At the La Roque d'Anthéron Piano Festival, a 14-year-old Russian baby ogre and an 18-year-old Korean youth

Mild weather and graying skies at the La Roque d'Anthéron International Piano Festival (Bouches-du-Rhône), where a cohort is climbing Rue Adam-de-Craponne, which leads to the Auditorium Centre Marcel Pagnol. One of the hopes of the Russian school performed there at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, July 23. Young Vladimir Rublev has been 14 since July 14, but his childish figure easily takes two years off him. A tally that disregards the Cornelian adage that says that "well-born souls are valued without the number of years." A quote verified from the Toccata and Fugue in D minor BWV 565 in Ferruccio Busoni's transcription, with its careful rhetoric, lacking a little freedom. With his curly head and small glasses that he regularly pushes up his nose, the brilliant teenager has put together a very substantial program, as if he wanted to give the full measure of his undeniable talent.

Beethoven's Sonata No. 14 , known as "Moonlight", whose first two movements are played in a somewhat applied manner, does not allow us to truly meet the performer. It will take all the passion of the final Presto agitato for something to open up in the extroversion of virtuosity. The pianist is still a student at the famous Gnessin School in Moscow, where his teacher is the demiurge Boris Berezovsky , who was a long-time regular there and in France, before his public support for the war in Ukraine during a television show led to his disgrace. It is with Prokofiev's rare Sonata No. 3 , taken at breakneck speed, that Vladimir Rublev will finally blossom his impressive piano playing and his artistic temperament: color, breath, imagination.

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