A crucial tip when playing with the score
Playing chamber music with the score, unless you use an iPad, means using a music desk. This involves something seldom thought about, even by pianists themselves, but it’s something of surprising importance.
When the music desk on a modern piano is fully erect you have an inch-thick piece of wood blocking the sound from the ear of the pianist. Try it sometime. Play first with the desk up, then with it down: it makes an enormous difference. But when playing with a cellist (or a seated string quartet) it is even more significant because it blocks their sound as well – a wooden barrier affecting not only the way the pianist creates colours but also the balance between instruments. As a simple rule you will play (or speak) more loudly than you realise if you can’t hear yourself properly.
The solution is to have the music desk at an angle so that your ears are above the wood-line but you (and your page-turner) can still see the score. On newer instruments there is usually a setting for the desk to rest like this, but in the past I’ve had to resort to using clamps from a woodwork shop to create this lower setting.
In the past our more decorative ancestors unwittingly had a solution to this problem. Their elaborately carved desks had enough holes in them to let the sound float through. If your aunt is old enough and she still has her Bechstein baby grand from 1892 you will probably recall seeing this. Of course, it was a nightmare to dust …
As far as I know, only the magnificent Australian piano from Stuart & Sons maintains this design feature or, for that matter, maintains the finish of real wood rather than the polyester, acrylic finish we usually see gleaming on our concert platforms. What about it, Messrs Steinway, Yamaha, Fazioli?
Out of the cockpit
A composer sitting in the audience while his music is being performed may be central to the occasion, yet he has absolutely no control of it himself. Most of the time when I’m involved in a concert it is on stage – fingers on keys, body in direct connection with the instrument, eyes in contact with the musicians and conductor. A soloist is always in the cockpit, even if occasionally I have been forced to be a co-pilot on the journey. But as a composer, once the rehearsals are over, everything is out of my hands. It’s exhilarating to hear people play music to which one has given birth, but it’s not always plain sailing in the nursery.
I once sat with a composer friend of mine at a premiere of a work of his that was so badly played I could sense him sliding into his seat in embarrassment. The air was thick with dismay and I was sharing in it. ‘Well, at least you can have another first performance of the piece because tonight we didn’t hear the piece you wrote,’ I suggested, by way of consolation.
Another composer friend told me about a performance when the solo pianist insisted on playing his piece from memory. ‘Maybe it would be better to use the score. No one will mind,’ suggested my friend gently, his attempt at tact bubbling underneath with panic.
‘Oh no, I know the piece. Much better to play from memory.’
You’ve guessed it. In the performance the pianist got totally lost in one section and began making it up, ribbons of the wildest rubbish, a cacophony of banality, for what seemed to the composer like minutes. The piece ended and the composer had to acknowledge the audience’s polite applause with an equally polite bow.
Humiliation and vomiting at the keyboard
Wayne Koestenbaum’s book Humiliation was delicious. The tiny chapters are bite-sized dishes (in more than one sense) and all is a-sparkle with wit and insight – sometimes lyrical, sometimes brutal, never dull.
At one point, about a third of the way in, my teacher Adele Marcus makes an unnamed cameo appearance. The story goes that she was so overcome by nerves just after the Schumann Concerto’s opening whiplash orchestral E and the piano’s zigzagging chords, which simply beg to be smudged, that she vomited onto the keyboard. The author says this took place in London, I had always thought it was in Aspen, but the story has been repeated too many times for it not to be true. The author observes, ‘Vomit on the keyboard – that image symbolises, for me, the always possible danger of the body speaking up for its own rights, against the stringent demands of the mind’s wish to construct a plausible, attractive, laudable self for other people to admire.’
Wrong notes can be part of the acceptable rough and tumble of a romantic interpretation. They can even seem daring and exciting and carefree. But stopping … forgetting … blanking: this is the ultimate humiliation in a public space, in front of an audience. Actually I think that Adele Marcus was most likely afraid of forgetting in the Schumann, not just of striking false notes or misjudging phrasing or pedalling.
The requirement for pianists to play everything from memory has probably called a halt to many careers that would otherwise have flourished. From the first time we have to play in front of our fellow students at the earliest age we face the roulette of public performance: adulation = red squares; humiliation = black squares. And at the end of the evening it is the pianist’s ability to remember the notes, that would appear to take him or her to the cashier with a light tread and heavy pockets … or the other way round.
Nothing that makes a performance great has anything to do with memory – except remembering to be at the hall in time to play the concert.
Stage fright and playing from memory
We have Liszt to thank for the unwritten but firmly held rule that the pianist must play that recital without a score. Chopin would not have approved; he chastised a pupil once for playing a piece from memory, accusing him of arrogance. In the days when every pianist was also a composer, to play without a score would usually have meant that you were improvising. Playing a Chopin ballade from memory might look as if you were trying to pass off that masterpiece as your own. No wonder Chopin went on the attack. But from the late nineteenth century onwards, as non-composing pianists gradually became the norm, using a score implied that you didn’t know the piece properly and began to suggest a lack of professionalism.
It is a rich topic of many facets and people defend both sides of the argument passionately. What is for sure is that there have been pianists, maybe of transcendental gifts, who have failed to have careers because they felt ill at ease without a score. One of the most common comments I hear from audience members after a concert is ‘How on earth do you remember all those notes?’ It is well meant, and not really a question but a sigh of perplexed admiration, but is memory really that impressive? Is it an essential part of the pianist’s toolkit? Does it have an artistic dimension or is it more like sight-reading – a skill of no particular musical relevance. Some artists can sight-read anything but have nothing to say about the music that races past under their accurate fingers; others (famously Josef Hofmann) cannot sight-read at all. Some learn quickly and others (famously Dinu Lipatti) take a long time to digest a new work.
Some arguments for using the score
It takes away the fear of forgetting, liberating the mind to concentrate on the music itself.
It enables the player to play what’s really there – to examine anew the message left in code by the composer. There is a parallel with a monk who, even if he knows the Psalter by heart, will still read it from the Breviary. It is a humble acknowledgement that life is too short to know a complex text completely.
It allows for greater variety of repertoire. One of the reasons Sviatoslav Richter began playing from the score in older age was that it enabled him to play a greater number of pieces. There is no question that, unless your memory is freakish, you will not be able to play all the pieces you would like to if they all have to be memorised.
It makes the act of playing totally focused on the music being produced, not on the skill (or not) of remembering. In certain works we have to find tricks to distinguish slight differences of phrasing or note patterns – often abstract issues having nothing to do with the content of the music.
The fear of forgetting influences repertoire choices. I’m sure that Fauré’s glorio
us piano pieces fail to appear as regularly as they should on concert programmes because they are so difficult to memorise.
Some arguments against using the score
It takes away the total physical freedom of simply walking onto the stage, sitting down and playing. Now that pianists usually play other people’s music (and no one pretends that the Schumann Fantasie is a newly composed work) we do actually want it to seem as if something is being created on the spot. It’s part of what makes hearing familiar music seem fresh.
It risks someone playing something that is not properly prepared. When we memorise something we have to learn it 101 per cent. If we can sight-read well and the notes are not complicated, there’s always the danger of presenting something half-baked to an audience.
It spoils the theatrical event like a script in an actor’s hand. Performing on stage is not just about what we are hearing, but about what we are seeing. There’s no question that someone seated at a 9-foot concert grand, playing a ferociously difficult piece with no score in front of him is an impressive sight.
There are many practical negatives involved: insufficient light to see the pages; the need for a page turner (or electrical device); the inability actually to look at the score during an awkward passage where the eyes are required to guide the fingers on the keys; the visual distraction for the audience of as many as two hundred page turns in an evening’s performance; the sound-blockage of the music desk.
There are many issues involved in nervousness in front of an audience, not just memory, but if you get a performer talking in a rare moment of complete honesty one of the principal reasons you will hear over and over again for stage fright is the fear of forgetting. The terror of suddenly not knowing where you are, an obvious wrong entry, that blackout, the orchestra and you in a train wreck of harmonic collision and confusion. It is one of the reasons some pianists start to conduct; it is one of the reasons others choose to focus on chamber music when the use of a score is acceptable; it is one of the reasons still others go into early retirement and start to teach; it is one of the reasons some artists play the same repertoire season after season; and I often wonder whether Glenn Gould’s premature move away from the concert stage to the recording studio had something to do with a gradually failing memory. Ironically it might have been one of the reasons Liszt himself retired from active concert life. There is a letter dated December 1855 in which he replies to a request from the mayor of Vienna to play at his Mozart Festival:
I have nevertheless a request to make – that you would be kind enough to excuse me from the performance of the Mozart Concerto which has been so graciously planned for me, and that this piece may be given to another notable pianist. Apart from the fact that for more than eight years I have not made any public appearances as a pianist – and many considerations encourage me to cling firmly to this negative resolve – the fact that my complete attention as director of the festival will be required may prove, in this case, to be my sufficient excuse.
I think all pianists need to learn how to memorise and to play from memory. To go through music college and always use the score seems to me to be missing an essential part of the formation process. Memorising is part of the discipline of learning the instrument and learning the music written for it. But I do think there comes a point (and not just in extreme old age) when we should feel free to play with a score without censure or comment. The only guideline should be the quality of the interpretation.
The only time (to date) I use a score, apart from chamber music, is to play my own music. Well, I wouldn’t want people to think I was improvising, would I!
Bad self-consciousness as the death of good self-confidence
People often complain that modern recordings and performances are less convincing, less exciting, less moving, than those of an earlier generation. Singers, pianists, conductors – there seems to be a freshness in earlier generations that is often lacking today. It’s a dangerous argument and our preferences can be the result of a nostalgic longing for the crackle of a 78 record or the Brilliantine in a sepia photograph, but there is something about this point that strikes me as true.
I once happened to see a video from 1946 of Tito Gobbi as Tonio in Leoncavallo’s I Pagliacci and it started me thinking about this topic again. For all of the art (and artfulness) of this extraordinary clip, it struck me as completely devoid of self-consciousness – the sort of looking inwards to assess quality as the performance progresses or, worse, to have an eye to the assessment of quality the audience might be making. He … sings. Out of the lungs, out of the heart, his voice free to resonate at its best. Ironically, self-consciousness when performing leads not so much to arrogance as to timidity and fear: will I hit that high note? Is my low tessitura as good as X’s? Is my voice at its peak now or is it in decline? And at the very point that these thoughts start to smoulder there comes physical as well as mental tension, reducing the ability to do the very thing about which one is worried.
This is not meant in any way to undermine the great singers (or pianists or conductors) of today. I could have chosen examples of fine performances from many names, and such psychological blocks are nothing new, but I’m sure that our present times and the omnipresence of recording equipment and the internet have made things worse. There is an artist who has become so paranoid about tape recorders in the audience that he has had physical confrontations with the public and has called in the police. I understand his worries. A concert one wants to live for that magical evening alone arrives with breakfast the next morning on YouTube and exists forever.
This issue goes beyond accuracy or technique. Tempos are also part of the problem. If I play this fast it will sound more impressive; if I play this slow it will sound more profound. There are performances of slow movements – in Schubert or Mahler, for instance – when the choice of tempo seems self-regarding not self-giving. I’m not suggesting a shrinking-violet approach or a pruning of individuality or eccentricity or even outrageousness, but to eliminate bad self-consciousness can be a path to achieving good self-confidence … and thus maximising our abilities on stage.
Beautiful bloopers: the joy of making mistakes
I came across a tweet once by Upen Patel: ‘Don’t let a bad moment ruin your day. Think of it as a bad minute, not a bad day and you’ll be OK.’ And it led me to think about playing concerts and to think about playing wrong notes.
When Vladimir Horowitz made his triumphant return to the stage in 1965 after over a decade of retirement, depression and illness, the anticipation was enormous, as were the expectations. He chose to begin his Carnegie Hall programme with a burst of Bach arranged by Busoni – that sparkling spritz of the high C major triad that opens the Toccata, Adagio and Fugue BWV 564. This moment has gone down in musical history because he hit an audible, strident wrong note in the first seconds. The tightrope frayed and the audience inwardly gasped as they looked up at the highly strung pianist’s wobble. All was well soon afterwards, but somehow that blemish, with its hint of human fallibility, made this fine performance even greater.
There has been an increasing anxiety in recent years about wrong notes. It’s partly the sanitised perfection of edited studio recordings, partly the competitions that fill the years of study and then afterwards seem the only gateway to a professional life, but also perhaps a more general digital way of thinking about everything. We live in a world with straight edges, with spell checks, with on/off switches. Computers don’t do approximation or ambivalence. I’m happy about the precision of the pilot who flies me to my concert destination but once I reach the stage I want to fly free. And when mistakes come in a performance it is essential to brush them away instantly like so many flies.
I remember a conductor once stopping a rehearsal and turning to the violin section in frustration: ‘I wish some of you would play out of tune for once. Everything’s so tentative, so cautious. Let go, for heaven’s sake!’ In masterclasses I have listened to someone playing along note-perfectly, with
dull, faceless monotony. Then … a botched chord, a bum note, and a visible wince on the face. I’ve sometimes pointed out (I hope kindly) that this was the most interesting moment in the performance. Not because it broke the boredom of ‘perfection’ for the listener but because it allowed for a momentary release of tension in the performer. The first scratch on those new shoes is annoying but how much better they look and feel as the leather creases and moulds and becomes supple.
My teacher Gordon Green once told me that he had sat with the great Hungarian pianist Annie Fischer as she reluctantly watched herself on a TV broadcast. She flinched as if in pain at every slightly misjudged phrasing, or at some passage she would have wished to inflect differently, but then there came a moment when she had had a memory lapse and had come obviously unstuck. She beamed at Gordon, delighted and proud of the deft way she had extricated herself from the potential train wreck.
Which snooker player has always pocketed every ball? Which tennis player has never had her serve called out? In performance aim for perfection, yes – but accept the mistakes when you fall short.
Can wrong notes be right?
Two of the most important things I think a teacher needs to encourage in a student are to lose the fear of inaccuracy and to be freed from the addiction to imitate recorded performances. They are related. The CD is seen as the perfection to strive for; if our concerts sound like that then we are getting it right. Wrong. If concerts are to be reclaimed as the place to hear music at its greatest, then they have to offer the audience more than a recording with an uncomfortable seat and a pricey ticket. We need to sense a connection with flesh and blood, with those who are our neighbours in row F in the balcony but more so with those whose pores are sweating onstage. And there will be mistakes. We’ve paid for them when we attend a live concert. A great performer will go for it, will take risks. The reaching beyond oneself, the utter commitment, the focus on things that really matter will result in mishaps. It is someone attempting the highest mountain with grazed, bloodied knees, not someone stepping onto an escalator in leather soles.
Rough Ideas Page 10
