At a memorial event in Jordan Hall in Boston on September 29, 2024, these were my remarks:
This concert hall,
this space,
the vibrating air in here,
the music that’s been heard,
those sounds.
The piano playing done on this stage…
In 1907, Ferruccio Busoni played the piano right about … here. Arthur Rubinstein’s first Boston concert, right here in 1904.
And Russell Sherman, pianist, many, many times. He played here, imore than 30 solo recitals over four decades in this space. He played music by Ludwig Beethoven, and Schubert, and Brahms, and Gunther Schuller and Arnold Schoenberg, and Ralph Shapey, and Johann Sebastian Bach, and Haydn, and Debussy, and Gershwin, and he played music by Edward Steuermann… Edward Steuermann, Mr. Sherman’s piano teacher. Edward Steuermann, the first performer of Schoenberg’s piano music. And Steuermann — a student of Busoni who played right here in 1907.
The air here it vibrates, always, there is music…
This is a place of oratory also. Of speaking, The pianist Ignaz Paderewski spoke words here in 1917, during a war. As Evgeny Kissin did in 2022. Carl Phillipp Emanuel Bach, Johann Sebastian’s son, wrote that: “The keyboardist alone, can make excellently, the quickly surprising — the change in speech — between one character and another…”
I say, that’s oratory, that’s speaking through wordless music.
Certainly Russell Sherman was an orator, a speaker, and then a writer of words too. But just in the music-making itself — he conveyed ideas, he expressed opinions. How his playing of a quizzical phrase of Beethoven’s Op. 28 could change what you thought you knew. How Brahms’ “Paganini Variations” became a tone poem. How a mysterious wash of pedaled piano sound could make spirits or specters come forth from the black box. After hearing Russell play Liszt’s Funerailles, I understood Busoni’s description of the piano’s pedal: “a photograph of the sky — a ray of moonlight,” said Busoni.
Sherman did not so much play the piano as use the piano. It was a tool for conveying delicate, or provocative thought — a disruptive questioning of many assumptions of ordinary classical-music culture. His repeated performances of a piece might vary a lot, evolving through his conscious work, or sometimes changing quixotically, unexplainably. Mr. Sherman’s playing was not generic. He liked very much the sentiment of Baudelaire: “Le beau est toujours bizarre…” (“The beautiful is always strange.”)
About half way back in the balcony up there, I sat one night in this room, with tears streaming down my face, as Mr Sherman conjured Liszt’s Fountains at the Villa d’Este. Before he played, Mr. Sherman told the audience that the piece combines two verities of 19th-century music — water and faith. Something about his playing of the rhythm that night, the sustained plangent melody notes in the middle register, something slightly hesitating in the high notes, quivering even, yet unstoppable. Water and Faith, he said. I was crying. How was this transmission, this transfer of emotion accomplished? I don’t know. Those vibrations in this room, passing through this air, to the skin, to the ear of a listener…
Truly, the course of my life was changed by Russell Sherman. I never had a piano lesson with him, but he offered us all many lessons, of many kinds. I’m sure I would not be at New England Conservatory without his thought, and work. When my own teacher died in New York City, Mr. Sherman was among the very first to call me. “I know how deeply you felt about him,” Russell said, “how deeply the death of a teacher can hurt.”
The preeminence of the New England Conservatory piano faculty today in the world — this magnificent group of musicians of whom I am very proud, very proud — this all traces to the earlier work of Mr. Sherman, and then to Wha Kyung Byun. Let’s not underestimate it.
It seems coincidental to me now, that in the first weeks I lived in New York, I walked by Lincoln Center and there was one of those big three-sheet posters, 80 inches high: “Russell Sherman will play Franz Liszt’s Transcendental Etudes.” I got a ticket and went to one of my first big-city concerts, a memorable performance.
Years later, Russell told me, that following that same concert, two well known Juilliard piano faculty members came to him backstage. One of them asked, “How can you play like that?’ (And he meant how can you play that well, it was a compliment.) Russell answered, “I have no professional standards.” And what did that mean? We live in a world where well-paid symphony orchestra players are esteemed, not really because they play music very well (they do), but because they work fast. They can handle a different concert program each week for many weeks and achieve a “professional” level of playing. A pianist can be praised today, for playing five demanding virtuoso piano concertos in a single night.
I believe Mr. Sherman didn’t count the hours.
How much attention to pay to a detail — to a turn of phrase? How much time to practice it?
How much time to spend preparing a meal, how much time to spend preparing an offering…
There was no limit. Professional speed, professional efficiency might not be a virtue.
Russell Sherman had an international reputation, but he was a Boston hero. When I contemplate the roaring ovations that we witnessed in this room, the fervor of those crowds, the intense praise of esteemed Boston music critics, Mr. Sherman stepping in for Maurizio Pollini to play a concerto by Beethoven at the very last minute, with the Boston Symphony across the street — that’s a hero! Mr. Sherman was — the Red Sox. (Although, I know he preferred the Dodgers.) I’m not sure such heroes can exist now. It was a remarkable time. And we hear that in his playing, we hear that in his wordless oratory, in his conjuring, in these offerings. You will hear it, you are about to hear it now.
(At the event on September 29, these remarks were followed by the showing of several archival films.)