The recording almost ended badly too. When I first arrived and met with Andrew Litton he told me that the Third Concerto would be the easiest of the four to put together as they had played it dozens of times and knew it very well. In fact it turned out to be the most problematic as we had very different ideas about certain musical issues and held those ideas strongly. Swords clashed and sparks flew but, in retrospect, I think this was good because a lot of energy was generated for this most energetic of pieces. And we remained the best of friends throughout, helped, of course, by succulent Texas steaks and some fine red wine from the State where Rachmaninov chose to make his final home.
The other Rach Three
The so-called ‘Rach Three’ is one of the most famous works in the repertoire, a fascinating and intricately lush forest of notes and perhaps the pinnacle of the Romantic piano concerto genre. But there is another, lesser-known Rach Three, his symphony, written almost thirty years after the concerto. It is the only symphony Rachmaninov recorded himself and it is a performance that shows him as an indisputably great conductor. All the late Rachmaninov works seem to me to be infused with a deep sadness as he returned to composition after a ten-year hiatus. Between his op. 39 (Études-tableaux) and his op. 40 (Fourth Piano Concerto) the world had seen the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the changing role of women, jazz, and countless other social, political and musical changes. No longer in the role of a publicly melancholy Russian Romantic, the composer is revealed in the last works in a private world of raw anguish and bewilderment, coming to terms with a new life in the New World.
The Third Symphony and the Fourth Concerto are full of tears. They seem to me a bit like a grandfather unable to understand the enthusiasms of his adored grandchildren yet trying desperately to do so. There are shadows of every movie not made, every tired, retired actress who was never a star, every thwarted opportunity in life or love, wrinkled faces dry of weeping, boxes of fading photographs, unrecorded interviews of unspoken memories. Above all, an instinctive sense that no one would understand, and if they did, they would care only a little. A return home with so much to say but no energy or opportunity to say it.
This sadness is seen in a letter Rachmaninov wrote to a friend in 1937 about his Third Symphony:
It was played in New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, etc. At the first two performances I was present. It was played wonderfully. Its reception by both the public and critics was sour. One review sticks painfully in my mind: that I didn’t have a Third Symphony in me any more. Personally, I am firmly convinced that this is a good work. But … sometimes composers are mistaken too! Be that as it may, I am holding to my opinion so far.
Eighty years after the piece was written and premiered I think he would be happy and content to know how much he, his music, and this piece are loved.
How Beethoven redesigned the cadenza
When I was in the process of playing and recording all five Beethoven concertos it struck me that there is an interesting development from one to the next in the way the composer treats the cadenza.
The cadenza developed in the eighteenth century from the custom of delaying and decorating the final cadence (hence the name) just before the end of a movement – a dramatic, penultimate pause ruminating in freedom beyond the constraints of the Classical form’s structure. In Mozart one is expected to play for about two to three minutes using themes from the movement along with stock patterns of arpeggios and other figuration and finally rounding everything off with a trill. Often in the score only this final trill is indicated, an unchangeable ‘happily ever after’ convention of the time. The custom was for the performer to improvise something on the spur of the moment – Robert Levin is a rare case of someone who brilliantly and audaciously continues this skill today. But in the nineteenth century it became more common to play either the cadenzas Mozart wrote as examples for his students or to play one written down, by oneself or by another.
Beethoven’s first two concertos were published without cadenzas and only later did he write some – indeed two completed ones for the First Concerto (one elegant and economical, the other an insanely extravagant example of how he might have sounded when improvising). For the Second Concerto he wrote a cadenza many years after writing the actual work, on the cusp of his late period. It sounds in places as if some rejected sketches for the second movement of his Sonata op. 101 had been muddled around on his desk. I’ve never liked it, not because it’s out of style (which it is) but because it seems to me to lack coherence. It’s ungainly, awkward to play and roughly constructed. Also, it doesn’t sound improvised. So I decided to write my own. At least it’s authentic to do so, even if what I’ve written is not.
In the first movement cadenzas of Beethoven’s Third and Fourth Concertos we see the beginning of the Romantic development of the idea: the cadenza as a long stretch of music that is the artistic climax of the whole work, often containing its most inspired musical ideas. This became the norm later in the concertos of Schumann, Tchaikovsky (First and Second), Grieg, Rachmaninov (First) and Prokofiev (Second) among many others. Although pianists have written their own cadenzas for Beethoven’s Third and Fourth Concertos, and he would have expected as much, somehow the best bits are missing if the composer’s own cadenzas are missing.
When we reach the Fifth (‘Emperor’) Concerto a further development has taken place. Now the cadenza is at the very beginning. Three stock-in-trade chords (I–IV–V7) are the punctuation for exuberant pianistic decoration that covers the entire keyboard. Then, where we might expect a conventional cadenza towards the end of the first movement, Beethoven expressly comments in the score: ‘Non si fa una cadenza, ma s’attacca subito il seguente’; ‘Do not play a cadenza, but instead proceed immediately to the following.’ The rules have changed – and not for the first time from the hands of this mighty iconoclast.
Beethoven, in redesigning the piano concerto cadenza, prepared the ground for the whole Romantic period. From this point on, cadenzas would either be present as an unchangeable, fully composed climax, employing all the composer’s skills, or absent because of a greater overriding symphonic design.
Brahms First or Second?
The Brahms piano concertos are two of the greatest pillars of the Romantic repertoire. The First is like a symphony where piano and orchestra seem involved at times in a titanic struggle, themes hurled across the stage with dramatic rhetoric; the Second is more like a massive chamber work, where the musical ideas are an exchange rather than a confrontation. If the First is more about proclamation, the Second is perhaps more about reception – a speaker versus a listener. The way each piece opens tells this story in a few seconds: the First with its ferocious drum roll, a clap of thunder pinning the audience back in its seats; the Second with a gentle horn solo inviting that same audience to lean forward in dialogue.
G. K. Chesterton, in a typical bon mot, wrote: ‘Bleak House is not certainly Dickens’s best book; but perhaps it is his best novel.’ If I could borrow and paraphrase that paradox I might say that of the two Brahms piano concertos the Second is the better piece, but the First is the greater piece. I think the Second is better constructed, better orchestrated; themes are better developed; harmonies are better judged; textures are better balanced – but for me the First has a greater burst of pure, utter, natural genius. Its flame flares with such intensity, and with such promise of more to come (he was only twenty-five when he wrote it), that I find myself overwhelmed by it in a way I’m not by the Second, written twenty-two years later.
That is until I recorded and played them both in the same concert in Salzburg. The First Concerto is work enough for one evening (or morning on that particular occasion) but when the interval arrived, instead of the usual backstage process of winding down I had to crank up for an even bigger piece and challenge. Returning to the piano on the Grosse Festspielhaus’s stage, I was physically warmed up but emotionally spent and drained, sated by the richness of the first half’s feast. But then the horn so
lo sang from the back of the stage and I replied with that gentle, lapping, ascending arpeggio (has a more intimate moment of chamber music even been woven into a piano concerto?) and instantly I was refreshed by this most conciliatory of musical exchanges, Brahms at the height of his confident maturity. As the orchestra took over from me after my first cadenza with their ringing tutti (only one forte not two) I was completely revitalised, as if I had received a shot in the arm – music’s second wind, the eagle’s strength-renewed wings.
Brahms’s final stroke of genius, after the ravishing slow movement where lyrical song-like sections frame a turbulent central climax more anxious than tragic, is the Allegretto grazioso finale. Many have suggested that this understated, joyful movement lets the work down and is a misjudged anticlimax. I think the only misjudgement is when performers ignore Brahms’s flowing metronome marking in the Andante and create a heavy-handed movement that makes the work’s overall structure lopsided. The graceful last movement, from its opening when the melody shyly sidles in on the subdominant through its later à la hongroise moments to the finale tarantella, is one of Brahms’s greatest compositional triumphs.
For all the grandeur and excitement of the First Concerto’s youthful flare, the Second’s older vintage seemed wiser, more fascinatingly complex as I revisited and rerecorded both pieces in the same concert. Its musical arguments seemed more nuanced, more open to exploration, more a search for common ground where, as in life, the sun can shine brightest … and warmest. Indeed, its multifaceted subtlety reminded me of reading one of those great, rich, life-enhancing Dickensian novels.
Dvořák’s Concerto for Ten Thumbs
I was chatting to a musician friend, Nicholas Ashton, a few years ago and he asked me what repertoire I was learning at the time.
‘The Dvořák Piano Concerto,’ I replied.
‘Ah…’ The warmth of affection in his voice could be heard through my iPhone. ‘That’s probably my favourite piano concerto.’
Then a year or two later Sir András Schiff asked me the same thing at a party. His eyes lit up when I mentioned the Dvořák Piano Concerto and he responded by sending me a beautiful, hardbound facsimile of the autograph a few days later with a kind note: ‘This wonderful work still needs our help until it’s properly appreciated by musicians and the public as well.’
But then there are those, famous and distinguished conductors among them, who have told me they hate this piece and would never want to perform it. ‘Oh, I did it once. A few nice moments but not one of his best efforts.’ ‘Just proves that Dvořák wrote some duds.’ How can a piece like this provoke such diverse, extreme reactions from fine musicians? Why is the Dvořák Piano Concerto a relative rarity in concert programmes? Why is it almost never heard in the halls of music colleges? Why do many musicians not even realise that Dvořák wrote a piano concerto? I don’t think it needs any apologies but it does need apologists committed to introducing this neglected but glorious, lyrical work to those who don’t know it.
There are a number of reasons perhaps why it is not central to every pianist’s repertoire. First, it’s really, really hard to play … and it doesn’t sound like it (not a performer’s choice combination). Sviatoslav Richter wrote of the two months it took him to learn Bartók Second and the two years of work for the Dvořák. It’s truly like a concerto for ten thumbs because the composer, who was not a pianist, seems to have had little idea where fingers comfortably or effectively sit on the keyboard. Whereas Liszt flies along the track marks as if in a sophisticated sled, Dvořák’s wheels are forever getting stuck in a rut. I’m speaking physically not musically, of course.
Then there’s the published score. Until very recently the only printed materials available came with two versions of the piano part, one by the composer and one by the Czech pianist and teacher Vilém Kurz. This latter version, from 1919, was the version played most (when the piece was played at all) until well after the Second World War. Recognising the fiendish and ungainly nature of the original piano-writing Kurz, rather than making a few judicious adjustments here and there, decided to try to make a Lisztian sled out of a Dvořákian cart. Unsurprisingly, it didn’t work. It feels a little as if Dvořák has found himself in his farm boots at a society ball. The ‘glamour’ of Kurz’s version sounds fake and misjudged, a rococo fireplace set into the rustic walls of a country cottage.
And then there’s the famous recording, the one most people hear first, by Sviatoslav Richter and Carlos Kleiber – the dream team of the most famous pianist and conductor of their generation. Incomparable, legendary artists but, to quote Richter from his diaries, ‘It’s not a good recording I’m afraid because the atmosphere wasn’t good … I wasn’t on form and neither was Kleiber … lots of shortcomings – and not only in the piano part … Carlos kept splitting hairs and I myself was very tense. Hence the absence of the charm and simplicity so characteristic of Dvořák.’ A refreshingly honest assessment! That recording has been frustrating for me because when the Dvořák Piano Concerto has come up in conversation with orchestral managers or conductors the exchange often goes something like this.
‘Yes, I listened to that piece once and didn’t like it. I don’t know what you see in it.’
‘Which recording have you heard?’
‘The Richter one with Kleiber.’
Some pieces sound like great pieces, even in poor or uncommitted performances, but not the Dvořák Piano Concerto. It needs the help of an affectionate heart directing the pianist’s fingers and the conductor’s baton. In fact, I think the pianist needs to be able to say, along with my friend, Nicholas, at least during the concert itself, ‘This is probably my favourite piano concerto.’
Schubert’s hurdy-gurdy man
The pathos of the final song in Schubert’s late cycle Winterreise is almost unbearable. It’s as if the composer, having taken us on this bleak journey, leaves us alone at the end of it, pointing us in the direction of a man who symbolises total disintegration. Life ends not with a sacrifice but with a slinking away, like the mangy dog in the poem.
There’s a performance of it by the Irish singer Harry Plunket Greene, readily accessible on the internet, which is in its own way as remarkable as the song itself. It is sung in English and with a disarming lack of vocal sophistication. We sense that all artifice has been stripped away. We hear a singer past his prime, even with a strain in his voice; it is as if he has become the song – an old man, whose vocal ‘plate’ is empty, conveying the hopelessness evoked by the composer. When a singer, whose instrument is his body, faces the end of a career journey, it is an existential termination. The body itself has broken down; the vocal cords are shot.
Schubert was not a sophisticated man, he was not an intellectual; but through a kind of inexplicable genius his scratching, blotching pen acted as a conduit for music of the most intense beauty and human expressiveness, without ever being calculating or self-conscious. This song was probably composed as quickly as it would take someone to write out a fair copy of the score, like water flowing out of a tap. The problem is, as the years pass and as our reverence for such a master and his masterpieces increases, we coddle and maul and groom and practise and fuss and worry and obsess … until we’ve covered over the wound of such a song with scented bandages. We want to be admired as lieder singers and pianists; we use the song as a vehicle for our own vanity; we want the world to recognise our sensitivity; we approach the hurdy-gurdy man with a coin in our hands but with a camera at our backs.
The final irony in this final song is that the Leiermann is … a musician. A spent, ignored, failed musician. In the crack of Plunket Greene’s tired voice we hear the song acted out; we pass the lonely man; we cannot, despite the song’s question, ‘with him go’. We can perform the other twenty-three songs as if on stage, but for this last one the make-up must be removed. We are alone, in the dressing room, head in hands, the janitor outside, about to lock up for the night.
Schubert and Simone Weil: a note for a CD
To listen to someone is to put oneself in his place as he speaks. To put oneself in the place of someone whose soul is corroded by affliction (malheur), or in near danger of it, is to annihilate oneself.
Those who are unhappy need nothing in the world but people able to give them their attention … nearly all those who think they have this capacity do not possess it. Warmth of heart, impulsiveness, compassion, are not enough.
Simone Weil
Franz Schubert, in his late piano sonatas, is revealed more as a listener than a speaker, the ‘heavenly length’ being that open-ended time it takes for a person to respond to the suffering of another. The composer and performer thus enter into an intimate communion of hearts, and the audience can only ever be eavesdroppers. There is a contrast here with Beethoven, the declamatory prophet, whose individualism tends to manifest a will to power, to overcome; Schubert’s individualism is more a withdrawal into solitude, and a sense of being overpowered and overcome.
Both composers reached full maturity only to discover that they had serious, debilitating physical ailments, one a loss of hearing and the other syphilis. There is something curiously enlightening in the nature of these afflictions, which almost becomes manifest in their musical personalities. Deafness is like a brick wall to be confronted, it is tangible and local; whereas syphilis is more like an ocean to be waded into, uncertain, intangible, its horror creeping up on a victim unawares.
Rough Ideas Page 19
