Denis Kozhukhin

Barbican début with Sakari Oramo and BBC Symphony Orchestra

“Kozhukhin’s performance was so natural and musical that he allowed the music to speak on its own terms. The mix of strength and sensitivity in his playing was ideal. In the first movement he was particularly impressive in the great build up to the central climax and the intensity of the climax itself was spine tingling. The wind down from here to the hasty end of the movement was particularly touching and ambiguous… For once the work came across as a satisfying whole, equal to and in many ways more sophisticated than the earlier concerti.”
Bachtrack, May 2015

“This work finds in Denis Kozhukhin a champion of the first order. One admires the power of his touch, his technical precision and his subtle musicality.”
ResMusica, May 2015

“The slow-movement intermezzo… shimmered with velvet-textured colours, only to yield to the most thrilling of all Rachmaninov’s finales before the last of the Symphonic Dances. And the encore, Gluck’s “Dance of the Blessed Spirits” from Orfeo ed Euridice as simply transcribed by Giovanni Sgambati, was perfect: sustained song, poetry which Kozhukhin wielded no less than Rachmaninov the pianist in a celebrated recording to take us slowly into a metaphysical zone.”
Arts Desk, May 2015