Most of the strokes winners, none of them good enough
Occasionally, talking backstage with someone, I’ve mentioned that I was playing a piece again soon – perhaps Rachmaninov’s Third Concerto.
‘Oh, but you’ve played that before lots of times, and you’ve made a recording of it,’ has come the reply, as if it were merely a matter of a quick glance through the score, a quick tinkle through a few of the trickier passages and then I would be ready to walk out on to the stage to face the orchestra’s two shimmering bars of D minor semiquavers before playing the brooding melancholy theme and the thicket of notes that follow.
There is a comparison to be drawn with a sportsperson. You wouldn’t say to Roger Federer, ‘What? Are you training … again? But you know how to hold the racket, you’ve played so many matches, you’re in good physical shape.’ It’s true that replaying a complex piece is not as time- or nerve-consuming as learning it for the first time, just as the ability to hit the ball across the net is not something a great tennis player forgets, but I find that the effort involved from beginning to learn a piece to being able to play it from memory is about the same as it is from being able to play it from memory to having it really ‘ready’. Learning the teeming demisemiquavers in the central section of the third movement of the Rachmaninov is a mighty task, but equal to it is striving to colour, to shape, to balance, to pedal each of those notes at will. It’s a point I discuss sometimes with students who have just played a piece in a public class with total accuracy and brilliance: ‘Great – but that’s just the foundation on which you now need to build a real performance.’
The increments of improvement in this final stage for the pianist can be minuscule and the resulting frustration immense, but I imagine it’s similar for Roger as his crashing serves thunder across the net in a monotonous, numberless series during training: most of the strokes winners, none of them good enough.
Staying power
Winning a competition is not a goal; it is putting the ball on the pitch, the keys in the engine. And the resulting opportunities from that first prize can come too soon and can be a liability. ‘Carnegie just loved your debut recital, Freda. They want you to do a series, three solo recitals and a chamber music concert. What do you wanna play?’ A curse for the talented youngster who has only one and a half programmes in her fingers: refuse to play and lose the chance (and the interest of a manager), or accept and risk undoing the debut’s success (and the interest of a manager).
A young conductor can be in a slightly different position. He might be invited to an orchestra, sometimes as a last-minute replacement, and make a huge impression on his first visit. The charisma is palpable, the musical ideas fresh, the personality engaging, the repartee at the pre-concert talk or post-concert reception witty and charming, the concerts an enormous critical and public success. The management is on the phone the next morning: ‘We’d like to book Maestro for two weeks next season and also for a small tour.’ Sometimes this is the beginning of a major career that goes from strength to strength and the rest is history. Sometimes, however, by the second week of the re-engagement, or by that concert on the road in Des Moines, everyone realises that the first impression had been superficial. This conductor had a few winning pieces in his repertoire, but not enough to sustain interest. The charm of that foreign accent is wearing off; the raised left eyebrow when he says, ‘Pianissimo, dear hearts’, begins to annoy everyone as each rehearsal lumbers past. The ferocious, shaking fist at the climaxes now seems meretricious rather than thrilling. Words whisper through the unforgiving corridors of musical bitchdom and a career that had flared up quickly fizzles out even more quickly.
The Russian crescendo
I first came across the term ‘Russian crescendo’ when Adele Marcus, one of my teachers at the Juilliard School, mentioned it in a lesson. She had been a student of and then assistant to Josef Lhévinne, one of the greatest pianists of the twentieth century, and the example she gave was the second subject of the first movement of the Second Concerto of Lhévinne’s friend and fellow student Rachmaninov.
The Russian crescendo is an expressive inflection that has the inner intention of a crescendo (getting louder) but achieves it by getting softer. In the Second Concerto theme the phrase reaches – yearns – in an arch towards the top A flat but by backing off the arrival point it is made even more poignant and expressive. By the time Rachmaninov wrote his Third Concerto he was actually notating some of these Russian crescendos as diminuendos (getting softer) to make sure we didn’t miss the point. Some can be seen in the first two pages of the piece.
I think this device, which is closely related to agogic accents, comes from the human voice. A singer will take a deep breath and start to sing a long phrase, and as the breath runs out there is a natural weakening of volume but without any weakening of expressive intensity. You are more likely to find examples of this shaping in ethnic folk or popular musicians than in the classical world. Russian crescendos, like Russian aristocrats, did not fare well as the Soviet years continued and most had disappeared completely by the middle of the twentieth century.
Fickleness of feelings
People are mistaken thinking that the creative artist uses art to express what he feels at the very moment of experience. Joy and sorrow are feelings expressed retrospectively. Without any particular cause for rejoicing I can be immersed in a mood of happy creativity and, conversely, I can produce, when cheerful, a piece saturated in gloom and despair. In short, the artist leads a double life: the ordinary human one and the artistic one, and moreover, these two do not always coincide.
Alexandra Orlova, Tchaikovsky: A Self-Portrait
Tchaikovsky writes about a number of fascinating issues here: first, it adds to the evidence about whether or not he committed suicide. (I’m convinced he didn’t; see here.) Then it addresses the often asked question of whether a composer needs to feel sad when writing sad music or happy when writing music brimming over with joy. (All the evidence is that mood has little impact on pen hitting paper.) Furthermore, it spills over to the performer and whether he or she needs to feel the music in a directly emotional way during performance. An actor will tell you that the worst thing to happen in a tragic scene is to be moved to tears on stage. It is no longer possible to act the role properly or to convey the play’s emotions to the audience. The actor has – literally – ‘lost it’.
To continue the train of thought: does ‘expressive’ music always need to be played ‘expressively’? When we begin to learn an instrument and to learn the grammar of music, we not only acquire a battery of conventions – phrasing, articulation, flexibility – along with all the physical aspects of technique but we learn how to please our teachers … and eventually our examiners and jury members. This is inevitable but dangerous. I often hear in masterclasses a student who is self-consciously being ‘musical’, who is shaping melodies or rubatos in a way that sounds both artificial and, ironically, wooden. It is an issue in slow movements, especially when there seems to be a fear of doing nothing. Unless we pamper every beautiful moment, often with a seductive shrug of the shoulder or a lurch of the torso, it will cease to be beautiful, or – worse – the audience/teacher/examiner might think we are unmusical.
I remember very clearly a certain lesson with Gordon Green when I was about twelve years old. I was playing the opening of the first movement of Beethoven’s Sonata op. 110 and, just as I reached the decorative arpeggios at the bottom of the first page, he stopped me.
‘My dear boy, this music is not beautiful. [Pause for a deep draw on his smouldering pipe.] It is sublime.’
I was responding to the superficial charm of the melody instead of reaching inside the flesh and bones to the very soul of the music. It is a lesson hard to learn as a young musician because it seems as if at the very moment when we have built up an impressive arsenal of expressive trinkets we need to start getting rid of them.
In our present age the baring of inner thoughts, emotions,
neuroses, opinions, has become not only acceptable but in some ways mandatory. I don’t want to return to an earlier time of repressive formality – and there is a fascinating wealth of rich, confessional literature – but there is a danger when we think that everything has to ‘show and tell’ in order to be telling. One recorded example that illustrates this is the first forty seconds of Rachmaninov playing his Third Concerto. This is a composer and pianist who was not afraid to wear his heart prominently on his sleeve but the deeply melancholy melody is played here almost rhythmically straight (and fast) with all of the expression refined into the most extraordinary tonal shading. We know from eyewitness reports of his playing that he sat completely motionless at the keyboard. I think what can be heard in this extract is another kind of stillness: emotion utterly distilled, and more powerful, more moving, because of it.
This one’s happy, this one’s sad
A research paper into music therapy came up with the following observation: ‘Some online music stores already tag music according to whether a piece is “happy” or “sad”. Our project is refining this approach and giving it a firm scientific foundation, unlocking all kinds of possibilities and opportunities as a result.’
I found this depressing reading and a further scrap of evidence that ‘classical’ and ‘popular’ music seem to be regarded as originating on different planets. Almost every great work in the Western classical canon would miss the mark of this too easy superficial definition. In fact, the first two minutes of the slow movement of Mozart’s Piano Concerto in C K. 467 moves from ‘happy’ to ‘sad’ at least four times. Its happiness is full of the shadow of the sadness from three seconds earlier, and the next bars of sadness to come are even sadder because they suggest a later return of the happiness that was so terribly sad before …
It’s depressing not just because of the reduction of art to a simplistic denominator, but because it suggests a measuring of life itself by too easy categories. Mozart’s shifting clouds in front of the sun are actually closer to most people’s experience of daily existence than the pap and pep pills of some pop music. Even if listening to Mozart might not cure someone’s depression, at least it honestly addresses the fact that the human mind (and its dis-ease) is complex and subtle. It is a listening ear of compassion rather than Pollyanna’s empty, unflinching smile.
What music makes you cry?
Adele Marcus led me to believe that she judged the worth of a performance by whether it made her cry – or at least produced a moistening of the eye. What makes this revelation from this deeply emotional woman all the more interesting is that she singled out the cool, detached, urbane English pianist Solomon as being the one who was most likely to have this effect on her … and she had lived through the golden age of great pianists, hearing them all repeatedly.
What is it in music that stimulates our tear ducts? Is it the association that certain pieces have, their vibrations reaching back to childhood? Or certain performances that uniquely touch us? Or the life circumstances that might have affected the composer? Are pieces in the minor key ‘sadder’ than those in the major? For me, when Schubert slips into the major in the slow movement of his final piano sonata (D. 960) it melts the tragic mood into greater human heartbreak. George Steiner puzzled why he was moved in an irresistible way by Edith Piaf’s rendition of ‘Je ne regrette rien’ – a courageous admission from a man of the most sophisticated artistic sensibility. Many people weep their way through almost everything Chopin wrote, yet my friend and record producer Andrew Keener cites the Polish master as one of the few composers who never makes him cry. And then there are tears of joy. I have experienced these in performance with the coda of Brahms’s First Piano Concerto (the D major, horn sunrise after the piano cadenza) and in the final movement of Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto, where the composer seems to fling a hat into the air in sheer exuberance.
Can atonal music make you cry?
Can atonal music move us, touch us, awaken in us emotions of a deep, human nature? I don’t mean thrill or inspire admiration (I’m excited and stimulated beyond words by many wildly atonal works from Stockhausen to Jason Eckhard) but rather reach inside us and … well, reduce us to tears.
I am fully aware of simplistic traps that can arise in this discussion but there are some things worth pondering. First, almost no music is completely tonal or completely atonal. Since music notation began there has been a constant tension between the two: conflict with resolution or irresolution, with concord and discord living together in fruitful harmony. In fact atonality’s greatest power comes precisely from it setting up such a dialogue. Pieces that are purely tonal are usually insipid – white on white. Similarly, pieces that are purely atonal are ultimately colourless – dirty brown on dirty brown, all the paints in the box mired in one indistinguishable puddle.
Purely atonal music is not expressionless. It can evoke anger and restlessness, although often in a fairly monotonous, shallow way. It can evoke humour, although generally of a cynical nature. It can evoke thrilling energy, but usually the sort found driving manically in rush hour on an emptying tank of petrol rather than in climbing a craggy mountain at dawn. Pure atonality’s ultimate problem is its lack of reference points. If you take away the compass of tonality; the magnetic pull is annulled. You can fight against tonality with ferocious vitality or with anguished despair – much great music does – but if you remove tonality altogether you are punching the air, and you’ll find you’ve forgotten what you were sad about.
So, to offer one possible answer to this question: perhaps only atonality can move us, but only in the context of the tonality it is struggling against, yearning for, or working around.
Symphonies under ice
Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony is not a piece you can grasp fully in one or even in twenty hearings. In fact, that’s the most amazing thing about all of his great works: however many times we hear this music, everything always seems new. But the Fourth is surely the most unsettling of the symphonies: unresolved, unfulfilled, the thematic material passed between instruments without eye contact or ownership. The final, non–coup de théâtre is the strange, mezzo-forte, chorale-like ending, which reminds us that it can be in the ordinary, middle-ground experiences of life where lurk the most searing depression and hopelessness. The eye remains dry in this piece because the tears just cannot, will not, flow.
The Fifth Symphony, after the enigmatic twists of the Fourth, seems a much straighter if not straightforward journey. Hearing them both back to back a number of seasons ago at the Royal Festival Hall with Osmo Vänskä and the London Philharmonic – craggy, rough-hewn, elemental readings, with a moss-off-the-mountains revelation of the works’ towering peaks – I was conscious of a pricking of tears in my eyes as the Fifth Symphony finished. I tried to work out what it was that made this piece so overwhelming and it struck me that it was like a symphony under ice, as if a great Romantic work were being heard from a point of inaccessibility: tunes deflected and diverted by the frozen surface, fissures forcing the counterpoint to veer off at strange tangents, climaxes narrowly averted, melodies ungraspable. The famous swinging motive in the third movement, inspired by the composer seeing a flock of sixteen majestic swans in flight, is one of those examples. Only when it gushes into C major does it openly reveal its Romantic heart, flooding over us all the more powerfully for the moment’s late arrival and brief duration. Even the final hammered chords, a six-time attempt to fell the tree, are prevented from full Beethovenian triumph by the anticipation of the timpani’s grace notes. The ground is not totally solid under our feet.
Clothing the naked melody
Those ascending Sibelian swans in the Fifth Symphony’s third movement – that swinging ‘tune’ once heard never forgotten – is an example of how we carry melodies in our heads, how we hold onto music with an inner humming, even when we cannot physically sing it. It is possible to sing that swinging motive but if we don’t hear everything else that goes along with it in the score
– the harmony of the glowing thirds, the shifting bass line, the orchestration with the brazen horns – it doesn’t really make any sense.
The human brain remembers music in a most curious way. We hum this Sibelius tune as we leave the concert hall (and at full force when we get into our cars to drive home) and the brain seems to supply what’s missing. The music has left an aura with it, a faint imprint, which is enough for us to relive the full moment with the sketchiest of material. Try this out with something familiar and simpler than the Sibelius example – maybe a hymn tune or pop song. Somehow, without being able to identify the harmonies, they accompany us as we sing; they have become an inseparable part of our recall of the music.
A different kind of example of the same principle is a piece such as the First Scherzo of Chopin. The outer sections of this piece are impossible to sing as they race by at breakneck speed and are outside the range of any human voice, yet we can still hold this music in our memories, in our hearts, as if it were a singable melody. This leads me to one of the main objections I have to some contemporary music. For me, great music should be able to be ‘heard’ after it’s stopped sounding. The vibrations that were created in the air of the concert hall or on the recording must be ‘cherishable’. When we listen to music we want some element of the piece to become a part of us. It is like reading a book. If we close the pages and nothing at all remains of what we’ve been reading, it is not unreasonable to suggest that we’ve been wasting our time. Ultimately if we cannot take away an aura from music, however complex the piece or indefinable the emanation, I don’t think the music is really worth anything.
Rough Ideas Page 6
