..... 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.
Sunday, April 23, 2006
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."
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.....
=============================================================
... 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.
==============================================================
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.
========================================================
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."
=============================================================
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.
===================================================
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.
=====================================================
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.
======================================================
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.
========================================================
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.
=========================================================
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.
=====================================================
"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."
===================================================
"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.”
===========================================================
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.
======================================================
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.
=============================================================
... 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.
==============================================================
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.
========================================================
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."
=============================================================
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.
===================================================
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.
=====================================================
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.
======================================================
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.
========================================================
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.
=========================================================
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.
=====================================================
"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."
===================================================
"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.”
===========================================================
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.
======================================================
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.
=========================================================
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.
===========================================================
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."
=========================================================
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.
===========================================================
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
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.
......... 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
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