January 2008 Archives

War profiteers stole two elections and screwed Iraq's pooch, but at least string theory's on track to explain physical reality...

"In the film [Lust, Caution] moderately scrutable orientals play inscrutable orientals pretending to be inscrutable orientals..."--Michael Wood in the London Review of Books

[it's been THAT KIND of week...]

from The Human Stain, by Philip Roth

312-13
[Adagio from Third Symphony to close Coleman Silk's funeral...]

That was it. They pulled out all the stops. They played Mahler.

Well, you can't listen to Mahler sometimes. When he picks you up to shake you, he doesn't stop. By the end of it, we were all crying... One moment we were immobilized by the infinite vulnerability of Mahler's adagio movement, by that simplicity that is not artifice, that is not strategy, that unfolds, it almost seems, with the accumulated pace of life and with all of life's unwillingness to end... one moment we were immobilized by that exquisite juxtaposition of grandeur and intimacy that begins in the quiet, singing, restrained intensity of the strings and then rises in surges through the massive false ending that leads to the true, the extended, the monumental ending... one moment we were immobilized by the swelling, soaring, climaxing, and subsiding of an elegiac orgy that rolls on and on and on and on with a determined pace that never changes, giving way, then coming back like pain or longing that won't disappear... one moment we ere at Mahler's mounting insistence, inside the coffin with Coleman, attuned to all the terror of endlessness and to the passionate desire to escape death, and then somehow or other sixty or seventy of us had got ourselves over to the cemetery to watch as he was buried, a simple enough ritual, as sensible a solution to the problem as any ever devised but one that is never entirely comprehensible. You have to see it to believe it each time...

TR: I've always wanted the second mov't to Brahms B-flat Piano Concerto played at my funeral, and just this morning I made SKL promise not to let the word "avuncular" into my obituary. But if you choose this Adagio, you are guaranteed to run out of Kleenex, even if you're Don Henley. Like a lot of Mahler, early NYPhil Bernstein is still the yardstick, with alarmingly precise details nestled inside the most innocent of transitions. There are very good entries from Boulez, and others, including the always inexplicable Zander.

from The Human Stain, by Philip Roth

pp. 209-210
Then Bronfman appears. Bronfman the brontosaur! Mr. Fortissimo! Enter Bronfman to play Prokofiev at such a pace and with such bravado as to knock my morbidity clear out of the ring. He is conscpiuously massive through the upper torso, a force of nature camouflaged in a sweatshirt, somebody who has strolled into the music shed out of a circus where he is the strongman and who takes on the piano as a ridiculous challenge to the gargantuan strength he revels in. Yefim Bronfman looks less like the person who is going to play the piano than like the guy who should be moving it. I had never before seen anybody go at a piano like this sturdy little barrel of an unshaven Russian Jew. When he's finished, I thought, They'll have to throw the thing out. He crushes it. He doesn't let that piano conceal a thing. Whatever's in there is going to come out, and come out with its hands in the air. And when it does, everything there out in the open, the last of the last pulsation, he himself gets up and goes, leaving behind him our redemption. With a jaunty wave, he is suddenly gone, and though he takes all his fire off with him like no less a force than Prometheus, our own lives now seem inextinguishable. Nobody is dying, NOBODY -- not if Bronfman has anything to say about it!

(Fortissimo, yes, but don't overlook his Tchaikovsky The Seasons on Sony)

My review of Levon Helm's Dirt Farmer aired this week on NPR's Here and Now.

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Part 3 (part one, two)

EP: Do I get paid for these gems? If so, I charge by the word!!!

TR: You sound like a writer.

EP: In my estimation Horowitz recorded better due to his being a more sound oriented pianist. Also his virtuosity was more electrifying than Serkin's. I heard Horowitz live only once and Serkin many times. I was able to hear Horowitz's color in his recordings. Serkin was not a colorist and his impact was so much due to his power that it was rare for a recording to capture that.

> "...Ormandy refused to allow me to play the Brahms because I was too
> "young".

TR: I find this just appalling!

EP: Ormandy was well known for "putting down" young performers who he thought needed to be put in their place. Vladimir Sokoloff told me that he accompanied Jaime Laredo in three different violin concerts when Jaime was 16 or 17 years old in an audition for Ormandy. Jaime went on to win the Queen Elizabeth competition when he was 18. After hearing excerpts from all three concertos, Ormandy asked for three or four other concertos that Jaime did not have prepared. When hearing this, Ormandy lambasted him for his arrogance, and limited repertoire, telling him "that's the problem with you young people these days. In my day we could play fifteen concerts at any given time." According to Sokoloff, Jaime was quite upset over these comments. In my experience, he said "what made you think that you are able to play the Brahms D minor at your age"? I answered that I had played it for five years and with both Maurice Abravanel in California, and with Howard Mitchell and the National Symphony Orchestra, and that Serkin thought it was a good piece for me. He responded that "you will not play it with my orchestra". After eliminating every virtuosic concerto that a twenty-year-old wanted to perform, he agreed to the Beethoven 2nd as his way of putting me down. Fortunately, he was unable to conduct my concert and William Smith agreed to the Tschaikovsky as I mentioned in a previous email.

> "...Interestingly, Peter has become very associated with performing
> the Brahms D minor concerto, and that was RS's signature piece. I
> heard Peter play this about 20 years ago and then again about three
> or four years ago. His playing had changed remarkably and the most
> recent rendition was more introspective and reserved, particularly
> in the 2nd movement. For whatever reason, Peter does not allow the
> passion to explode or even flow freely in the way that RS did."

TR: I've always wanted to read an informed essay comparing father and son
in just this way, through the various pieces they became known for and
how they differed in their approaches... my sense was that Peter was a
VERY strong, rebellious personality when he was younger, but that he
has tended towards a more conservative groove later on... Very
interesting that the Brahms D minor has become one of his big
pieces... do you care to speculate on the psychological implications
of that?

EP: Honestly, this is a huge issue in my estimation and I can only comment on the difference in performances, not why he ended up playing the piece so much. In my estimation, Peter has become very gentle and introspective as he has gotten older, and perhaps avoids expressing such music in the passionate outgoing way that his father did. Peter had a very conflicted relationship with his father and I recall a quote in the NY Times where he said that his relationship with his father improved when he realized and accepted the fact that RS was not capable of loving him in the way that he had always wanted. I don't remember the exact words, but it was something like that. It might be that a piece like the Brahms D minor would recall too much pain if he let himself go with it. This is purely speculation on my part and I really don't know for certain.

> I don't really have a person who comes to mind who was an unlikely
> RS student...

TR: I think of Richard Goode's Beethoven set as carrying that Serkin
"torch," he's settled into the same "basic" performing repertoire etc.
I guess I'm wondering if there's anybody out there who studied under
Serkin who turned into a WHIZBANG Chopin figure or something... I
really like that "Rudy should play more Chopin" quote... to my
knowledge there's no recording of Serkin's Barcarolle... am I mistaken?

EP: I do not know of anyone who studied with him who became known for "different" repertoire, but do not pretend to know what everyone is playing. Tony Querti is still active and I don't know his repertoire. Eugene Istomin, Seymour Lipkin, Teddy Lettvin, Susan Starr, Richard Goode, Steven DeGroote, Christina Ortiz, Andre Michel Schubb, Cecile Licad, are the ones who come to mind. I play a reasonable amount of Chopin (the Baracarolle, Fantasie, 4th Ballade, all the Etudes) and am comfortable playing this music in a very un-Serkinesque manner. His approach was physically too tight to be able to do justice to the myriad changes of color. However, he taught this music wonderfully.

> I cannot say that I have ever "gotten into" Rachmaninoff's
> recordings, but have heard some that stand out such as the Bb Minor
> Chopin Sonata. Overall, I still have to rate Artur Rubinstein as my
> favorite pianist, but not for everything.
>

TR: Favorite Rubinstein story: Joseph Schwartz recollected purchasing a
new Steinway for the Oberlin's Finney Chapel, the big concert hall,
and coordinating its installation, tuning and voicing the week
Rubinstein was scheduled to play a solo recital. Everybody was very
excited because they'd been suffering with a truck of a piano in there
for years and had finally broken through the red tape and installed a
fine new instrument. Rubinstein shows up, plays the first half, and
some piano faculty are chatting at the break about how great the new
piano sounds. The technician overhears them and tells them he had to
swap out the new piano for the old one at the last minute due to a
broken key he couldn't fix. Rubinstein was making the old piano sound
so good they mistook it for the new one they had just bought...

More questions:

Favorite recording by a pianist you don't particularly like:

EP: That's a tough question because a great performance of anything is persuasive for me to then like a pianist who I might not have liked. I hated Berman's Tchaikovsky Bb when I first heard it, but in later years came to love it. In general I dislike Arrau's recordings, but did hear a very fine 4th Beethoven in a telecast performance. He apparently believed that recordings were different and you were obligated to a give 'blueprint" of what the piece is when it's a recording. James Tocco studied with him and told me this. I love most of Berman's recordings--Liszt Transcendental, Dante Sonata, Liszt Sonata, Beethoven Op. 57, and yes that 3rd Rachmaninoff is fantastic--maybe the best out there.

TR: For me that's Lazar Berman's Rach 3 with Abbado, most persuasive
rendering of that monster and I REALLY dislike a lot of Berman's
stuff. Is there a Serkin recording you find not to your liking? A
Rubinstein? Is there a Horowitz interpretation of something you
studied under Serkin that you find captivating despite its
waywardness? I sort of get off now on all that eccentric flailing
about, except in his Mozart.

Are there any pianists you used to abhor but find yourself like as you
get older?

EP: Van Cliburn was a pianist I did not like after hearing him in the years after he won the Tchaikovsky Competition. I thought his Tchaikovsky Bb was too tame after growing up with Horowitz's rendition, likewise with the 3rd Rachmaninoff. But now when I hear those recordings, I really love them. It was amazing playing for someone so young.

TR: If you had to take 5 recordings by different pianists to a desert
island, which would they be?

EP: Serkin's Brahms 1st, Berman's Rachmaninoff 3rd, Horowitz's Tchaikovsky Bb, Brendel's Schumann Symphonic Etudes, Serkin's Op. 111 and "Emperor" Concerto, Berman's Rachmaninoff Etudes and Preludes, to name a few.

TR: What are your five favorite piano recitals ever... Concertos? Which
pianists do you wish you could have heard live?

EP: Richter in 1960 or 61 playing in Los Angeles, Serkin in Curtis Hall in 1962 playing 109.110. and 111 Beethoven Sonatas, Rubinstein playing at the Academy of Music in Philadelphia in the early 60's, Horowitz in 1978 in Tempe, Arizona, Chura Cherkassky playing in Cincinnati in 1980 or 81. I never heard Gilels live. I would have wanted to heard Hoffman and Josef Lhevinne. Serkin's Beethoven "Emperor" was unforgettable with the Philadelphia, perhaps the most electrifying piano and orchestra performance I ever heard...