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.
