Svetlana Smolina: “Music can unite cultures and transcend our differences”

Music can immediately unite cultures and transcend differences, because it does not belong to a country as the music speaks the human language, points out the prominent Russian pianist Svetlana Smolina.

The dazzling artist arrives in Lima after a decade of absence to perform for the second time before the Peruvian public, in a presentation that belongs to a season of close ties with Latin America.

This year he offered nine recitals in Argentina and Chile and made his debut in Ecuador. After Lima he will continue with performances in the United States, and then in December he will travel to China for a recording project with an orchestra.

"Music can immediately unite cultures and transcend our differences. Our profession does not belong to a single nation: it speaks a human language," emphasizes Svetlana Smolina.

He has especially vivid memories of his visit to Peru in 2015: the conversations, the photographs and the long line of people waiting for an autograph at the end of the concert.

An extension of the evening that she humorously calls her “third part.”

“That time, it made me very happy to meet and talk with the Peruvian audience, take photographs and feel that wonderful personal connection beyond the stage,” Smolina remembers.

The dazzling Russian pianist will perform this October 26 at the Municipal Theater of Lima, with a program that links the romanticism of Chopin and Liszt, the jazz of Gershwin and the strength of Latin American rhythms.

The presentation is part of the 2026 Season of TQ Producciones and marks the artist's return to Peru after more than a decade.

With a career that includes venues such as the Carnegie Hall in New York and the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles, Smolina will have a single meeting with the Lima public before continuing his international agenda.

The repertoire includes works by Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Liszt, Gershwin, Lecuona and Ginastera, among others. For Smolina, this diversity also expresses a way of understanding his job.

Smolina's performance in Lima

Svetlana Smolina's musical journey will begin in the intimacy of romanticism and will advance towards increasingly rhythmic and extroverted music. The common thread, he explains, is in “emotion, color and transformation.”

She hopes the audience will experience those changes as a succession of stories.

There will be tenderness, humor, passion and moments of great technical demand, although he warns that the intensity of a performance does not depend solely on its difficulty.

“Sometimes the most powerful moment is not the loudest or the most virtuosic, but rather a single soft phrase that creates a deeply personal connection between the performer and the listener,” he says.

His relationship with Chopin and Liszt reflects this search. When she was younger, she was especially attracted to the beauty of their melodies and their technical display. Over the years, his attention has shifted to musical breathing, the subtleties of time, and “the eloquence of silence.”

In Chopin he finds writing close to the human voice; in Liszt, an orchestral imagination that requires building different planes and colors within the same instrument.

“Every time I return to his works, I feel that there are still new colors to discover and new sounds to evoke,” he notes.

The program will change pulse with Gershwin and his encounter between classical sophistication and jazz.

In Malagueña, by Lecuona, echoes of flamenco guitar and dance will appear. The Argentine Dances, by Alberto Ginastera, will take the public from the delicacy of a female portrait to the rebellious energy of the gaucho.

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(END) CFS/CFS / MDV

Publicado: 21/10/2026