Rough Ideas

by Stephen Hough

  Nevertheless, when I first played this piece in concert – in the original version – I was struck by a problem in this second movement: the music is so glorious, and I couldn’t understand why it just didn’t seem to ‘work’ as a structure. I didn’t think that it needed cutting, as early critics had suggested, but I did feel that the solo instruments were out of balance. It was wonderful to hear the solo violin and cello declaim the theme at the start of the movement (especially after the first movement’s extraordinary, super-virtuosic, turbo-charged pianism). The changes of character were perfectly judged: first solo violin, then solo cello with violin accompaniment, and finally the piano. Then follows the dramatic B-section that Siloti cut – full of turbulence, with brilliant cadenzas for solo violin and cello. Finally, when things have calmed down, the three solo instruments play the opening thematic material, united as an equal trio for the first time in the piece. So far, so good.

  But then Tchaikovsky suggests a cut – at the point when the piano stops and the solo violin and cello continue and develop up to a passionate climax. It is one of the most inspired moments in the whole work (even Siloti kept this passage), but there is a problem with it, as Tchaikovsky obviously realised if he suggested removing it. The issue, though, is not its length but that it begins as an exact repeat of the opening section, a jarring reprise after the three instruments have already been playing together with equal prominence. It’s a little as if the pianist were suddenly unwelcome in the room at the party, and is sent out to help with the dishes at the very point when the best bottle of claret is about to be opened. I realised that if the music here is played by the piano instead, leading naturally into the original piano cadenza, it would give a symmetry to the whole movement, lending a psychological cohesion, and circumventing the need to remove any music.

  Tchaikovsky’s Concert Fantasia

  The wonderful, neglected, elegant, exuberant Concert Fantasy or Fantasia. Actually I debated whether it should really be listed in French on my recording as it is in the original Russian edition: Fantaisie de Concert (its form taking precedence over its function), especially as ‘fantasy’ in the title is about more than the structural shape of its musical journey. My computer’s built-in dictionary suggests the following definition for the word: ‘The faculty or activity of imagining things, especially things that are impossible…’ – yes, the writer of those words had seen the first-movement cadenza of the piece in question. There is some astonishing virtuosity in the Fantaisie de Concert, but there is also great humour – in particular, two crazy moments.

  In the second movement (‘Contrasts’), after the soulful solo cello and piano melody and its orchestral development, in fact at the very point of climax, a tambourine enters, shaking and dancing with syncopated thrusts. I don’t know of a more astonishing moment in any piano and orchestra piece than this. It is silenced for a couple of bars with more orchestral dolour, but then it re-enters and remains as a flamboyant jester until the end of the piece. Perhaps it is meant to evoke sleighbells on a bitter, Russian winter’s morn?

  But it’s not the only mad moment in this ‘fantastic’ work. After the opening few minutes of the whole piece, with the flutes of champagne, the chiming bells, and the modal, singing melodies, there is a pause. Then the piano enters alone, ruminating on a new theme based on a descending triad. This turns out to be the beginning of a cadenza of almost ludicrous length – totally out of proportion and beyond any expectation the opening of the work might have suggested. The pianist doesn’t even have the courtesy to comment on the material the orchestra has thus far supplied, but rather sweeps all aside and simply shows off for close to ten minutes. After the keyboard has been left in tatters, and after a winding-down conclusion of slightly fake profundity (the pianist playing more and more slowly, until grinding to a complete halt), the orchestra simply starts the piece all over again from the beginning, as if shrugging its shoulders and getting on with business as usual: ‘Well, I don’t know what that was about, but we have a concert to play, so let’s now get back to the task in hand.’ Humorous, but also open-hearted: an intimate glimpse of Tchaikovsky the man – with a great big smile on his face.

  Artificial gushing tunes

  The 1954 Grove’s Dictionary of Music and Musicians infamously evaluated Rachmaninov’s music as ‘monotonous in texture [with] artificial and gushing tunes’, the popular success of which was ‘not likely to last’. This is somehow beyond offence today, so off the mark is its prediction, so dated its taste. On just about every day of the year Rachmaninov’s music is heard and applauded across the world, and his concertos will be performed as long as there are pianos made and pianists to play them.

  His four concertos are like markers throughout Rachmaninov’s life, covering his entire creative career. But the numbering of them is not quite so straightforward. There is a Piano Concerto in F sharp minor by Rachmaninov – no. 1, op. 1 – written in 1891 when he was eighteen. This youthful work is recognisably by the Russian composer with his distinctive voice (that melancholy with the samovar just a little hotter than expected), but the writing – orchestrally, pianistically and structurally – is ungainly and awkwardly tailored. Despite the heart-on-sleeve appeal of its voluptuous melodies, the shoulders are too square, the seams too visible. By 1917 Rachmaninov had published 38 other major works and, as a mature, world-famous composer, pianist and conductor, he decided to revisit this early piece. By the time he had finished, a whole new creation was revealed, keeping all the vigour of its youthful origins but tightened with the rigour of the experienced composer. The airship had become a sleek jet and this airborne work is, in fact, really his fourth piano concerto, written down on the page eight years after he had completed his Third. (He tinkered with it again two years later just to adjust a few small details – a stitch here and there.) Rachmaninov was proud and fond of the revised First Concerto, and he asked two of his closest pianist friends, Vladimir Horowitz and Gitta Gradova, to play it. They both promised to do so, but neither did. I first learned the piece as an understudy for Gradova, who was due to perform it with the Chicago Symphony and James Levine at the 1985 Ravinia Festival. She was totally committed to fulfilling her promise to Rachmaninov but, sadly, she died before she could and I played it instead.

  The Second Concerto (1901) was the first to be written in its present form, and the one piece of the five piano and orchestral works for which there has never been any suggestion of revisions or cuts. It’s his first great work, his most popular, most often performed and, arguably, the most perfect structurally. It sounds as if it wrote itself, so naturally does the music flow; yet, it appears to have caused the composer the most difficulty in creation. Rachmaninov had writer’s block, and it is claimed that the hypnotic ministrations of Dr Nikolai Dahl (the work’s dedicatee) got the composer’s juices flowing again. However, Rachmaninov’s grandson told me that this was not the case. His grandfather was in love with the psychiatrist’s daughter; hence the visits to the doctor’s house – the source of this alternative story apparently being the composer’s wife. No proof, but no matter. The Second Concerto is both an open floodgate of inspiration, and a work of supreme romantic intensity. It was written in Russia at a time when Rachmaninov thought of himself principally as a composer rather than a pianist, and the solo writing is perhaps the most awkward and least natural of the five works, with thick orchestral textures always threatening to cover the piano part.

  The Third Concerto (1909), however, was expressly composed for his first US tour as a pianist, and it appears that he learned it on the high seas during his voyage to New York. The piece was dedicated to the great pianist Josef Hofmann but was never played by him – possibly because of his famously small hands, but more likely because it was such a lot of work to learn. It is the most overtly virtuosic and highly strung of the five works, a veritable encyclopedia of pianistic difficulties. But it is virtuosity in the truest sense: not merely fast fingers, but an entire world of sound, nuance, pedalling, te
xture, rubato and dynamic control. It is these qualities that make the Third Concerto such a show-stopper in the right hands. It’s also the piece in which Rachmaninov most skilfully used compositional techniques of thematic transformation. Many of these are hidden away, perhaps most wittily in the whirling dance that ends the second movement where the simple, melancholy opening theme of the whole concerto is metamorphosed into a ballroom encounter of the most sophisticated glitter.

  By the time he wrote the Fourth Concerto (1926, revised in 1941) Rachmaninov had left Russia for good and had ceased to compose about ten years earlier. He was busy playing concerts and adapting to life in the West, a West that itself was changing beyond all recognition in those battered years after the First World War and the revolution that had chased the composer away from the land of his birth. Everything was shifting, nothing (social, political or musical) was certain and the Fourth Concerto is Rachmaninov’s reaction to such change; it was both his attempt to keep up with fashion, as well as expressing a profound discomfort at the disappearance of a world he loved. With its fragmentation, restless melancholy and profound dis-ease, the Fourth Concerto is a musical Waste Land, an evocation of alienation equivalent in some ways to T. S. Eliot’s poem published four years earlier. Whereas the nostalgia of the Second Concerto is heart-warming and affectionate, in the Fourth it is heart-wrenching and painful: a view of the lonely, exiled composer backstage under the harsh lights of his dressing room, rather than bathed in the footlights of the auditorium. It is the most ‘modern-sounding’ of his works, the least played, the least known, the least loved – except for a few who, like me, love it the most. The final 1941 version, tight as a drum, is a unique, original, twentieth-century masterpiece.

  One post-war musical response to overripe romanticism and the disturbance of social change was neoclassicism – a spring-cleaning of harmony and form, with bright colours, sleek shapes and crisply defined rhythms. Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Hindemith, Ravel, Busoni and Strauss among others all experimented with this new aesthetic, and the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini (1934) is the closest Rachmaninov came to writing his own neoclassical work. The lean orchestration and piano writing were a new departure for him. Only the eighteenth variation, one of the greatest glories of thematic transformation, is cut from the velvet plush of his earlier style (and was apparently languishing in a sketchbook for a number of years). The Rhapsody is perhaps the most American of all Rachmaninov’s works, not just because of the crooning lyricism of variation 18, or the snappy, big-band moment in variation 10 (jazz accents and stresses clearly indicated in the score), but because of its overriding optimism. The Dies irae plainchant serves as a sombre counter-melody to Paganini’s spiky theme but it never seems to be that serious in its ‘Day of Doom’ predictions. Indeed only a year before its composition Prohibition had been lifted, and might there be the hint of a dry (vodka) Martini in the lean sparkle of the piano’s figuration, not to mention in variation 15 a tribute to Art Tatum, whom the composer admired?

  Authenticity playing Rachmaninov

  One of the first LPs I was given as a small child starting to learn the piano was a mixed recital including Rachmaninov’s miraculous 1921 recording of his transcription of Fritz Kreisler’s Liebesleid. From that moment a door opened for me into a pianistic world where I immediately felt at home. A few years later I was given his recordings of his concertos, long before I heard anyone else play them, and I was genuinely puzzled when I did eventually hear some modern performances. Where was the characteristic rubato of the composer’s playing? Where were the flexible, fluent tempos, always pushing forward with fervour? Where were the teasing, shaded inner voices forming chromatically shifting harmonic counterpoint to the melody? And what about the portamento slides in the strings? It was like eating a traditional dish far from home and missing the correct ingredients. What is a pesto sauce without garlic? What is sushi with brown rice?

  Concern with correct performance practice does not just apply to the Classical and Baroque periods; it has to do with the very dialect of musical language itself. To take too slow a tempo, with numerous ritardandos, for the first subject of the first movement of Rachmaninov’s Second Concerto means that one of the longest melodies in the repertoire becomes fragmented and earthbound, robbing the second subject when it arrives of its natural place of repose and sentiment. To ignore the composer’s vivacissimo marking for the ‘big tune’ at the end of the Third Concerto changes a climactic peak of ecstatic energy into an over-long section sounding heavy and emotionally sated. (His clear desire for this pacing is seen not only in the score and in his own recording but in the 1941 performance by Horowitz, a pianist whom the composer considered peerless in this piece.) To fail to capture the true improvisatory style of the solo melodic passages, with their agogic accents and subtle balance between ardour and languour, is to fail to communicate the message itself. And if we are concerned, as we should be, with dots and accents in Schubert, why should we not have equal interest in some of Rachmaninov’s characteristic markings: his tenuto lines indicating a certain kind of lingering, or many of the slurs in the strings suggesting a gentle slide?

  It would be of no service to the music and of little artistic interest to try simply to copy the composer’s recorded performances. What is important is to understand and to become fluent in the pianistic language of that time – both of Rachmaninov and of his contemporaries who, though unique individuals, shared many common ‘turns of phrase’; then we can feel free to speak or sing our own personal words with an authentic vocabulary and intonation.

  Recording Rachmaninov

  ‘Stephen, how about recording all of the Rachmaninov concertos?’

  ‘Great!’

  ‘In Dallas?’

  ‘Great!’

  ‘In “live” performances?’

  ‘Great!’

  ‘In one three-week period?’

  ‘What! I need to think about this.’

  But my manager caught me on a clear, sunny day when I’d slept well. I phoned back fifteen minutes later and said, ‘Yes, let’s do it!’

  It was over two years from the time of that discussion to the recording itself and on days when I hadn’t slept well, or the weather wasn’t clear and sunny, many questions would haunt me. How would I have all the pieces ready at the same time? Would I play too inaccurately because of nerves? Would I play over-carefully because of nerves? Would I play both inaccurately and over-carefully? How could I achieve a sense of freedom and abandon with microphones pointing inside the piano and throughout the orchestra like so many shotgun barrels? How could I have the necessary romantic spontaneity when I knew that every musical breath would be frozen onto the face of a compact disc, clenched in the teeth of its jewel case?

  I had played all the Rachmaninov concertos before and had always wanted to record them, as much as I did anything else in the repertoire. As I digested the idea of a ‘live’ recording, I became more and more excited and enthusiastic, despite the practical worries. These pieces are ‘live’ works written for a ‘live’ audience, the pianist’s final bars of interlocking chords demanding applause, the songful melodies lodging as a lump in every throat.

  As the contract was drawn up it was decided to record the Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini on a separate occasion, after a concert and in the same hall but in a studio session. This was done ten months before the main three-week period and it turned out to be a good way to get into the swing of things. I was able to try the resident New York Steinway, which turned out to be perfect for the repertoire. I could sample the astonishing Presidential Suite at a nearby hotel, noting that it had a baby grand piano in its over-sized living room. I could hear how the piano and orchestra sounded on tape, meet the wonderful recording engineer, Jeff Mee, see where the control room was situated, see where the coffee machine was situated … generally have a clear picture in my mind to carry around over the following months as the demanding three-week period drew near. Over and above these thoughts was my del
ight at being able to work with two dear Andrews: producer Keener, and conductor Litton.

  I wanted this music to sound authentic. With Andrew Litton I found a conductor who felt exactly the same way and had spent years in Dallas addressing these issues with the support of the concertmaster, Emmanuel Borok – a violinist whose understanding of Romantic style went from his bow and fingerboard deep into the entire string section. I was utterly thrilled with the sound that surrounded me on stage during the first week of concerts.

  But the recording began badly. My first evening in Dallas was spent with some of the major donors. I was to talk to them onstage about how I choose a piano for a recording and to demonstrate the DSO’s two Steinways, a Hamburg and an American. I knew the latter from recording the Rhapsody the year before and so I sat down to show the audience what I liked about its power and fabulously mouldable cantabile sound. Except that now it sounded terrible. It had become soggy, dull and uneven. I began to panic. The Hamburg piano was beautiful, but too Classical in touch and nuance for Rachmaninov and there was no time to find another instrument before the rehearsal the following afternoon. I got on the phone immediately to the piano technician, James Williams, to alert him and it turned out he had not seen the piano for two months. I was furious but took a deep breath and trusted the success of the whole recording into his skilful hands. After eight hours of work the instrument was coming back to life and by the second rehearsal it sounded like the piano I had loved before.

  The first week was four performances of the Second Concerto with an 80-minute patch session just half an hour after the final concert; the second week was the First and Fourth Concertos in three performances with a slightly longer patch session on a separate day; and the final week was the same as the first but with the Third Concerto. We would convene the mornings following the concerts and listen to the tape, noting things we liked and didn’t like from the performances. Four concerts sounds like a lot of time to ‘get it right’, but when you add mobile phones, beepers, raucous coughs, a thunderstorm with lightning that could be heard as clicks on the tape, noisy page turns from the orchestra, a snoring audience member, and the inevitable wrong notes and ensemble issues, it doesn’t seem that much. And the patch sessions, rigorously controlled by union rules of starting, finishing and taking breaks, seemed desperately short – good only for emergency repairs. Oh, and did I mention the fire alarm…?