Pianist Louis Lortie played an "immersion" concert this evening: the 12 Etudes, opus 10; the 3 New Etudes, Op. Posth.; the 12 Etudes, Op 25; and for an encore, the Nocturne in D♭, Op. 27 No. 2; all by Chopin. With such a program, one discovers both differences and similarities: the vast differences in size, length, and complexity, and the surprising similarities between pieces written years apart, particularly those in the same key. Most of these pieces were quite familiar to me, while others seemed (and may well have been) new to me. In that sense, the concert was a success. I came away with a renewed appreciation for a great composer.
I really like Lortie. I've seen him play a few times before in San Francisco, but only in Davies Hall with the Symphony, and he always struck me as a pianist's pianist: incredible technique but not flashy, wearing tails but no sequined LL on the lapel. I was eager to hear this recital.
But things got off to a bad start, due to overpedaling, which turns even the best playing to mush. The pedal is there for a reason, so how much is too much? The best way I can explain it is in terms of information theory. Using the pedal is like removing the spaces between words. IfIwriteawholesentenceortwowithoutspaces,itgetshardtoreadbecauseyoucan'tquicklytellwhereonewordstopsandthenextonestarts. Now, sometimes that's OK. If I write hellooooooooooooooooothere, it doesn't matter precisely how many o's I used, because it's just an acoustic effect on one word' the extra o's provide no new information. Likewise, if I write thegiantswontheworldseriesthegiantswontheworldseriesthegiantswontheworldseries, what you understand is one message, repeated several times; there's no new information with each repetition. Call it a "lexical arpeggio." If I write abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz, you see one alphabet, not 26 individual letters; it is the lexical equivalent of a chromatic scale.
So the idea is that when there is a lot of information, you need the acoustic space between the bits in order to hear it. Lortie used such heavy pedaling in the first half that we lost the substance of the music, and all that remained was the superficial aspects, typically very fast and often very loud. For some audiences, that's all they want, but my impression of the audience at this concert, sponsored by Chamber Music San Francisco, was that they're a little more sophisticated and wanted more -- or less.
Not everything in the first half (the Opus 10 etudes) was mush. My favorite piece in this half was the Etude No. 9 in F Minor, with lightning-fast runs played pianissimo and secco, without pedal. Indeed, I've heard very few pianists who can play pianissimo as well as Lortie, and it's such an exciting moment because the audience suddenly goes quiet, almost leaning forward to hear better. Fireworks are exciting, but so are anti-fireworks.
While I remain mystified that Lortie had such a lead foot for most of the first half, things got better in the second half, and I could just revel in the beauty and skill of his playing. The Etude in G# Minor, Op 25 No. 6, was my favorite in this half. It was dazzlingly difficult, like most of the program, and maybe I was overwhelmed by it because, in part, it was unfamiliar. The monster piece of the set was the Etude in B Minor, Op. 25 No. 10, but here I felt that Lortie reverted to the dark side of the force. On the other hand, if I had the technique to play like that, I might just succumb to the temptation to let loose. When you got it, flaunt it. Overall, this was a memorable concert, flawed though it was.
I wonder what modern composers, or performers for that matter, think about MIDI devices. In particular, Yamaha makes a grand piano that's outfitted with a MIDI interface, so that you can hook it up to a computer that tells it which notes to play, when, how long to hold each note, how to pedal, and so on. There is no limit imposed by ten fingers, and there's nothing to prevent the piano from playing as fast as its action will allow. I'm sure that there's a MIDI score for some of the Chopin preludes, so what would we do with this? There's no reason to suppose that it would have to sound "mechanical"; you could introduce as much variation in tempo and dynamics as you liked. Perhaps you could bootstrap this process by taking an actual recording, or even a piano roll like the ones Rachmaninoff made. Then you proceed to tweak it so that it sounded just the way you wanted it. You could even define some variations, perhaps random within certain limits, to prevent every performance from being the same.
My point is that very few people have the time, energy, talent, perseverance, and hands to play Chopin as well as Lortie plays, while relatively many people could use a computer to work on a MIDI performance. I did not handwrite this article in Times Roman for you, and while it is not as visually beautiful as a great calligrapher and a great typesetter could make it, it's pretty good, courtesy of a computer. If I were a youngster just starting to learn to play the piano, and I faced a choice between spending hours every day, for the rest of my career, practicing scales and playing the same repertoire over and over, versus learning how to use a computer to construct a performance, I think I would do the latter. Moreover, that's what I would encourage a kid to do today. This isn't possible for singing, or even tuba-playing, but I think it is possible for keyboards.
It's not that one shouldn't spend one's life practicing the piano. There are enough people on the planet that we can spare a few thousand to do this -- or almost anything else. For example, consider an Olympic diver. Is there anything more bizarre than spending a significant portion of your waking life, in your physical prime, jumping into a pool of water, over and over? It's not evil. It's far less useful, for pure entertainment, than learning to play the piano; even bad pianists can lead happy crowds in song. But divers do something that we consider beautiful, however brief, and diving is an abstraction, a quintessence, of something anyone who ever jumped into a pond can understand. There aren't enough divers in the world that it costs anything important. So why not?
Compare that to people who spend their lives preparing to wage war with the folks who live on the next hill because, well, they live on the next hill and must therefore be done away with. Now that is evil and a waste of a life. In some better, parallel universe, we would spot people with this tendency, take away their weapons, and hand them -- tubas.
Sunday, March 13, 2011
Sunday, February 27, 2011
Jenny Lin, February 27, 2011
In an intriguing program, pianist Jenny Lin selected five Preludes and Fugues this afternoon from Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1 and surrounded each with a pair of Preludes and Fugues from Shostakovich's Opus 87. The story is fairly well-known: Shostakovich heard Tatiana Nikolayeva play all 48 of the Bach Preludes and Fugues (Books 1 and 2) in 1950, and suitably inspired or challenged, wrote his own set of 24, one in each major and minor key. So interleaving the Bach and Shostakovich in a performance has a certain appeal. Will we hear more than a superficial connection? A lot has to do with the particular choices in each Shostakovich-Bach-Shostakovich trio, and Lin's choices worked quite well, with neighboring pieces in nearby keys, sometimes nearer than you might think. The Bach E minor Fugue, for example, ends on an E major chord, so going directly into the E major prelude of Shostakovich was easy on the ear.
So was Ms. Lin's playing. She came out on stage looking cool, calm, and collected, making eye contact with the audience (unlike some players), and sitting comfortably at the keyboard, all of which puts the audience at ease. It would be inaccurate to call her playing "relaxed"; "completely confident" would be better, and considering that this was her debut recital in the Bay Area, that was a good sign. I especially enjoyed the clarity with which she brought out inner lines, even in the thick of 4- and 5-voice textures.
The transitions were sometimes illuminating, but not always. Exiting the Shostakovich C major fugue, which contains only white notes and therefore keeps a certain simplicity, and entering the Bach C major prelude, with its white-note arpeggios (for 5 bars, anyway) seemed not to be a 200-year jump at all. On the other hand, following that with the Shostakovich A minor prelude, played at breakneck speed, seemed jarring, despite the harmonic connection. (A similarly troppo presto tempo seemed to derail the Bach E Minor fugue for a few bars.)
One naturally thinks of the influence of Bach on the Shostakovich pieces, but the performer must also consider the effect of Shostakovich on the Bach. For example, the Bach pieces are often played with varying nontrivial amounts of ornamentation, mordents and trills and grace notes and so on, whereas the Shostakovich is not, so if you're juxtaposing them to bring out their similarities, you would likely play the Bach fairly straight. Lin did that, except in the C# minor prelude, where the ornaments seemed overdone, even though they would be mild for most Bach performances.
(Actually, the older I get, the less ornamented I like my Bach. An ornament draw attention to a note, and some performers get so carried away that the ornaments cease being the icing on the cake and become the cake itself. That wouldn't be an issue for, say, Couperin. I heard a brilliant concert earlier this month by Juho Pohjonen, who played pieces from Couperin's Fourth Book for Harpsichord, followed by Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin, where the point was to highlight the difference between the original and the homage, and moreover, where the icing really is the cake.)
The Bach C# minor fugue is a grand, stately affair, one of my favorites, and stylistically, it is closer to the Shostakovich D minor double fugue than to the A Flat major or D Flat major preludes that surrounded it. Similarly, the Bach D major fugue, with its flight of quick 32nd notes followed by slow, dotted eighths, is closest to the Shostakovich B Flat minor fugue, with similar figures. That may be the strangest piece in the entire Shostakovich Opus 87: one might call it "dreamy," following no discernible rhythm. Indeed, it's hard to imagine a fugue, Western civilization's most structured art form, as such a free-flowing piece. In this enlightening performance, it suddenly occurred to me that this fugue sounds like bird calls: they're all the same melody, but they're completely asynchronous and tonally unrelated. It's not every piano recital of Bach or Shostakovich that reminds you of Messiaen.
So was Ms. Lin's playing. She came out on stage looking cool, calm, and collected, making eye contact with the audience (unlike some players), and sitting comfortably at the keyboard, all of which puts the audience at ease. It would be inaccurate to call her playing "relaxed"; "completely confident" would be better, and considering that this was her debut recital in the Bay Area, that was a good sign. I especially enjoyed the clarity with which she brought out inner lines, even in the thick of 4- and 5-voice textures.
The transitions were sometimes illuminating, but not always. Exiting the Shostakovich C major fugue, which contains only white notes and therefore keeps a certain simplicity, and entering the Bach C major prelude, with its white-note arpeggios (for 5 bars, anyway) seemed not to be a 200-year jump at all. On the other hand, following that with the Shostakovich A minor prelude, played at breakneck speed, seemed jarring, despite the harmonic connection. (A similarly troppo presto tempo seemed to derail the Bach E Minor fugue for a few bars.)
One naturally thinks of the influence of Bach on the Shostakovich pieces, but the performer must also consider the effect of Shostakovich on the Bach. For example, the Bach pieces are often played with varying nontrivial amounts of ornamentation, mordents and trills and grace notes and so on, whereas the Shostakovich is not, so if you're juxtaposing them to bring out their similarities, you would likely play the Bach fairly straight. Lin did that, except in the C# minor prelude, where the ornaments seemed overdone, even though they would be mild for most Bach performances.
(Actually, the older I get, the less ornamented I like my Bach. An ornament draw attention to a note, and some performers get so carried away that the ornaments cease being the icing on the cake and become the cake itself. That wouldn't be an issue for, say, Couperin. I heard a brilliant concert earlier this month by Juho Pohjonen, who played pieces from Couperin's Fourth Book for Harpsichord, followed by Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin, where the point was to highlight the difference between the original and the homage, and moreover, where the icing really is the cake.)
The Bach C# minor fugue is a grand, stately affair, one of my favorites, and stylistically, it is closer to the Shostakovich D minor double fugue than to the A Flat major or D Flat major preludes that surrounded it. Similarly, the Bach D major fugue, with its flight of quick 32nd notes followed by slow, dotted eighths, is closest to the Shostakovich B Flat minor fugue, with similar figures. That may be the strangest piece in the entire Shostakovich Opus 87: one might call it "dreamy," following no discernible rhythm. Indeed, it's hard to imagine a fugue, Western civilization's most structured art form, as such a free-flowing piece. In this enlightening performance, it suddenly occurred to me that this fugue sounds like bird calls: they're all the same melody, but they're completely asynchronous and tonally unrelated. It's not every piano recital of Bach or Shostakovich that reminds you of Messiaen.
Sunday, February 20, 2011
Rafal Blechacz, February 20, 2011
Rafal Blechacz is a 25-year-old pianist from Poland with a long list of awards, and he is particularly known for his Chopin. His recital this afternoon at Herbst Theater, sponsored by Chamber Music San Francisco, had lots of Chopin but started out with the "9 Variations in C Major on Lison dormait" by Mozart, "L'isle joyeuse" by Debussy, and the Sonata No. 1 in C minor, Op. 8, by Karol Szymanowski. The Mozart is a 20-minute work, pretty, but surprisingly lightweight for the 22-year-old Mozart, well into his maturity. Blechascz' playing was crystal clear; if anything, he made it sound too simple for a recital. It reminded me of the time I heard heard Arkdai Volodos play a Schubert piece, a strange choice for someone with keyboard-crushing technique and repertoire.
The Debussy was brilliant, perhaps a tad fast, but a pleasure to hear. The Szymanowski was the major work on the first half. Written when he, too, was 22, the 30-minute work sounded less to me like Chopin (an influence on much of Szymanowsky's music) and more like Godowsky: richly harmonic, and pianistically grand-scale. The opening movement ends with such a flourish that some members of the audience started applauding; Blechacz even acknowledged it by standing and taking a bow, which was unusual. The piece is in C minor; the second movement is in A-flat major, but there are ominous low C's near the end, reminding us of where we came from, and where we will return in the final movement. The cheery third movement alternates between E-flat major and B major, but the fourth movement has us back in C minor, and with a grand, exciting fugue. Near the very end, there's a full-keyboard glissando, leading to a bright conclusion in C major, which is where this recital began. The last few bars are a little odd: trills in both hands slow down the action, when the scale of the piece would seem to demand something simpler, bigger, and louder. But Blechacz did a wonderful job with this unfamiliar piece, and was richly applauded.
The second half began and ended with two of Chopin's four Ballades, in G minor and F Major. In between there were two Polonaises, Op. 26, and four Mazurkas, Op. 41. (The 4th, in A-flat Major, was incorrectly listed as A-flat minor.) I know the Ballades well, but the Polonaises and Mazurkas were new to me. However, they sounded rock-solid, old-hat here, and one understands why this pianist has done so well with Chopin: it's in his blood, of course, but it's also in his head, his hands, and his heart. I actually found the F Major Ballade a little rushed and pedal-heavy for my tastes, and I've seen lesser pianists crack under the strain of this piece. Perhaps Blechacz will approach it differently in ten years' time, when there's less pressure to dazzle with sheer technique and more time to savor the richness of all one zillion notes.
Blechacz played two encores, one by Chopin (I should know which one it was -- it has themes that also appear in one of the Piano Concertos), and one probably not by Chopin (Haydn?). The pianist, who's young, tall, and handsome, was very popular with many of the younger members of the audience, who had to be reminded by the series director not to take photos, to film the entire concert (I've seen that done in Herbst), to send text messages, to watch the Simpsons, "et cetera." From my seat upstairs, I'm also noticing that the ubiquitous smartphones, with their brightly lit little screens, are now joined by iPads, with their brightly lit large screens. Fortunately they were dark during the performance. Unfortunately, there were a couple of ringing phones and a lot of coughing, but the pianist played bravely on.
I look forward to hearing Blechacz again.
Monday, January 31, 2011
Paul Jacobs, Davies Symphony Hall, January 30, 2011
Paul Jacobs returned to Davies Hall to give a recital on the Ruffatti organ. I saw his previous performance here in 2009, and I was amazed at how good he made the instrument sound. It's a tricky organ to play well. The acoustics are fairly dry, so when you're playing big, noisy French Romantic pieces that were composed for echo-y churches, you have to adjust your playing, and linger on some of those chords.
Jacobs started the program with a piece by one of his teachers (Weaver, Fantasia for Organ), and he also played a piece by a pianist-friend at Juilliard (Oquin, Reverie). I wasn't crazy about either piece, but it's not polite to comment on pieces by friends and teachers, so I'll say no more about those, although I do support bringing new pieces to audience's attention.
The program opened with the Weaver, and was followed by Sweelinck Variations on "Mein junges Leben hat ein End." Jacobs got to display lots of the color that this instrument can provide, as he moved from variation to variation. Jacobs requested that there be no applause after that piece, and he segued directly into the Bach Fugue in G Major, BWV 577, the "Gigue" Fugue. He played this at breakneck speed, which showed off his hand-eye-foot coordination but made a total mess of the music. It's the way you play a piece you can't stand (any more) but which you play because the crowd likes anything that's familiar, loud, and fast.
The Reger Inferno Fugue at the end of the first half fared no better. After explaining that this was a double fugue, and playing the two subjects, Jacobs launched into the piece, and again, there was so much noise that it was hard to hear anything clearly, even the second theme we have been primed to listen for.
I have a theory: Just as Davies has a reverberation limit, it also has a decibel limit. Beyond a certain volume, you can't make anything louder, or if you try, it's just static. I've heard massive concerts in Davies: Mahler's Eighth, the concert version of Mlada with 200 singers in the Symphony Chorus, a 400-person choir at the Chanticleer Youth Festival in 2010, and others. (I haven't tried anything with serious electronic amplification.) They all seem to top out at some point. The same is true for organ recitals here, and for note-heavy stuff like Reger, it's easy to exceed the limit.
As much as I failed to enjoy the first half of this concert, I was ready to forgive everything in the second half, where Jacobs played one work, the Durufle Suite for Organ, Opus 5. Ah, finally! He slowed down the tempo so that we got to hear all the notes and appreciate how the music developed. The Prelude is, as Jacobs mentioned, very sad, and we got The Full Lament on this one. The middle movement, Sicilienne, was wistful, and the solo stops came in handy. The final movement, Toccata, was brilliant and blaring where needed, but not overdone. This piece was worth the whole concert.
Jacobs played an encore, the Bach A Minor Fugue, BWV 543, which he played because "we hadn't heard enough Bach." Unfortunately, this was like the other Bach: a race to the finish line, seriously accelerating to the end, where he added a jarring A Major chord. All the subtleties of this piece were lost. It's not as if Jacobs were trying to play in the style of Cameron Carpenter, who does outrageous things but with a musical purpose. This was supposed to be legit Bach, even with the bravado suitable for an encore, and it wasn't.
There's one more concert in this year's organ series in Davies, on April 3rd, when Jane Parker-Smith plays Franck, Guilmant, Langlais, and Widor: some of those big, noisy French Romantic pieces. Let's hope she gets enough practice time in the hall to understand that this is not St. Eustache, or even Grace Cathedral.
Jacobs started the program with a piece by one of his teachers (Weaver, Fantasia for Organ), and he also played a piece by a pianist-friend at Juilliard (Oquin, Reverie). I wasn't crazy about either piece, but it's not polite to comment on pieces by friends and teachers, so I'll say no more about those, although I do support bringing new pieces to audience's attention.
The program opened with the Weaver, and was followed by Sweelinck Variations on "Mein junges Leben hat ein End." Jacobs got to display lots of the color that this instrument can provide, as he moved from variation to variation. Jacobs requested that there be no applause after that piece, and he segued directly into the Bach Fugue in G Major, BWV 577, the "Gigue" Fugue. He played this at breakneck speed, which showed off his hand-eye-foot coordination but made a total mess of the music. It's the way you play a piece you can't stand (any more) but which you play because the crowd likes anything that's familiar, loud, and fast.
The Reger Inferno Fugue at the end of the first half fared no better. After explaining that this was a double fugue, and playing the two subjects, Jacobs launched into the piece, and again, there was so much noise that it was hard to hear anything clearly, even the second theme we have been primed to listen for.
I have a theory: Just as Davies has a reverberation limit, it also has a decibel limit. Beyond a certain volume, you can't make anything louder, or if you try, it's just static. I've heard massive concerts in Davies: Mahler's Eighth, the concert version of Mlada with 200 singers in the Symphony Chorus, a 400-person choir at the Chanticleer Youth Festival in 2010, and others. (I haven't tried anything with serious electronic amplification.) They all seem to top out at some point. The same is true for organ recitals here, and for note-heavy stuff like Reger, it's easy to exceed the limit.
As much as I failed to enjoy the first half of this concert, I was ready to forgive everything in the second half, where Jacobs played one work, the Durufle Suite for Organ, Opus 5. Ah, finally! He slowed down the tempo so that we got to hear all the notes and appreciate how the music developed. The Prelude is, as Jacobs mentioned, very sad, and we got The Full Lament on this one. The middle movement, Sicilienne, was wistful, and the solo stops came in handy. The final movement, Toccata, was brilliant and blaring where needed, but not overdone. This piece was worth the whole concert.
Jacobs played an encore, the Bach A Minor Fugue, BWV 543, which he played because "we hadn't heard enough Bach." Unfortunately, this was like the other Bach: a race to the finish line, seriously accelerating to the end, where he added a jarring A Major chord. All the subtleties of this piece were lost. It's not as if Jacobs were trying to play in the style of Cameron Carpenter, who does outrageous things but with a musical purpose. This was supposed to be legit Bach, even with the bravado suitable for an encore, and it wasn't.
There's one more concert in this year's organ series in Davies, on April 3rd, when Jane Parker-Smith plays Franck, Guilmant, Langlais, and Widor: some of those big, noisy French Romantic pieces. Let's hope she gets enough practice time in the hall to understand that this is not St. Eustache, or even Grace Cathedral.
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