Ingrid Fliter in Vancouver

A wonderful celebration of music took place in Vancouver this past Sunday. Pianist Ingrid Fliter gave a recital of music by Haydn, Beethoven and Chopin, one that left me in a state of exultation and wonderment.

She opened her programme with Haydn’s E Minor sonata, Hob. XVI:34. Coincidentally, Ms. Fliter played the same sonata in her last recital appearance here, and it is interesting to hear how she has evolved as an artist – every turn of phrase is now more exquisite, every note in a passage work like pearls in a necklace, and every one of the many pregnant pauses charged with meaning.

Ms. Fliter also manages to bring out the quirky sense of humour that is so unique to Haydn’s piano sonatas. In the instantly memorable third movement, I was reminded of the words of Ignaz Ernst Ferdinand Arnold, who wrote in 1810 that, “The last Allegros or Rondos consist frequently of short, nimble movements that reach the highest degree of comicality by often being worked out most seriously, diligently and learnedly… Any pretence at seriousness only serves the purpose of making the playful wantonness of the music appear as unexpected as possible, and of teasing us from every side until we succumb and give up all attempts to predict what will happen next.” Indeed, this movement, a highly structured hybrid of rondo and theme and variations, aptly fits this description. Ingrid Fliter captured Haydn’s innocentemente marking to perfection, and the lightness and nimbleness of her playing making the performance a breathtaking one.

Beethoven sonatas have been an integral part of Ingrid Fliter’s recital programmes since her first recital here. In her previous two recital appearances, she played, respectively, the composer’s Op. 31, No. 3 and Op. 10, No. 3 sonatas. On Sunday, she turned to the middle of the three Op. 31 sonatas, and gave a performance that captured the high drama of the first movement, filled with portentous silences, the almost peaceful and tranquil second, disturbed by interjections of quick triplet figures, and the ethereal third movement, which somehow always reminds me of the composer’s famous Für Elise. I hope to hear Ms. Fliter in some of Beethoven’s later sonatas - perhaps the Op. 101, Op. 109, or Op. 110 sonatas would suit her beautifully.

After the interval, Ms. Fliter treated us to ten of Chopin’s waltzes, beginning with the first two published ones, Op. 18 and Op. 34, No. 1, and then proceeding in her own planned order until she ended her performance with the masterful Op. 42 waltz. The surprise in her programming was her inclusion and beautiful performance of two of the Op. Posthumous waltzes, the A-flat major and the A minor, the latter of which is not even included in the otherwise comprehensive Paderewski edition of the composer’s works. Her performance of these waltzes reminded me how unique each of the waltzes is, and how each work is, remarkably, with its relative brevity, absolutely self-contained and developed. Especially moving was her performance of the great C-sharp minor Waltz, Op. 64, No. 2, in which she brought out the otherworldly beauty of Chopin’s music. Ms. Fliter’s performance was sometimes whimsical, sometimes impetuous, and always ravishing. She delivered the waltzes with a freshness and sincerity that made me feel that I was hearing them for the first time.

The two delectable encores – Chopin’s Nocturne, Op. 9, No.3 and the scherzo of Beethoven’s Op. 31, No. 3 sonata – were just as memorable. She gave us all the nobility and beauty of the nocturne, and brought split-second timing in bringing out the humour, as well as the final “punch line” of the ending, in the Beethoven scherzo.

Ms. Fliter is an artist who uses her musicianship and considerable pianistic ability to bring us close to the heart of the music. We the audience are the beneficiaries of the fruits of her continuing artistic journey. I, for one, can only hope for many more of such memorable musical experiences from this remarkable musician in the nearest future.

Musical Memories

A musician’s autobiography is often as revelatory about the artist as well as the human being.

Musical memoirs roughly fall into two categories. There are, on the one hand, the raconteurs, who use the medium to chronicle their storied careers – encounters with famous personalities, marriages and love affairs, memorable performances. The danger here is that such books often end up to be nothing more than name dropping. The second of Arthur Rubinstein’s memoirs, My Many Years, unfortunately falls into this trap. In Glenn Gould’s wicked but killingly funny piece of writing, Memories of Maude Harbour, the pianist mercilessly makes fun of how Mr. Rubinstein recounts one amorous encounter after another in his autobiography.

Other musicians, while telling the story of their lives, share with readers their philosophical viewpoints, political sympathies, or musical insights. Yehudi Menuhin’s Unfinished Journey is just such a book. Both types of memoirs can make fascinating reading.

Pianist Leon Fleisher’s My Nine Lives – A Memoir of Many Careers in Music – co-authored with Anne Midgette, cannot be so easily categorized. While telling the story of his life and career as pianist, conductor, and teacher, Mr. Fleisher also gives readers his personal insights into many of the musical masterpieces that have been the cornerstone of his pianistic repertoire. They take the form of intermezzi sandwiched between various chapters of Mr. Fleisher’s life story. Personally, I find that such a format disrupts the flow of the narrative, and would prefer to have them at the end of the book as appendices.

Fleisher was of the outstanding American pianists of the 20^th century. At the height of a brilliant career, he was diagnosed with focal dystonia of the right hand and lost its use in piano playing. Even with this major setback, Mr. Fleisher has continued his musical career by constantly “reinventing” himself – as pianist (with his left hand), teacher, conductor and musical administrator. Some of Mr. Fleisher’s early recordings, such as his Beethoven and Brahms concerti with George Szell and the Cleveland Orchestra, remain classics to this day - a fact that Mr. Fleisher himself took pains to share with his readers.

What are unfortunate about this volume are the many instances of almost derogatory statements about some of his colleagues, or certain pieces of music. When writing of Arthur Schnabel’s recital programmes, Fleisher writes that Schnabel would have “a whole evening of Beethoven or Schubert, without a single crowd-pleasing bonbon like a Chopin mazurka or Liszt operatic paraphrase.” Chopin’s mazurkas as crowd-pleasing bonbons? The mazurkas are probably the most elusive of Chopin’s compositions, and are far from being crowd-pleasers. To categorically connect such diverse musical creations is unfair both to Chopin and to Liszt.

I was also surprised at Fleisher’s views on some of his fellow musicians. On conductor Sergiu Comissiona, Fleisher writes that “he was the best conductor of second-class music that I’ve ever known. He had his problems with Beethoven and Brahms, somehow; those performances never quite reached the heights of others I’ve experienced.” There are quite a few lines devoted to the Boston Symphony Orchestra at Tanglewood where Mr. Fleisher was administrator for a number of years, and to Fleisher’s relationship with conductor Seiji Ozawa. Mr. Fleisher writes, “Seiji likes musical depth, and I was deep: a window into the tradition. Seiji doesn’t necessarily access that kind of thing himself, but he certainly appreciated it in other people.” When Fleisher is recounting his eventual famous rupture with Ozawa and with Tanglewood, it degenerates into a sad case of “he says, she says.”

There is no doubt in my mind that Leon Fleisher was and is one of the great pianists and artists of the 20^th century. Upon finishing the volume, I cannot help but feel that the entire thing is more than a little self-serving, and does not do justice to Fleisher as an artist. Not everyone, regardless of how distinguished they are in their own field, is suited to writing about themselves. Perhaps someday a more thoughtful biography will be written, one that does justice to the life, career, and artistry of this great musician.

An Insult at the White House

So Lang Lang played at the White House state dinner for Chinese Communist leader Hu Jin-Tao.

As an encore, Lang played a Chinese song, My Motherland, and instantly became a hero to people in China. My Motherland is a song from the 1956 film Battle on Shangganling, a film (as well as the song Lang played) that vilified the Americans and their role in the Korean War.

Hu must have been laughing when he heard the song, because of its highly anti-American stance. Why the Obama administration would choose to honour the leader of the Chinese dictatorship in such an elaborate fashion is a mystery. It is surprising that the White House, which usually plans its event down to the last detail, would not have vetted Lang’s programme beforehand. Perhaps the encore was a spontaneous decision.

Ever since he burst upon the world of classical music, Lang has been changing our image of a “concert pianist.” From his embrace of the latest technology in performances to his wardrobe, Lang has been attracting much of the world’s attention to himself, if not to the music he purportedly loves. According to Lang, he wants to make use of technology to bring classical music to a wider audience – a commendable idea. But his antics at and away from the keyboard seem to suggest otherwise.

When playing My Motherland at the White House, Lang writes, according to one news source, that it felt like he was “telling them about the power of China and the unity of the Chinese.”

Lang Lang himself benefits from his American education at the Curtis Institute of Music, and he enjoys the privilege (and it is a privilege) of living in a free society. I am certain that a significant portion of his concert fees and recording royalties come from America. This is a great way to repay his benefactor.

Politics aside, though, Lang has also violated, in my view, one of the basic tenet that a musician, an artist, should abide by, namely that he or she puts his or her talent at the service of the composer. When Lang uses his music to convey a political message, whether or not it was his intent, he has sunk to the level of the countless composers and poets, now thankfully forgotten, who churned out odes and cantatas to Hitler, Stalin, or Mao.

Even his worst critic would have to admit that Lang Lang has an incredible ability at the piano. I hope and wish that he would devote his considerable talent towards his own artistic and musical growth. Without that, no amount of designer clothing or glossy promotional material would be able to sustain his life as a musician.

Patrick May

Perfection

Glenn Gould said that during a concert, the performer walks a tightrope, and the audience secretly waits for, or even wants, the artist to fall off the tightrope. Gould lamented that live performances bring out this gladiatorial instinct in all of us. We snicker when the horn cracks, the pianist forgets, or the soprano missing the high note. In Europe, audience routinely heckled performances (or artists) they disapprove of. Even Luciano Pavarotti was victim to this treatment.

Much has been made about Vladimir Horowitz’s famous memory lapse in the second movement of the Schumann Fantasy during his famous Carnegie Hall “comeback” recital. Years ago, I was at a performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin at the Vienna State Opera. When tenor Siegfried Jerusalem’s voice cracked during the demanding final scene, there was a collective gasp from the audience.

Why is our generation so hung up about mistakes in performances?

Many great pianists from the early 20^th century had stupendous techniques, but they were often less concern about playing all the right notes. When we listen to recordings from when technology was still in its infancy, we often hear performances that are less than note-perfect.

As recording technology improved, it allowed artists endless opportunity to edit, splicing together portions of a complete performance in order to make it “perfect”, meaning, without wrong notes.

What follows is an entire generation of listeners who would, in the comfort of their homes, be able to listen to a faultless performance at the press of a button. Over time, we come to expect that in live performances as well. In addition, because of the availability of recorded performances, many of the members of the audience attending a concert would be very familiar with the music being played. This, I believe, is part of the reason of an increase in the technical level of music making. Paderewski or Anton Rubinstein would never be allowed in any decent conservatory, people say, because they played their performances were so splattered with wrong notes.

But is that all there is to music making? Playing a “clean” performance and hoping that we do not stumble?

Artists have divergent views in their answers to these questions. Artists like Leonard Bernstein, Alfred Brendel and Sviatoslav Richter had taken to recording their own live performances; performances that they thought represented the best of themselves. In the other extreme, Glenn Gould had completely abandoned the concert stage to devote himself to making music in the recording studio. According to Gould, one of the great pianists of the 20^th century, a recorded performance and a concert performance are two entirely different things, and recorded performances should never be compared with a live performance. Gould believed that in the recording studio, the artist has the luxury, with the aid of technology, to create a performance that he or she would deem to be the ideal conception of the music.

As a member of the audience, it is often too easy to be judgemental, especially when performances (we think) do not live up to our expectations. Music making is difficult, and even the greatest artists have days when they are below par. As for me, I would much prefer a performance that brought out the essence of the music rather than one that was clean but sterile.

Would there come a day when we all gather in Carnegie Hall to listen to a “perfect” performance on speakers?

Political Music

Throughout the history of music, composers have been called upon to create works serving extra-musical needs. Composers have written music to celebrate the openings of churches, concert halls, and coronation of kings and queens. In the 20^th century, major composers like Shostakovich and Prokofiev had to write music glorifying their odious regime. Adolf Hitler did not so much call for music glorifying himself or even his equally odious Nazi regime, but exploited music by composers such as Beethoven, Bruckner, Liszt, and of course Richard Wagner, for his own political ends. German newsreels from the 1930’s and 1940’s would inevitably show huge party rallies accompanied by such great music.

In post-1949 China, Mao Zedong, saw himself as a patron of the arts. Conservatories in cities such as Beijing and Shanghai continued to flourish, with occasional visits by distinguish professors from China’s “older brother”, the Soviet Union. Then in the latter half of the 1960’s, Mao’s Cultural Revolution saw the attempted destruction of all “bourgeois” art and artists. Composers who were able to continue their work had to churn out hack works such as Red Detachment of Women, The Red Lantern, and Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy, music to accompany Jiang Qing’s (otherwise known as Madame Mao) revolutionary ballets. I do not know whether to feel sorry for the composers of such scores, or the musicians who had to play them night after night. The music produced during this period was no more than watered-down Tchaikovsky or Glazunov, adapted to Chinese specifications.

An interesting by-product from this unfortunate period in Chinese history is the Yellow River Piano Concerto. Written in 1969 by a committee of six composers, the piano concerto is really a reworking of themes from composer Xian Xinghai’s Yellow River Cantata, a work written during the Sino-Japanese War in 1939. The style of orchestration and piano writing is a curious mixture of piano concertos by Grieg, Rachmaninoff, and Tchaikovsky. The fourth and final movement of the concerto is based on The East is Red, a song glorifying Mao Zedong. According to pianist Yin Cheng-Zong, one of the composers and original performers of the concerto, he took part in creating this monstrosity because he wanted something he could play that would at least simulate music by the great composers, and he made it as difficult as he knew how so as to keep up his piano technique.

What is disturbing is that, unlike so many works deifying Stalin and Mao, or music from Jiang Qing’s revolutionary ballets, the Yellow River Concerto is still performed and recorded today, and popular as ever, especially throughout Southeast Asia. There can be several reasons for this aberration – a lack of awareness of history, and of the background associated with this music, but also a mistake, made even by many in the west, of not putting Mao Zedong in the same “pedestal” as Hitler or even Stalin. Even the great 20^th century composer John Adams, in his opera Nixon in China, made the mistake of normalizing Mao as just another major historical figure. How would we feel if our local opera company or symphony orchestra performs a work that tells of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, or Neville Chamberlain signing the Munich agreement with Hitler?

We must remember that in today’s China, where the government is constantly using words like nationalism and patriotism to divert people’s minds off its dictatorial regime, continuing performances and recordings of works like the Yellow River Concerto, a work of zero artistic merit, only serves to contribute towards our collective historical amnesia.

Playing by Heart

In music school, one of the most frequently heard questions in the corridors outside the practice room is, “Have you memorized it yet?” Meaning, of course, have you memorized your music yet? Can you play your pieces without the music?

Before Franz Liszt, public concerts tended to be variety shows, often with dubious artistic merits. Liszt, by his incredible pianistic abilities as well as the sheer force of his personality, was the first pianist to have an entire concert of solo piano music. He also coined the term, the “recital”. People laughed when they first heard the word, “How does one recite at the piano,” they asked.

Liszt also started the practice of performing without the aid of the score. Before Liszt, pianists were expected to play with the music. Artists who tried to perform from memory were considered arrogant, or show off’s.

How times have changed. Anyone who plays the piano, from the child doing his or her first piano examination, to pianists competing in the most prestigious international competitions, to the artist playing at Carnegie Hall, are expected to play the music, by heart. Without having to look at the music, they say, one can be freer to express oneself. They can really focus on the music, is another argument.

It is interesting that violinists, cellists, organists and other instrumentalists, often do play solo recitals with the music. Conductors often use the music. Chamber musicians, including pianists, use the score when they play. Does it necessarily mean that these musicians are not as focused on the music? Or that they are expressing themselves less?

The thing is, having the music in front of you does not mean that you are, or have to, look at it every single minute that you are playing. In my mind, having the score in front of you frees you up more because the stress of memory lapses is minimized.

The great Soviet pianist Sviatoslav Richter, one of the great artists and virtuosi of the 20^th century, was a proponent of playing with the score. He believed that it is a more honest way of performing, and it allows the artist to not have to restrict him or herself to playing the one or two memorized recital programmes.

Don’t get me wrong. As a piano teacher, I am not expecting to see everyone using the music in performances. Sometimes, keen students would want to challenge themselves by seeing if they can memorize the piece, just for fun, just like they would choose the really difficult pieces to play. What I do feel is that memorization should be a choice, and not an expectation. Some people feel more secured with the music memorized, and using the score does not mean that a person knows the score less well. To an audience, to see a person playing without the score seem more impressive, like someone walking a tightrope blindfolded. But playing music is more than just a circus trick.

Instead of playing by heart, I would much rather be playing from the heart.

Seiji Ozawa

The New York Times reported today that conductor Seiji Ozawa, scheduled to conduct at Carnegie Hall, will only be able to conduct part of the scheduled programme. Mr. Ozawa, who has been recovering from surgery for oesophageal cancer, is now suffering from back problems stemming from the past months’ inactivity. His absence from concert activity has really left a void in the world of classical music.

It is difficult to see Seiji Ozawa as an old man. Other than his incredible musical talent, Ozawa burst on to the musical scene in the 1960's with his hippie hair style, the beads that he wore, and his hip clothing, and became the talk of wherever he was appearing. Unkind critics harped on these superficial things, and quickly labelled his music making “superficial”, and lacking in “depth”. Just as they earlier criticized Glenn Gould for singing while playing, Karajan for closing his eyes while conducting, and Bernstein for jumping too high when he conducted, critics see these superficial traits and allow them to bias their judgement on what is essential, namely, the music making.

Seiji Ozawa is a great conductor, a great musician. Leaving his native Japan upon finishing his studies, and with barely a word of a western language, he quickly made a name for himself as a musician of exceptional talent. Success followed success – assistantship to Bernstein in New York, coaching with Herbert von Karajan in Berlin, music directorship in Chicago, Toronto, San Francisco, Boston, Vienna, and of course, Japan. Again, critics became suspicious – too much success too quickly, they say. Nobody can really be that good.

One of the arts’ greatest tragedies is the power and influence of the critic. They can raise an artist to the skies one day, and destroy him or her the next day. Artists, who are in the “good books” of these musical writers, can do no wrong. Others never seem to get a good review no matter what he or she does. In book stores, we find impressive volumes of the “greatest” Classical music recordings, where the authors “grade” the performances of great musicians – one star for this, three stars for something they really like – as if they were school children submitting an essay.

For years, Richard Dyer, critic for the Boston Globe, had been raging war against Mr. Ozawa’s performances with the Boston Symphony, calling him a weak music director and an even worse conductor. Recent history of the performing arts has been full of examples of such battles between critic and artist – Harold Schonberg and Leonard Bernstein, Claudia Cassidy and Jean Martinon, and later Georg Solti in Chicago.

Early on in his career, Mr. Ozawa was criticized in Japan as being too western in his ways. In America later on, critics, perhaps running out of invectives, say that he is “too Japanese” – he cannot really have any deep understanding of our music.

Of course, no critic, no matter how powerful, can really destroy talents like Ozawa, Bernstein or Solti. We only have to look at some of his fellow musicians, among them Serkin (Rudolf and Peter), Jesse Norman, Yo Yo Ma, Kissin, Zimmerman, and Rostropovich, who love collaborating with him. Great orchestras in Berlin, London, Paris, Boston, San Francisco, and Tokyo, keep asking him back. Luck can carry a mediocre talent only so far, and certainly not for so many decades.

Among his many incredible and memorable performances, we can list Beethoven’s 9^th Symphony, Mozart’s Idomeneo, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, Messian’s Saint Francis of Assisi, Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin and Queen of Spades, all of the Mahler symphonies, many of Strauss’ tone poems, to name just a few. Ozawa has always been a tireless champion of contemporary music, performing the works of today’s composers, whether world famous or relative unknown. The aforementioned Saint Francis of Assisi by Messian, a major 20^th century opera, was premiered by Mr. Ozawa. In his music making, Mr. Ozawa uses his talent and charisma to draw our attention to the beauty of the music, not to himself.

Conductor Andre Previn, who worked as a composer in Hollywood before embarking on a conducting career, had to work hard to shed his reputation as a “Hollywood composer”, said that reviews for his early concerts inevitably began with something like, “Last night, Hollywood’s Andre Previn…” Once he read those words, he said, he could almost dictate the rest of the review. Previn also added that it is perfectly fine to ignore a bad review, as long as one can ignore the good ones as well.

Bias and prejudice are powerful factors, and no one is immune from them, but coupled them with a position of power, and the results become dangerous. Now that Mr. Ozawa is an old man, perhaps the distinguished writers of the major newspaper will finally begin to see the “depth” and “conviction” in his performances, things that have been hallmarks of his music making all along.

Patrick May

December 7, 2010