Rough Ideas

by Stephen Hough

  Let’s begin with orchestras in the studio. The first thing to point out is how little time there is to make a recording with an -orchestra unless there is an unlimited budget. Normally there are two three-hour sessions out of which around 40 minutes needs to be deducted for breaks. That sounds like a lot for 30 minutes of music, but not if you include rehearsal time, listening-back time (and walking-back time to the control room) and, most difficult of all, trying to get a good sound with the engineer. I recorded the Brahms Second Concerto in the late 1980s with the BBC Symphony and Sir Andrew Davis and I can still remember that after an hour of trying microphones in every position we still did not have a sound we liked. The piano was too distant, then too close, then too dry, then too reverberant. Then the woodwinds sounded boxed in, then the strings lacked clarity. By the first break we had nothing in the can (professional-speak for a usable take), yet I had been playing this toughest of concertos for over an hour. By the time we settled on a sound I was exhausted, frustrated and anxious. Because studio sessions with orchestras are rigorously controlled by union rules the clock ticks away and nothing but a huge overtime payment can make a difference … and even with a large budget the orchestral players still have to agree to the overtime. And all of this is just to get the notes down, never mind with what finesse or inspiration. In the end things gelled then caught fire, but for a while we were perilously close to releasing at best a workaday recording.

  How does one generate that danger, that spark of excitement, when a session is drawing to a close and everything is suggesting safety – covering a split note in the horns here or an out-of-tune phrase in the cellos there? I remember very clearly recording the 4th movement of Scharwenka’s Fourth Concerto – one of the hardest pieces I’ve ever learned – with the City of Birmingham Symphony. We’d done a good take, perfectly releasable with a few patches here and there. The conductor, Lawrence Foster, turned to me with a smile as if to suggest that things were going well. They were, but I had a feeling they could go better. We’d played accurately and musically, but I knew there was more to be done. ‘Can we do it again?’ I asked. ‘Of course,’ said Larry and raised his baton. I pushed the tempo a few notches faster and saw some players sit forward in their chairs. It was more exciting this time, if a little less accurate. ‘Let’s do it again,’ I said, flushed and a little frenzied. A few notches higher again. By the fourth or fifth take there was a whiff of madness in the room. I felt sick, dizzy, almost on the verge of hysteria by the end … but I think the movement did eventually come alive, even if I myself left the piano that evening feeling half dead.

  Red-light district III: solo lows and highs

  So much for the time limits, the energy limits, the union limits and how to inject adrenalin into a studio recording with an orchestra when spirits and standards are sagging. Making a solo or chamber recording in a studio … now this should be a doddle, shouldn’t it? Sometimes with as many as three days to record one solo CD; no start or finish time except what is agreed by pianist and colleagues and producer, and a vast horizon of possibilities towards which to saunter with ease and confidence. Ah, but therein lies part of the problem: too many choices, too much freedom. Not that I would want voluntarily to make the sessions less flexible, but there’s nothing like a deadline for inspiration, and lack of time constraints can allow time for neuroses to ferment.

  I remember recording the Chopin ballades and scherzos for Virgin in the late 1980s. (At my request this CD was never released and I ended up re-recording these pieces for Hyperion over a decade later.) I don’t entirely know why, but things just went badly from the start. The piano I’d selected a month or so earlier had totally changed character in the interim. It had been juiced up for a concerto recording and was strident and punchy whereas before it had been mellifluous and lyrical. There was no time to have the piano completely revoiced and I probably should have cancelled the sessions there and then, but we went ahead at the request of the company. In Chopin the correct piano sound is essential for the correct rubato and shaping of phrases; if the first phrase feels right you become inspired and the next phrase tends to feel even better and on and on … a snowball effect of inspiration and confidence. Conversely, if the sound is unsatisfactory, there is nothing you can do. Without well-judged colour and nuance, the delicate rhythmic freedom essential for Chopin sounds staged and artificial. This is one of the causes of much dull or lumpy Chopin playing.

  During the first day of recording there was not one line of music without some jangle from the metallic instrument making me wince. By the evening I was thoroughly dissatisfied and in a thoroughly bad mood, even though we had masses of material on tape. We got the tuner to do some extensive work on the piano before the second day and then started again. It was better but somehow a mental block had set in. Everything I played sounded bad, every take seemed worse than the last, and it spiralled into an inability to play even the simplest phrase: ‘Where is middle C?’ In the end we had enough usable material to issue the CD, but I was unhappy with the first edit of the ballades when I heard it and asked the record company if we could scrap the whole project. They agreed, much to my relief. There are often black moments in solo recordings but this is the only occasion when I was unable to work through them.

  The other side of the coin was my recording of a selection of Federico Mompou’s piano music for Hyperion. I remember well the sunny sessions in St George’s, Brandon Hill, as afternoon light filled this former church with a gentle glow of affirmation. Those heartwarming pieces seemed to put everyone in a good mood – even the piano was smiling – and we finished the record very quickly.

  Red-light district IV: live or alive?

  And so to the third category, making a recording from ‘live’ concerts. I’ve done this a number of times now: the complete Beethoven violin sonatas with Robert Mann, the Rachmaninov concertos with Andrew Litton and the Dallas Symphony, the Tchaikovsky concertos with Osmo Vänskä and the Minnesota Orchestra and the Dvořák and Schumann concertos with Andris Nelsons and the City of Birmingham Symphony. All of these involved taping the performances with patch sessions afterwards. With the orchestral recordings we always had more than one concert from which to select material – two, three or four performances of each piece.

  In some ways (and for some repertoire) this is the best way to record. It enables you to utilise the natural excitement and adrenalin of a concert but to shape and refine some essential details later in the safety of studio conditions. Purists sometimes ask, ‘Why don’t you just release a concert unedited?’ There have been some wonderful direct concert-to-disc recordings over the decades but this has almost always been decided after the event: a particularly great concert was subsequently deemed worthy of being issued. I don’t think that recording in any form should ever be a stunt: ‘Can we play the piece without needing retakes?’ It’s about getting the best final results for the sake of the music. An out-of-tune violin passage, a misplaced cymbal crash, a raucous cough, or a perky mobile-phone ring does not add quality to the experience of listening to Rachmaninov’s Fourth Piano Concerto. With repeated hearing it simply becomes an annoyance … and it’s not just a matter of damage limitation. If, in the course of three concerts, the third movement on Thursday really took wing but the second movement on Saturday had a special wistfulness about it, only a purist would demand that you kept one of the performances complete. What would probably end up happening is that you’d take Friday’s more measured account of the whole piece because fewer things went wrong.

  If there are details not adequately covered by any of the concerts, there are the patch sessions. How innocuous they sound, but nothing in my professional life has been more stressful. It could be seen as a safety net in one sense, but the tension involved is more like walking on a high wire. In Minnesota we had thirty minutes per concerto, of which ten minutes needed to be break time, all at once or in bite sizes. The stopwatch was ticking away like an unexploded bomb, and the producer, the (mostly) unflappa
ble Andrew Keener, would bark out the bars we needed to cover in a manic sequence: ‘Bar 254, second chord in winds, never together.’ Osmo would quickly find the place, raise his baton, and we were off. Sometimes these inserts would be in the middle of a blizzard of an awkward passage and I would have to jump in as if onto a merry-go-round spinning at high speed. Usually we ended up covering what we needed with only seconds left. We would stagger off the stage, shell-shocked, dazed, trusting that the snippets we recorded could be stitched in seamlessly at the later editing stage.

  Red-light district V: play it again (and again), Sergei

  I was fascinated to read an article in Gramophone magazine in which Rachmaninov compared recording and broadcasting. We know that he hated the latter and in fact refused to allow any of his concerts to be transmitted. Instead, in the middle of the concert, the radio station would make a sudden switch and play one of his records instead of the performance about to take place. There was obviously something about the immediacy of the broadcasting medium that meant he felt uneasy and out of control. This is confirmed by this fascinating article, with its strange contradictions and lopsided arguments. He says:

  Through the medium of the gramophone we can now offer the public performances closely similar to those we give on the concert platform. Our records should not disappoint the most critical listener who has heard us in the flesh; to the millions who have no opportunity of doing so, they convey a just and accurate impression of our work.

  Is this really what he thinks? Surely a broadcast is closer to a performance on stage because it is a performance on stage. He goes on to say a little later:

  When making records it is actually possible to achieve something approaching artistic perfection. If once, twice or three times I do not play as well as I can, it is possible to record and re-record, to destroy and remake until, at last, I am content with the result.

  But isn’t that the direct opposite of a concert performance? Although I got into trouble once from a Rachmaninov fan for suggesting that the Russian master was nervous onstage, as if this made him less of a pianistic god, Adele Marcus, who was a teaching assistant to Josef Lhévinne, one of Rachmaninov’s friends and a fellow student with him in Moscow, told me that Lhévinne sometimes had to push Rachmaninov out towards the piano at Carnegie Hall from the wings because he was so petrified. If this is true, might it have been this anxiety that influenced his attitude towards recording versus broadcasting, the loss of control in the latter, a magnifying glass held up to every flaw?

  His recording with Fritz Kreisler of the Grieg C minor Violin Sonata, made in Berlin in 1928, is one of the glories of musical history. But it was not made in one take, as we tend to think 78s were. Rachmaninov remembers that ‘the six sides of the Grieg set we recorded no fewer than five times each. From these thirty discs we finally selected the best, destroying the remainder.’ I have a feeling that had he lived into the era of the tape machine and beyond, he might well have been as demanding and fastidious as Glenn Gould, spending days and days, playing pieces again and again, honing every bar.

  Red-light district VI: did I really play it like that?

  If playing in front of a microphone is hard enough, listening back can be as great a challenge. Sometimes quick decisions have to be made in the sessions themselves. ‘Are we covered?’ is the horrible phrase for the minimum requirement. Have we actually got all the bars of the piece down in an acceptable manner? But then do I like this version or that version? The one when the phrase tails off to nothing in a perfect diminuendo but is a little too slow, or the one where the sound is more present but the rubato works well? Or should I try another take? Ah, this time there was a crack in the floorboards. Is that a wrong note in the thicket of Scriabin’s harmonies? Yes, no, yes, no … the ear can be cruelly deceived when under pressure and after hours of intense work – like looking at a simple word over and over again and wondering if the spelling is correct. Or that slip in the middle of an exciting passage: ‘Yes, let’s leave it. I like the sense of danger.’ But then later I hear it again and it no longer sounds exciting or dangerous, just wrong.

  The Austrian pianist Artur Schnabel referred to the recording studio as ‘the torture chamber’, but the real agony comes when the first edit drops onto my doormat. No more playing is possible, but quite a lot can still be adjusted at this stage. The problem is hearing objectively. I put the CD into the player and start to listen. Every note sounds horrible. Panic sets in and my ears close. Sometimes I drive off in the car to listen to it there, the engine noise allowing me space to face the truth gradually.

  When the final, finished, packaged CD arrives months later, with a serial number and a glossy booklet inside its plastic case, it seems like something outside me – distant, separate – and I rarely listen to it again.

  A promiscuous weekend in Amsterdam

  A few years ago I was in Amsterdam to play the Grieg Concerto with Andrew Litton and the Netherlands Philharmonic. We’d had our first rehearsal and as we’d recorded the work not long before, things were smooth and enjoyable. Then in the afternoon, as I was practising, I got a call from my manager: would I like to play the Grieg Concerto tomorrow … twice! There was to be another performance of the piece by Nikolai Tokarev and Roman Kofman at 2.15 p.m., also at the Concertgebouw, but this time with the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic. Apparently Nikolai was unwell and the orchestra was asking if I would be prepared to step in. I thought about it for a minute and then agreed it would work out as long as everyone was happy with the arrangement and that it was logistically possible.

  So I ended up doing my dress rehearsal with Andrew at 11 a.m. at the Yakult Zaal; then I was whisked off to the Concertgebouw to do my dress rehearsal there with Roman at 12 noon; then I grabbed a quick bite before playing the Grieg on the stage of the Concertgebouw at 2.15 p.m. I was then whisked back to my hotel for a quick rest and shower before being whisked back to the Concertgebouw to do a final rehearsal on stage with Andrew at 6.30 p.m. before playing the Grieg again on the stage of the Concertgebouw at 8.15 p.m.

  Never was a post-concert supper more welcomed or more relaxed.

  Ringtone in Padua

  Once I was in Padua playing a recital. All was normal – or as normal as the madness of pressing down black and white keys in profile to an audience who hit the palms of their hands together every time I stopped playing could be … until I finished the first movement of the Chopin B minor Sonata. I played the final two chords and brought my hands down to my lap to pause before launching into the Scherzo. A mobile phone rang – or rather shattered the silence. I have never heard such a racket: an explosion of acid rock that would corrode the most abused eardrums; heavy metal that would sink, even in the Dead Sea. It was not coming from the audience but from the wings. I looked round after five seconds of this aural abuse to see if anyone was there. Not a person in sight. So, as it made no sign of stopping, I left the piano, walked offstage, and began to hunt for the phone. I finally found it, still screaming its head off, in a cupboard on the wall. I pressed the red button and … silenzio. There was much laughter from the audience and applause as I returned to the piano to continue the Chopin. All was normal – or as normal as the madness of pressing down black and white keys in profile to an audience who hit the palms of their hands together every time I stopped playing could be … until, in my dressing room afterwards, the presenter winked at me as if to say, ‘You naughty boy!’ I didn’t think my rubatos had been that outrageous in the Chopin, but you never know people’s tastes.

  ‘We were surprised at your choice of ringtone!’

  It transpired that the entire audience had thought that the phone had been mine!

  Hysterical laughter on stage

  There was that memorable tour with Steven Isserlis when we lost it – on stage. Our mirth spilled out, gushed forth, totally unchecked, unstoppable, unforgettable, in full view of the audience.

  Something was going on during this whole concert. We were in Newcastle, New Sout
h Wales, where my father happened to have been born – maybe his ghost was egging me on. The splendid Stuart & Sons concert grand I was playing seemed to encourage me to bring out wild inner voices, frilly petticoats of counterpoint, which the composers themselves might not have suspected could lurk under the sober dress of their work. Indeed in the Rachmaninov sonata there were a few teasing rubatos from the pianist that caused the cellist to turn around in astonishment, so far had my eyebrow of expression arched upwards. Finally, we got to the encores. The first one was my little piece ‘Angelic Song’, dedicated to Steven’s son Gabriel. Then we did ‘The Haunted House’ – a dramatic monologue composed by Steven, in which he declaimed a ghost story while making all sorts of noises and sounds (some of them musical) on his Stradivarius, with me accompanying him on the Stuart. It is a wonderful piece of Gothic camp, a children’s horror story that always produces laughter from the audience.

  But on this occasion … well, we lost it. I had one line to declaim, at the end of the piece. As if playing Norma Bates in Psycho, I had to croak, ‘My son, it’s good to have you home.’ I had a small white towel on the side of the piano so I decided on this occasion to balance this ‘veil’ on my head as I said the words. As I did so, the audience laughed even more than usual, and suddenly it hit me: I couldn’t speak for laughing. Steven, of course, was facing the back of the hall, so he wasn’t able to see me. When the punchline of his piece failed to be spoken by his pianist, he turned around one last time. Tears were streaming down my face and I was unable to see or play or speak. By now the audience was laughing yet more, and he, after a twitch or two of attempted self-control, started to laugh uncontrollably too. Within seconds we were both completely limp with hysteria. ‘He’s got another line,’ he moaned at the sea of roaring faces in the auditorium. I tried again and again: ‘My ssson, it’s…’ ‘My son, it’s good ttt…’ Hopeless. In the end we just walked off stage, tails between our legs, faces glistening, noses dripping, eyes red.