Maurizio Pollini Live in Salzburg

Solo Recital: Maurizio Pollini, pianist

Saturday, August 17, 2013

Großes Festspielhaus Salzburg

9pm

Program:

Schumann - Kreisleriana, Op. 16

Schumann -Piano Sonata no. 3 in F minor, Op. 14 (Konzert ohne Orchester)

Intermission

Chopin - Piano Sonata no. 2 in B flat minor, Op. 35 "Funeral March"

Chopin - Berceuse in D flat, Op. 57

Chopin - Polonaise in A flat, Op. 53

Some 2,200 people turned out in their best attire at the Großes Festspielhaus Saturday night to hear what was tauted to be one of the great musical events of the year. Maurizio Pollini's recital at the Salzburg Festivals this year was one of its centerpiece concerts, along with the Mahler Symphony Cycle and the emphasis on El Sistema. The recital both was and was not what I hoped it would be, but we can talk about that after a brief overview of all the pieces.

He came out on stage to thundering applause, bowed quickly and charged into the stormy opening of Kreisleriana before he had completely sat down at his personal Fabbrini Steinway. He must have done something wrong in his rush to get started because he played almost exclusively wrong notes for the first four phrases of the piece. It flew by so quickly he couldn't get his bearings, wisely skipped the repeats, and reset himself for the B section, which was moderately better but disturbed. The return of the A section was hardly improved. From where I sat on the left side of the hall, I could see his shaking and uncertain hands rushing from one place to another, trying to find the right notes. The second movement was very beautiful in the slow themes, but the faster intermezzi were weak in every sense of the word. Although the third movement and most other fast movements of this piece were much better "technically," I could hear nothing but a wall of sound being thrown at me. The pedal was cleared at most once a measure, and he made no apparent effort to bring out any particular voice. Perhaps this was an attempt to cover up any more flubs? Nevertheless, his fifth and sixth movements were so good that they redeemed the entire piece for me. I have never heard those figures at the opening of the fifth in particular played so well. He completely did away with the pedal and let that glorious piano of his shine for what it is. It was spooky! The last movement began very well. The single sixteenth notes in the right hand sounded like grace notes (an interesting and satisfying effect), but as the piece went along he lost the 6/8 feeling and instead started to play as though in 2/4 - i.e. with two equal eighth notes per beat separated by a grace note.

I see I am getting a little wordy here. Suffice it to say that the Schumann Sonata was infinitely superior to Kreisleriana. At intermission we learned that Mr. Pollini was quite sick and was ready to cancel the concert, but after significant convincing from the audience and management, he decided to play the second half after all. Aren't we all glad he did! His Chopin Sonata was a marvel of pianism. He knew exactly the sound he was going for and drove forward through the piece relentlessly, maintaining a strong sense of pulse, which can be an especial challenge with this sonata. The second movement was smooth and effortless. The third "moved" a bit more than I was used to, but to good effect. The fourth was so quiet that I was unable to pinpoint exactly when it started: it seemed to fade in from nothing, like some creature darting here and there in the fog.

As said, Pollini's playing through all of his pieces, no less in the Berceuse and the Polonaise, was very fine for the most part. His sound was very carefully crafted, note by note, and he had a good amount of energy to move the pieces forward (often rushing to an extreme!). His interpretation of little things here and there was quite unusual, and I dare say he would not advance very far in an international competition against today's generation of the newest hotshot pianists like Daniil Trifonov, Benjamin Grosvenor, Sean Chen, or Vadym Kholodenko. It's hard to say. He is very old, but I wouldn't say that he is past his prime. His playing made an impact on me, but it didn't move me. He is a very calculated, intellectual player, a fine artist to be sure, but the performance lacked something I needed - an emotional connection with the audience which, I claim, is critical to become a really transcendent performer.

What do you think? Do you have to be emotionally involved in the music in order to "make music"? Voice your opinion in the comments below.

Rupley's Rating:

Fellner Fills Big Shoes at the 2013 Salzburg Festival

Solo recital: Till Fellner, pianist

Wednesday, August 7, 2013

Großes Festspielhaus Salzburg

9pm

Program:

J. S. Bach - Well-Tempered Clavier II, nos. 1-4

            Prelude and Fugue in C major BWV 870

            Prelude and Fugue in C minor BWV 871

            Prelude and Fugue in C sharp major BWV 872

            Prelude and Fugue in C sharp minor BWV 873

W. A. Mozart – Piano Sonata in F major, KV 533/494

Intermission

F. J. Haydn – Piano Sonata in B minor, Hob. XVI:32

R. Schumann – Symphonic Etudes, Op. 13

Pianist Till Fellner had no easy task in front of him in preparing a recital program on such short notice that would satisfy the 2,500 disgruntled music lovers who had purchased tickets to see legendary pianist Evgeny Kissin perform live in the Großes Festspielhaus last night, a recital which was to be one of the highlights of this year’s Salzburg Festivals. Kissin had canceled the performance three days prior due to a “critical finger injury” leaving him unable to play. As his first solo concert in over a year, Fellner daringly chose a program of mostly “personal premieres”, excepting the Bach set, which he learned about the time he released his recording of WTC I under the ECM label in 2004. Curiously, the Bach was the most questionable set on the program – his heavy use of pedal throughout most of the pieces, although carefully cleared now and then to maintain the independence of the contrapuntal lines, did obscure the ornamentation, muddy the texture a little and make more some too-bell-like long notes. Most people I talked to agreed that it was too much. Still, the warmth of tone he was able to create with it was captivating – especially in the C sharp and C sharp minor preludes and fugues. His skill in developing an intense, churning fugal texture is first-rate; the preludes, by comparison, were rather flat and seemed poorly thought-out.

The tremendously difficult, exposed, cheerful opening line of the Mozart was very carefully executed, but I could hear him shaking as he played it. For most of the first movement, his lines were uneven and forcedly cheerful, and the dynamic range was narrow. He got gradually better as he went, finally closing out the movement quite nicely. His second movement was the highlight of the evening: absolutely brilliant. His tone was stunning; varied; directed; full of sensitivity, pain, and happiness. It was everything that one could have dreamed of hearing at the festival – to my young ears, in any case. Not everyone was equally enraptured, and I heard more rustling of programs during the B section of that movement than at any other time during the concert. After the final movement came intermission.

After intermission, he played a lovely Haydn sonata that I was personally unfamiliar with, and which I did enjoy. His final piece were the devilishly hard Symphonic Etudes by Robert Schumann, which was obviously his most immature piece. All of the “impossible parts” he played flawlessly, but the lostness, the forced phrasing, the mechanical pounding out of notes and even a memory lapse managed to work themselves into the darker corners of the performance. My favorite parts of the piece were disappointingly unmusical, but there were other moments I had never noticed before that were truly beautiful. Such is life in the world of live performance!

At the end of the concert, he bowed four times before the audience finally convinced him to play an encore, a thing which he should not have been expected to do on such short notice. He played the Sarabande from Bach’s A minor English Suite, and he was clearly unprepared. It sounded tired, shaky, and uneven. There were some beautiful, musical moments in it, but for the most part it was weak. The entire audience felt this with me, too, because the stopped clapping and were heading out the door before he even made it to the stage door. To be fair, it was a long walk to get offstage.

So, what’s the final opinion? In that same 1836 article by Schumann, he writes that criticism always has a million letters more than praise. Such is the case here, sadly enough. His performance was worthy of the stage he was on, and the audience enjoyed his performance very much, a thing I was skeptical of when going into the hall, seeing all the bored faces. There’s nothing more difficult as a performer than substituting for a world-famous artist at a sold-out concert.

Rupley’s Rating: 

Let's Turn the Page...

A quote I ran across today by Robert Schumann sums things up just about perfectly. Roughly translated, it read:

"The best way to talk about music is to say nothing."

That, of course, was published in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, a tremendously successful and long-standing publication of music criticism founded by Schumann in April, 1834 and still publishing to this day. He goes on to qualify his statement, in order to dispel some of the inherent irony:

"Consider, however, that we have a responsibility to Chopin [and, by extension, all other composers], and that the great public, seeing our silence, rather than observing our awe of this music, would come to a somewhat different conclusion about us." (Schumann, Robert: Schriften über Musik und Musiker, Joseph Häusler, ed. Philipp Reclam jun. Stuttgart, 2009. 89-90)

Over the next few pages, he describes the greatness of the task of honoring music with speech. I suppose one could say I have been doing that already, but I think "complaining" about music is more accurate. I have decided, in short, to begin using this blog as a means of publishing music criticism, probably the only thing I know enough about to write a blog on. Unfortunately, I am no position to analyze and comment on new compositions as Schumann so deftly did, but I hope to share the musical ear I have been working for so many years to develop with all of you because when you get down to it, I believe that the current inattention to the so-called Classical Music World is due not to a lack of quality in the art being produced - on the contrary, I find it to be the genre with the highest standard of all - but because of an underdeveloped musical ear in the audience. I will share my thoughts in the form of a review and discuss how I go about listening to music to get the most enjoyment out of the finest performances on earth.

The Issue of the Ear and Mental Rehearsal

Liszt’s Ballade in B minor S. 171 has been a centerpiece in my repertoire since age 14 when I spent about 8 months learning it. After two years, I brought it back for a run of competitions, and now I have resurrected it for my upcoming time in Europe and a series of five concerts in Germany and Italy. One of the recurring causes of frustration in my pianistic life, and one I have yet to see any other pianists write about on the innumerable blogs I follow, is the issue of cultivating my ear – learning to hear exactly what this ballade could sound like, if I could play it any way I wanted to. In other words, how do I know if I am following the score, and how do I learn to hear, evaluate, and criticize my own interpretation with all the discernment of a great artist? It is through the ear that a pianist becomes a great pianist.  Neuhaus and Gieseking talk at great length on this without ever actually proposing comprehensive solutions. So, we continue to flounder around a bit.  I’ll write more on this.

The problem with a too-good ear is that you become frustrated with your own playing, but an ear that is only one step ahead of your playing or right on the same level with it is one that won’t do you much good either; you become satisfied with your playing and run out of things to practice. Although my days of running out of steam on a piece are slowly coming to an end (at last!), I still find myself constantly swinging back and forth between total, unhealthy satisfaction (arrogance) and total, unhealthy dissatisfaction (depression).

Today was one of the dissatisfied days. Having spent most of last night listening to recordings of great yet still totally unknown pianists really took its toll on me this morning as I tried to practice and found myself confronted with more of my own weaknesses than ever before. I remember times when I used to have to force myself to make up criticisms in order to push myself to continue practicing, but today the new level of realization was debilitating. I gave up practicing after about two hours and hopped on the city bus for a change of scenery. After several hours of clearing my head and thinking deeply on issues mostly unrelated to music – namely the world population, God, and ice cream – I pulled out my score of the Liszt Ballade, which has been sitting untouched in my bag for about a week now, and started to do some mental practicing.

I was re-exposed to the extraordinary powers of mental rehearsal the other day by a recent study which showed that people who were given a piece of music to study away from the piano for two hours made basically equal progress to the ones who practiced it at the piano. Gieseking was known to study an entire piece by a composer, run through it a couple of times at an instrument and then record it – and these aren’t shabby recordings either! Take a listen to his Debussy Preludes. 

There is power in mental practicing. I have learned entire sections of pieces like Scarbo this way, but lately I had given it up for whatever reason. Well, picking it up today led me to have to deal with a principal issue in the beginning of the Liszt Ballade, one which I had always glossed over: the pedal. I’ll have to go into detail on my thoughts in another post.  The point is, mental practice has the power to improve your ear.

I sit down, make sure my posture is good and I am relaxed, just as I do when I practice normally, I breathe in through my nose and out through my mouth several times, and then I visualize the piano and my hands as clearly as I can. I often face difficult-to-surmount mental blocks, and I can only see a few fingers at a time. Over the course of a few minutes, I gradually broaden my point of focus until I can see my entire hand in detail. I view the keys from different angles, and finally I set into the challenging and sensitive opening of the Liszt Ballade. There is no autopilot in mental practicing; you can’t just let the fingers go! They don’t move until you can see the key and visualize your finger depressing it; so everything goes slowly. I work on one hand at a time, I try to hear exactly how the sound of the string will peak and decay, and exactly how I play the note that comes after it in order to make them connect perfectly. I do it again and again until it’s perfect! Then I work through my plan for how I am going to make it perfect, every time.  It’s powerful, and it forces you to decide note-by-note exactly how you intend to make that note sound. For me, it is much more useful than sitting at the piano, but it is thus much more exhausting. There’s no pushing more than half an hour at a time at this method of practice, but I think you’ll find, as I did, that that half hour on the bus was more productive by far than the two hours this morning staring at the piano in the pits of despair.

The True Confessions of a [Justified] Self-Deprecater

I have always struggled with overly-harsh self-criticism.

I feel that one of the reasons I become so depressed when I perform or record is that I teach myself to ignore certain mistakes when learning the notes to begin with; those rose-colored glasses are then stripped off once I am aware that people are listening critically to me.  Then I run back to the shelter of my practice room and try to play the piece; I am shocked; I hold the fragments of a shattered masterpiece; the optimism is gone; I wonder what happened; all enjoyment found in playing the piece is lost.  I try in vain to correct one problem - if I could only play that one measure right!  But my patience is too short-lived and I leave the practice room to go for a walk.

I have two options at this point to overcome this temporary aural trauma and move on.  First, I can remove or lower my self-determined standards, turn off my ears when I go before an audience or a microphone, and simply play without allowing myself to feel disappointment or disgust at the result: it is what it is.  This option sickens me - it seems contrary to the fundamental principles of art.  The second option is to open my ears still wider in the practice room and expose myself to the painful realities of all my technical and musical shortcomings from the very beginning.  I am not perfect, but I do not allow myself to be content with imperfection; I assess where I am, and I set attainable goals for that day's practice session.

This negative experience happens less and less frequently these days, thankfully.  Partly I'm developing the instincts to predict what will fall apart in performance and how to prevent it, but mostly I'm just focusing on smaller segments of music and playing them precisely from the get-go.  I'm learning that there is a feeling of total control and comfort that fills up the hands when you really get a piece under your fingers; you feel that everything you do is intentional; silly mistakes, fobbles, and wrong notes don't scare you, because you're still in control.  Having gotten a glimpse of what that feels like, I now strive to attain that within the first weeks rather than two years down the line with a piece.

Today is an excellent example.  It was a remarkably productive practice session, despite some rather uncomfortable interruptions.  I spent a little over an hour on the A section of variation 1 of the Goldbergs, just looping it a little under tempo.  It's about a 45 second section.  I find more and more that it doesn't matter how I practice, but rather that I am focused.  I can control the piece well enough that if I fumbled a little or played a wrong not, I kept going and when I got around to the section again, I corrected it.  Each time I played through the section I set a different goal and gradually worked the entire piece up by degrees. About 40 minutes in I experienced the major crash in finger coordination, dreams about which happening on stage wake you up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat!  So I stopped, slowed significantly down, and worked out the finger movements again from about 40 beats per minute all the way back up to about 90.  And now, with minimal upkeep, I can keep that section from ever going haywire again.

After the incident I took up looping that section again until playing it gave me that feeling of total control I desire.  Of course, I only achieved 95% of the feeling I was looking for, but the last 5% will take another few months to settle in. Sadly, that's the way it works.  Now that I know what that feels like, however, I will not perform unless I experience that total relaxation and freedom when I play my program.  It's dangerous to do otherwise; why would I go into the lion's cage not having mastered the whip I'm wielding against the beast?

This seems unrelated, but it's the first step to becoming more confident and overcoming the shock of hearing yourself perform or record in a positive way.

"Let me try this out on you..."

Tonight, on our way to Denny's, I dropped by my practice room to drop off some unnecessaries.  The two young ladies with me, having just learned that I play the piano, wanted me to try something.  Well, the only thing I've been working on seriously solo-wise lately is Scarbo....  why not?  It sounds great when I play it for myself.  So, I set out into it.

As any of us could have predicted, it was a trainwreck.

I've thought more and more lately about why we as humans can play something so well when it's just us around and totally blow it the moment others show up.  It's not always the case, and in fact (I'm only speaking for myself on this one) I observe that the trainwreck is worst on the first run and aligns to what I do alone in the practice room more and more as I play the piece more.

This is all very obvious, still.  Let's get down to some deeper thought here.  Identify the problem and the answer will resolve itself 9 times out of 10.  What exactly happens?

• First, those repeated notes at the beginning were starting to sound like something out of a Dusapin etude... impossibly erratic, never more than 3 out of every 4 notes sounding, as many different dynamics and tone qualities as there were notes.
• It was at least 20% faster than I have practiced it.  Some parts were probably even faster than I intend to ever perform them in concert.
• There were innumerable wrong notes, particularly when the hands are crossed or on top of one another (which is, to my great frustration, more than half of this piece).
• I got lost twice, had to backtrack a measure or two, and keep going.

Much of this was to expected in any case.  You don't perform Scarbo after working half-heartedly on it for a month.  Also, the repeated notes were obviously not together because I hadn't warmed up.

Tempo is a different issue, and its cause is different in different people.  The two main reasons I observe, for example, when my students will bring a piece to their lesson and play it way faster than they have obviously been practicing, are nervousness and pride.  The nervousness comes in both from a feeling of shyness and the "this piece is really hard...gracious sakes I hope I can get through it..." attitude.  If a piece is hard, it gets over faster if you play it faster; also, at least with me, I find that if I don't know a piece of music, it's not going to sound good at any tempo.  So I might as well play it fast.  The pride is not a bad kind of pride; instead, it is that you have worked hard on the piece for a good while and you want to show to your first audience how much progress you've made so far.  This combines with the understanding that it's just a casual run-through, creating the perfect storm.  Sloppiness takes over. Tempo flies off the charts as you try to give your new audience a sense of the piece, and you yourself are incapable of taking it at that tempo... yet. But hey, they all say that if you can play a piece slow you can play it fast as well, right?  Wrong (well, to an extent).

I feel perfectly comfortable playing for myself when it's just me in the room, and sometimes when there are only other pianists there too.  When non-pianist friends drop by to hear my poundings, I somehow lose my mind and end up playing the music the way I played everything four years ago.  Old habits die hard, though.  Especially when the piece is as through-and-through-awesome as Scarbo.

Steps to preventing a repeat offence?  I can't say there's a magical series of cures.  Speaking for myself, I can make some comments.  In my playing, when it's just me who's present, I strive for absolute correctness, clarity of tone and touch, and intelligent structure to the section I'm practicing, regardless of tempo and to a degree regardless of dynamic and other, more polished expression.  There are plenty of times when that alone is my focus - those aspects of music are just as valid as the black dots on the page - it's just that I don't have the mental capacity to critically focus on every aspect of playing at once. So I limit myself somewhat, when I am in the practice room, mostly to just playing the notes well.  Once another person shows up, however, my extreme social nature urges me to focus on communicating.  Well, the mind is like a small plate at a Thanksgiving feast, and so in order to communicate with these fellow human beings, things get pushed off the plate: note accuracy and control/moderation of tempo, first of all.

The important thing this early in the game is to become accustomed to playing well in front of other human beings.  I can communicate naturally, in most circumstances, and I have also learned how to practice that alone.  Maybe I'll post on that someday.  The point is, I need to tell myself that since accuracy and control/moderation of tempo are my greatest difficulties in my art, that these must be my primary focus when I have the opportunity to "try out" a piece on someone early on in the process of learning something.

The ladies left, chuckling to themselves and pointing out how interesting and cool the piece is; they avoided commenting on the execution altogether.

The Doldrums

I have learned enough pieces at a university level (whatever that means) by now that I can recognize a pattern I go through every time I start a big new project like Gaspard, the Goldberg Variations (posts coming soon), or a larger sonata like Waldstein, Rachmaninoff Op. 36, a Schumann sonata, etc.  It always begins with the initial excitement; I pull the piece out of my bag for the first time, open it up to measure 1, set it on the piano.... the thrill!  I start to sightread it, and gradually I'll get the notes under my fingers.  (I may post something later on about learning notes, since that seems to be the single biggest frustration a lot of young pianists face, including myself, up until two or three years ago.)

I learn the notes, and if I'm smart about it (and patient, which isn't frequent), I'll work through the piece at a slower pace but focus not only on the notes but also on developing a good structure, developing a rich sound  that is appropriate to the piece, and resolving technical problems right when I first meet with them.

In a piece like Gaspard, however, the problems I face require me to develop new technique in addition to implementing the skills I have already acquired.  This means I cannot resolve the technical problems in the piece as quickly as I can learn the notes.  And as I am forging through entire oceans full of physical challenges, that is exactly when the engines give out, my excitement at learning the piece leaves me, and I find myself in all-too-familiar doldrums: able to sloppily plow through the majority of a movement at half-tempo with no motivation to do what it takes to play better.

I hit this point with "Scarbo" about a week and a half ago.  I would run through the piece twice and then call it quits, moving on to something new and exciting or something I can already play smoothly.  Last night it came to a head as I resolved to select a couple of specific spots in the 400+ measures I have already learned  and "woodshed" them, as Rombach says.  The first was the fast repeated notes at the beginning of the movement, and the second was the return of one of the themes in mm. 256-312.  I had the time to spend two or three hours on them, at the end of which I felt productive, rewarded, and satisfied.

To be clear about my practice methods, I do not condone pure repetition as a means of acquiring technique and certainly not as a means of learning a piece of music.  Every time I run through a section, when there is no way to learn it except by repetition, no matter if it is five notes or five hundred measures, I intentionally focus on something different each time; it must be interesting.  I also find that sometimes it is helpful to clarify to myself exactly what I am trying to accomplish rather than just telling myself, "it's not right yet. It's not right yet."  So I will write down my goals or simply say them out loud.  It forces the brain to recognize completely what it is I am working out.