Breakfast of penitence

Today I ate for breakfast my words about Till Fellner.  What made me change my mind about this pianist was his playing of Bach - not the hideously disembodied floating-in-vacuum studio recordings he made for the ECM label, but broadcast recordings of his recitals where he played selections from Book II of the Well-Tempered Clavier.  Having long given up on Glenn Gould's juvenile pranksterism and Sviatoslav Richter's Soviet-Industrial grimness, I found Fellner's calm, reflective, Apollonian approach to Bach very attractive.  I doubt I'll ever hear a more telling example of what Charles Rosen had in mind when he described Bach's keyboard music as deeply private and meditative.

Those of you who have been waiting for an opportunity to vindicate your suspicion that I can be as much of a judgmental doofus as any professional music critic now can do so with these Fellner performances from Schwarzenberg (BWV 874-877, VIII.24.2014), Rohrnbach (BWV 878-881, VI.25.2015), and Hohenems (BWV 888-893, X.7.2016).

Cute puppies sell anything...

I have nothing against cute boys and girls exploiting the advantages of their phenotype, be it in modeling or in soliciting sugar daddies on Craigslist.  But when it comes to serious music, I would expect a musician's success to be based on more artistically relevant factors than just 'cute puppy' looks.  Which, of course, makes me a hopeless imbecile - a depressing self-assessment, true, but amply justified by the meteoric career trajectory of the Canadian-born, still very young,  and singularly mediocre pianist Jan Lisiecki (b. 1995).

I must be missing something...

For a woman who plays not a note of contemporary music in her public recitals, what does this publicity photo supposedly promise to those who pay to hear Khatia Buniatishvili play the numbingly familiar works of Liszt, Chopin, and Schumann?  A sensuous massage backstage during the intermission?  A slow striptease to accompany the dying away of final notes in Schumann's Fantasy Op.17?   Or is it simply a desperate attempt to divert everyone's attention from the fact that Khatia has never been able to give a clean execution of a single technically demanding piece in her repertoire (at least not in the dozens of live recordings I've heard before giving up on this pianist)?

With music critics like these...

The job is daunting -- there are hundreds of takes.

Jeremy Denk on the editing of his studio recording of Ives' Concord sonata,
"Flight of the Concord", New Yorker, Feb. 6, 2012, p.28. (italics mine).

 [Jeremy Denk's] recent recording of Charles Ives piano sonatas ... displays a formidable technique and a fine combination of intellectual rigor and emotional depth.

John von Rhein, review of Jeremy Denk's debut with the Chicago Symphony (Beethoven's C-minor piano concerto), Chicago Tribune, Dec. 9, 2011 (italics mine).
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Even without Jeremy Denk's charmingly confessional essay, an experienced music lover (let alone a music critic at a major newspaper) should know that studio recordings -- assembled from hundreds of snippets recorded over weeks, months, and sometimes even years -- can display no more "emotional depth" than a well-assembled microwave oven.  And the only "formidable technique" to be found in such assembled soundbites belongs to a skillful recording editor.

I hope the good people of Chicago are proud of their hometown newspaper which has generously provided this dolt with 30+ years of well-paid employment.

Four years later it is still about unbuttoned jackets...

Mr. Andsnes played the piece while seated calmly, never bothering to unbutton his stylish suit jacket.
Anthony Tommasini, New York Times, January 19, 2008

... in his modest yet commanding way, without even unbuttoning the jacket of his suit, Mr. Andsnes brought out excitement, inventiveness and beauty in works by Haydn, Bartok, Debussy and Chopin.
Anthony Tommasini, New York Times, February 16, 2012
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What the fuck is it with Tommasini and Leif Andsnes' unbuttoned jackets (stylish or otherwise)?

Jeremy Denk

[Studio recordings] are manicured artifacts, from which the essential spectacle of human effort has been clipped away.  ...  I think about how precious live performance is, and how terrible it is that more and more performances aim to sound like recordings rather than the other way around.

Jeremy Denk, "Flight of the Concord", New Yorker, Feb. 6, 2012, pp.24 - 29.
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I know Jeremy Denk's playing from broadcasts of his frequent appearances at the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center.  He is not a spectacular pianist (who is?), but he is an intelligent, reflective musician who often has interesting things to say about the music he plays.  And judging by his recent essay in the New Yorker magazine, he can be as eloquent at the computer keyboard as he can be at the keyboard of the piano.
      Denk's thoughtful and often disarmingly honest essay, which relates the perils of making a studio recording of  Ives's "Concord" sonata, is the most attractively intelligent way I can think of for a musician to promote his new recording.  I hope Denk's CD outsells Lang Lang.  I really do.  But I am not going to buy it.  In fact, I will not even listen to it for free (if my public library acquires a copy) because my attitude toward studio recordings, expressed frequently in this blog, is far more negative than Denk's wistful lament quoted above.  It is the attitude of bottomless contempt.

I feel puzzled by Denk's conflicted, if not outright incoherent, perspective on studio recordings: he laments their "terrible" effect on "precious live performance", yet proceeds to invest considerable time and effort in making one of those "manicured artifacts, from which the essential spectacle of human effort has been clipped away".  I am puzzled because Denk's live recordings of Bach, Ives and Ligeti (from the Aspen Festival, and also from his recitals at the Isabella Stewart Gardner museum in Boston) show that he can give technically impressive, tonally seductive, and interpretatively compelling public performances of the most demanding music.  If such performances do not happen at every recital, that's just the price of trying to enrich music with "the essential spectacle of human effort".  Instead of spending hundreds of hours manipulating hundreds of takes in the editing room of a recording studio (and later lamenting the artificiality of the final product), Denk would be artistically much better off recording his public recitals (which can be done inexpensively these days) and letting the microphones hunt for those special occasions on which his playing, even if not note-perfect, fully communicated his love and passion for the music he chose to perform.

How to cure the Chopin-induced sickness

In science and mathematics building on the work of others to obtain deeper discoveries and more powerful explanations is essential to progress in these fields.  But even if  your results reach much deeper and wider than those of your older colleagues, this in no way negates the value of the latter's contributions to the discipline.

In music, on the other hand, things can be strikingly different.  If someone takes the formal, stylistic, thematic, and harmonic elements of your compositions and uses them to create deeper, richer, and more powerful music, chances are good that he will get all the credit from posterity, while you will end up being royally fucked.  Your music will be all but unknown to future generations of music lovers because it will be ignored by performers, dismissed by composition teachers, overlooked by record companies, and denigrated (if mentioned at all) by popular accounts of the history of music.  

Delusional young pianists

Sometimes I think that many young concert pianists are simply delusional.  Surely they must know that, to attract the relatively small number of people who go to piano recitals and buy piano recordings, they must compete against countless other young pianists with similar training, talent, and technical endowment.  To make matters worse, in the concert hall these youngsters also have to compete against the still living "giants of the keyboard", and on recordings against the living giants as well as the dead ones.

So, what does the young pianist do to improve his (or her) odds in this brutally competitive market?  Does he try to intrigue you with a rare opportunity to hear a live performance of some unjustly neglected piano music of the past, say a passionate proto-Romantic sonata by Dussek or Hummel?  Does he try to ignite your curiosity with a rarely heard work by an important 20th century composer, such as the melancholy first sonata of Roger Sessions, or one of Stockhausen's haunting Klavierstucke ,  or perhaps Elliott Carter's moody Night Fantasies?  Hell no!  He expects you to spend your time and money to attend a recital whose program consists entirely of pieces that have been played and recorded ad nauseam by just about every great, almost-great, and far-from-great pianist of the century.  A typical example is Cedric Tiberghian's recital in Hohenems (May 21, 2011), where he played Beethoven's Moonglight Sonata, Ravel's Gaspard, and Schumann's Kresleriana.

Now let me get this straight: The young pianist expects me to dress up, drive across town, pay for parking, pay for tickets, sit for two hours in the auditorium, and then take a long drive back home - all for the privilege of hearing the fucking Moonlight Sonata played by some sultry-looking, carefully groomed, and fashionably attired skinny metrosexual twenty-something???  I would pass on this kind of recital program even if the ticket included a free backstage blowjob from the artist during the intermission.  And I consider myself a fairly typical pianophile...

The point of all this is not that Cedric Tiberghien's  playing of tired "masterpieces" shows him to be a bad pianist or inadequate musician.  On the contrary, I think he is quite good.  The problem is that there are too many other young pianists who are at least as good as he is.  And most of them seem to be equally delusional in their belief that they can attain pianistic glory by starting off with recitals consisting of sorely overplayed and numbingly over-recorded segments of the piano repertoire.

     
   

A Perfect Pianist

Years ago I had  what must have been a Perfect Girlfriend: she was good looking, young (early twenties), intelligent (earned a Ph.D. from a top school a few years later), erudite in the visual arts, and musically informed.  She also was honest, kind,  and optimistic.  Not once did she have a headache or lose her temper fighting traffic on LA freeways.

Despite my Perfect Girlfriend's long list of virtues, what I remember most vividly about the time I spent with her is my persistent feeling of boredom.  She had everything I could ever ask for in a woman except personality.  There was something so anonymous about her that when our relationship ended I only felt a sense of relief as I went back to dating cynical secretaries, neurotic two-bit actresses, disillusioned MILFs, and tattooed heavy metal chicks - all so abundantly distributed along the coast of Southern California as if God himself wanted to make life easy for a young guy of modest means and immodest libido.

Where to sit in the concert hall for a piano recital

1.  With pianists whose playing is extroverted, powerful, and strongly projected, I would sit toward the back of the hall:

2.  With pianists whose playing is introverted and highly nuanced, I would sit next to the stage:

3.  And then there is one pianist who recently proved that the best place in the hall may actually be under the piano itself:

Grrrr... Grrrreat Pianists....

A theater actor who constantly forgets or mangles his lines because he can't stand the repetitive and boring activity of rehearsing his roles...   A mathematics lecturer who forgets  to present simple but important lemmas, and who routinely messes up his blackboard calculations - all because he can't endure the mind-numbing and time-consuming preparations for his assigned courses...
      I think that a reasonable person would have a healthy doze of contempt for such sorry "professionals" who willfully disregard the basic responsibilities of their profession.  And this contempt would not be diminished by loud assurances that, although such "professionals" screw up the details of Shakespeare and Chekhov (or Gauss and Hilbert), they convey the big picture, the spirit, if you like, of Macbeth or Uncle Vanya (or the Fundamental Theorem of Algebra) better than most.

Yet when it comes to pianists, such unprofessional behavior can be looked upon with tolerance bordering on affection, or even adulation, as witnessed by the axiomatic inclusion of Cortot and Schnabel among the so-called Great Pianists.   This is not about wrong or missed notes per se.  This is about the easily recognizable difference between wrong notes as neurophysiological accidents (which can happen to any musician) and wrong notes as the predictable consequence of willfully keeping one's technical equipment in the state of sad disrepair.