Tuesday, December 05, 2006

Sergei Rachmaninov



Mr Rachmaninov's playing is distinguished by clarity. His dissection of a composition is not, however, pedagogic.... He is far from being a dry analyst, but he delights in exposing the structure of a work in an eloquent manner. In this he has no rival.

I am aware that my playing varies from day to day. A pianist is the slave of acoustics. Only when I have played my very first item, tested the acoustics of the hall, and felt the general atmosphere, do I know what mood I shall find myself at a recital. In a way this is unsatisfactory for me, but, artistically, it is perhaps a better thing never to be certain what one will do than to attain an unvarying level of performance that may easily develop into mere mechanical routine.

When playing, Rachmaninov would sit almost bolt upright with his head slightly bent, free of all superfluous gestures, quite unlike the prevailing fashion of the times. Everything was made to appear effortless - his ability to sight-read even the most complicated pieces and commit them to memory in a matter of hours was naturally an enormous help. Even the most thunderous passages would be executed principally from the wrist and lower arm, hardly engaging the muscles of the back at all, resulting in a uniquely clear, yet pearly sound quality. He would retire as he emerged, with a shyness and humility that perhaps exerted the strangest fascination of all.

Rachmaninov felt that every piece had its own peculiar nerve centre around which the rest gravitated. It could be a certain change of chord, the climax of a melody; it might be loud or quiet, fast or slow. Yet if he failed to make this magic moment register properly, he felt that the rest of the work had become utter nonsense. He insisted that it was his own work on composition that gave him this special insight into the inner workings of the composer's mind. Indeed, each and every one of his own works possesses this focal point, some more obviously than others.

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Joseph Hofmann's tribute to Rachmaninov:

Rachmaninov was made of steel and gold;
steel in his arms, gold in his heart.
I can never think of this majestic being
without tears in my eyes,
for i not only admired him as a supreme artist,
but i also loved him as a man.

Sunday, November 05, 2006

Rhythm Is It!


“Try to be silent. We work in silence because when we dance,
we have to speak through the body.
So it’s important not to let the energy go out of your mouth.”








The Importance Of Focus
by Royston Maldoom, choreographer, Rhythm Is It!

I cannot plan before I get in because even though I will direct a choreography very much; it starts the moment I'm in the room, with the people. It depends; if the sun is shining, if it's raining, if I had a good night before or a bad one… how they are; it's really impossible to tell. We will just go, do a warm-up, do a lot of work on focus. The majority of the work I do with people is getting them to focus on themselves and how to find stillness. The secret of dance is stillness. In the same way music begins with silence. Without silence you cannot begin to create the music. Painting begins with the blank page, and dance begins with stillness.

So the hardest thing for any group of people who are not used to this work is to find focus. I insist on it. It's not only that it makes our working process easier but also when they are going on stage they have to work for 35 or 40 minutes without speaking. It's a dance performance. That's a very hard thing for any young person today and we have to begin on day one to practice that. It's something they always find very hard and sometimes they find it a little controlling in the beginning. But once they experience it, it is such a good feeling when you discover it, that they become very enthusiastic about it. It will make them look very, very professional when they go on stage.

Monday, October 09, 2006

Sviatoslav Richter on memorizing

In any case, what's the point of cluttering up your brain when there are far better things to do? It's bad for your health, and it also smacks of vanity. True, it's not as easy to retain the same degree of freedom with a score open in front of you - it doesn't work straight away and requires a lot of practice - but now I've got used to it, I find that it has lots of advantages. In the first place, I've never made any distinction between chamber music and music written for a solo performer. But one always plays chamber music with a score; why should one have to perform without one as a soloist? In the second place, it's easy enough to memorize a Haydn sonata, but I prefer to play twenty while reading the music, rather than limiting myself to two performed from memory. As for contemporary music, there are only a few exceptional artists who are able to memorize a piece by Webern, or Hindemith's Ludus Tonalis, but it's a waste of time and effort. It's not practical. Moreover, even if the element of danger and risk aren't totally foreign to music, you feel more secure and can concentrate better if you've got the score in front of you. Finally, and above all, it's more honest to play like this: you've got how it has to be in front of you and you play exactly what's written. The interpreter is a mirror, and performing music doesn't mean contaminating the piece with your own personality, it consists in performing all the music, nothing more and nothing less. Who could ever remember all the performance markings indicated by the composer? Failing that, performers start to 'interpret', and it's that that I'm against.
By freeing the brain of the useless task of memorizing the music, you can also stop inflicting the same endlessly repeated programmes on audiences - and on yourself.
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There are too many masterpieces, and I'm laziness and passivity personified. I simply try to bring a little freshness to the music I play by performing what people don't expect, rather than what everyone else plays. I've worked it out. My repertory runs to around 80 different programmes, not counting chamber works. I'm an omnivorous animal with a large appetite. I've tried to eat all I can, and up until the sixties I continued to take on new works in order to provide myself with a basis on which to keep on changing my programmes. I don't reject a score because i'm not satisfied with what I've done with it in the concert hall. A performing artist doesn't develop in a straight line, it seems to me, but in a spiral. I can be patient and if a piece hasn't worked to my satisfaction, I continue to work on it and play it over and over again.

Thursday, October 05, 2006

Sviatoslav Richter and Heinrich Neuhaus




There's a Russian saying: 'You lack ten roubles, you've one hundred friends.'
Wherever I went, even at the height of the war, I always found a potato to eat. I didn't mind not having a home. I slept wherever people would have me: At Anatoly Vedernikov's, at Volodya Tchaikovsky's, at the home of the mathematician Igor Shafarevich. I felt comfortable everywhere. Above all, however, I was put up by Neuhaus for several years. He was so generous that his pupils could call on him without warning, even at four in the morning. His wife was equally amazing and welcoming. She never slept; if you turned up in the middle of the night, she'd be drinking tea or wine and was delighted for people to come. And she'd say to you:'You've nowhere to sleep? Well, you can spend the night here.' They had a tiny flat.
At Neuhaus's, I slept under the piano.

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Emil Gilels was also another one of Neuhaus's students at the Conservatory. But he was a complex individual, had a frightful temperament, was extremely touchy and always sulking. He was pathologically jealous.
With Neuhaus he behaved appallingly badly. Towards the end of Neuhaus's life, he did something dreadful. He wrote to the papers and also to Neuhaus in person, saying that he'd never been his pupil. Everyone in Moscow knew that he had been Neuhaus's pupil and hey were all indignant. When I heard what he'd done, I refused to acknowledge Gilels in the street. Neuhaus was terribley affected by it and died soon afterwards.

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(the circumstances surrouding Gilels' death) are appalling. Before setting off on a tour, he went to hospital for a checkup. He was given and injection and 3 minutes later he was dead. It was the Kremlin Hospital. Everyone knows that the doctors there are chosen because of their political background. The result is that, through sheer incompetence, they gave him the wrong injection and killed him.

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Neuhaus was of German and Polish extraction, a cousin of Szymanowski. In his youth he had been friendly with Horowitz and close to Artur Rubinstein. He studied in Russia, Berlin, Italy and Vienna where he was a pupil of Leopold Godowsky. He was immensly cultured and widely read in literature, philosophy and the arts. He spoke fluent Russian, Polish, German, French and Italian.

You might have thought his small hands would have had an adverse effect on his playing. But nothing could be further from the truth. He produced a magnificient tone. It's to him that I owe this habit of sitting upright at the piano. He was right, everything depends on this.

Thursday, July 06, 2006

Bernstein on Stillness

STILLNESS is our most intense mode of action.
It is in our moments of deep quiet that is born every idea,
emotion and drive which we eventually honor with the name of action.

Our most emotionally active life is lived in our dreams;
our cells renew themselves most industriously in our sleep.
We reach the highest in meditation, the farthest in prayer.

In stillness every human being is capable of greatness;
he is free from the experience of hostility;
he is a poet, and most like an angel.

But stillness requires a profound discipline,
it must be worked for,
and it is therefore all the more to be treasured.

~Leonard Bernstein

Bernstein: A Tribute To Teachers

The following is the speech made by Leonard Bernstein at a New York Philharmonic Young People's Concert in 1963:

My dear young friends,
Welcome back to Philharmonic Hall. You may think it strange that I have chosen to open this new season of Young People's Concerts with the subject of teachers. After all, aren't these programs always about music? And what have teachers got to do with music?
The answer is: everything. We can all imagine a painter who is self-taught, and maybe some writers too, but it is almost impossible to imagine a professional musician who doesn't owe something to one teacher or another. The trouble is that we don't always realize how important teachers are, in music or in anything else. Teaching is probably the noblest profession in the world -- the most unselfish, difficult and honorable profession. But it is also the most unappreciated, underrated, underpaid, and underpraised profession in the world...........

Monday, June 12, 2006

Leonard Bernstein

INTERDISCIPLINARY VALUES
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... he recognised that the important matter for him then - and for his entire life - was the opening of the mind to the validity of interdisciplinary learning; the best way to understand a problem was the recognition of its relationship to other spheres of knowledge.

' The principal thing I absorbed was a sense of interdisciplinary values - that the best way to know a thing is in the context of another discipline'.

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ISAAC STERN on LENNY
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'In art, in performance, one of the most difficult things in performing music is - also for him - one of his greatest weakness - the most difficult thing is how to be simple....... Don't interpret, just let music go free like through a glass, a clear glass, a beautiful glass. That's for me the greatest art and that's the centre of the greatest artists' achievements, where everything seems so simple, so right, and just that.

Sunday, April 23, 2006

Isaac Stern on William Kapell

..... a woundrously giften young pianist...........

he seemed to walk electrically; it was as if he needed only to touch the piano and it opened up to him. He was a brilliant, explosive virtuoso, a Promethean pianist. During the past two years, his perceptions had matured; his palette of colors and ideas, the inner substance of his music, had grown larger, and he was able to give every greater scope to his performances and develop more and more music of various kinds - classical, contemporary, romantic, impressionistic. There was literally no limit to his talent. He was headed for a major career, not only because of his intrinsic ability as a musician but also because he possessed what I call the "X" factor, the most important quality of personality, describably but unexplainable, that enables the performer to extend across the footlights and mesmerize the audience.

David Oistrakh

Isaac Stern asked him why he was working so much in Russia, playing, conducting, teaching from morning to night, performing local concerts in the provinces. "You don't stop," Stern said.

Oistrakh answered, "If I stop even for a little while, I'll start to think. If I think, I'll die."

Isaac Stern: My First 79 Years

.... ability to concentrate, to prepare, to focus on what I had to do in order to be a performer when, at the moment you're performing, the rest of the world doesn't exist, only the music and the audience, and nothing in your life can be allowed to affect you in a way that might hurt the music.....

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... willingness on the part of the Russians to listen to another style of interpretation, to be moved not only by the virtuosic, the dramatic, the technically brilliant, but also by the slightest nuances, by a phrase spinning out of a long phrase in a Brahms slow movement, by the fleeting swiftness of Mozart in a rondo, the impressionism of Szymanowski, the elegance, gaiety, and quicksilver brilliance of the Rondo capriccioso of Saint-Saens.
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Whenever I studied a work, I would first look at the score to see it in its totality. With Zakin's help at the piano, I would play it through, to acquaint myself with its structure; then play it again, to hear its melodic line. Once I had a clear conception of the work, I would begin to study it technically. When necessary, I would work ten to twelve hours at a stretch, until I felt saturated with the composition.

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Advice from Dr Leo Mayer on his injured wrist: Play for 10 mins. An hour later, play again for 10 minutes, and an hour later you'll also play for ten minutes. Do that five, six times. Tomorrow, the same thing, but you'll play for 15 mins. The next day, for 20 mins. And then you'll have the rehearsal and the concert.

After he played the entire concerto succesfully: No pain. I flexed my wrist, and it was as though nothing had happened to it. It seemed to have forced itself back into shape because I needed it. That's one of the things the body (or the brain?) can do sometimes, in moments of great need.

"I didn't start worrying about my hands, and I didn't stop playing tennis. Artistic control of one's medium whould never be achieved at the cost of draining the joy of life."

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The goals of anybody who thinks about what he's doing change constantly. The more you learn, the more you recognise the absolute inability of any one person to achieve omniscience and perfection with regard to his art. The most you can hope to do is learn what the possibilities are, and then employ your own proficiencies to achieve at least some of those possibilities. And you come to realise that you can never really plumb the entire truth of ideas in music. Tha in essence is the power of music - the fact that the art form is larger, deeper, and far more varied than any single person can divine in his own lifetime - and realising it should give pause to any artist who starts to consider himself all-knowing. We are simply steps in a continuing age-old tradition. When we do something that enhances that tradition, that makes it richer, purer, clearer - then we have done what we were put here for.

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I chose Bach because there is in his music a pervasive sense of balance, a continuity of deep belief. Whatever he wrote, whether it was a religious choral work or a composition that was purely instrumental, one felt it was permeated with his faith, his devotion to God. For me, his music was always a catharsis; I play it sometimes quietly to myself when I am in a dark frame of mind.

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It is astonishing to what degree performing artists are clasped to the bosoms of people everywhere. And if you don't exploit that generosity wrongly, it becomes a tremendous personal, private wealth. I'm grateful to be a musician. Sometimes, when I'm onstage, I feel this wonderful sense of joy at being able to play. I feel blessed. It's extraordinary to have spent a lifetime making people nejoy themselves, and gaining a collective warmth and friendship that has lasted over decades. To be wanted and useful is the ultimate fulfillment for any artist. That's the greatest satisfation an artist can have.

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The only thread that seems to run through all these artistic accomplishments - and similarly, in other arts - is the imaginativeness of that mind, the ability to see below the surface, to see with clarity what is only dimly perceived by others, and to accomplish with seeming ease what is apparently impossible for the less talented.

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At each of the music conservatories I visited in Beijing, I heard players with an extraordinary level of talent. They could all play the notes with astonishing dexterity, but they didn't understand the music. They wanted to play the fast, flashy, loud, difficult compositions, display their technical virtuosity. They hadn't had sufficient time or instruction in basic musical values that were part of the old European tradition, and they also thought that technical excellence was a necessary part of good music- making, but that it wasn't everything; I talked to them about emphasising the mind, about playing each note with the ear and the heart.

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I remember once telling a group of students that their instruments were there for the music, and not the other way around. Every time you took up your instrument, you were making a statement, the player's statement: a statement of faith, a statement that this was the way you wanted the music to speak through your instrument.

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"Let me play the fiddle as well as I can. What is equally important to me is to live like a human being. If I can show people that a musician needn't be a crackpot, that he is fundamentally no different from the next fellow, that music is not a luxury but as natural as reading or arithmetic - if I can do that then I've really done something."

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"If you ever have any question in your own mind about how a phrase should go, put down the instrument and sing it. Then listen again to how you sang it and where you took a breath, and try to do the same thing with the violin and bow. Eight times out of ten we sing the phrase naturally and properly, and that is what you should try to do with your instrument."

I would urge them not to listen to violin records. I'd say " Listen to a quartet, but with the score. Know the score before you listen, and read the score while you’re listening. Listen to the Budapest String Quartet play the Beethoven quartets – you’ll hear the score being written right in front of your ears. If you want to hear what beauty can be, listen to a great voice singing German lieder. Or listen to a first-rate performance of a Mozart opera. Hear how voices are used, how they change with each word. Notes are our words. And we have to use them in the same way that most people use words when they speak, and as individually as most people, who will sound differently while saying the same thing.”

First of all, learn to look at yourself and say honestly, “I’m not trying to impress the listener; what I really want is for the listener to hear how beautiful is the music the composer wrote. I want the listener to feel how much I love this music. I want to convince the listener that his music is very important to us, necessary for us, as human beings.”

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On music and imagination
Your teacher… was quite right in telling you to use your imagination when you are playing music. Whether it should be a literal story or simply an idea of form or content makes no difference really, because, as you study more and more, and read about it and learn to analyse it, you will find it less necessary to have pictures of an event in your mind; rather the music will speak to you in its own language and you will begin to have a dialogue between your understanding of the music and what the composer has written. Whatever you use to excite your imagination in playing or listening is worthwhile, because inevitably it will lead you in the direction of music which is indeed a way of speaking. It does not speak in words, it speaks in images which each of us creates in his own way and it is the only way to get into the inside of the music to find out how many ways there are of speaking the same phrase.

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Some critics were saying that I might then have been at the very peak of my career had I not devoted so much time and energy to talent scouting and other causes. But they left me unmoved. Perhaps if I had stuck only to the fiddle, only to practicing with the fingers, I might have been playing a little better, I might have accomplished a little more musically- but to what purpose? I hadn’t lacked for public success. So I missed a few notes sometimes. Was that really a big deal? I had the joy of being surrounded by young people who had become world figures and by others who were coming up. I had a whole world of family, and in that sense I was one of the richest men in the world.

Saturday, April 15, 2006

Isaac Stern: Words of Wisdom

My musical choices for the programs Zakin and I played were based entirely on what I liked. If you play a piece not because you like it yourself but because it's the right length, or other people like it, or you need something light or splashy at a certain point in the program, you'll find that you aren't going to make your audience like it. What you are playing at that moment must be your own favourite piece of music. You're playing it because it has meaning for you, and you want to communicate that meaning to your audience. When you're on the concert stage, you can't pretend to like a piece; the audience can hear your conviction, or your lack of it.

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A performing artist selects and rehearses repertoire with thought for musical variety, with a wish to display abilities and move an audience, and with the realization that the world of music is enormously complicated in that it is without absolutes - except when what you are doing is wrong, absolutely wrong, wrong in tempo, wrong in ideas, wrong in your understanding of the period in musical history when the work was written, what performance practice was then like; all those things. Rehearsing and practicing, you have to learn what the variables are. Most people do not stop to think that the words "piano", "forte", "mezzo-forte", "mezzo-piano" - that is, soft, loud, half-loud, half-soft - mean nothing in themselves. Each of these indications is simply in relation to the sound that preceded it; the kind of piano or the kind of forte that one plays or uses depends almost entirely on where it comes in the body of the work that you're learning or performing. And the relationship between the quality of sound and the amount of sound has to do with the control and understanding by the performer of the composer's total concept. You learn that when you play the first note of a composition, you must already understand where you expect yourself to be when you reach the final note of that movement, if it is a three- or four-movement work; you must know the tonal, harmonic, and tempo relationships among the movements to make a work hold together throughout its entirety, from the first note to the last.

And you remember the performances of the same work by many great artists, how differently they sounded - and yet all correct. How can music be so differently performed and yet remain correct? Because as the performer grasps the totality of the composition, he gauges the amount of sound and speed required by the work against his own skills with tonal and volume pressures and technical fleetness, so as to enable him to create feelings and ideas that will make difficult passages seem easy. In every fine performance there is a sense of inexorable logic that forces you to say, "Well, of course, that makes absolute sense. It's clear that's the way it should be." Then you'll hear someone else do it differently, and you'll say the same thing. Beyond the necessary acquired knowledge of the instrument and musical history, every artist also has a very personal and indefinable symbiosis with his instrument, be it violin, piano, cello or his own vocal cords. As he plays, he hears the composition in his or her own very special personal voice. Every great artist has a distinctive interpretive strength. That is what one searches for through all of one's life: uniqueness and simplicity. The single most difficult responsibility of a performing artist is to know how complicated, how interwoven, how difficult a work is - and how to get it to sound simple and inevitable.

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Mr. Stern himself described his style of play as like the "natural rise and fall of the human voice. . . . You sing in your head, and you play what you hear."

Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Isaac Stern

To be a musician in the service of music is not a job; it is a way of life.

Two things are necessary for a life in music; a clear idea of what you want to be, and the arrogance to pursue it. You can't walk onstage and say to the public, "Excuse me, I'm here." You must believe in yourself and make immediately clear to everyone, "I'm going to play, Listen!"

For me, the art of making music is a highly personal affair that involves the performer, the instrument, and the public. It's all too easy to be ignorant, or feign ignorance, of basic rules of music and to say or think, "This is the way I feel, I will do whatever I like, I don't need to recognise the boundaries of good taste or know the historical development of musical composition or have some rudimentary idea of the history of musical performance. " But to abide by the strict disciplines of music and, accepting those limitations, develop an individual voice; to become perceptive and honest; and above all, to recognize how to convince the listener - not to go to the listener, but bring the listener to you - that is the mark of musical artistry

Thursday, April 06, 2006

John Carewe

Importance of Analysis

......... one of the essential things about the analysis we had been doing together was that once you had done it and it had guided your instincts then you had to forget everything and let it come through your subconscious. You're not teaching the orchestra or the audience what you've learned in analysing the piece! Your analysis tells you how the music goes, and then you've got to put it across.
Conductor, also a mentor and friend of Simon Rattle

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

32 Short Films About Glenn Gould

Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould is an imaginative and engaging work of art which pioneers a new form of screen biography.
Co-writer and director Francois Girard circles around the life and artistry of Canadian pianist Glenn Gould. Through 32 vignettes, we gain access to the idiosyncratic essence of this reclusive man who loved short piano pieces, the vast spaces of Canada, pills, telephones, humming, radio, recording studios, books, and fingerless gloves. Colm Feore does a masterful job portraying Gould, who died of a heart attack in 1982 at the age of 50. The best thing about this innovative film is that it proves that some people can thrive on solitude.

Monday, March 20, 2006

Glenn Gould

Glenn Gould and the Vacuum cleaner

"....... the inner ear of the imagination is very much more powerful a stimulant than is any amount of outward observation."

The second consequence was that it became more difficult for him to feel satisfied with the actual sound of music, his own performances as well as those of other musicians. It forced him to become a perfectionist. From now on, whenever a work had to be prepared for a concert, he had to struggle mightily in trying to match his playing as closely as possible to the inner model of what it should ideally sound like.
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In fact, it was in Russia that he first noticed what he called "accruing bad habits" in his interpretation of Bach: "all sorts of dynamic hang-ups, crescendi and diminuendi that have no part in the structure, in the skeleton of that music, and defy one to portray the skeleton adequately. The reason... was that I had to play in very large halls which weren't set up with Bach in mind certainly, and try to project it to that man up there in the top balcony.... And I added this hairpin and that hairpin to a phrase that didn't demand it, didn't need it, and that ultimately destroyed the fabric of the music.

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Although Glenn rarely re-recorded anything that he had made earlier, he reconsidered in the case of the Goldbergs , which were still selling well in their 1955 version and were widely considered one of his greatest triumphs. He felt compelled to do this for several reasons. The technology of recording had improved enormously over the intervening years. "Someone had the nerve to invent something called Stereo. Then a few years later someone else had the audacity to invent a process called Dolby which invalidated the quality of sound in which [the earlier Goldberg recording] was done."

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The new Goldberg recording, and the tape made of the recording, were greatly successful, and the debate still goes onas to which is the "better" performance, that of 1955 or the one of 1981. It's a fruitless debate because both recordings are superb. If you want youthful abandon, spontaneity, and a miraculous technique, listen to the first. If you prefer stateliness, mathematical precision, the reflective wisdom of middle age, and the clarity of digital sound, listen to the second. In the opening and closing "Aria" of the 1981 recording, Glenn takes much more time, about twice as much as in the 1955 version, and some variations are also played at a more leisurely tempo.

Julian Lloyd Webber

What Julian did not realise was that this 'experience' was the best possible preparation for the concert platform as he was forced to find ways of controlling his nerves. He discovered that 'you have to lose yourself totally in the music so that the body becomes a channel through which it can flow. if the mind is given over completely to something outside the physical body, the nerves disappear. Although part of the mind has to be aware of its physical surroundings, the technical side of a performance should have been prepared before, so leaving music to take control.'
This condition can only be practised by performance itself, which in turn increases confidence. There were days when his nervousness seemed to be uncontrollable and, in time, Julian learnt one or two specific ways to deal with the problem: 'When my right hand began shaking and the bow bounced all over the strings I would immediately focus attention on my left-hand fingerings - I'd forget about the bow and it would start to behave properly again.' As for nerves before a concert he believes that they can be made to work for, rather than against you because the extra flow of adrenalin sharpens the reflexes and gives each performance a special edge.


'It was the experience of a lifetime... it is perhaps the one thing I have done which i would never have dreamed of being able to accomplish when I was a student. I do remember that I was at my lowest point emotionally. I had gone through all the heartache of my marriage breaking up only to fall out with Zohra. THings had never felt so bad but I could not allow my petty problems to interfere with recording God's beautiful music.
It is a strange truth that people's greatest professional achievements can be at the moment of their greatest personal unhappiness.

Sunday, March 19, 2006

Alfred Brendel

"Chaos must shimmer through the veil of order" ~Novalis

"Everything should be done as simply as possible but not more simply" ~ Einstein

When doing things, do them with relish.

... I tried to give freer rein to my feelings. That is sometimes dangerous for young performers, because when you simply lean back and give vent to your feelings, you don't always achieve the hoped for results; only after many years of practice is it possible to filter one's feelings properly. Which brings me to a phrase of Novalis that I am always quoting

"Chaos, in a work of art, should shimmer through the veil of order."

I am very much for chaos, that is to say feeling. But it's only the veil of order that makes the work of art possible.

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For me personally it was hugely important in teaching me to listen to myself. I can recommend it to everyone, if need be at home with at microphone and tape recorder. To see how the inner vision corresponds with what is played, and to see what doesn't correspond, and whether it corresponds at all. To see whether one can perceive the sound, even in forte, properly; or whether one gets so emotionally excited that it's simply impossible to hear what's going on. And perhaps it will gradually become clear what repays hearing several times over, and which nuances become embarassing and wearisome when heard more than three times. It's a matter of striking the right balance between too much and too little. It was only much later that I learned to record, as if I were playing in the concert hall.

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What fascinates me in singers is the connection between singing and speaking, which also seems to me particularly important in piano playing. And with Mozart it is literally vital. Mozart, after all, was the great opera composer, but there is also a pronounced singing quality in his instrumental works; and not just a singing quality, but a rhetorical and characteristic quality as well. There are characters, they are visible on stage and all differ from each other. Each has his or her own kind of music. And each of these characters goes through a variety of emotions, which are portrayed in connection with the character.

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It became clear to me fairly early on that a performer is a truly split personality.
One must give oneself certain instructions, such as , 'My arms are heavy.' But one must not desire such a thing in a fanatical way and with one's whole consciousness. On the one hand you have the instructions. on the other, a free flow of associations. It is perhaps something similar that makes a good performance possible.

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When I am on stage, I must do several things at once. I must control myself and free myself; I must look ahead to what I am about to play - see the piece, as it were, spread out like a panorama before me - but at the same time take in what I have just played. I have to play for the audience, and must reach the ears as far back as the thirtieth row. I am accountable to the listener. I am not delivering a soliloquy, but am somewhere in the middle. 'The medium is the message' is a quotation that you have used.

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I was never the most immaculate of artists. There were evenings when I was technically flawless, but I am not basically a perfectionist. I played sufficient wrong notes early on in my career not to be shocked by that as I grew older; and I got the impression from pianists I particularly admired that one could make an impact despite some little lapses. Flawlessness is not the first indication of a great performance.

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I have never believed in the myth of the piano as a percussion instrument. Bach's Inventions were created specifically to encourage cantabile playing- Bach wrote a foreword in which he said as much. He therefore reckoned with the possibility that on old instruments one could play cantabile or less cantabile. If the piano were just a percussion instrument, the great composers would not have written so much for it. I have always tried in my playing to draw sound out of the keys and not strike it in. Hammering and stabbing is not my thing. And neither is it true, by the way, that a single note can only be played louder or softer, but not with different expression, different character and different colour. Nor should the role of pedal be forgotten. I could demonstrate to you on the piano how even single notes can have a distinctive character. Then there is of course the connection between notes which can achieve even more, evoking a mixture of singing and speaking. Singing is for me the basis of music - at least music before the modern age. ... In matters of singing and speaking one should learn from singers, and opera. I have noticed that, despite my admiration for certain great pianists, I seem to have learnt more from singers and conductors. And from actors.

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He was extremely busy at Esterhaza and had to see to many things: performing new works that were not his own, training the orchestra and the singers, looking after the puppet theatre and learning to play the baryton, because that is what one of the princes required.

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I wrote that Haydn and Mozart represented for me the antithesis between the instrumental and the vocal. (Beethoven too I consider to be instrumental, while Schubert for me is vocal - which does not rule out the fact that the underlying character of all three is a cantabile. There is an instrumental and a vocal cantabile.) Then: motif and melody. Of course we also find wonderful melodies in Haydn, but he is primarily a composer of motifs, similar in this to Beethoven

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Most people believe that Glenn Gould was a strong personality who therefore had his own idea of a piece, and so much imagination that he was able to turn every piece into something new. On the other hand, people believe that someone who tries to understand and follow the text must of necessity lack imagination and be boring. To which I can only reply that to read the text accurately is an extremely difficult business - much more difficult than even most musicians realize. To understand the markings and give them life requires a great deal of imagination. One should not act as a computer, or as the composer's slave; one must, rather, try to assist the composer as a voluntary helper. I once discussed this with Pierre Boulez, who said that he was satisfied if eighty or ninety percent of the markings were followed.

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A pianissimo with Beethoven is almost always a 'pianissimo misterioso', and more rarely a 'pianissimo dolce'. With Schubert the pianissimo has a much wider domain and is, as Rudolf Kolisch said, a 'pianissimo espressivo'. There are composers who use dynamic markings in a very consistent way to render high and low, near and far. With Beethoven one must be able to distinguish with 'geographical' clarity that the fortissimo is outermost and that a single forte is located somwhere further down; one must never confuse the two.

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I like using the 4 elements to describe music. Busoni tells of how his composition teacher in Graz, Mayer-Remy, explained Bach's preludes and fugues to his pupils in this way. He remarked that in the first volume of The Well-Tempered Clavier the sequence of the first four fugues represented water, fire, air and earth. Such things can, I think, help the student to get a clearer picture of the pieces, and of musical variety.

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On a personal note (PC): In a way I think Alfred Brendel is pretty interesting because (he himself admits this) he's not really a prodigy, he doesn't have photographic memory, not really faster or louder than others, not really a good sight reader and he does things other than music (such as writing)..... so I guess this makes him quite an all-rounded individual not just a "slave" to music.....

Monday, March 13, 2006

Lorin Maazel

Quotes by Lorin Maazel, Music Director of New York Philharmonic Orchestra,

"Stage fright is borne of an excess of ego. Nervousness is a sign of egotism and should be overcome. You must approach the stage humbly and in the spirit of service. So if you're nervous, and thinking about yourself, you cannot do the best job really required."