Isle concert by Russian pianist

Award-winning pianist Alexander Kobrin visits the islands next weekend, giving Hawaii audiences the rare opportunity to hear a guest artist in both solo and concerto performances.

Kobrin was the 2005 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition’s gold medalist, giving crowd-pleasing performances that had audiences throwing roses onto the stage and critics like Bryce Morrison of Gramophone Magazine praising him for his “memorably personal and stylish” sensitivity.

The gold medal culminated a series of victories for Kobrin, who was groomed for success in the great Russian piano tradition. At age 5 he enrolled in the famed Gnessin Institute in Moscow, where he was immersed for two years in rhythm, singing and pitch lessons, then passed a rigorous examination to continue at the school.

“You get a fantastic, extraordinary level of teaching over all music disciplines,” Kobrin said, speaking by phone from New York. “You get very highly trained in music history, music literature, theory, all those things that here you only get at the conservatory level or if you’re lucky and go to Juilliard pre-college.

“The students are basically a soldier and should do what they are told, which is a bit different than the Ameri – can style of teaching,” he said. “But we know of a lot of famous, fantastic results coming from the Russian school.”

Kobrin rebelled against his training for a short time at age 14, telling his father he either wanted to get another teacher or go to another school. “Everything was great for the next two weeks after that, and then everything went back to normal,” he said with a laugh. He would go on to study at the Moscow Conservatory — an archrival of sorts — where his string of competition victories began.

His solo concert tonight at the University of Hawaii at Manoa’s Orvis Auditorium, courtesy of the Hawaii Music Teachers Association, will take listeners on a “journey from the Vienna Classical era to the 20th century,” featuring Haydn, Schubert, Chopin and Scriabin, with Scriabin highlighted in commemoration of the 100th an – niversary of his death.

Kobrin chose the program as an exploration into the development of piano repertoire.

“Scriabin is fairly close to Chopin in his early stage, and despite the fact that he separated himself rather completely at the end, I thought it would be good to connect those two,” he said.

Hadyn — who is considered to be firmly of the Classical era — and Schubert composed in approximately the same time period, and Kobrin’s program will explore the connection between the two.

“It’s funny how many universities in America can’t figure out whether (Schubert) is Romantic or Classical,” said Kobrin, who now lives and teaches in New York after spending the early years of his career in Moscow.

Kobrin himself has no problems saying he was both.

“What Schubert started to do a lot, furtively, was he started singing on the piano, where if you compared him to Beethoven, Beethoven would be talking on the piano, he would be speaking. Schubert started to sing on the piano, which Brahms and Chopin would take over.”

A few days after his solo recital — he’ll also give a master class Sunday for young local pianists – Kobrin will join the Hawai‘i Symphony Orchestra on Kauai and in Honolulu for performances of Beetho – ven’s Concerto No. 3 in C Minor, one of the few concertos in its time written in a minor key. Kobrin said it is one of his favorite works, noting the challenge of its second movement.

“It’s one of the most difficult beginnings to a second movement, in my opinion,” he said. “It’s a long, complex solo with just a few notes. That’s always been fascinating for me, in Beethoven, in Hadyn, in Mozart. They’re not using too many notes. It’s not Rachmaninoff. That is for me the biggest challenge, because the intensity of emotion really, you could say, it’s Romantic music as well.”

The symphony’s program features guest conductor Michael Stern returning to lead the orchestra in Dvorak’s Symphony No. 7, a patriotic work reflecting the struggles of the new Czech nation.