That doesn’t mean we should aim at inaccuracy. Florence Foster Jenkins, the doyenne of dodgy divas, was trying to sing in tune even if it was her failure to do so that gained her such a huge following. Her execrable intonation was the result of an unmusical ear and an uncooperative throat. What I’m writing about is an entirely different thing. You can hear prime examples of it sometimes in the playing of Alfred Cortot – a towering pianist, who, through a careless (in the sense of carefree) musical vision, seemed simply not to worry that the notes on the keyboard failed occasionally to match those on the printed page. No matter. Like a bruised eagle he still soared higher than most.
Two problems remain. First, to learn a piece requires us to care immensely about every detail: every note, every nuance, is important. Yet at the point of performance something greater has to happen: a shift of focus, a broader scope, a letting go. Perhaps it’s a little like preparing a parachute on the ground with the utmost attention and concentration so that we can exit the airplane with a leap of confidence when the moment arrives.
The other problem is with music no one has heard. A Beethoven sonata is one thing, but if we are attending a premiere of a newly composed work we do want to hear what the composer has written. Sometimes a change in harmony by just one note creates the very poignancy that can break the heart. Notes are words in music, and the wrong word can alter the meaning of a sentence completely.
Speaking of which, the pianist Martin Roscoe was reviewed once by a major newspaper in the days when reviews were telephoned through rather than sent via email. ‘The immaculate pianist, Martin Roscoe’ became ‘the inaccurate pianist, Martin Roscoe’ on the news-stands the following morning.
Clap between movements? Please!
Before a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Second Piano Concerto in San Francisco, the conductor David Robertson and I gave a short talk to the audience about the piece they were about to hear. One of the last things David said before we began the performance was: ‘If you enjoy the first movement then please applaud.’ People were obviously a little shocked, and there were a few embarrassed giggles. Isn’t it forbidden to clap before the end? Won’t people think I’m ignorant? I don’t want to be the only one. My only worry was that they might actually not like what they’d heard, but now feel obliged to clap anyway!
The reason why humans hit the palms of their hands together if they like something is probably buried in the mists of prehistory. Some audiences stamp too, or scream, or whistle, or shriek … or occasionally boo. In Holland there is the famous ‘standing ovation’, seemingly given to all, regardless of quality or level of appreciation. There are slow, rhythmic handclaps too, although with a positive connotation in musical settings, unlike in politics. These responses have more to do with the audience’s participation in what is happening on stage than with boosting the egos of the musicians. To experience passively something that is moving, touching, exciting or thrilling demands some active outlet if we’re not to burst.
There are certain movements in the repertoire that absolutely demand applause. In piano concertos, off the top of my head, there are the first movements of both Brahms concertos, Rachmaninov’s First and Second, Grieg, Tchaikovsky’s First and Second … and so on. The list is long. The most interesting example for me is the third movement of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, which seems to call for an ovation like nothing else on earth. What do we do? Sometimes the conductor is so absolutely determined to stamp out the public’s enthusiasm that he or she will start the final movement without a breath, with the applause still ringing in the auditorium. I have been at performances of this work when the opening bars of the last movement were completely inaudible because of this. But how much applause should you allow? Should the conductor leave the stage to take curtain calls and treat the final movement as a substantial encore? Obviously not, but a burst of steam from the pot before continuing is virtually essential – and would have been the tradition at the time of the first performance.
Once, though, I experienced an extreme exception to my present argument. I played a recital at Notre Dame de Fidélité, a Benedictine Abbey of nuns situated in Jouques, fifteen miles north-west of Aix en Provence. It was in the depths of summer and the stout, oak doors were open to the lavender fields. On my right as I sat at the piano, as usual, was the audience, but on my left, behind iron bars in flickering candlelight, were the barely visible faces of the nuns in their habits. Sviatoslav Richter discovered this little jewel of a church and was the first person to play here. The small series they held was to raise money for a new building for the novices. It was a conventional recital format … except that there was to be no applause at all during the entire concert. In this setting it was understandable, and, as it turned out, quite magical, almost like an erasure of ego and anxiety, and an embrace of the world outside the music, an inner world that was the very source of the music. As the final ghostly bars of Schumann’s Kreisleriana tripped down the keyboard, dancing into the distance, I played the last, almost inaudible bass notes into a cave of silence. I stood up, acknowledged the audience with a slight bow, and walked away, the final sounds only an echo in the memory on the warm, perfumed night breeze.
Don’t feel you have to clap between movements
In some places, notably the BBC Proms, applauding between movements has become almost customary. Is this a new trend sweeping across the world or just the local enthusiasm of the vast crowds sitting and standing in the Royal Albert Hall?
In a way I’m pleased because, as I discussed above, there are works where applause between movements would have been expected by the composer, is appreciated by performers, and is a cathartic release of tension for the audience. But … one summer a few years ago, during a performance of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, I became uncomfortable when about a quarter of the audience (that’s over a thousand people) applauded after every movement. It seemed as if their hand-clapping was virtually routine. It was not a letting off of steam from a pressure cooker of emotional intensity; rather it came across as conventional, polite and, in the event, almost divisive. It felt as if, well, the movement had finished, better clap a bit before the next one begins – an alternative to scratching one’s ear or shifting one’s legs. These patches of lukewarm applause were especially puzzling after the slow movement – that long stretch of majestic sorrow, with its heavy cloak of brass chords sound-wrapped around the hall. Appreciation would have been much more effectively displayed with the breathless weight of silence.
What about applause in the middle of a movement? That was as common in classical music as it still is at the ballet or after a great jazz solo. Jazz musicians would be puzzled and hurt if the crowd did not cheer, whistle and clap at these cadenzas: ‘Were we really off form tonight?’ Any ballerina would throw her pointe shoes at her dressing-room wall in frustration and disappointment if her 32 fouetté turns in Swan Lake did not receive a roar of approval. Hans von Bülow, perhaps the most ‘serious’ pianist of the late nineteenth century, known for his strict adherence to the score, wrote that he never played Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto without receiving applause at the end of the opening cadenza (which is only three minutes into the piece).
Perhaps this is going too far in music where the unfolding of a piece’s narrative is as important as any details along the way, but nevertheless I think we should let our audiences loose to enjoy the concerts they have paid to attend, to express their appreciation when and how they want to, and thus to go back to an older, authentic tradition of concertgoing, the tradition of Mozart, of Chopin, of Liszt, of Brahms … and of just about everyone else.
Ample amplification
People who do not go to classical concerts are often amazed to learn that the pianos we play are never amplified in an ordinary concert setting. So used are they to everything in life being connected in some way to a microphone – singers, guitarists, priests – that the idea of something ringing in the air, supported only by the natural resonance of wood and wir
e, is beyond belief. When microphones are seen pointing into a piano’s lid onstage, they are recording or broadcasting the sounds, not amplifying them, even in the largest indoor auditoriums. Actors today are often inadequately trained to project their voices to the back of a theatre; pop singers without a mike are barely audible beyond the front row … it’s a matter of technique. For a classical pianist to be heard above a full orchestra in every corner of a 3,000-seat hall requires years of study and work. We have to learn how to use the whole body to form and project the sound from the instrument to the furthest pair of ears. Interestingly, this is different for jazz musicians; unless the performance space is very small, amplification for them is de rigueur. The technique for a jazz pianist is more often hands and forearms producing either light-fingered nonchalance, a chunky, angular thrust, or battering rhythmic violence – and mikes are built into the equation. For the classical pianist, the power of shoulder and back-weight involved in playing huge chords against eighty players in an orchestra is actually diminished by amplification. The sound loses tension when it lacks a literal and figurative ceiling, and it rides too easily, too glibly, over the sonic mountain.
One afternoon a few years ago, I was walking around Seville and I came across some flamenco dancers in one of the squares. I love flamenco, but as I turned the corner I realised that the music was not real. It was heavily amplified – part performed, part recorded. Yes, we could hear it more clearly in the bustle of the Sunday streets, but it was like instant coffee – it lacked depth, kick, bite. However much duende was created by the woman turning her proud head, stamping her petulant foot, or arching her jet-black, plucked eyebrows, it fell flat next to the buzzing boxes providing the music. I wanted to hear a guitar’s strings straining and slowly going out of tune; I wanted to see the young gypsy’s tattooed arm embracing his instrument with a cruel passion; I wanted to see the castanets hot with wood-splintering sparks. But instead there was a soulless, flabby accompaniment, as innocuous, as bland, as the Manchego sandwich I had just had for lunch.
PPProjection
The ability to project sound to the back of a hall above the full resonance of an orchestra without a microphone is one thing, but we must also be able to communicate with the softest whisper as well as with that thunderous roar. For a pianist, there are some technical aspects involved. For instance, we have to judge the arm-weight and timbre of an extremely soft note or chord – a gentle ‘laying down’ of the hand on the keys combining a caressing lift with a sinking to the bottom of the keybed. The elbow is the fulcrum – the wings to the fingers’ landing wheels. It’s hard to put into words, and not much easier to perfect over decades of stubborn work.
There are some more prosaic aspects to projection too. The first time we have to speak in public, at a brother’s wedding perhaps, the standard advice is: don’t speak too fast, pause between sentences, choose one word in a phrase to emphasise. These are all equally relevant to musical performance. A rapid passage or trill played clearly will sound faster than one that is uneven in sound and rhythm.
A real pianissimo forces the audience to listen in a much more active way than a force of sound hitting them between the eyes. The ear has to lean forward when the sound is floating gently in the air. Even our breathing has to be restrained sometimes when we are making sure to catch that delicate aural feather, and when the strings themselves seem barely to have been brushed by the cushioned felt of the piano’s rising hammers.
Charismatic
Projection has as much to do with intensity of intention as with decibels. In the end it’s the projection of an idea that is key: the force of will, the ability to compel an audience to listen. How is it that someone can enter a room and set it alight merely by her presence, without speaking a word, whereas another fails even to be noticed? Similarly, someone can walk onto a stage to perform or ascend a podium to speak and can have everyone in the house instantly bewitched with bated breath before anything has disturbed the silence. This phenomenon is often called charisma, or, more poetically perhaps, magnetism. It’s an inexplicable quality but we know when someone possess it, and it can explain why certain people become famous or powerful. It has a whiff of dynamite about it, and it might well have been used more for evil ends than good in human history.
When Orson Welles makes his first appearance on the screen as Harry Lime in Carol Reed’s classic movie The Third Man, such a moment occurs. Not a word is spoken, and his body is still, but the two glances up and down (the second staying a micro-second longer in its upward movement than the first) and the way the mouth incrementally dissolves into a smile then a half-formed word, has to qualify as one of the greatest acting moments ever captured on film. Was it a moment of thespian brilliance or was it just Welles’s natural charisma? Are those flickers of rubato in Ignaz Friedman’s playing of Chopin mazurkas a practised, knowing expression or a subconscious, direct line from the folk rhythms where gnarl the roots of all human musical expression? With true magnetism, the question need not be asked.
Stanley Kubrick and recording
I think I might have learned more about making records from Stanley Kubrick than from anyone else. I remember my sense of astonishment and recognition when I saw a documentary about his filming of The Shining. He must have thought about this movie intensely, obsessively, for at least a year before filming, absorbing its mood of frightening descent into violent madness. Then there would have been the planning, and casting, and the thousands of different details that are part of the preparation process before the day when the camera first begins to shoot. But then I saw the famous director, known for his perfectionism, making it up on the spot – changing the script, the camera angle, everything. He looked as if he was improvising, freewheeling; unsure, then suddenly more sure than he’d ever been; pausing to think, then tumbling into wildly passionate action; devouring and being devoured by this monster of a movie that sprang to life take after take, beyond all planning, beyond all vision.
This is how I want to feel when I make a recording. To have thought deeply about the music I’m about to record, but not to walk in, sit down and simply play it through, like some mock concert – one take, and maybe a few extra ones to cover the mistakes. No, even though I know the scores on the producer’s desk intimately, the process of recording is a process of fascinating, invigorating discovery. This happens in the playbacks, of course – ‘Did I really mean that left-hand line to be as prominent as that? That phrase sounds very tame as I listen, whereas it seemed exaggerated to me when I was playing. What if I continued that diminuendo into the next phrase?’ – but also as I’m playing. To be able to throw caution, notes, taste, technique to the winds … knowing that nothing is lost while there’s still time to do another take, and while the producer and engineer are still awake in their chairs. That’s the equivalent of the danger of the live concert for me: not the once-through risk before an audience generating the excitement, but the risk of keeping sanity and soul intact as I explore every nuance the piano is capable of … and then to try for more.
Red-light district I: the background
Around a century ago recordings were souvenirs of concerts. A pianist would play in town and those who liked what they heard would buy a scratchy memento, waiting anxiously for the next live visit on the next tour. But since the 1950s, with the invention of the LP and the steady increase of sound quality and capacity, recordings have gradually replaced concerts as the public’s first step of acquaintance with music and the artists who play it. Exact statistics are unknowable, of course, but I would guess that over 95 per cent of the music we hear today is from recordings. Since the era of the LP it has been almost unheard of for a soloist to have a major career without recordings. At the point of writing, whether we like it or not, to be a ‘concert’ pianist is to be a ‘recording’ pianist.
Making a record is not just a matter of sitting down and playing well in front of a microphone; it’s a different art form, and requires a different technique. I like
the comparison between cinema and the theatre: if you put a camera in front of a wonderful ‘live’ play it won’t necessarily make a good movie; it’s another way of working altogether. When I made my first record I wasn’t fully aware of this and I was scared of having to do retakes. The fewer the takes, the better the pianist was the subconscious accusation underpinning, undermining each rejected attempt. But it shouldn’t be like a test or an exam – or, worse, like a sports event. We can (and should) approach the diving board as many times as we like. All that matters in the end is whether the recording sounds good. I’d say the only thing that is ethically unacceptable is if it sounds better than you on your best day. Nobody cares how many times it takes a great poet to rework the lines, or a great painter to reshape the forms. The poem, the canvas … and the shiny silver disc are the artforms, not the arduous process through which they come into being.
Red-light district II: frenzy
There are three types of recording in which I’ve been involved: ‘live’ recordings from concerts, studio recordings of solo or chamber repertoire, and studio recordings of concertos with orchestras. Each of these categories is completely different and needs to be explored separately.
Rough Ideas Page 11
