Dispatched from the Audition Room (mit Bolzano auch dabei) After the third day of piano auditions at New England Conservatory, I attended an evening recital given at the school by one of my piano faculty colleagues. Backstage, he said that while he was playing he imagined my stern voice from the audition room. Making a fairly unpleasant face, he told me, "You know when you say, 'Mmmmm, not really good...'" The cold fact is that from about … [Read more...]
Piano Sonata as Video Game: Anomalies in My Reception of Beethoven’s Music
A transcript of my spoken remarks at Boston University last week, as part of a symposium on piano sonatas by Beethoven. “I’d like to talk about what I would call anomalies in my own reception of Beethoven’s piano sonatas. “I can certainly remember -- as I’m sure many of you can remember -- a time when I first played through a piano sonata by Beethoven from beginning to end, in a kind of performance. It was in my living room, I think I was … [Read more...]
Repertoire Inflation
In this spring's auditions, I've heard prospective undergraduates perform Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata, Schubert's A-Minor Sonata, D. 845 -- and, of course, many offerings of Liszt's Sonata, Stravinsky's Three Movements from Petrushka, and Ravel's Gaspard de la nuit. These seventeen- or eighteen-year-old pianists are grappling with, or storming through, music that's considered to be at the pinnacle of musical or virtuoso difficulty. I … [Read more...]
One Hand
From the school's library I checked out again the copy of Messiaen's Le merle noir (The Blackbird) that I used last fall when I played the piece with Paula Robison. Since then, many markings were made in the piano part. I don't mark anything in the scores I use, but when I opened the music again there were all the things pianists write: dark circles drawn around printed dynamic markings, fingering, penciled-in lines showing correspondences … [Read more...]
Piano Darwinism
Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time has gotten easier to play. Fifteen years ago, I learned the piece and performed it, finding the music quite difficult. There were rhythmic complexities, and ensemble challenges. Especially in the first movement ("Liturgie de cristal"), andin the sixth movement ("Danse de la fureur, pour les sept trompettes"), it was difficult just to stay together with the other players. Around the world last … [Read more...]
Can we play too well?
It's been suggested (by Charles Rosen) that a pianist who plays difficult passages notated in Robert Schumann's piano music, to today's standard of accuracy, is not giving an "authentic" reading. No one in the early nineteenth century could have done it, so, the argument goes, "mistakes" would be part of "authenticity." (We might speculate on the impact the sounds made or make...) In Ghent, a year and a half ago at the Orpheus Institute, we … [Read more...]