its acoustics are apparently problematic -- to the point where Steinway recently withdrew its piano. Greilsammer, like myself a Steinway artist, performed on a Yamaha. Had the name not appeared on the side of the piano you would have assumed it was a Steinway. There was a time when Yamahas produced a sound that was solid, powerful but somewhat flat. That was not the case this morning, when the sound was ringing and brilliant.

That of course had to do with the wiry, darkly handsome young man at the keyboard. Most astonishing was the breathtaking delicacy of the pianissimo passages he played, far harder to bring off than thundering fortissimi. Beyond his formidable command of the dynamics of the keyboard there is a fierce intelligence at work. He sets himself great challenges, but the musical effects he achieves are ingratiating and emotionally involving rather than intimidating.

It is rare to hear a recital with so much unfamiliar music that the performer makes so immediate and so moving. Few recitals I have ever attended have offered such a sense of intense beauty and discovery.