Glenn Gould [Elyse Mach]

That is not to say that there were not occasional moments- perhaps when I was giving a concert with an esteemed conductor or playing a solo work in an especially fine hall- when some special feeling took hold of me. I wouldn't deny that. But it didn't happen because the audience was there; it could just as well have happened at rehearsal or in a practice session. I can honestly say that I do not recall ever feeling better about the quality of a performance because of the presence of an audience. Indeed, it's precisely for that reason that when I record, I banish everybody from the studio except the people actually working on the recording....
But I found that even the presence of one person would make me tend to show off and, to that extent, it acutlaly got in the way of the performance. It meant that I was more concerned with their reaction than I was with what I was doing. Consequently, it simply did not serve the musical end. Now if you multiply that one person by two or three thousand at a large concert, you have some idea as to the extent of my reservations about public performances as an appropriate medium for music making.

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During those concert experiences I had to project that particular piece to a very large audience in most cases and, as a consequence, I had added hairpins - crescendi and diminuendi, and similar un-Bachian affectations- where they didn't need to be; I had exaggerated cadences in order to emphasize the separation of sentences or paragraphs, and so on. In other words, I was making an unnecessarily rhetorical statement about the music, simply as a consequence of having attempted to project it in very spacious acoustic environments.

In a studio, where the pick-up is close to the piano, you can achieve a very similar effect to that which the listener enjoys at home. The relationship of the piano to a microphone which is, eight feet away is very similar to the relationship between the listener at home and his speakers. There's a one-to-one aspect in both situations. But no such relationship exists when one is sitting on a stage, like the Tchaikovsky Hall in Moscow, and projecting a Bach partita to the first row of seats and to the top balcony simultaneously.

So the result was that the record made in the summer of '57 is a very glib, facile effort, because a series of little party tricks which just don't need to be there had been added to the piece.

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What is it about Schoenberg's music that attracts you?
I think I was first attracted to it because some of my teachers hated it; advocacy can be a useful weapon in a teenage rebellion. Actually I've always been attracted to music that is in one way or another contrapntal, whereas I'm essentially bored by homophonic music. Indeed, I've often said that I have something like a century-long blind spot with regard to music. ..........
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When my recording of the complete Mozart sonatas was released recently, I devoted about 7000 words to explaining why I really don't like Mozart's music very much. And one of the main reasons, certainly, is that it's not especially contrapuntal and worked out, so to speak. When I have to deal with such music, I confess that I tend to emphasize tenor parts to alto parts- anything to give it the semblance of a contrapuntal presence, to give it the illusion of a polyphonic lay-out.

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What about the format, the representation, for example, of the recital? There are rumours that the recital format is out, or at least is on the way out.

Well I don't go to concerts- I rarely did, even when I was giving them, .... so I can't honestly tell you that such a format has no validity in today's scheme of things. But it doesn't for me, certainly; as far as I'm concerned, music is something that ought to be listened to in private. I do not believe that it should be treated as group therapy or any other kind of communcal experience. I think that music ought to lead the listener- and, indeed, the performer- to a state of contemplation, and I don't think it's really possible to attain that condition with 2999 other souls sitting around. So my strongest objections to the concert are primarily moral rather than musical. But as far as the format of the recital is concerned, I personally don't particularly relish a sequence of the same instrumental sounds all evening, especially if htey're piano sounds. There are, as you well know, many piano freaks. I just don't happen to be one of them. I don't much care for piano music.

You don't care much for the music from the instrument you play? That's hard to believe.
Well, I'm really not hooked on the instrument per se- on any instrument, per se. I'm kind of instrumentally indifferent, I guess. Of course, if I hear a very scintillating performance I get great pleasure from it; I certainly don't mean to say that I don't get pleasure from listening to performances that involve the piano, but I don't get pleasure from performances because they invovle the piano. And I think that that really has laways been true. I've never been a piano buff in that sense.

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What are you like outside the recording studio? What is your lifestyle?
First of all, I can't divorce the studio from my personal life. The recording studio and the kind of womblike security that it gives is very much integrated with my lifestyle. I guess tis' all part of my fantasy to develop to the fullest extent a kind of Howard Hughesian secrecy. I'm a very private person, I think, I'm alone, or quasi-alone, a lot because the recording studio, with its small crew, provides me with the atmosphere that I need to work productively- to make music or indeed, to work on a radio or tv program. I stay up all night mostly. I very rarely go to bed until 5 or 6 oclock in the morning, and it's not unusual for me to hear the headlines on "Today Show" before turning in. I tend to get up around three in the afternoon.

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What about your views in areas other than music? Your views, for example, on a life hereafter?
I can only say that I was brought up as a Presbyterian; I stopped being a church-goer at the age of about 18, but I have had all my life a tremendously strong sense that, indeed , there is a hereafter, and the transformation of the spirit is a phenomenon with which one must reckon, and in the light of which, indeed, one must attempt to live one's life. As a consequence, I find all here-and-now philosphies repellent. On the other hand, I don't have any objective images to build around my notion of a hereafter, and I recognise that it's a great temptationto formulate a comforting theory of eternal life, so as to reconsile one's self to the inevitability of deat. But I'd like to think that's not what I'm doing; I'd like to think that I'm not emplying it as a deliverate self-reassuring process. For me, it intuitively seems right; I've never had to work at convincing myself about the likelihood of a life hereafter. It is simply something that appears to me infinitely more plausible than its opposite, which would be oblivion.

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The term eccentric has been applied to you many times. How do you react to it?
I don't think that my life style is like most other people's and I'm rather glad for that; I think it's in some way integrated with the kind of work that I want to do. As I said previously, the two things, life style and work, have become one. Now if that's eccentricity, then I'm eccentric. If eccentricity consists of wearing a scarf in an air-conditioned environment while recording, or playing with an overcoat on during my stay in Jerusalem, I'm guilty; but those things are organic to what I have to do.

Great conversations: the pianists / Eugene Istomin [video recording]

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/loc.natlib.ihas.200031106/transcript.html

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/loc.natlib.ihas.200031106/default.html

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/loc.natlib.ihas.200031106/contents.html

ROSEN:
The way Schnabel used to practice... he rarely practiced the really difficult passages. What he would do is practice the chords in something like the opening chords of the slow movement of the Op. 106.32 And what happened, he practiced them for the balance of sound. And in the end, that's really what the key to a beautiful tone, tone is. I mean, he would practice it until the chord vibrated from it, until the harmonics of the chord started to come out, until the chord sang the way he needed to make it. I mean, what I'm trying to say is, there's a vertical component, which is, you know, how the chord and how the chord vibrates and how the harmonics work in the thing-- and then, of course, there's the horizontal component of shaping the melody. If one of the notes sticks out too much, that sounds like banging. I mean, if you do it wrong. Also, when playing a chord, if you do this [gestures], just play all the notes equally, it's, it tends to be disagreeable. You have to use it only for a special effect. Can I add one small thing, which is that, I mean, what most people mean by a beautiful tone is that you bring out the melody and you use the pedal. And I mean, that's what a lot of teachers do. And I mean, to a certain extent, for a good deal of music, this is a good idea. But the whole, the way music is taught, not only in this country but around the world, which is that you use the same kind of sound for Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn, Boulez, Debussy, you know, Chopin. It becomes ridiculous. I mean, there should be a different sound for each composer.

FLEISHER:
The wonderful thing, the problem, I think, or one of our challenges is: Music is a horizontal activity, and yet it's the piano, the unique instrument that produces horizontal activity through a totally vertical, totally vertical activity. Violin: horizontal. Blowing air, from piccolo to tuba, is horizontal, in a sense. Putting down 88 keys is totally vertical.

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ROSEN:
We all come from families which were immigrant families, too. I mean, there's the second displacement, in other words, that we came from families that were displaced. It's what I said, that-- now, actually, most of the students in conservatories like Juilliard, they come from displaced families from Korea and Japan, and they're an entirely different-- the tradition hasn't changed. I mean, what happens is that music for immigrant families, classical music had a certain prestige, it was a way of sort of arising in society, and we were encouraged by our parents, and, you know, "my son, the pianist," or, instead of saying "my son the doctor" or "my son the nuclear physicist." And so that was a help. And that basically, there was, this is important, I think, for people to understand-- there was a whole transference of the European tradition not just in music but in everything: in nuclear physics, in mathematics. I mean, after 19...after Hitler, after 1938 and the Russian Revolution, there was an enormous transference, migration, of intellectuals from Europe into America. And I know American musicology was created at that time, and American pianism of a very special kind. Otherwise, before that, Americans had to go to Europe and study. Now, the European professors came and taught, and taught us here, and that was a big thing.