fullermusic

Tanglewood

2008-08-20T10:21:00.002-04:00

Congratulations to Jessica on the UK premiere of her "A Walk Through the End of Time". This woman is astonishing in every way -- warm, charming, deeply cultured, prolific. And very funny. Congratulations, Jessica.

Jessica reports that the UK has forgotten summer this year. While Boston has had an awful lot of rain, there have been some breathtakingly dry and sunlit days. I happened to catch one at Tanglewood last weekend and snapped this photo. The Koussevitsky Music Shed is behind me, the lake of the Stockbridge Bowl ahead in the distance, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's little red house is just behind the foreground hedge. The lake has been casting its spell for thousands of years, glittering away since it was scooped out by ice age glaciers.

2008-07-08T23:03:00.010-04:00

The last of The Risør Festival's 22 concerts ended in a seething series of climaxes -- Ligeti's Violin Concerto. It was a hair-raising performance by violinist Christian Tetzlaff with the Risør Festival Strings under Christian Eggen. By this time, the Festival audience had undergone a rare immersion in superb performances of Ligeti's music.

But because of the wild and insistent applause, the very final music of the festival (excluding, of course, the hilarious caprices that erupted at the all-night party on the musician's boat) was an encore. Tetzlaff alone playing Bach.

Earlier in the program, the Orion Quartet played Bartók's String Quartet No. 5, written in 1934. When the first movement closes, Bartok holds a mirror up to the themes that have unfolded, and we hear them upside down.
My eye wandered to this wooden carving at the front of the church:

It was an indescribably compelling performance.

The Orion Quartet has been playing together for two decades now and they've developed the oneness that comes with that kind of history. Violinists Daniel Phillips and Todd Phillips are brothers who take turns playing the first violin role. The violist is Steven Tenenbom and the cellist is Timothy Eddy. They've obviously stocked their portable box of psychological coping tools for keeping things inspired. They must be sophisticated tools, too, especially given the fact that the four players were put together in the same apartment for a week... and they still came through it with an absolutely unabashed adoration of this festival! They gave nothing but ecstatic reviews about a happy, free, inspired experience.

We talked about the nature of this open-minded audience, listening day after day to truly complex and often tortured music.
It prompted a conversation about the open-mindedness of children, and violist Steve Tenenbom said this:

I wonder if in the US we're not the slightest bit lazy in terms of choices in culture …
Give young people the option, and they'll really go for the music with energy, and they'll let the music speak to them. Then, at some point, we grow and we become very reliant upon movie reviews, restaurant reviews, word of mouth –- we only want to go to concerts because we've heard of that person and they're famous, and there's an electricity in the audience really because you're there because of the star power.… Somehow in this festival, it's really about the music. It's so much that way.

And cellist Timothy Eddy said this:

Hopefully playing an instrument will be taught in such a way that from the earliest age, and from the earliest experiences, the child is encouraged to literally play with the instrument … to use their sense of fantasy and connect it with the adventure of self-expression … it's another voice.

There he hit upon the theme of the Festival itself. And that phrase the adventure of self-expression keeps bouncing around in my mind.

More photos (click on them for a bigger view) beginning with the church's wonderful ceiling, and its simple doors:

Happy festival-goers with ice cream:

Three of the Orions:

Beautiful boat:

The view from the big floating restaurant:

Co-director Leif Ove Andsnes:

And a couple views of dinner:

Twilight Boating

2008-07-02T05:11:00.006-04:00

On Friday night at the Risør Festival , musicians and audience packed into boats and headed to Stangholmen. This tiny, rocky island has a lighthouse, a newly constructed glass stage, a superb and elegant sound system, and, of course, the Norwegian glow of summer twilight that deepens as the hours go on. The audience can drink local beer and choose their piece of rock (cushions provided) to sit on. The Directors came up with a beautiful program that included the Norwegian Soloists' Choir
atmospherically stationed around and in the audience, moving toward the stage while singing haunting folk songs of Norway. Also on the program, Brahms, Haydn, Liszt, Donizetti. The final piece featured the deeply moving voice of Thomas Quasthoff sending Schubert's "Auf der Bruck" into the dusk and far, far out to the gleaming horizon.
The picture above shows a little boatful of highly valuable musicians and their highly valuable instruments, with a bigger boatful of highly valuable audience members.
Here's a look at the little rocky natural amphitheater on the island, and a shots from the lighthouse.

Great Openers

2008-07-01T05:58:00.005-04:00

Haydn, Ligeti, Antheil and Ornstein have become familiar bedfellows here in Risør. The programs are brilliantly devised, always with the theme of humanity's need for playfulness ready to bubble to the surface. These concerts are diverse, colorful, shocking, and very often deeply affecting. And this audience has never heard such remarkably adventurous concerts. I've met San Franciscans whose regular Norwegian summers are built around this week. I've met the Vicar of the Risør church who becomes a hard-working volunteer for all six of these long days. Because it is a festival that this audience has come to love and anticipate, it is a perfect example of the rewards that await a willing ear.

Great care (and mischief) has been put into the opening of each program. A concert on Friday, for instance, began with George Antheil’s “Jazz Sonata”. It's 90 seconds of manic jazz gestures that feel like they’ve been ripped up and pasted together in the dark. A hilarious slap in the face delivered by Marc-André Hamelin, followed by Nikolai Lugansky and Jan-Erikk Gustafsson playing a deep-in-the-strings account of the Debussy Cello Sonata. Then the cool warmth of Edgar Varèse’s Density 21.5 for solo flute (Andrea Lieberknecht was riveting) and then his Octandre, which was a slap of a different sort that seemed to ricochet around the church like coins in a hurricane. Follow that with a Haydn Symphony and a short breather (at intermission I did get a confession from a 6-year devotee that her ears were feeling a tad bit “tired”, but she was happy, willing and ready for all the rest), and after the breather: Charles Ives’s Concord Sonata, again with Hamelin. (How wonderfully strange for the many who were hearing this piece for the first time here … )

To start the noon concert the next day, something much farther out of any box than George Antheil’s music … a section of the Ursonata by Kurt Schwitters, the German painter whose technique of bringing together fragments and found art he called “Merz”. It’s been called “psychological collage”. Soprano Eir Inderhaug grabbed us with a collection of repeating nonsense phrases. She became a fascinating creature, playing with these words and their marvelously meaningful/meaningless inflections as if they’d been a part of some ancient culture since the beginning of time. I felt like I was meeting a sweet-faced, big-hearted alien. Great applause, shot through with laughter. Fabulous way to start a concert.

The most playful and outrageous of concert beginnings? Had to be Scratch from 1991, written and performed by Rolf Wallin. The instruments: large red balloon, soapy water, knife.

Also on that concert were a bouquet of songs by Schubert, Bartók's Fifth String Quartet (with the Orion String Quartet) and the Ligeti Violin Concerto.

Please stay tuned for encounters with the Orion String Quartet, violinist Christian Tetzlaff, trumpeter Hakan Hardenberger, and pianist Leif Ove Andsnes.

Devastating Ride

2008-06-27T10:39:00.007-04:00

I sat in on a rehearsal yesterday. After turning the pianist's pages for Schubert's Erlkönig I felt like I needed to be resuscitated. Thomas Quasthoff sings this song with such an overwhelming conviction and such unnerving tension ... it is an indescribably wild ride. His wife Claudia feels as though she is watching him become four different people before her very eyes. He is a force.

I've talked at length with both of them now, and it has been a joy to witness their deep love for one another. It's constantly punctuated with extreme humor, and much adoration. They are an inspiration.

Here's a little bit of Thomas Quasthoff's thinking

2008-06-27T08:01:00.004-04:00

Last evening's concert finished with an army of dark metronomes. At last I have witnessed a performance of Ligeti's Poème Symphonique for 100 of them. It's an experience both eery and hilarious. Risør's church is so acoustically alive that the wild initial clatter was breathtaking. And as the little machines (which come to seem ever more human) die at random, I became mildly obsessed with the idea of a single soldier standing -- flapping away. Who would it be?

This performance worked perfectly. Members of the Risør Festival Strings wound their metronomes each 17 times in front of the audience, then stood at attention. They were dismissed once they'd neatly allowed the clatter to begin. The last surviving metronome, having had diminishing company for 18 minutes or so, clicked away all alone for a time ... then there was a slight deadening in his resonance ... then a great emptiness.

Wild applause.

Here's a shot of the army on stage:

2008-06-26T10:10:00.005-04:00

Through miraculous good fortune, I woke up today on the Southern coast of Norway. And it’s a morning with such sparkle -- so blue and so bright -- that I’m stunned. There are quick and wonderful breezes coming off the sea, charged with sunlight and salt. (I’d be happy to have these breezes in my hair forever.) I’m barefoot with my coffee, on the deck of a little guest house, a short walk from the harbor. I can’t get enough of the sound of the seagulls laughing in the wind. The sky is endless.

This is the little, white-washed town of Risør, with its wooden houses nestled together on small, airy streets.

I recognize this feeling – everything is soaked in an atmosphere of rugged charm that I know from time spent on the North Shore of Massachusetts. But there is a mysterious and wonderful sense of ancient history here.

Throughout the day, happy tourists amble about. Bicycles float past the harbor and motorscooters buzz in and out. But there’s something different here. Look closely at some of those happy people and you’ll begin to recognize faces … isn’t that Christian Tetzlaff, the violinist? The young pianist Nikolai Lugansky comes around a corner … baritone Thomas Quasthoff seems to be talking with someone by the church – and the inspired Norwegian pianist Leif Ove Andsnes is everywhere.

This is the Risør Chamber Music Festival. I’ve come here to gather up some of its sights and sounds. In September, I’ll present a series of radio programs on WGBH 89.7 with concert recordings and special interviews. But now I can’t resist sharing a little of the atmosphere.

Last night I experienced the summer's midnight twilight. It arrives, gets stuck, and shimmers –- on hold – until somewhere in the wee morning hours it must get overtaken by the sunset. Magic. A half-moon hung over the harbor and laid out a diamond path of light, just for extra effect. This came after an astonishing nighttime concert (10:15pm. It was one of 22 concerts being offered day and night during the six days of the festival. Leif Ove Andsnes and violist Lars Anders Tomter are co-directors, and the theme they’ve given it this year is Playful!
They are aiming at finding music that evokes “Joy over the superhumanity of machines … A world of adventure; of mechanics, play and invention.” So Haydn, Antheil, Ives and Ligeti all work together to transform Risør. There will even be a sampling expert(Jan Bang)who will be transforming Haydn (and the Orion Quartet) with electronics.

It is a delicious shock to walk up the little hill to Risor’s white-spired church
and find two 9-foot German Steinways being installed at the front

on which Marc-André Hamelin and Leif Ove Andsnes are rehearsing Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, arranged by the composer for one piano, and further colored and nuanced for two pianos by the pianists ...

[movie clip here]

And for a little taste of the marvelously quirky programming that pays such joyous attention to the thrill of machines, toys, humans and life, tonight's concert
features Leroy Anderson's 1950 entertainment "The Typewriter", Haydn's Symphony 101, Antheil's Death of the Machines, Beethoven's Grosse Fuge, and Ligeti's Poème Symphonique for 100 metronomes.

Please keep checking back -- I'll be writing more whenever I can.

Taylor-made rain ...

2008-02-07T20:56:00.000-05:00

One day years ago, when my youngest daughter was still small and wide-eyed, we were driving through the sunlit pine trees of Dover, Massachusetts. Strapped into the back seat, she heard Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun on the radio. With the windows open and the summer light filtering through the cedars, she took it all in with the enviable, unburdened tenderness that allows children to feel things so completely ...
"Mama, look ... the music matches the day!" And I could feel the best part of my brain locking that moment away like some profoundly precious 10-second film.

My commute now is shorter and less picturesque. For some weird reason, I've begun snapping pictures, randomly, out my window, while driving. I'm really not sure what I'm after, but I have noticed that combined with some random radio tune-ins, there have been some interesting matches.

Cecil Taylor's wildly unpredictable pianism, for example, with its high-velocity clusters and sudden lyricisms soaked my commute yesterday. I was in love that day with the teasing that he did -- the tune and harmonic changes buried under a barrage of mood-swings. Yet they were still there, those initial structures. I turned to my right and snapped a random shot that now seems to mirror the Taylor effect.

Another day, after a wind-swept storm of snow that left not a single, tiny twig untouched, I drove down Commonwealth Avenue under a bright blue sky. I opened my window at a stop sign and snapped. I think there was no music this time, but seeing the photo now, I wish I could say I'd been up to my seatbelt in Bach ...

2007-04-28T12:53:00.000-04:00

Since 2000, his charitable foundation has provided vaccinations for nearly 2 million children across the Russian Federation, protecting them against mumps, measles, rubella and hepatitis B. His work with these kids symbolizes all that is great about the Russian soul. For that reason, Russians love him — everyone knows him. You go to a remote village, they know of him. He reaches far beyond the music world.
--Maxim Vengerov on Rostropovich

Soho the Dog has the usual blogeloquence, emphasizing Rostropovich's deep and sophisticated talent for accompanying, with Mussorgsky provided as luminous proof.

Genius Out of Context

2007-04-08T12:36:00.000-04:00

"I'm surprised at the number of people who don't pay attention at all, as if I'm invisible. Because, you know what? I'm makin' a lot of noise!"
--Joshua Bell, on playing at rush hour at the l'Enfant Plaza metro station in D.C.

Thanks to Justin Davidson over at The Rest is Noise for linking to this Washington Post Story.

Back Bay's Bonus Twilight Hour ...

2007-03-11T21:41:00.000-04:00

This was a sweet city evening with unnaturally long 6:30 shadows and 50 heartwarming degrees. Result: Spring fever with a nice little twist of strangeness.

I'd just heard pianist Eric Sedgwick play at First Church Boston (formerly First and Second Church). Eric is an astonishingly gifted graduate student at the Manhattan School of Music. I was so grateful that he'd done Leon Kirchner's first piano sonata, written in 1948 when the composer was only 28. Sedgwick grabbed the controls and unleashed the thing, finding all of its luminous crevices and dangerous corners. He also found its lyricism and quick wit. I love this music. At 88, Kirchner is still inspired. Sedgwick got it right.

When I stepped out, it was Twilight Savings Time, and the surprise of the softness of the air, and the weird length of my shadow on these undulating, heel-devouring brick sidewalks gave me spring fever. It started me on a dizzying walk that vacillated deliciously between Memory Lane and Avenue of the Future ...
Good Old Boston.
I'm still here.

The astonishing J. Haguttohamenazy

2007-03-04T11:59:00.000-05:00

And as for the pianist Joyce Hatto, I'm looking forward to doing what I've not yet been able to do -- listen to an honest recording, in which she/they are uncompromised. And I'll listen with real compassion.
Jeremy Denk gets the award for the strangest post on Hatto. And don't miss Matthew Guerrieri's eloquence either.

(P.S. The kindergartner in me used Vladimir Ashkenazy's right shoulder and ear; Hatto's hair and nose; a slice of the face of Horacio Gutiérez; and the hands of Marc-André Hamelin, all of whom had their work, in part or in complete performances, used by W.H. Barrington-Coupe in his wife's recordings.)

(P.P.S. Here's a report by the excellent Alex Gallafent of PRI's "The World" which includes interview clips with retired Boston Globe critic Richard Dyer, and a couple of smaller points made by yours truly.)

Talking to Osvaldo

2007-02-12T21:15:00.000-05:00

An interview with Osvaldo Golijov, who's just claimed a couple of Grammy awards for his opera Ainadamar.

Sweet, Synchronized Dream

2007-01-14T19:13:00.000-05:00

I happened upon the enchantment below after reading Jessica Duchen's article in the Independent about the joys and hazards of YouTube.
I am so fond of Debussy's warm observance of the lives of children. I love the pieces that are musical mirrors of children's secret and open-hearted worlds. He captures essence of that sweet quickness that moves them from universe to universe when they are deeply absorbed ... that quick and determined little dance they do that melts the heart with an admiring kind of love.

This little film captures the dance, too. It includes three of the pieces from the Children's Corner Suite, dedicated to Debussy's little daughter Claude-Emma (Chouchou). The dance is captured through a layering of great minds:
Emile Vuillermoz, music critic, biographer of Debussy and friend and student of Ravel. He wrote Musiques d' Aujourd'hui (Music of Today, 1923), Histoire de la Musique (History of Music: 1949), Claude Debussy (1957), and Gabriel Fauré (1960); filmmaker Marcel L'Herbier; pianist Alfred Cortot and Debussy. It's a recipe for intelligent magic.

Here it is.

Vuillermoz, by the way, was the kind of critic who could write this way: (here he's describing the opening of Debussy's Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun): "The alternation of binary and ternary divisions of the eighth notes, the sly feints made by the three pauses, soften the phrase so much, render it so fluid, that it escapes all arithmetical rigors. It floats between heaven and earth like a Gregorian chant; it glides over signposts marking traditional divisions; it slips so furtively between various keys that it frees itself effortlessly from their grasp, and one must await the first appearance of a harmonic underpinning before the melody takes graceful leave of this causal atonality." (Emile Vuillermoz 1957)

Debussy with his daughter Claude-Emma (Chouchou).

Discs, nerves and rubbers ...

2007-01-12T20:46:00.000-05:00

While I'm stuck at home, ever-so-patiently waiting for a disc in my neck to fall out of love with a nerve in my arm (they should never have met), I see I've arrived at the time of night when I am simultaneously missing two great concerts. One of them is a little far away ... Marc-André Hamelin in Philly playing Villa-Lobos's ecstatic nerve-pinch, the inexplicable portrait of Arthur Rubinstein that Villa-Lobos called "Rudepoêma". Hamelin's performance leaves you gasping ...

The other concert is maddeningly close. Hilary Hahn, 15 minutes away at New England Conservatory's gorgeous Jordan Hall. I noticed on the Bank of America Celebrity Series blog (one of my faves) that she has a blog of her own. Her "itty-bitty news" items brought me a smile. This one, for example:

"Maestro Has a Request"

Some moments are the stuff of comedy routines. This is a scene from a recent rehearsal, exactly as it happened. The conductor was European, the orchestra of British descent.

"Does anyone have a rubber?" the maestro asked the orchestra, pencil in hand.

A titter passed among the musicians. Realizing his double-entendre, the conductor turned crimson, ruffling his hair in an embarrassed gesture.

The principal violist located a large white eraser and handed it over. The conductor rubbed out an old pencil marking, then returned the eraser. A quip was made about sharing a rubber, getting it back used.

A minute later, the eraser was borrowed again, and again returned.

The next time an eraser was needed, the principal violist gave the conductor a small, flat, white packet with serrated edges and a distinct shape inside. A surprised chuckle escaped the orchestra. The maestro shook his head, laughed, and held it up for all to see. He hesitated – and then, in one decisive motion, pocketed the package.

The joke was complete. Rehearsal continued as usual.

Also on Hilary's site
a sweet
note about the loss of
this little friend:

Well, here at home I'll quietly applaud all of the heroic, touring musicians who brighten our lives, while they live theirs, so unimaginably full of stresses and obstacles. And, very often, loneliness. Here's hoping for lots of gasping tonight, and riotous applause. And lots and lots of encores.

I'd like to buy a vowel, please ...

2007-01-11T11:16:00.000-05:00

The principal carrier of [Edwin Fischer's] expressiveness was his marvellously full, floating tone, which retained its roundness even at climactic, explosive moments, and remained singing and sustained in the most unbelievable pianissimo. (In conversation, Fischer once compared piano tone to the sound of the vowels. He told me that in present-day musical practice the a and o are neglected in favour of the e and i. The glaring and shrill triumphs over the lofty and sonorous, technique over the sense of wonder. Are not ah! and oh! the sounds of wonder?) By bringing the middle parts to life, Fischer gave his chord-playing an inward radiance, and his cantabile fulfilled Beethoven's wish: 'From the heart -- may it go to the heart.'

From Musical Thoughts and Afterthoughts, by Alfred Brendel, Published by Noonday Press

Here's what the ah! in Fischer's Bah!ch sounds like ...

Seeing Paris

2006-12-26T06:44:00.000-05:00

I'm just back from another overwhelming visit to Paris, where my daughter is spending her junior year. Paris startled me, seduced me, soothed me, reduced me to tears. I saw it deepening in Alexandra's eyes. In the little time I had, I could see it bringing her into her newest state of being. She inhabits the place, and it inhabits her.

With my little camera I tried to find a new angle on that wonderful old feat of astonishing organization:

And I tried to capture Alexandra:

We found, thanks to a precious friend, an astonishing feat of disorganization called Un Regard Moderne, a shadowy little bookstore that pulls its delighted victims into an old Paris wall and swallows them completely.

2006-10-23T21:58:00.000-04:00

Unbelievably, it's taken until now to get the juicy Boston arts blog of Geoff Edgers on the blog roll. Sorry for the delay.

Fallen

2006-10-14T18:37:00.000-04:00

Found this one lying quietly on Commonwealth Avenue.

Good Vibrations

2006-10-14T13:57:00.000-04:00

If Debussy's insistence that you get your piano to sound like it has no hammers is a little bit too taxing an illusion to maintain, maybe it's easier to consider the sweet, flexible nature of those hammers, and the profoundly magical result that comes from their vibrations. R. Wormleighton, Ph.D. writes about tone in his paper "The Fundamentals of Piano-Playing", attempting to disprove the 1934 conclusions of Hart, Fuller (no relation) and Lusby, who claimed that the pianist can control only hammer velocity -- that's it, nothing else -- and that control of tone is an illusion. Their big mistake, he says, lies in the assumption of the rigidity of the hammer.
Wormleighton describes the perceptual importance of the sound and nature of the attack (the "prompt sound"):

A string prefers to vibrate at its own natural frequencies, or harmonics, which are determined by the length, weight and tension of the string. When vibrating at these frequencies, the energy is dissipated very slowly and the sound lasts a long time. If other frequencies are imposed on the string, however, the energy in those frequencies disappears quickly as soon as the driving force is removed.
(my italics)

When a piano key is depressed, the energy is transmitted to hammer-and-arm and then, when the string is struck, from hammer to string. The flaw in [Hart, Fuller and Lusby's] simplistic model is the assumption that all the energy in the hammer is the kinetic energy of its forward motion. This would only be true if hammer-and-arm were a rigid body. But because it is quite flexible, depression of the key not only throws the hammer forward, but causes it to vibrate. And the vibrations are at the natural frequencies of hammer-and-arm, which differ from those of the string. When the hammer strikes the string, two things happen: the kinetic energy of the forward movement is translated into the natural frequencies of the string; the vibrating hammer imposes its own extraneous frequencies on the string for the 6 or 7 milliseconds of contact. Hence the prompt sound consists of both natural and imposed frequencies: as soon as contact is broken, the latter quickly disappear and only the former remain. The prompt sound, which lasts for the first one or two hundredths of a second, contains the harsh dissonant frequencies; the after sound consists only of the natural string frequencies.

A sound is pleasing and musical when it is dominated by the lower harmonics of the note and discordant frequencies are weak. Thus the pianist wants to maximize the energy in the natural frequencies, i.e. the kinetic energy of the forward motion, and minimize the vibrational energy that produces the discordant frequencies in the prompt sound. The relative strengths of the natural frequencies are determined by the structure of the piano. But the division of energy between forward motion and hammer vibration can be controlled by the pianist. A key that is hit from above will jar hammer-and-arm into strong vibrations but, if the key is accelerated smoothly, vibrations are minimal, and so are the discordant frequencies in the prompt sound. The key to tone control thus lies in the way the key is depressed and the hammer is accelerated.

The above theory explains the effect of the mis-named soft pedal, which primarily affects tone rather than loudness. Except in the bottom octave, each note has two or three strings. When the action is shifted by the soft pedal, one of the strings is not contacted by the hammer. The hammer imposes its own frequencies on one or two, but not all of the strings and less prompt sound is produced. The unstruck string vibrates sympathetically only at its natural frequencies, reinforcing the after sound. Less prompt sound, more after sound, sweeter tone.

The theory provides a plausible explanation of how tone can be affected by the pianist, but has not been fully verified experimentally. No one, to my knowledge, has recorded the vibrations of the hammer.

Oh, but all the science is blinding, isn't it ... I'll have to assume that somewhere in that paper is talk about all the sympathetic singing and whispering ... all the distancing and shadowing ... all the magic that happens when you put the pedal down ... not to mention when you set the dampers to kissing and teasing the strings ....

Anyway, it's October in New England, and the kitchen window is overcome with blueness and sunlight. And the dry sweet air touches my face in such a way that I'm overcome, too. Autumn always prompts a strange thrill of melancholy.

Perfect Art

2006-08-09T21:04:00.000-04:00

Tatum.

Thumbs, Well-Armed Men and Generous Friends

2006-08-06T12:50:00.000-04:00

An immensely generous friend recently offered me some bound copies of manuscripts by Beethoven, Brahms and Chopin. I've been spending time with the ink spills (Beethoven Op. 101),

and the corrections (Chopin F-Major Ballade),

and the name changes (Brahms E-Major "Intermezzo" Op. 116 No. 4).

(Click on any of these photos for a bigger look.)

Beethoven sent a letter about his piano sonata Op. 101 to the Viennese publisher Sigmund Anton Steiner in 1816:

As regards a new sonata for pianoforte solo, all that need happen is for sixty well-armed men [i.e. gold ducats] to present themselves and it can be produced forthwith.

(Of course, it wasn't finished yet.)

I find real comfort in seeing the direct, inky result of Beethoven's thinking. In some ways it seems to offer proof of the brilliance and the absurdity of our system of musical notation.

The trademark, timeless, out-of-body thrill that comes when Beethoven writes a series of hovering trills seems to have an appropriate look in his hand:

While a publication can seem to take the thrill and imprison it:

When Brahms finished his exquisite set of Fantasies, Op. 116, he sent a copyist's manuscript to his trusted friend Clara Schumann. The E-minor Intermezzo begins this way:

The opening upbeat forces the thumbs to interlock, the one crossing over the other.
Brahms wrote an optional, bracketed fingering in his manuscript that kept the player's thumbs from getting entangled:

Along with the manuscript, Brahms wrote to Clara:

In the little piece in E minor it is probably best if you always take the sixth eighth-note as indicated by the bracket on the upbeat.

Clara wrote back:

First of all, my thanks for the marvelously original piano pieces, with which I am now fully acquainted. But I would not wish to hear the E minor piece with the small notes as the interlocking of the hands has a charm all its own, and indeed produces a completely different sound!

I'm sure Brahms must have caught the wisdom in his friend's words.

Where would any of us be without our generous friends?

Pliable's Path

2006-07-31T22:58:00.000-04:00

Pliable has developed such elegant blogging chops that what he delivers is always a rich and sensory experience. A recent post takes the fast lane on a bizarre route that begins with Condolleeza Rice scowling at Brahms, and moves through Hitler, Hanfstaengl and Poulenc ... and then finishes with the voice of Paul Eluard himself, reading his poem "Liberté". Virtuosic blogging. Always an essential read.

Gloucester, Massachusetts

2006-07-27T09:38:00.000-04:00

More Recent Shivers ...

2006-07-22T21:15:00.000-04:00

Best "God-I-love-young-musicians" shiver:
Yesterday, the Pacifica Quartet flooded WGBH's Studio One with their vibrant, highly charged playing. And as we talked, I had the quartet's eight exuberant eyes to wonder at ... all of them sparkling at me with an almost disarming sense of playful assuredness. Young players of this caliber always give me the most warm-hearted shivers, and leave me with a sense that the the great string quartets written long ago, and those still unwritten, are in really, really good hands.

The Pacifica played Mozart's "Dissonant" Quartet, and then the profoundly moving Shostakovich 8th. My favorite remark came in response to my asking this:
"It's the Mozart year ... we're all thinking so hard about him, it wouldn't surprise me if we somehow collectively made him reappear. Were he to walk in now and catch you rehearsing, what would you need to ask him?"

Simin Ginatra:
"I think I'd tell him not to waste his time on us ... just please go write some more music."

Watch WGBH's webcast page over the next couple of weeks for their live performance and interview.

Most recent Schubert shiver:
Many times I have broadcast the luminous and delicious recordings of the Duo Tal and Groethuysen. And I've always reveled in their golden sound and absolute oneness of mind and heart. But last week, the shivers came in little packages (little Schubert packages): Schubert's Deutscher with Two Trios and Two Ländler D.618,
Four Ländler D.814 and the strangely heartbreaking little March for Children in G major, D.928. Yaara Tal was born in Tel Aviv and Andreas Groethuysen in Munich. Combined, they are pure magic. They play on a Fazioli piano for reasons described at some length in the CD booklet.
What a nice present the complete boxed set of Schubert's four-hand piano music would make ...

QWERTY

2006-07-16T09:36:00.000-04:00

I fell strangely in love with typewriters when I was in high school. I even became quick enough that our teacher challenged me to a lunchtime duel. (She won.)

And now I find that Boston has its own typewriter orchestra.
Their QWERTY waltz goes like this.
Aren't you jealous of this town?

Back

2006-07-15T20:55:00.000-04:00

A blog, I can tell you, will whisper and scratch at you, should you neglect it for too many months ...

But a recent comment, the result of a cyber-stumble, has jostled me back to the sphere. Thanks to Paul for the note.

Jeremy Denk's recent posts (especially his funny encounters with frogs) make me think that he's lucky enough to have created a kind of living notebook where he can unburden his unceasingly inventive and associative mind. Nomadic pianists seem required to invent their secondary worlds of intrigue. And especially summer nomads in "FestivaLand" as he calls it, ("a performance, a reception, and an outgoing flight") where problems come up, and there's no time to debate or resolve them. He's now onto the subject which always seems to reject normal vocabulary -- the issue of "leaving a piece alone" ... letting it speak for itself .... Someone in FestivaLand had started in with the "just play it, don't interpret it" line of musical reasoning, prompting Jeremy to blog his heart out ("In my opinion, music doesn't want to be left alone.")

And this brings up the inevitable, somehow inane, discussion of where the player belongs in all the abstract layering of things: the composer's idea; the ideas in the player that the composer's idea inevitably must evoke; the arguable markings that plague the score; the trickery that can come with the visual display (or lack of it) that the player engages in; the ideas that are evoked in the listener's mind, which are born in part because of the player, who has played with his own ideas working urgently in his heart and mind (I hope) ... ideas that have been evoked by the composer's original idea, much of which is, in the end, up for deliciously abstract speculation.

There is a private realm within a musician. It's vast. It's not to be described. And it comes to life within the phrases (the ideas, the statements, the utterances, the music) of the composer. This realm is vital ... it must remain turned on. The door to it should never close. I suspect it's the same realm from which poetry is born.
Far beyond associative, it is a deep and fertile place in the imagination that connects us directly to music. Its power gives light and air and gravity and sensation and despair and shadow -- and all that's privately the most human of things -- to every phrase that a real musician really plays.

And great music invariably lights up this place in the heart/mind/imagination, so that the music becomes alive and develops a deeply satisfying sense of color, achingly human for the player, and mysteriously touching even for the listener who has never heard it before.

When the subject of "interpreting" and not mucking around with the score comes up ... when a listener makes conversation by implying that too many people "do too much" with the music, it brings all this up.

It's a hard conversation.
But play anything -- any phrase ... even just two consecutive notes ... with every marking intact, but without access to the poetic realm, and there is a dry and two-dimensional result that can feel downright offensive. Mostly, it's sad.

Today when I was teaching, I noticed that months ago I'd penciled in to the top of one of the pages of my student's Schubert sonata "Lorraine Hunt Lieberson -- Handel arias" ...

My heart skipped a beat. She was someone so completely connected to the poetic realm that not a single soul seemed to miss out.

I had wanted my student to be inspired by her. To find a way to be hugely communicative, even when the marking is pp.
Or better,
because the marking is pp.

Pulitzer in mano!

2006-04-17T23:07:00.000-04:00

This early manuscript hasn't left my piano since it was given to me by its composer Yehudi Wyner in February 2005. It was just before pianist Robert Levin and the Boston Symphony Orchestra gave the premiere under conductor Robert Spano. I was so deeply touched, and I've lived with the score as an inspiring part of my daily landscape.

Just hours ago, it was announced that Yehudi will be awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize for this piece.

And I'm relishing this ecstatic feeling that the world is back to spinning as it should.

The concerto is delicious. It's charged. And it's propulsive and human .. witty, vital and warm. It glistens.

The composer's note from Schirmer:
The idea for a piano concerto for the Boston Symphony was instigated by Robert Levin, the great Mozart scholar and pianist. The idea was evidently embraced by BSO Artistic Administrator Tony Fogg and supported by Music Director James Levine.

Much of the concerto was composed during the summer of 2004 at the American Academy in Rome in a secluded studio hidden within the Academy walls. While much of the composing took place far from home, the concerto comes out as a particularly "American" piece, shot through with vernacular elements. As in many of my compositions, simple, familiar musical ideas are the starting point. A shape, a melodic fragment, a rhythm, a chord, a texture, or a sonority may ignite the appetite for exploration. How such simple insignificant things can be altered, elaborated, extended, and combined becomes the exciting challenge of composition. I also want the finished work to breathe in a natural way, to progress spontaneously, organically, moving toward a transformation of the musical substance in ways unimaginable to me when I began the journey. Transformation is the goal, with the intention of achieving an altered state of perception and exposure that I am otherwise unable to achieve.

"Chiavi in mano" - the title of the piano concerto - is the mantra used by automobile salesmen and realtors in Italy: Buy the house or the car and the keys are yours. But the more pertinent reason for the title is the fact that the piano writing is designed to fall "under the hand" and no matter how difficult it may be, it remains physically comfortable and devoid of stress. In other words: "Keys in hand."

--Yehudi Wyner, December 13, 2004

My infinite heartfelt and admiring thoughts go to this genuine and brilliant man.

There is an interview which I did with Yehudi and Robert about the concerto and much more here

Congratulations, Yehudi!
With much, much love.

Taming the lascivious sarabande ...

2006-04-04T22:04:00.000-04:00

I've recently spent time visiting again with the G Major French Suite of Bach. Even after playing it in concert, the mysteries of its songful Sarabande continue to tickle me and draw me back, back, back to the piano. On certain days it is unearthly -- a perfect, weightless dream. On other days, its shadows and crevices become essential. It gets weighty and human, and I bend it, perhaps, where it shouldn't be bent ...
These different lights seem to change the music every day. It can feel different every time I touch it.
Ah, Bach anguish.
The other day I was lying on my living room floor (I'm not sure why) and there on a very low little bookshelf was Meredith Little and Natalie Jenne's book Dance and the Music of J.S.Bach.
Chapter 7 tracks the "tawdry" history of the Sarabande. From Spanish origins, it arrived in Italy as an exotic and tempestuous dance with fiery variations. Opponents wrote passionately against its lasciviousness.
The French are said to have "tamed" the thing, giving it order and balance. But the two authors spend time considering the teasing passion behind all that balance by citing a recently discovered description written in the 1600's of a solo dancer seducing a crowd with his sarabande:

At first he danced with a totally charming grace, with a serious and circumspect air, with an equal and slow rhythm, and with such a noble, beautiful, free and easy carriage that he had all the majesty of a king, and inspired as much respect as he gave pleasure.

Sometimes he would glide imperceptibly, with no apparent movement of his feet and legs, and seemed to slide rather than step. Sometimes, with the most beautiful timing in the world, he would remain suspended, immobile, and half leaning to the side with one foot in the air; and then, compensating for the rhythmic unit that had gone by, with another more precipitous unit he would almost fly, so rapid was his motion.

Sometimes, for the pleasure of everyone present, he would turn to the right, and sometimes he would turn to the left; and when he reached the very middle of the empty floor, he would pirouette so quickly that the eye could not follow.

Now and then he would let a whole rhythmic unit go by, moving no more than a statue, and then, setting off like an arrow, he would be at the other end of the room before anyone had time to realize that he had departed.

But all this was nothing compared to what was observed when this gallant began to express the emotions of his soul through the motions of his body, and reveal them in his face, his eyes, his steps and all his actions.

Sometimes he would cast languid and passionate glances throughout a slow and languid rhythmic unit; and then, as though weary of being obliging, he would avert his eyes, as if he wished to hide his passion; and, with a more precipitous motion, would snatch away the gift he had tendered.

Now and then he would express anger and spite with an impetuous and turbulent rhythmic unit; and then, evoking a sweeter passion by more moderate motions, he would sigh, swoon, let his eyes wander languidly; and certain sinuous movements of the arms and body, nonchalant, disjointed and passionate, made him appear so admirable and so charming that throughout this enchanting dance he won as many hearts as he attracted spectators.

"If you were to play me a tune ..."

2006-02-19T09:30:00.000-05:00

I've rediscovered on our WGBH website a conversation with pianist George Shearing that has me all stirred up. This is the kind of casual and revelatory talking, constantly punctuated by spontaneous playing, that makes me love the radio. I hope you'll take some time to go here.
Then poke around for more astonishments ... Golijov, Machover, Piston, Copland -- and don't miss Lawrence Rosenwald reading some of Emerson's most transcendentally powerful lines and then handing off to members of the Triple Helix Piano Trio, who find similar transcendence in Charles Ives.
Delicious.

Is my disgust showing?

2005-12-16T13:02:00.000-05:00

A computer has been used to decipher the enigmatic smile of Leonardo da Vinci's Mona Lisa, concluding that she was mainly happy.

The painting was analysed by a University of Amsterdam computer using "emotion recognition" software.

It concluded that the subject was 83% happy, 9% disgusted, 6% fearful and 2% angry, New Scientist magazine was told.

From the BBC. The story is here.

Recent shivers ...

2005-11-21T21:17:00.000-05:00

Art thrives on metaphysical ideas, which I believe are as old as human consciousness. A great work of art, reflecting the powerful intellect and the compelling imagination of its creator, elicits from us a metaphysical shiver as it confronts us with a vision of ultimate reality.

--Stanislaw Skrowaczewski

Over the past couple of weeks, I've had some very good shivers.

Most profound shiver:
November 13th, Jordan Hall, New England Conservatory of Music in Boston

Pianist Gabriel Chodos played Schubert's A Major Sonata, D.959. I studied with him as a graduate student, and I tried to talk myself into feeling prepared for the heartbreak I knew was coming in the Andantino. When it came, everything changed. Stunned hush. We were all drawn in to Schubert's painful rocking ... the whole building itself fell into that relentless rocking. Something in Schubert exposes the truth about loss. The evaporation of love. Schubert doesn't get easier to take with age. And when this movement is right, it can undo me. And things get worse at that exquisite moment when the sadness is reduced to one single, luminous thread of sound -- the rocking finishes and there we all are, dangling high above God-knows-what realms of the heart, hanging on to one single homeless voice (and following it as if we'd never, ever heard it before)... until the madness sets in. Schubert writes the truth about madness. I wished it would end, and I wished it would never end. This was a metaphysical shiver.

Most astonished shiver:
November 7, Mechanics Hall, Worcester, Massachusetts. The Worcester Music Festival.

Hearing the 29-year-old French violinist Renaud Capuçon. I stood with brilliant sound engineer Antonio Oliart dead center in the first balcony at the back of Mechanics Hall, to listen to some of the rehearsal an hour before the program. Korngold Violin Concerto (as lush as it gets). Dennis Russell Davies, conducting the Bruckner Orchestra Linz. When Capuçon drew his bow, the place virtually blossomed with a sweetness and richness of sound ... we both exhaled audibly. Gorgeous. Renaud plays the violin that Isaac Stern played for fifty years, and he told me that it makes him feel as if he has "different shoulders." This was a good-hearted shiver.

Most enigmatic shiver:
Friday, November 18th, The Regattabar, Cambridge Massachusetts

Front row table to witness a force unlike any I've heard before. Patricia Barber reaches into strange and artful territories with her voice. Her pianism is extraordinary. She is uncompromising -- a perfectionist with a nearly compulsive need to speak the truth. She never stops moving. She strikes bizarre open-mouthed poses. Her hands stab at the air, rub themselves with a kind of madness, then stir up a magic on (and in) the piano. She sets songs to the poetry of Verlaine. She is not to be missed. A mysterious and baffling shiver.

"The wings of one's conception ..."

2005-11-12T17:21:00.000-05:00

Back to the 'sphere from God-knows-where ...
smiling about Jeremy Denk's encounter with those who overhear him practicing Berg.

There's healthy blogger-anxiety over the New York Times article conjecturing about the health of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson. Vilaine Fille, Alex Ross and Steve Smith have touched on the tension between musicians and the media.

I have moved from address to address a number of times, and I carry with me a number of boxes of books. I've neglected so many of them that should I one day fall completely out of sanity, they will, I'm sure of it, plot a brutal and breathless attack on me ... I sometimes think I've heard them whispering about it already.
I'll occasionally, to ease the ache, violate them with random openings (they must hate this).

One book which I've dragged along from house to house for decades yields marvels with every violation. Written by Agatha Fassett, it is a poetic account of Béla Bartók's American years -- the last five of his life. The Naked Face of Genius is a 1958 publication of Houghton Mifflin:

These last five years, as they slowly unfolded before me, attained in an unrelenting cycle the roundness of a lifetime, as massive and preordained as a Greek tragedy. And his wife Ditta, linked in the same chain of circumstances, inevitably shared in her own way the anguish of Bartók's destiny.
Bartók remained permanently lonely here, since he was not the kind to transplant well, and every step was made harder -- for although he did not know it, soon after he arrived here the seed of his fatal illness, leukemia, was within him, and wherever he went he was followed by the doom of his tightly numbered years.

She remembes Bartók's description of his first public appearance as a nine-year-old pianist:

"It seems to me that I always played the piano, and always seriously ... that I always dug up fragments of music I considered my own; and it was never anything else but an intensely consuming occupation ...
"What I remember most distinctly from that occasion is the awareness I had of being confined within certain uncomfortable boundaries, and how I tried to console myself with the thought that this was just a temporary condition, an obstacle caused by my limited knowledge, and that it only rested within myself to break through these boundaries into a greater freedom. And the desire to do so filled me with an impatience so unbearable that it was almost physical pain.
"Nothing could speak more eloquently of my innocence at this time than the belief that I could make my boundaries disappear. For only much later comes the discovery that one remains confined, to a lesser or greater degree, forever, and the wings of one's conception are always clipped."

Fassett remembers her walks with Bartók through the Vermont countryside. He would poke at cow dung, digging into it with his walking stick:

"There is life in this dried-up mound of dung," Bartók would say. "There is life feeding on this dead heap." And he would crumble it apart with his cane. "You see," he would say, scrutinizing it intently, "how the worms and bugs are working busily helping themselves to whatever the need, making little tunnels and passages, and then soil enters, bringing with it stray seeds. Soon pale shoots of grass will appear, and life will complete its cycle, teeming within this lump of death. Once in a mound like this I found a tiny shoot of an apple tree growing, springing up with so much confidence -- a long time ago, in Hungary. It could be bearing fruit by now, but more likely its life was crushed out almost as soon as it started, for Nature takes life as abundantly as she gives it."

The author tells story after impossibly poignant story, with genuine, tactile detail:

... Bartók, huddled in his old flannel robe, reminded me of a chestnut vendor bending over his tiny stove. He would be working on his Romanian collection, spread all around the room, and he needed only a glance at these single pages to place each one on the pile where it belonged. Every featherlike sheet added still one more link to the complicated system of classification, where every small variation of rhythmical pattern played a part in revealing relationships between peoples and places.
Perhaps for Bartók these notes, like pressed flowers in an album, still retained traces of their original fragrance, potent enough to draw him back to the land where he first found them and releasing him from the shadows of the room where he sat.

The story of Bartók and Ditta playing with Fritz Reiner and the New York Philharmonic is astonishing. The first performance of the Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra is described by the author who, from the audience, sensed that Bartók suddenly somehow broke away from the rest of the musicians onstage ... he was playing something entirely unknown to her, "something that had an immediate and bright existence of its own but still seemed an integral part, inseparable from the rest."

She remembers the conductor's reaction after the performance:

"What on earth came over you, Béla?" Reiner said in a voice that was cold, but somehow compassionate too. "How could you endanger everything, risking disaster for a momentary whim? Didn't you realize what an impossible task it was, trying to follow you through your wanderings? For all of us, not to mention Ditta!"
Bartók looked up at Reiner and did not say anything, and seemed to remain detached and undisturbed.
He held his brooding silence in the taxi on the way to Riverdale, and we were already going up the hill when he sat up straight and turned to Ditta.
"The tympanist," he said, "the tympanist is the one who started everything. He played a wrong note, suddenly giving me an idea that I had to try out, and follow through all the way, right then. I could not help it -- there was nothing else for me to do."

I'll either hyperventilate, or read the whole thing ... Look, I've gone and typed a good chunk of it already ...

Piano Trips

2005-10-14T20:54:00.000-04:00

Bart Collins offers the usual tour of fascinating piano destinations on his Well-Tempered Blog, including a trip to Maison Erard, and a look at this 1803 piano of Beethoven's, thanks to a link to Stephen Birkett's web page. There you'll find the bright, near-giddy sound of an 1822 Erard. And Bart gets you to the Chopin Competition, mp3 breast implants, and Beethoven's newly unearthed four-hand manuscript of the Grosse Fuge ...

It often happens that I'll be stunned by music while doing the broadcaster's dance (taking transmitter readings, signing logs, searching for that pithy segue)... Today pianist Randall Hodgkinson's resonant and genuine way with the first three Moments Musicaux of Schubert drew me to a place far, far, far from the relentless clock (the one that wags its merciless finger at every soul who sits in front of a microphone) ...
The thing to do when such a sweet, inspired moment arrives is to crank up the studio speakers and get the ON-AIR light glowing at every door ... so no one dares to interrupt.

The Good Doctor

2005-10-11T21:43:00.000-04:00

"Any musical value heard [in the cylinder recording] can be charitably described as the product of a pathological imagination."

This is musicologist Gregor Benko's remark about the nearly impenetrable noise on a very famous recording of Johannes Brahms playing the piano in 1889 at the home of Dr. Richard Fellinger in Vienna. Thomas Edison was sending emissaries to record the voices of famous people for use as advertisements. This wax cylinder was made for Edison by Theo Wangemann. Scholars have strained to analyze the rhythmic nuances of the recording's too-few measures of the 1879 arrangement of the first Hungarian Dance, and part of a paraphrase of Strauss's "Libelle". And many a lover of Brahms has gleefully imitated the introduction at the start of the cylinder:

"I am Dr. Brahms ... Johannes Brahms."

What a surprise! A strangely startling voice from the great, autumnal philosopher himself ...

But, perhaps not.

"The spoken text at the start of the cylinder recording has been wrongly attributed as belonging to Brahms. Numerous writers, scholars and amateurs alike, have presumed that Brahms introduces himself with the words "I am Doctor Brahms, Johannes Brahms". However a number of factors raise serious doubts as to who is speaking. The only mention of the recording by someone who was present (in the published memoires of Fellinger's son) states that Brahms was introduced. Considering the time between the announcement and the start of the music it seems improbable that the same person could segue from speech to playing so quickly particularly given the technological limitations.
The denoised excerpts reveals enough of the speech to suggest that the speaker (probably Wangemann) introduces Brahms as follows:

"...Dezember Achtzehnhundertachtundneunzig. Haus von Herrn Doktor Fellinger, bei mir ist Doktor Brahms, Johannes Brahms".

("...December Eighteen Hundred Eighty Nine. House of Mr. Fellinger, with me is Doctor Brahms, Johannes Brahms.")

Read about the playing and the talking, and the man who has painstakingly denoised the cylinder here.

Dreamhouse

2005-09-24T21:47:00.000-04:00

Over the past three years, he has hosted a small series of concerts at his home, which have featured acquaintances. "I have a lot of friends who are artists and who deserve to be heard, and I wanted to showcase them here," he says. His most recent performance, in April, featured a concert pianist-friend from Japan. The show, which drew around 65 people, began with the pianos on the first floor, with the pianist and audience working their way up to the second in order to match the pieces to the pianos best-suited for them.
--excerpted from The Boston Globe

Don't miss Wqan Ang's Boston Globe photos of a Boston psychologist's home, filled to overflowing with pianos.

P.S. I know he works with children ... but if he were my psychologist, I'd be cured.

A few chords short ...

2005-09-20T21:28:00.000-04:00

I felt so behind in my preparation, anxiety set in with its cousin, insomnia. I began pathological bouts of list-making — the Chopin group, the Schumann group, the 21st-century music, the recital program, the lecture-recital. In the middle of telephone chats, I was apt to recite my columns to the vague discomfort of friends. For me it had become a ritual for the calming of runaway nerves.

So, naturally, just as I’m a few chords short of entering Bellevue for observation, the telephone rings and a conductor speaks. As any pianist knows, a conductor’s call has a special ring. The conversation: Do I know the Beethoven Third, can I play it in a month, we’ll speak again on his return from Europe, so yes, it’s a go. A few moments of pure elation. The anticipation of a concerto with orchestra is a sweet one. It gets the inner metronome beating faster. The Beethoven C minor concerto with a good chamber orchestra! Then panic. On top of everything else, I now need to reconnect with a great work and bring it to life as swiftly as possible.

Part of a diary entry and one of many articles that pianist Beth Levin has contributed to the online music review La Folia. In Beth's playing, her honesty, tenderness and fierce tehnique can stop your breathing.

She writes: “I live with my family in Brooklyn. I very much wanted children and was eager for the challenge of balancing a musical life with a home life. One of my favorite tasks is to pop a lasagna into the oven while doing some intense practicing, thereby fulfilling two roles at once — mother and musician.”

There's No Place ...

2005-09-17T22:31:00.000-04:00

Pliable offers more paths to important performances and astonishing productions ...

And while I was considering Edinburgh last night, McCoy Tyner was coaxing his Steinway into an ecstatic jangle in my living room ... a state of confident grace there on my television, raising money for New Orleans.

Danny Glover arrived to speak eloquently on Katrina:

"She has revealed a poverty of imagination ..."

Jessica Duchen writes a post about the marvels and the thrill of the Eternal City

and she imagines that Dorothy must have actually said

"There's no place like Rome."

It brought on a brutally tender memory of Judy Garland. My father loved her deeply as a friend, and as her agent near the end of her life. They had marvelous, hilarious times together. I was about nine years old when he brought me to New Jersey to see her perform (she collapsed on stage that night). Earlier, in her hotel suite, I remember playing for her on an upright piano. It was Ellfenreich's little "Spinning Song", a piece that has entered the lives of so many little pianists. I sat down next to her when I was done, and she took my face into her hands with a passionate, surprising suddenness, and kissed me on the mouth. When we went out to the Boardwalk, passing through crowds of admirers, I remember her telling people that I was her daughter. Now that I'm older, I'm able to imagine the loneliness that must have shadowed her all the time. Except from the stage. And that must have been where she found the life-saving intimacy that we all need.

Looking into the living room at McCoy Tyner, I thought I saw it there, too.

Piano flashbacking

2005-09-04T18:49:00.000-04:00

Bart Collins in a recent post features an article that touches on the strange and indescribable connections between music-making and memory, and it's prompted me to think again about a recurring condition of mine. It's a strange, occasionally eery and consistent flashbacking (best verb I can think of) that happens nearly every time I practice the piano. These are astonishing, out-of-the-blue, instant transportations to forgotten moments ... (as a 9-year-old walking past a swing ... as a 28-year-old sitting a certain way in a certain house ...) Mundane and tiny they often are, yet they are perfect recollections. Little virtual realities that arrive with an absolute suddenness. Absolutely unpredictable. Always when I'm involved in playing. And it always feels as though I'm reliving the moment for the first time.

This happens so regularly that I've just folded it into the library of the everyday. But over the years I have tried to think scientifically about the cause, as if I were trying to narrow down the triggers of an allergy, or a headache. I've imagined that it might be certain measures of certain music (can't find any evidence of that) ... or a certain exactly re-struck piano-playing pose that my muscles somehow remember (but there are such an infinite number of them) ...

In the end I've left it all in the unsolved mystery files, but I really think that it has got to have something to do with the place that music naturally occupies in our mind's blueprints. Bart quotes Paul Robertson, the founder of the Medici Quartet: "Music is the underlying structure of communication.”

It's a big thing to say.
But it strikes a chord (as they say).
And helps to emphasize the poignancy of a saying whose source I'm still trying to find ...
We danced before we walked and we sang before we talked.

(I'd love some help on that one.)

I did an interview once with Mikko Nissinen, the Director of the Boston Ballet. He told me that he immediately knows when he's watching a good dancer because it seems as though the dancer is the source of the music.
That thought has never left me.

In any case, I've long wondered whether any other pianists go flashbacking like me ....

2005-09-01T21:29:00.000-04:00

MoveOn.org has begun an emergency online national housing drive to help victims of Katrina who desperately need shelter.

And the Red Cross has made it simple to donate.

Every moment counts.

Relevance and Music ...

2005-08-28T20:27:00.000-04:00

The word relevance keeps cropping up in posts, conversations and essays on programming music. Composer Ned Rorem was compelled to write to the New York Times about it today. And many are bristling with the first breezes of the oncoming Mozart storm, wondering about the relevance of his music in our time.

Ned Rorem's letter paints a dismal scenario of highly practiced, empty-minded virtuosos playing to score points with incurious audiences. Both are apathetic toward the new. Both have a disdain for the relevant. And they have developed a comfortable distance from the exuberance and freedom that comes with the intriguing shock of the unfamiliar.

The complaint is complicated. It begins with the problem of selling. Marketing music can mean working in the Devil's workshop, or at least setting up office just a couple of dangerous doors away.

The ongoing and furious experiment of using irrelevant visuals to lure a profitable number of ears is not working. While there is great fantasy and possibility in the visual realm, and while that realm is now astonishingly easy to pass on to thousands of people, the thing being marketed is not a thing meant for seeing. It's a thing meant for hearing.

In radio broadcasting, there are often stories of really marvelous intersections of the visual and the aural realms, confessed by listeners. A driver drenched in Mozart navigates a crowded city street in the fall ... a solitary soul with Messiaen in his earbuds shuffles through a snowy campus at dusk ...

The driver, stuck at a stoplight, is compelled to focus for a moment on the pulsing, longing gestures that are unfolding in the clear air of a Mozart slow movement. His eye catches the tempo of some perfect and oblivious cloud crossing silently above the chaotic throbbing of the crowd in the crosswalk ... and he has a moment of altered perception. Elevated sensibility. An inexplicable tenderness pours through him ... a feeling of oddly removed involvement -- of being human.

I would say that this is relevance.

The solitary walker, pushing through the wind, feels the brittleness of ice under his feet, and as he plods, the bright whistle of Messiaen's piano birds fills the blue air of his consciousness. His eyes scan the shapes of the naked trees and his perception of them changes ... he sees their shapes as hauntingly beautiful. He has an inexplicable sense that he and the landscape belong together.

In these cases, the listener's perception of his own, real world is dramatically altered by music.
It's not using visuals to lure the listener.
Rather, the listener has listened, and the world has changed.

Mostly sky ...

2005-08-24T09:39:00.000-04:00

Sam and I walked briefly yesterday on a beautiful beach. It is the paradise of my young summers, and on that rocky point stands a miraculous house which is no longer in the family. And while there is still, decades later, a visceral pain of nostalgia, I still squint at it, admire it and imagine my smaller feet giddily exploring the temperatures of its vast wooden floors. I noticed when I got home yesterday that I'd taken a picture of the house ... but barely.

It's mostly sky.

And now I'm wondering whether that's perhaps a sign that, as time goes by, I've found a certain wisdom that compels me to see a broader picture ... (this seems unlikely). Or perhaps I'm still denying the loss, and pushing the house out of the picture ... (and photographing the wrong thing).

If the first were true, then I'm inclined to run to the piano and get at, say, the Schumann Fantasy, which is so full of smaller, internal intrigues. Maybe, with this new wisdom of age, I'd get the broader picture ...

On the other hand, I might focus only on its "clouds" -- and leave the elemental things to fend for themselves (I've done that before). I suppose that, as in the photo, the "clouds" would be interesting and enjoyable to consider ... but I'd still have it wrong, wouldn't I?

Sam's just turned thirteen. And I can see now that the photo that she took is the wise one:

"When I am playing well, I feel as if warm oil were pouring through my arm."

2005-08-22T21:07:00.000-04:00

Richard Dyer of the Boston Globe tells the story of an astonishing and little known pianist of our time. Now 76, she has 119 recordings (including the Chopin/Godowsky etudes, which she's been practicing since she was thirteen!). She's worked with Cortot, Richter, and Haskil. No public performing in the past 25 years because she is living with cancer, and was once told that it is "impolite to look ill." She's still recording and has major projects planned. Read about Joyce Hatto.

High-heeled piano

2005-08-20T22:09:00.000-04:00

One of the Schimmel pianos.

The Wyner/Levin encounter

2005-08-20T20:46:00.000-04:00

The post below should have included this link to an hour spent with pianist Robert Levin and composer Yehudi Wyner just prior to the world premiere of Wyner's piano concerto. It was commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra and dedicated to Levin. During the show, Levin plays music by Wyner and Mendelssohn, and Wyner exposes some of his creative process at the keyboard, including the unleashing of a riotous song called "The Florida Express." Both offer insights into music, friendship and life.

Revolutionary relaxation

2005-08-19T22:24:00.000-04:00

It was a deep pleasure to spend the evening with two major musical forces based here in Boston. The delicious dinners that they create are famous in the music world. This composer/pianist and his wife, a conductor and former world-class soprano, are the warmest possible creatures. Midnight arrived, and there'd been so much wordplay, so many stories, and such a volley of hilarity-and-profundity, that I left feeling like I'd taken a vacation.

They told us that soon after they'd finished converting their garage into a composition studio, Susan one day discovered a number of curious neighborhood women who had descended upon the composer to find out exactly what he was accomplishing in there. Yehudi fell mischievously into a brash display at the piano, beginning with Chopin's Revolutionary etude, followed by choice bits from the Tempest sonata, and more. The women exhaled in unison, and Susan heard them oohing and aahing. Finally one of them exclaimed, "Oh, that is so relaxing!"

As a classical broadcaster, I realized, while laughing, that I've developed a bristle which happens automatically when I hear the word relax in the context of art music. It has been for some time the talk of the industry (and not only broadcasting, certainly). I've come to believe that it is symptomatic of a problem of vocabulary.

God knows that music, by nature, resists explanation. Like poetry, it works its magic at levels we will never be able to name. But what would cause someone to call the dangerous and unstable blowing, rushing winds and waves of a Chopin etude "relaxing?" I imagine that it must be the first word that springs to the mind when the music has done its generous clearing-out. It is a sweet required focus that it demands. The dozens of needling daily stresses that bark and yelp for attention are forced to fall away when these exquisite waves come crashing into the foreground. That, perhaps, prompts the word "relax". It is similar to focus ... to a higher kind of attention.

I remember the pianist Russell Sherman telling me that he is a "great fan of tension." But, he said, it must be elegantly ... elegantly distributed throughout the body.

Right.
What can we possibly accomplish without tension?

The strength of tenderness ...

2005-08-06T20:48:00.000-04:00

I stole an hour from myself on this bright blue summer afternoon to practice the tenderest of things ... the first of the three Opus 117 Intermezzi by Brahms, and the warm ache of the second movement of Schubert's "little" A Major sonata.
And I was struck by the unique kind of strength required to sharpen the perfect limbs of those melodies ... to keep them focused and poignant, ringing, and singing, while the background blushes and sighs in a focused haze of color.

This is what the eyes do when they focus on little Samantha in this picture I just recently developed (after it languished for six sad years in a drawer). Her shapes, her fingers, the sun in her hair, all become sharp enough to melt the heart when the eyes admire her. That little body looks ready to turn and walk contentedly, heart-breakingly, away ... and with the eyes fixed on her, the lush greens of southern France blur into the sweetest and softest of hazes.

This effect I fought for in my stolen hour with Brahms and Schubert. And when I caught it, I was sure I'd come closer to knowing the meaning of tenderness.

Humor envy ...

2005-03-16T14:51:00.000-05:00

I develop an occasional paralysis... a blogging block ... and large chunks of time go by without posting.
This is the opposite condition of Lance Mannion, who can blind you with his sheer blogging virtuosity.

He's quick ... funny ... and boy, he's just got LOTS of time to post.
I've got Lance fixed in a kind of Mozart category. Mozart's hyper-achieving defied the normal passage of time. There must have been a "Mozart minute" which adhered to none of the rules of earthly science.

Or maybe Mr. Mannion's a little like Art Tatum. I learned recently from a brilliant
scientist/pianist that psychoacousticians (I also learned that there are psychoacousticians) have a unit of speed called a Tatum, indicative (I hope I've got this right) of the maximum amount of audio information that the human ear can take in in one second. It's named for Art Tatum, who could play more notes in one second than any other human.
And he was blind ...
Which probably, somehow, helped.
They could have called it a Paganini ...
but Tatum's hipper.

Here's where to go to hear an interview I very much enjoyed doing with scientist/pianist Michael Hawley. He describes the life and magic of Art Tatum, and plays transcriptions of Tatum's recordings with astonishing prowess. He also plays Bach/Busoni, Chopin, and Guastavino. click here

And here's a little afternoon toast to Lance -- whoever you are.

2005-03-01T00:04:00.000-05:00

... I'd pay.

Landing on the Moon with a 12-year-old ...

2005-02-26T20:24:00.000-05:00

I was recently invited to the press opening of Robert Lepage's "The Far Side of the Moon" at the American Repertory Theater.
Desperate as I am for magic, and desperate as I also am to help my children to appreciate a desperation for magic (or something close to that), I took my youngest one along ... not knowing the degree to which the thing unfolds with a kind of elegant, exquisite desperation of its own.
Desperately innovative.
Desperately poignant.
Desperately symbolic.
And desperately beyond her.

Theater can do such magic. I'm so sorry I'm so rarely in its grip.
This is a virtuosic one-man show with Yves Jacques playing two brothers, both desperate, really ... one a gay weatherman in love with money, the other a kind of sweet, depressed misfit obsessed since childhood with the space race. And he is constantly, constantly failing at everything. He's really not able to connect with other humans, and his only success is a sad home-made video of his own tiny, luckless world. The video wins a contest and is chosen to be sent into space.
He deeply loved his mother, who ages and dies (it's discovered later that she killed herself), and in one scene he becomes her ... with green pumps and a dress ... dancing slowly and lovingly with a small, alarmingly expressive three-foot-tall astronaut-doll.

Effects through projection and trompe l'oeil took my breath away. I remember feeling physically excited by their elegance and cleverness.

The final scene used the enormous mirror that had tilted and twisted to astonishing effect throughout the play. In the end it took on an angle which allowed the actor to writhe around the floor of the set and perfectly, perfectly! create another reality in the mirror. There he was -- floating, weightless, without gravity ... slow somersaults and exquisite tumbles ... and he was perfect. A contented astronaut finally in his element.
The first movement of the "Moonlight Sonata" accompanied his floating, and it worked amazingly well.

In fact, I imagine I'll never hear those triplets in the same way again.
All of it was a gorgeous thing. I was feeling that I understood every decision ... every symbol ... every delicious metaphor for life and its absurdity. Every bit of humor was marvelous.
I wanted to kiss the actor.
At the end the theater was up on its feet, and I asked my 12-year-old if
she liked it ...

And she said she really didn't like it at all.

Of course she didn't. How could she?
She found it strange.
But it had an effect ...
The other night she told me that she's writing a short story at school about a daughter and father who discover, when rummaging through the basement, that the mother had killed herself.
(I can imagine what her teachers are thinking.)

And so up again sprang a recurrent little distance-of-mothers theme that just keeps knocking inside me. Being the reader for Earl Kim's piece "Dear Linda" the other day didn't help to make it go away, either.
Anne Sexton's love letter to her daughter is pretty damn hard to pull off: "I'm in the middle of a flight to Saint Louis ...." "I was reading a New Yorker article that made me think of my mother" ... "I love you 40-year-old Linda" ... "I wrote unhappy, but I lived to the hilt ... you live to the hilt, too Linda ...." etc. etc.
All with hauntingly sad piano sounds and flute sounds ... and cello sounds ... percussion sounds ...
It's one thing to rehearse it in a basement practice room in Harvard Square. But put the damn thing in a large, darkened concert hall, add the strange intimacy of a microphone that gives you the odd and sexy power to make huge your most whispered voice so that it reaches the exit signs ...
Well, then the thing, even when it is at its most musically cliché, becomes a thing of power ...
When you are asked to deliver: "I too was 40 once, and with a dead mother who I needed still" ...
and then think of your own mother (dead when you were 40, of course) ...
Then it gets a little surreal.
At the end: ("x, o, x, o, x, o x, o .... Mom.") the pianist and percussionist were so understated, and my x's and o's became so small, and so big ...
The audience was so very, very quiet, that the decay of the last sounds (after "Mom") went on interminably, and my eyes grabbed onto a distant corner of the room and couldn't blink, or see. Everyone's breathing seemed to have stopped. It was such a very big relief to lower my hands in a slow signal that the thing had ended.
Thank God.

Suburban Doughnuts

2005-02-25T12:55:00.000-05:00

Found the poem below scribbled in a badly-kept, well-wrinkled little notebook ... written in honor of suburbia's inspired gathering places (Dunkin' Donuts). I found in that same notebook the autograph, with an Italian phrase I cannot read, of Carlo Bergonzi ... must have grabbed the sad little wrinkly pad while on a musical tour of Tuscany, drinking too much wine in an attempt to prolong the dream.

I also found verses in praise of a train -- one which muscled its sleek way past all types of elegant graffiti, and husks of inexplicably burnt cars, and manicured lawns ...
a train which hustled me straight to the miraculous playing of the inspired keyboard navigator
Marc-André Hamelin ... who arrived at the piano, reached forward, and generously melted away the walls of the Miller Theater -- in order to let in the exquisite light of Albeniz's Ibéria.

Click here for an interview/performance with Marc-André Hamelin.

I also found notes scribbled during a financial aid information session at a potential college for my oldest girl.

All badly scrawled, and separated by many, many blank pages ...

I don't keep notebooks well.

_________________________

This is where fluorescent dreamers
gulp their milky
caffeine --
Chew at their
sourceless bread --
And pretend that the walls
offer comfort ...

Tricky-eyed.
Looking downward.

And just outside --
Beside the glass --
The sky is ravishing!
Blushing ...
Bright ...
A sweet, fiery sun
between the sad single trees
And the unending turnpike ...

Here ...
Cold clumsy cars made of
dirt
Keep dancing and
blinking --
Women in tired heels
Look downward --
Tricky-eyed.

From the ceiling,
At a careful slant,
A television
screams
To keep our pupils
shrunken ...

The ravishing sky
deepens and
closes.
No wide eyes
to sparkle at ...
No poets to gleam for.

So the sunset dies.

And the fluorescent ghosts
pay no attention
to the
dark.

Visions ... and hearing loss ...

2005-02-23T19:37:00.000-05:00

Sex sells.

Musicians are offered up as sensual visions.
Chosen ones with secret breezes that blow their locks just so.
Bearers of the torch of beauty and light.
Tantalizing in their perfect understanding of shadows and curves, with eyes wide (or shut) to signal their thrilling arrogance.

They are pictures.

I wonder. When they are bought ... if that moment of purchase is just a lusty
grab ...
Then what happens after that?
Does the music pour forth and a divine path become suddenly cleared to take the trip from lusting to listening?
And then from listening to loving?
And then from loving to ...
transcending?

Are these glossy visions meant to symbolize sheer
commanding power?

Like elegant strippers?
Specially made bodies fueled by the irresistable essence of
art?

Am I being reminded that it is the musicians who control those secret breezes which tickle my most private of places?
That from the ideal face flows the perfect phrase ...
From the shapeliest shoulder, the most truthful vibrato ...
From the highest-heeled ankles, the most exquisite pedalling ...
From the roundest bosom surely must come the most insightful, devastating, inspired unleashing of the layers of life that
throb and throb
in the greatest of fugues.

What nasty business, the business of selling

Inside a Steinway B

2005-01-18T16:15:00.000-05:00

Miraculous geometry ...

Stuffing my pockets at the bookstore ...

2005-01-07T10:11:00.000-05:00

Last night's January twilight was glazed over with ice.

At the bookstore, I just couldn't spend that $35.00 on every last word packaged up so nicely into a new and attractive book
by Mr. Rosen .

So I spent $3.00 on a latte and strapped myself into these damn reading glasses (suddenly they're necessary) and began
stuffing his dry words into whatever pockets I could find in my over-burdened
memory.

Now on this brittle January morning I've checked my pockets and found that they must have holes.
I must have littered the parking lot with those well-chosen Charles-Rosen-words.

Maybe there are some in the car.

Some I still had. I found 1814-1819
and nephew
and suffering.
Opus 90 is caught up in that ugly time of deafness and mad desire to take ownership of the nephew.

Disintegration

It's the best of the words. It's always there in Beethoven. Imagine laying such careful plans to disintegrate. Imagine writing such beautiful undoings of beauty (that's not Mr. Rosen. He's better than that. And certainly more careful.)

I scrounged around and found that I still had Mr. Rosen's small and honest confession in one of my pockets. He admits that he's just not clear as to whether the end of the opus 90, having slowed, ought to gear up and move past its original tempo in that final cascade, and then retrieve the tempo in the last two bars ... or simply accelerate just enough to be back by the end.

It is a marvelous uncertainty set down boldly in a stern little font.
I found that reassuring.

And, as always, I again found my own confession. It kicks around in various costumes in virtually every pocket I own.
A nagging little ghost that scratches at the heart, claiming I've missed some elemental piece of knowledge.
Some essential wisdom which will prevent me from playing the music as they say it should be played ....

I just keep digging to see who they might be.

Small silver phones pressed desperately against the ear ...

2005-01-05T10:31:00.000-05:00

Think of the depth with which we search the syllables, and each of their letters, and the nature of the breaths that surround them.
Think of the deep diving we do into the nuances of the vital voices that reach us by cell phone.

In a parking lot, perhaps, a call from someone deeply loved, whose voice comes but occasionally. A miraculous human.
I hear every inhalation ... each curl of the lip that darkens or brightens a vowel. (Might that be sadness? Could that slight sigh between words -- the one that teases my senses -- could that be some small resignation? a little motive that will develop later into difficult news? Is there a new distance? I clutch subtle accent, the audible smirk. Mundane words are given slightly new pitches and never-before-taken tempos. What are the secrets that motivate these punctuations?)

These, I thought, once I'd snapped the small silver phone shut ...
These are the questions I ask when practicing Chopin ...
When hearing a Schubert song ...
And while weeping through the ebb and flow of Schumann's Fantasy ...

How carefully we listen to our deeply loved voices on these small silver phones ...
What insightful listeners we are.

If only music could receive such attention.

The window and the Sarabande ...

2005-01-03T22:21:00.000-05:00

It's changed.
It had been a darker affair. A single rectangle with a weakening sill and peeling paint. Brittle blinds with broken ropes.
(It seemed just as well ... only a cruel suburban crossroad to see. A house or two and a flagpole with its proudly clanging chain.)
There was, though, something right about
it.
Its dimensions I think.
Maybe its darkness.
Its angle on the shrubbery below?
It did ignite a memory of me-as-child and my window back then, with its same proximity to the piano.

It's changed now.
Someone new has bought the house, and I keep renting the walls for the sake of the ceilings. And suddenly, here it is! A dramatic bay window. And there, too, is the sky!

Old men now walk at length. I can learn their gaits. I once followed the shuffle of an ancient man for the entire first page of the G Major French Suite ...
Now children in this sun-soaked frame have complete choreographies to unleash.
Bicycles float past ... I have light on my face and my hands.
I can see the seasons.
There is a tree, and I'm learning its branches.
Chickadees halt and stare in at my anguishing.

And I wonder.
Does this change the practicing?
Deeply in love with the random dances that waltz into this dramatic frame, I wonder ...
Does this change the practicing?
For me, who never imagines changing the space myself,
I admire the thinkers who envision these big panes of glass.
I wouldn't have thought of this.
I wouldn't have guessed it would cause this warmth.

But whether the French Suite is better ...
Perhaps.
Because this bigger view keeps urging me to consider these unexpected dances, and allows me just enough time to absorb them.
The old man's arrival in the window frame ...
Strangely slow. Meticulous.
A purposeful trip across the glass. An elderly propulsion.
Never a change in tempo, but constantly new in his nearness to trees
and puddles of darkness and sunlight.
An occasional turn of the head.

Cruel suburban shuffle.
It's a lesson for a Sarabande.