HOFMANN, JOSEF (JÓZEF) KAZIMIERZ (1876–1957)

Yasynskyy is the recipient of numerous awards and competition prizes. He received the gold medal at the Cincinnati World Piano Competition in 2015 which led to his debut at Carnegie Hall. His concert appearances have taken him throughout Germany and to Italy, South Korea, Greece, Japan, the US, Spain and Russia, as well as appearing at several international music festivals. He made his recording debut with an album of works by Józef Hofmann on the Grand Piano label in May 2015 [GP765], and in September 2016 he recorded the album of sonatas by Domenico Scarlatti on Naxos.

Like so many other performing artists of the past, Hofmann was equally at home composing. His output includes a symphony, five piano concertos and a considerable quantity of solo piano music. Some of his smaller pieces appeared under the pseudonym Dvorsky (which is actually the Polish equivalent of Hofmann). He delighted in the fiction that Michel Dvorsky was a reclusive young Frenchman who modestly sent his efforts to Hofmann for evaluation. The humour behind this innocent little deceit is akin to that of the violinist Fritz Kreisler, who famously ascribed the names of little-known composers to some of his own slighter pieces. Hofmann’s compositions are positioned very firmly in the Romantic tradition. To his contemporaries, familiar with the recent work of Debussy or Scriabin, they probably came across as old-fashioned, but now that sufficient time has passed we can simply enjoy the music on its own terms without worrying about whether it is ‘modern’ enough.