Jury of Annual German Record Critics' Award 2020
Dina Ugorskaja is a musician, who is reticent and deeply intense, earnest and soft-spoken, starry-eyed and radiant. (...) Her internalised accomplished musical excellence is left to us now only in these amazing recordings – Händel’s suites, Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, Schumann, late Sonatas by Beethoven, and Schubert. Her last recording, Schubert’s Sonata in B Major from the year of his death, reveals bewildement of the visionary music with its frailty and subtlty and breathlessness, that falters and oscillates, leaving the artistry that is existential.
Heavenly Lengths
Dina Ugorskaja’s rendering of Schubert is dauntingly existential, it belongs among the most truthful renditions that have been delivered to us by musicians lately. To attain Schubert’s sound so closely out of the depths of contemplation and insight, both consciously and by touch, – that is something only few pianists can master, and that is what Dina Ugorskaja has achieved.
About the Last Schubert' Recording
Ugorskaja plays as if to overturn all the ostentatious conventions of interpretation, everything that is normally projected outwards, to expose the bare soul of this music. She was a pianist of outstanding technique and strength, and yet she made them but modest servants of her personal expression.
The Last Great Musical Achievement of a Wonderful Performer
Ugorskaja’s interpretations always remain concise, unique in their expression, sometimes mercilessly intense, clear and yet intangible. For the listener they provide an intense experience outside space and time.
About the Recording of Franz Schuberts’s Moments Musicaux
Dina Ugorskaja „reads this music as if it was a projection of the orchestral score – the way Schubert intended. The majority of his compositions for the piano is virtually orchestral. The fantastic playing with tempi – ritardando, accelerando – is something that cannot be taught. It must be felt. And these are the distinctions that make an interpretation grand in cases where the music is alive and breathing, or else leave it common and trite when the musician merely follows the noted metre”.
"Resplendid, Sacred Song!"
(Eleonore Büning about Beethoven Op. 106 & 111)
...technically speaking, breathtaking, with not a hint of affectation or capriciousness... She combines astonishing power with tender warmth, confidently shaping every detail, while at the same time always telling the whole story ... Amazing also is the rhythmic precision and the momentum, the design of the repeated pause and the endurance of the contradictions in the Scherzo. The tremendous Adagio sostenuto, played according to the instruction "passionate and with much feeling" – from now on, one would like to hear it precisely this way: as a resplendent, sacred song!
About the Recording of Beethoven' Sonatas (op. 90, 101, 109, 110)
Not only does Dina Ugorskaja understand how to colourfully shade detail, how to shape and hold an arc of tension, she allows the emergence of the great architecture of sound that makes these complex works audible in the first place. She truly plays in the major league.
About the Recording of Bach' Well Tempered Clavier
Informed in all historical details, but never showing off what she understands, balancing the main and secondary voices, the dancing, choral-like, and bravura improvised passages, the cycle emerges as a perfect whole. If one listens closely the entire time, one cannot imagine classical Bach done better.
About the Recording of Bach' Well Tempered Clavier
You feel yourself not directly addressed, but rather quietly listening in on an intimate dialogue between Bach, God, and the universe. Dina Ugorskaja keeps a noble distance, which protects the fragility of her discourse. An impressive appeal to the freedom of the spirit.
About the Recording of Bach' Well Tempered Clavier
Gulda, Gould, Richter, Tureck, Schiff, Hewitt, Fischer – the list of recordings of the Well-Tempered Clavier is long. But now another artist came along who without a doubt belongs among the best … one of the best counterpoint performers of our time … Dina Ugorskaja´s secret lies, on the one hand, in her spiritual affinity for Bach‘s music already as a child and, on the other, in feeling grounded, as she herself acknowledged, by her preoccupation with WTC. The rest is an accumulation of technique, education, and the richness of sound that keeps surprising you again and again.