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Hilversum, 18 October 2015
It’s not difficult to find pianist Simon Trpceski in one of the rooms of the Dutch radio studios in Hilversum, since I can hear him practising the last movement of Chopin’s First Piano Concerto..
Simon Trpceski (ST): Tough concerto… I am playing four different concertos at the moment!
ST: No, they are not all new, but it requires time and patience to play four different concertos!
ST: Three or four years ago, I played it for the first time. I studied it for concerts with Andris Nelsons in Birmingham and I played it before with the Dutch conductor, Kees Bakels, in Porto. He is one of the best conductors I have worked with! I prefer Chopin’s First Concerto to his Second, I need to come to terms with the first movement of the latter.. I will play Chopin’s First Concerto in San Francisco next week, last week I played in Verona and I was on tour with Rachmaninov’sThird Concerto in the Czech Republic with the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra. It’s nice to be back here, I have a good relationship with the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra.
ST: You get a smile on your face when you hear it for the first time.. It is easier to understand music when you understand the circumstances and the irony that are behind it. Shostakovitsj picks up themes from the street and there are quotes of Haydn and Beethoven. He was a genius in the way he combined these motives. The orchestration is unusual, but it obviously worked. I played it for the first time in 1999 along with Prokofiev’s First Piano Concerto, two totally different languages and approaches to the piano. It was with the Macedonian Philharmonic Orchestra in Skopje. It was a great joy to play it.
If you look at the effects Shostakovitsj wanted to reach, it is difficult to bring out the irony, but his language and his style are not naïve at all. The concerto should be almost Mozart-like in its articulation. For yesterday’s concert, we had very little time to rehearse, but I think it was a good run-through for the concert in Amsterdam. I have good memories of a gala concert in Amsterdam in 2007 with Mariss Jansons. I heard that Shostakovitsj’s wife was present during the concert, but to my regret, nobody introduced me to her.
ST: It’s an unusual combination. The character of tunes sounds natural on that instrument. Shostakovitsj liked to explore limits of instruments in his symphonies, although not so much in this concerto. The writing for strings is not too comfortable by the way..
ST: For the violins and celli in the first movement in general and also the writing of the fugato in the last movement. They need to be alert, for the trumpet, all depends on the tempo of the pianist!
ST: You may find it “joyous” when you hear it for the first time, but it is a very ironic piece. There are a lot of personal and intimate moments, especially in the second movement. He tells a very personal story that has a lot to do with the struggle he was living through. He was a master in expressing his pain or sad memories, e.g. in the recapitulation of the slow movement when the trumpet comes in. You can hear his subtlety as a composer in the dialogues with the trumpet. The intensity of emotion with this kind of orchestration without winds is amazing. The trumpet is almost a decoration.
ST: The irony is one of his specifics. It’s an answer to the system he lived in. It can go to a point of grotesque indeed. I love the childish spirit he kept throughout his entire life. What you said about his music being gloomy, yes, very much so, but isn’t it nice to explore different sides of someone’s personality? Even towards the end of the First Concerto, something remains in the soul that basically the story wasn’t that happy..
ST: Not too much, there are a few moments where it can be uncomfortable, however it is difficult to put it together with the orchestra, you need a good team!
ST: He was probably not as good a pianist as Ashkenazy! (laughs). I worked with him in San Francisco.. It depends on what you call “good”?
ST: Well, when I hear how fast Shostakovitsj could play.. He was one of the prize winners in the Chopin competition in 1927 and playing in such a competiton… If you listen to his recording of the last movement of his cello sonata, we should pay respect to that. He certainly was a good pianist, but how much time do you have to practise when you have so much music in your head?
ST: Thank you for telling me, I don’t speak Dutch.. Yes, I can agree that it’s about pictures and emotions as well as changes of atmosphere. He went straight to the point with the quote of Beethoven’s Appassionata right at the beginning. With this quote he wanted to make jokes as well, although they were often of ironic truth, sometimes even cynical, but that’s acceptable for this kind of geniuses!
ST: I accompanied my students and enjoyed it very much. He wrote it for his son, who wasn’t a very good pianist. Its third movement has a rhythm that is characteristic for music in Macedonia! He was stealing a lot, but he knew how to integrate it in his own music. There is no going around… he had a fantastic mind. Shostakovitsj can produce incredible emotions of intensity and he makes you think, more than others. To live under that kind of stress, not being able to express yourself, having to face people who have no clue about his music and yet he stayed faithful to himself and he was still able to maintain his principles and not to go under even if he had to write works for the occasion.. It is a shame I never had the chance to meet him!
ST: Yes, the romanticism is close to my heart, probably because of my personality. It touches me how Russian composers express their emotions. I had Russian teachers, so it was very natural to play a lot of Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, Tschaikofsky and Shostakovitsj for them, but I have explored many other styles. I really enjoyed playing Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven and I hope to go in that direction as well. On one of my CD’s from Wigmore Hall, I play Bach/Liszt and Schubert and I am very happy about it. I remember I played Bach’s Ouverture in the French style for my debut recital at the Kleine Zaal of the Concertgebouw and on my next CD live from Wigmore Hall, I will play Brahms Intermezzi and his Händel Variations that are not so often played, as well as works by Ravel and Poulenc. For my Wigmore Hall debut, I played Schumann Fantasiestücke and Symphonic Studies and I loved it.
ST: No, but I am thinking of it. I played several of his sonatas as a student and I played his 5th Concerto this season. Life is very short for all the music I’d like to play, but I would definitely like to explore his music, for the sake of music and Beethoven. I’d also like to play his 3rd and 4rth Concertos, we’ll see about that!
ST: That’s correct, it’s a very sexy concerto in its freedom of spirit and development of musical personality! It was the last concerto of the four I studied. Number four shows us another writing of Rachmaninov, its language is full of jazzy harmonies. And in this concerto, he shows wonderful craftsmanship of orchestration. It’s true that the melodies are different: they are shorter, but certainly beautiful. There is also a lot of mystery in the second and third movements, especially towards the end of the development of the last movement, it is like a bad dream at some points..
ST: His melodies touch the heart, Rachmaninov evokes this kind of emotions..
ST: Yes, my favourite is number one! It’s the result of his Russian period, after its completion he left Russia. I played the revised version, which is more compact than the original. Especially after number two, people “expected” beautiful melodies from Rachmaninov. If you take the Paganini Rhapsody, people always remember Variation number 18, which is actually the reversion of the theme, but other than that there are not many beautiful melodies.
ST: Yes, at the end Rachmaninov wants to say: “There you are, I can finish like this as well!” Sadly, both the First and the Fourth Concertos are not often performed, I played them a few years ago, but I should do them again, you should come when I play them! (laughs)
ST (laughs loudly): You were there! We had a very short rehearsal, they cut it and the Yamaha piano wasn’t that great… but a member of the organisation of the Queen Elisabeth Competition in the audience and he was thrilled. He told me I should play in that competition, but I said: “No thanks, I am done with competitions!”
ST: Can you send that review to me? I am glad he wrote that, unfortunately I don’t play often in France, but it’s certainly nice to hear that there are people who like my recordings. Yes, I think you have to play his music with nobility and elegance, you shouldn’t be too sentimental, the “Chopinization”of romantic composers is bad, because Chopin is a very delicate composer. A lot of pianists are milking him! Taste in music is what I learnt from my Russian teachers.
ST: It is difficult…when I play Beethoven 5, Rach 2, Tschaikofsky 1, Grieg or Schumann concertos, I don’t like to play them in order to sell tickets. I try to explore more and find a meaning that I missed when I was learning it. It’s all about the inexplicable magic that music brings out.. When I am tired or when I think “Here I go to play … again”, I should think of the privilege to touch an instrument, to produce sounds and to create, about the happiness this brings to you. The majority of people can’t play an instrument, so you should be happy. This thought should come when you play something famous; the concept stays the same, but you are always exploring yourself. People expect you to be on a high level: you have a responsibility towards yourself, that is your first responsibility!
ST: No, never! If the machine is taking over, I am not afraid to stop! I composed songs and played the accordion, so I could do different things…
ST: Yes, you have to focus on the problems that arise and stay calm. You should allow yourself time, then you can go faster. I memorised Brahms First Concerto in five days and Rachmaninov and Prokofiev Third Concertos within one month, but sometimes the memory works slower. You also have to spread your energy. And last but not least: you should enjoy what you do!
ST: My brother will come and we will have dinner together. Tomorrow is his birthday. A few people will come to the concert in Amsterdam on Sunday morning and on Monday I’ll fly to San Francisco for concerts and masterclasses!
Amsterdam, 16 March 2004
I agreed to meet Stephen Hough at his hotel in Amsterdam at 10.30 a.m We agreed to combine the interview with (a belated) breakfast, but much to my embarrassment it wasn’t possible to find a place, where a decent breakfast could be served... We finally ended up in café Wildschut for some coffee and the interview....
Stephen Hough (SH): There was no classical music in our house and I only remember nursery rhymes like “Jack and Jill went up the hill”. When, on one occasion, I went to a friend’s house and saw a piano, I became fascinated and tried to play these nursey rhymes on it. I then began to ask for lessons so we eventually got a piano. Within a year I participated in the National Junior Piano Playing Competition and made it to the finals at the South Bank in London. I was the youngest competitor and although I didn’t win a prize, Gerald Moore, who was the Chairman of the jury, made a special point in his speech of saying that he thought I showed great promise and had a future ahead of me. A lot of hyped up things happened – someone wrote about me in the Daily Mail:“Could this be the new Mozart?”, but my parents were very wise. They said “no”to all offers of concerts and managers and that was the best thing they could do at the time! They wanted me to have a normal life. I then became quite obsessed with the piano and sigh-read lots of repertoire. I also composed a lot of music.
SH: On recordings I was impressed by pianists from the past, e.g. Rachmaninov, Paderewski, Cortot, Godowsky. I found the playing of contemporary artists less interesting. In live concerts, I remember being thrilled by Richter and Ogden- this was at the Liverpool Philharmonic Hall.
SH: At the age of 6! I didn’t want to do anything else... although in my early teens, I did become less interested and didn’t listen to classical music. As I said, my parents were very wise, they wanted me to go to school. A lot of prodigies burn out in later life. Solomon, on the other hand, withdrew and came back later as a mature pianist. I often ask myself where you draw the line between art and circus.
SH: I am not sure. Everybody deals with this in a different way. You definitely need a certain strength. You need to find resources for inspiration under the most uninspiring circumstances, e.g. a rehearsal straight after an 8 hour flight! You also need sensitivity and some natural originality. Performing is often a balancing-act, on the one hand you don’t want to be original in a self-concious, artificial way on the other hand, you don’t want to follow mindlessly what everyone else does. It has to be natural from the inside. I try not to listen too much to other pianists- you have to leave space for your own ideas to develop.
SH: Not very often, but it can be good if I am stuck with something. I sometimes wonder what others do with a problematic passage and it can be inspiring, even when it’s a bad performance. If even x or y plays something badly, then it’s less intimidating when I am not at my best!
SH: Yest, to Cortot or Friedman, whom I find very inspiring. Horowitz too, he has such creativity and sheer presence. I heard him only once in concert in 1982 at the Met in New York, and he knew exactly how to make the piano sound..... He was like a cup of espresso, a piano-energy boost!
SH: I learn very thoroughly and don’t learn anything I won’t perform or record. Having said this, I have to choose very carefully, since I can’t play as much repertoire as I like. For instance, there was no way I would have learnt the Ghost Variations by George Tsontakis without intending to perform it in concert. Although I have never played the Von Sauer Concerto in concert, it was a coupling on record for Scharwenka’s 4rth Concerto.
SH: No, everybody seems curous about the Hummel Sonatas since they were played so much by pianists from the past like Chopin and Liszt..
SH: Hyperion is a wonderful company, they never seem to say no. Although the more obscure, the better. I actually do play mainly standard repertoire, even though I haven’t recorded all of it, say Beethoven sonatas. For my previous recording company, Virgin, I recorded more well known repertoire: Schumann, Liszt, the Brahms concertos, yet a lot of people think I only play obscure repertoire. I think it’s important to play many different things. For example, I played Hummel Concertos and think it’s vital to know them in order to know the Chopin concertos properly. Chopin took so many of his ideas from Hummel and we can learn something about the way Chopin would have played his own concertos from understanding the earlier prototype. Liszt played Hummel’s concertos everywhere. To me it’s inexplicable that pianists don’t know Hummel’s music! People often see Chopin as a genius, whose ideas come from nowhere. That’s not true, of course. He was a genius, of course, but there is a clear link with the past. Chopin’s style is a continuation of the Classical, forward looking in its romanticism, not a kind of early model of a big romantic concerto. For instance he took the idea from Hummel of making the coda more virtuosic instead of writing a cadenza. I find it also inexplicable that pianists play Rachmaninov and don’t know his recordings!
SH: If I didn’t, I wouldn’t record them! And they have never been recorded as a “live concert”set yet. Frankly, I haven’t listened to many cycles. But many performances I hear do not satisfy me. There is a tradition since the 50’s to take heavy, slow tempi for instance the 3rd movement of the 3rd concerto where the coda of the 3rd movement is marked “vivacissimo”and often played too slowly. The 2nd Concerto can sound mundane and ordinary. It can work in a confortable sort of way, but I want to go beyond that.
SH: I don’t think there is anything in the rythm itself which is unusual or difficult, but the whole concerto is complicated because of the intricate inner figuration and the necessity of complete control of colour at every dynamic level. The 4rth Concerto is harder to bring off with the orchestra as a unified piece. But then again, everything is difficult! Mozart concertos are difficult too! Or Saint Seans’s 3rd Concerto, it’s one of the hardest pieces I ever studied. You hear every detail unlike Rachmaninov’s 3rd Concerto... Hummel Sonatas are difficult too, because the enormous technical demands are so audible and awkward. That’s one of the reasons Liszt was such a genius, he made things easier to play whilst sounding more difficult!
SH: He is underrated, although less and less as the years go by. It’s interesting what Collard said about Saint Seans being more popular in the UK than in France!
SH: No, but you need at least knowledge where the music comes from. You could also ask the question “What is typically English music?”Does “English”mean Saxon? Viking? Elgar’s music has some deeply nostalgic quality, but is it typically English? Or is Byrd? Or Vaughan Williams? Gieseking was one of the greatest pianists in French music, whereas he was German, Cortot was great in Schumann, whereas he was Swiss-French.
SH: Yes, from a quite recent past, there is Ades, Birstwistle, Maxwell Davies amongst living composers. From the past, Bowen and Ireland also wrote beautiful music. Britten is not as impressive in his piano music as in his other works, Tippett also wrote for piano – four fine sonatas and a gorgeous concerto. It’s actually interesting that the first body of music written for a keyboard instrument comes from England – The Elizabethan virginalists Byrd and Gibbons. There were both perios of richness and huge gaps!
SH: I haven’t commissioned anything myself directly, but I have been involved in commissions, e.g. the 2nd Concerto by Lowell Liebermann that was commissioned by Steinway. And Tsontakis and James MacMillan are both writing concertos for me- for Dalls Symphony and Minnesota Orchestra. I find it interesting to see works by contemporary composers, no matter how unknown they are, but I receive so many scores.....I have to be sure it’s a good piece though I program a new composition with an orchestra.
SH: It was written for the pianist Yefim Bronfman, but it’s a very long piece of about 70 pages. He didn’t have time to learn it and the score had not been looked at since then. I discovered Tsontakis’music in an orchestral concert and spoke to him. He sent me the score and I looked at it and started to play it through and gradually fell in love with it. For me, it’s a greater piece than Prokofiev’s sonatas, which I feel are almost overrated, although the 7th Sonata and parts of the 6th and the 8th sonatas are wonderful. I have played the Ghost Variations dozens of times, and when I performed it at the Philharmonie in Berlin, for example, some of the orchestra players were really enthusiastic about the music and said it was one of the most extraordinary pieces they had heard. It’s a mixture of the heart and the head, and I think that’s what makes a piece great. I also heard a CD of his String Quartets and liked them. I thought they were fascinating pieces, real masterworks.
SH: During the 20th century, there was a point when one became either a performer or a composer. However, Shostakovitsj was a good pianist and Strawinsky was a decent pianist. Of the contemporary composers, Thomas Adès is a wonderful pianist. .
SH: I haven’t worked enough with composers. With Liebermann, who is an excellent pianist, I made suggestions – some he liked, others he rejected. Some composers who don’t play the piano confuse complexity with virtuosity. They need to learn something from Liszt!
SH: In contemporary music, different skills are involved sometimes. For instance, I couldn’t bring anything to the 2nd sonata of Boulez. I am glad that some people play such intensely complex scores- Pollini is extraordinary in the Boulez sonata of course. Although some modern music sometimes sounds as if has not been written for humans to perform!
SH: I met him at the end of his life, but he was not a close friend. He was very supportive and warm. I was told recently that he said he was very flattered and honoured when he saw his picture hanging next to mine in Steinway Hall in New York! I was touched to hear this anecdote about someone I admired so much. For me, he was the ultimate instinctive player, he didn’t have a cerebral approach to music. He worked very hard and practised very slowly in a very detailed way. He actually never wanted to talk about music, but rather about holiday resorts and gossip!
SH: I have had wonderful times with Steven Osborne, Imogen Cooper, Jean Yve Thibaudet, Olli Mustonen, Howard Shelly to name a few. There is a general friendliness I experience.
SH: Certainly, although I am not sure whether it will be the same (a mobile phone rings with the melody of Für Elise, WB), but you see, as long as people still want Für Elise on their cell phone, although the future of classical music will be more profound than that I hope! It is slow but long in its life, whereas pop music is quick and fast, the latter is created to be disposable. People may come to classical music later in their lives. Young people rarely want to do socially what their parents do. What I do reject is the excessive marketing and manipulation by some of the big recording companies. This is a form of abuse by people who look solely to make money at the expense of music.
When we walk back to the hotel, Hough says something very interesting: “Do you realize that in the entire history of music artists have only actually been concertizing for one and a half centuries? That’s curious, isn’t it?”
© 2004 Willem Boone
Arnhem, 12 July 2004
Stephen Kovacevich has just played Beethoven’s 4rth Concerto with the Gelders Orkest (They record for Naxos and are better known under the name of Arnhem Philharmonic Orchestra) and the excellent, but very modest, German conductor Berhard Klee. Kovacevich impressed with his concentration, and the way he sits at the keyboard vaguely reminds me of the late Emil Gilels. “Just give me your number so that I can call you in case it doesn’t work out”says Kovacevich, when I ask him for an interview. We agree to meet the next day at the same venue. I sincerely hope that my mobile phone will not ring on the Saturday morning and indeed it doesn’t. There were a few other complications, I almost ended up in a traffic jam (on a Saturday morning 11.30 a.m!) and I almost got locked in the hall, but thankfully I managed to escape and meet Stephen Kovacevich for an exclusive interview, in which we focused on his relationship with the Beethoven concertos and sonatas, favourite pianists and his studies with Myra Hess.
Stephen Kovacevich (SK): I can’t remember, they wanted the Emperor Concerto, but I will play Beethoven 4 next week in New Zealand. I also played a lot of recitals lately, so there was no time to properly rehearse the Emperor.
SK: I am still in love with it!
SK: Beethoven normally has an incredible energy, it doesn’t happen often that he is so gentle. Brahms hated to write vivace, if he used it at all, it was always “vivace ma non troppo”. Similarly, Beethoven must have hated to write “moderato” and the first movement of the 4rth concerto is an allegro moderato. The two other movements are different; the second is full of imagination and the third is hardly moderato, it’s vivacious. I have been working very long to find a consistent tempo for the first movement and last night I played with a very musical conductor, Bernard Klee, I think we found something together...
SK: No, I don’t.
SK: No, I combined three, Beethoven’s and my own!
SK: I did, there were a few moments from my own one, I think cadenzas shouldn’t always be the same.
SK: In a way, the ensemble of a soloist who conducts is easier, because you can put the piano in the middle of the orchestra and you are part of it. On the other hand, with a good conductor like Bernard Klee last night, I am happy too. As long as it’s not with a “Kapellmeister”.
SK: Routine... someone who is not inspired!
SK: It is my mile stone, for sure!
SK: Longer, it was eleven or twelve years I believe. The biggest challenge was to learn the Hammerklavier sonata.
SK: It’s a monster... It’s difficult to be able to play all the notes... there are some moments, for instance in the final fugue where nobody really plays all the notes or trills, we almost do! The intensity of the whole piece is extremely difficult.
SK: Ah, that is the cri du coeur of Beethoven , along with the two arias of opus 110. Well, you either have the intensity and then it’s not difficult, or you don’t and then it is difficult...
SK: Schnabel tried and I think Gulda too, although I am not sure about the latter. Peter Serkin also did, but I think it’s terrible. When I play it at tempo marking 132, it simply sounds ridiculous. I often had the same experience as a student: when I choose a tempo away from the piano, it was always too fast. We should bear in mind that Beethoven only heard the internal sound when he wrote this piece. We do have recordings from Bartok and Strawinsky and they didn’t always take their own tempo markings. Once I played the Piano Concerto of Michael Tippett with Michael Tilson Thomas and I played according to the required metronome marking and Tilson Thomas asked me why I played so fast. We shouldn’t be too strict with this, I think we want to be like good boys and girls and always respect the “good”tempo!
SK: Yes, we were not happy with the sound of a few recordings and EMI wanted to offer the best possible sound. I remember we worked in a studio that had just been painted and things didn’t work at the time.
SK: Some of the old recordings had a very heavy sound. The paint wasn’t hard and it obviously affected the sound.
SK: The Hammerklavier and also opus 2/2 and opus 109.
SK: You can understand that opus 111 was the last one, the harmonies have become more chromatic and there is more pianistic virtuosity. For me opus 109 and 111 radiate some sort of faith that life begins again... maybe that’s philosophy and if it’s religion, then you call it religion. The darkest music by Beethoven I know is opus 110. The arias make me think of someone who is dying and who is almost unable to speak, especially when the aria comes back...
SK: Not even...
SK: I am actually not interested in big projects, I’d like to learn a lot of chamber music, such as the piano trios and quartets by Brahms and the violin sonatas by Bartok.
SK: I am not thinking of a partner in particular, but yes, I have thought of some.
SK: Did you hear that in Holland?
SK: I’ll be playing in Amsterdam in November with Truls Mork, I love him as a cellist.
SK: He was a genius, his recording of Schumann’s Carnaval is phenomenal. Quite interestingly, he played a surprising amount of Beethoven sonatas, but he only played the first of the five concertos. The others gave him no pleasure, can you imagine?
SK: It could be....
SK: No, I haven’t . I learnt all his concertos and I love them, but I haven’t played them in public. I don’t know if it is my music on stage...
SK: Kissin is not young now, but he is marvellous. And the young English pianist Freddy Kempff, who is extremely gifted. The critics are against him, but I think he is very good.
SK: Let’s wait and see....
SK: The inside of the music. To produce a beautiful sound with a lot of variation. She was fantastic in Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Mozart, Brahms. And she used to be very popular in Holland and the USA. She could fill Carnegie Hall!
SK: Gina Bachauer also played them. It was unusual at the time, but not today.
SK: No, I haven’t, I think they are fantastic!
SK: O no, that is not true, on the contrary, she works very hard!
SK: Good question... Actually no, our repertoire is quite different.
SK: That was when we were still together, I don’t know. It might happen.
SK: No, I wouldn’t. There are already two in the family, there is no need for another!
Stephen Kovacevich says he will play the Beethoven 4rth Concerto this evening in Nijmegen and says he has heard good things about the hall of “De Vereeniging”. He asks me whether it is indeed a good hall. I reassure him and answer that it is quite nice and that I like it actually better than the hall where he played last night (Musis Sacrum in Arnhem)... but he says he was quite happy last night...
© 2004 Willem Boone
Amsterdam, 27 May 2006
The eminent Dutch pianist Tan Crone is mainly known for her collaboration with many Dutch and international musicians, among which Roberta Alexander, Arleen Auger, John Bröcheler, Miranda van Kralingen, Tibor de Machula, Theo Olof, Marien van Staalen, Carolyn Watkinson, etc. She also has a reputation as a teacher. And, something that few will know, she knew the legendary pianist Clara Haskil quite well. She received letters from the famous Haskil, was asked to turn pages during recording sessions and accompanied her during her only American tour in 1956. I had previously heard Tan Crone on the radio when she spoke at length about Haskil so after a pre-concert talk in Rotterdam when she spoke about Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto, I decided to ask her for an interview. She accepted and one month later, I visited her, listened to her stories in her beautiful appartment in Amsterdam with view of the Amstel river and the Skinny Bridge. I hardly needed to encourage her, I barely sat down and she started reminising about her great colleague, with several handwritten letters by Haskil on her lap....
Tan Crone: That was at a time when travelling took much longer than nowadays and when artists stayed longer at the same hotel. Haskil was actually only well known during the last fifteen/twenty years of her life, before that period she was often ill and therefore she had a lot of time to think and reflect.
TC: That’s true, but in general they were much shorter.
TC: That was in the 50’s when the Brabants Orkest had just been founded. They played the Schumann Concerto under Hein Jordans with Clara Haskil as the soloist. They played four concerts in Den Bosch, Breda, Eindhoven and Tilburg, but unlike nowadays, these were not four consecutive performances. They rehearsed in a building called “Het Kruithuis” in Den Bosch, the city where I was born. I used to play with orchestra too and Jordans asked me whether I wanted to prepare the rehearsals of the Schumann Concerto. I had played this concerto for my final exam and thought it was a great experience as a young pianist who was not even 20 years old to help the orchestra. I asked whether I could attend the rehearsal with Haskil. The Kruithuis was not far away from the city center and at that time, there were no taxis or cars to take musicians to their hotel or to the station. They just walked to the station. When I went to my bike after the rehearsal, I met Haskil outside. I told her that I had heard her play, she was interested to hear that I studied the piano and that I had prepared the rehearsal with the orchestra. She knew my piano teacher Nelly Wagenaar, which was a good recommendation. We walked together and I carried her bag, I almost asked her if she wanted to ride on the back of my bike. She was a lady with a slight handicap, so of course I didn’t ask her. Jordans invited me for the concert in Eindhoven and I had to promise Haskil to come round after she had played. By chance, we both took the same train to Paris shortly after. She often stayed in Paris, where her sister Jeanne lived, whereas she lived in Vevey with her other sister Lily. She travelled first class, I travelled 2nd class, but she begged me to stay with her. She liked talking and was very interested. She spoke French very well. In Paris, her sister Jeanne was waiting for her, she introduced me to her. At that time, I studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, that was another good recommendation.
She invited me for her recital at the Théâtre des Champs Elysées. I remember only two of the pieces she played, Bach’s Toccata in E minor and Schubert’s Sonata in B flat major, D 960, I don’t remember the rest of the program. After the concert, a lot of Romanians flocked to her dressing room. She asked me whether I wanted to have coffee at her hotel and Jeanne gave me a pass to attend the concerts of the orchestra in which she was playing, the Orchestre des Concerts Lamoureux. It was a nice acquaintance, but I wouldn’t call it a friendship.
Later, she made recordings in the Netherlands with Grumiaux at the Kurhaus in Scheveningen and in the Bachzaal in Amsterdam. I turned pages during the recording sessions and concerts. I still remember that she was never satisfied, wheras I thought she did amazing things. At that moment, I realized there are degrees of excellence. Sometimes, she closed the lid of the piano and said: “I won’t play any more and I don’t want this to be kept”. It sometimes irritated me, when you are turning pages for someone, you tend to listen less well. By the way, Grumiaux and his wife were always extremely nice to her. They always brought her gifts and always accompanied her to her hotel.
Sometimes I wrote to her and I also got letters in return. I gave the originals to her sister Jeanne after her death and made copies for myself. In the book “Frauen mit Flügel”, they included a short letter from Haskil to me. “The first time, I opened the book, I just saw the page with my own name”!). Sometimes, I went shopping with her, because she had little confidence. I remember we went to the Bonetterie in The Hague. After she had seen herself in a mirror she would sometimes suddenly walk out of the shop, due to her lack of confidence.
In the mid 50’s, I studied in the Unites States (Boston). Coincidentally, Haskil played there in 1956 with the conductor Charles Münch three times Beethoven's Third Piano Concerto and once Mozart’s Piano Concerto in D minor K 466. He was a charming man, who loved women, regardless whether they were beautiful or not. The orchestra adored him. Haskil was completely unknown in America. She toured with the Boston Symphony Orchestra to Philadelphia and New York. She sent me a letter and asked whether I wanted to accompany her. She wanted me to help her with the language, since she didn’t speak English very well. She stayed at the Ritz Carlton Hotel in New York and I stayed with friends. She created a sensation and was surrounded by journalists. After the intermission, she wanted to listen to Tschaikofsky’s Pathétique. She was so impressed at the end she didn’t want to leave. She got angry when I tried to guide her through the audience when the applause started. Münch invited her to come over to eat spaghetti after the concert, but she was also invited to a chique party. She refused to go there “There will be a grand piano and of course they will want mo to play’. I had to excuse her and say that Madame Haskil had become unwell and couldn’t come, which made it possible for her to go and see Münch! She had already been invited for a second tour and I even managed to get time off to accompany her again.
TC: No, she was not feeling well at the time, she had to cancel.
It struck me that I seldom heard her practice, I asked her “Clara, (I had to call her Clara), I never hear you practice”, to which she answered “No, I used to do that when I was young”. The only thing I heard her play in her dressing room was the Chopin study opus 10/2 in chromatic scales and it was flawless. She had huge, “meaty” hands and a natural talent for the instrument.
For every performance with a different conductor, she got a new score in which she noted his remarks. She didn’t want to show Szell for instance that she had played the same concerto with Münch one week before...
TC: She sent me to a shop in Amsterdam, Broekmans en van Poppel to find her a score. She always wanted to look at a fresh score.
One of my teachers, Rudolf Serkin, studied with the same teacher as that of Haskil. As a young girl, she had been very ill and was forced to stay in bed for a long time. She had hardly experienced anything in her youth. However, she played the music of Granados and Albeniz with the temperament of someone who had experienced a thousand love stories. You see, you really don’t need to have lived through anything to play well...!
She was very interested in everything I did, I was very young and unexperienced at the time. At first she wrote “Liebes Fräulein”, later on she wrote “Ma chère Tan”, I have a letter she wrote on the train (“Dans le train de Paris à Amsterdam”). I even have a picture on which she had written “Pour ma chère Tan, que j’aime de tout mon coeur”( To my dear Tan, whom I love with all of my heart). I was quite proud of that.
TC: No, I was the one who took the pictures. Later on, I received her records with a dedication. When she recorded the Mozart Double Concerto with Anda, she said I would only get the record once I guessed whether she played first or second piano.
TC: I don’t remember, but she gave me the record anyway. We stayed in touch until her death. I heard about it on the radio, it was a tremendous shock.
TC: We’ll never know, it could have been a small stroke..
TC: That’s true, I recognize her playing because of her left hand. Her jeu perlé is very characteristic. It has focus, like a singer is supposed to have in his voice.
TC: She loved doing normal things, for instance, I once took her for a bus ride in new York. The pianist Geza Anda, who happened to be in New York at the same time, was furious and said: “How could you take such a fragile woman for a bus ride?”But she wanted it so badly! I also took her to museums. She hated pretentiousness, she had experienced too much of that.
TC: That’s correct, but she needed joy. And she had a great sense of humor.
TC: She could laugh about small and silly things. It has to do with intelligence when you can laugh about such things. She was egocentric though, always concerned about how she felt. A lot of colleagues like Serkin, Stern and Anda were married and had families. She was by herself and lived with her sister Lily in Vevey. Her other sister lived in Paris.
TC: I don’t know whether she felt the need to marry. Maybe nobody ever proposed to her. She was not approachable because of her handicap. She was a simple, unassuming woman. Clothes were not as important as nowadays. And right after the war, there were less clothes. She often wore a long skirt and a blouse, it had to feel confortable. Only in the 70’s, was there more luxury.
TC: I can’t tell you, the age difference was too important.
TC: Her touch, the lyricism. It was magical. The other day, I heard someone say on the radio that nobody can be compared to her when it comes to Mozart Piano Concertos. She was simply spellbinding and created a very special atmosphere.
TC: Because of her touch, the timing and the honesty of her playing. She had a lot of temperament, just like Martha Argerich, whom I admire, although Haskil didn’t walk on the edge, as Argerich sometimes does. Haskil had an enormous, flexible hand. Huge, but not unelegant? They were like those of the harpist Phia Berghout.
TC: At the end of her life, it wasn’t that big any more and she often played the same pieces. That’s still the case with certain musicians..
TC: No, she was convinced it was ok. There was no time for it.
TC: Probably, yes. I was less convinced of my solo playing.
TC: She never said anything bad about other musicians, never anything good either.. She mostly avoided the subject, although she asked me whether I listened to others like Anda and Istomin.
TC: No, I stopped playing concerts. I wanted to stop when things were still going ok. I was getting increasingly tired of having to schedule concerts long in advance. In addition, I was the one who had to plan all the rehearsals. I planned to stop playing concerts by no longer accepting engagements. A lot of my “customers” like Theo Olof had stopped playing, and singers like Bröchler and Alexander were increasingly focusing on opera. Rehearsing means a lot of work. You can’t afford to be ill. I also wanted to do other things, like travelling and gardening.
TC: Yes, I do, but I need to be encouraged. I play piano trios and quartets with friends at home or pieces I don’t know very well. We pianists can go on for a long time!
© Willem Boone, 2006
Hilversum, 25 April 2005
Meeting Vladimir Ashkenazy for an interview can seem a daunting task. How to squeeze in an appointment in his very busy schedule? After his concert in Amsterdam in July 2004 with the NHK Symphony Orchestra he was willing, but immediately asked: “The question is when and where?” Thankfully, he came with a solution himself: “I will be in Hilversum in the Netherlands to record a CD at the end of April 2005.” Willem Boone and Jeroen Vonhögen spoke with Vladimir Ashkenazy, who was recording Respighi with the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra in one of the Dutch radio studios in Hilversum. The interview took place in the canteen, where the conductor and pianist had lunch, together with his wife Dody.
Vladimir Ashkenazy (VA): From my parents, I suppose (laughs)... Let me get my wife, she is lost (walks away and comes back with his wife Dody)
VA: People talk too much, I don’t know...
Dody Ashkenazy (DA): Yes, you are extremely organized!
VA: Fortunately, yes, I am, but many people are, that’s nothing special... All my friends are quick learners. I am a quick sight-reader, that’s a gift.
VA: No, when you interview me, I think of what you are saying!
VA: Yes, of course it is, but the main reason was that both Decca and myself were interested in these projects. It is a challenge to play a lot of music.
VA: Sometimes, you basically find out that they too were human beings. They were gifted, but they had problems too. It can be informative, for instance I found out that Beethoven had such an incredible warm heart, the way he helped his nephew.... but reading biographies doesn’t always help you to play better...
VA: The music speaks for itself, biographies only confirm what you find in the music. You have to understand music by itself.
VA (surprised): I don’t know, I don’t comment on my own activities!
VA: Yes, it’s interesting and good to listen to how terrible you are. You can try to improve....
VA: It’s my life, if I am asked to record, I do it. It’s fun and I just love music so much. I also have a big record collection.
VA: A few thousand CD’s
VA: It’s not that I always want to listen to all of them, but I like to have things when I need them.
VA; No, I am not against it, but you don’t achieve the same result in concert as in a recording studio. A live recording is seldom perfect.
VA: Of course you can, otherwise there is no point. Music can’t be just clinical!
VA: No, I don’t listen to my CD’s, if I am asked to record things, I do it.
VA: You try to improve things..
VA: I have no idea what you are talking about, I have no answer to it..(asks his wife)
DA: He usually is not very particular about getting a certain sound, but in recordings from the 60’s, the sound used to be very muted with the piano in the background. Maybe Decca got complaints about that and changed things? The only thing he basically asks when he is in a studio is: “Can we record? “
VA: Yes, I have to
VA: No, normally, it’s OK.
VA: I have/had a wide choice, normally they agreed with a lot of things I asked. Things are difficult now, because the market is low.
VA: They have other pianists too, but I had a good choice, I can’t complain. There were priorities though, such as the Beethoven sonatas. The most important is that I was able to play great music, I have been lucky to record the basic repertoire.
VA: I don’t know, life changes, there are no prescriptions...
VA; No, I didn’t say that, I said I played much less, but I still practice every day and learn a lot of repertoire.
VA: Yes, I direct Mozart and Beethoven concertos from the keyboard.
VA: I don’t play recitals any more, I have no time.
VA:About three years ago.
VA: It’s slavery and a gift (laughs)
VA: It’s difficult to say how much you can learn..
VA: I couldn’t watch them, I was to busy to learn, when I had to play! In the end, you can’t imitate, you have to do your own thing. You get ideas and you try to work them out, you try this or that and try not to do anything stupid. Klemperer already said (Ashkenazy quite funnily imitates how the great conductor spoke when he was paralyzed) “You can’t teach someone to be a conductor”
VA: (smiles), yes, I do!
VA: Yes, I think so, he was great.
VA: I like many pianists, as a conductor, I accompanied many colleagues, Pollini, Zimerman, Lupu, Perahia, Richter...
VA: Yes, I did, she’s a very warm person
VA: No, she is very easy to work with!
VA: Yes, I know that, but never thought of working with her as a piano duo
VA: You can do anything if you have enough rehearsal time, but playing and conducting Liszt and Prokofiev is not always advisable..
VA: Well, then you have to do it in one rehearsal!
VA: Yes, I just finished that.
VA: I am still afraid and still in awe, but I like challenges. And you know, I got used to playing many voices at the same time... I think it’s not so bad, some of them were really well played..
VA: O no, they are so different!
VA: No, I didn’t, but he wasn’t a good pianist, he never practized. There is a recording where he played his piano concertos and it isn’t very good. When he was young, he used to be better and even did silent films.
VA: Yes, but some of it is fantastic! He was a strange man... (thinks).. he had a controversial character. On the one hand, there was the purity of expression, but something went against it. Sometimes, he was fantastically inspired, for instance in the B-minor sonata or the first Mephisto waltz, but a lot of his music is over the top. But what counts; he was incredibly devoted to music, he taught so many musicians and promoted Beethoven on the piano. And his imagination was amazing.
VA: There is an attempt to get to another level, but he was at his best in his diabolical works , the first Mephisto waltz is fantastic.
VA: Mephisto is better! (laughs)
VA: They are allright, but it wouldn’t be my first choice.
VA: No, I never conducted any symphonic works by Liszt. Nobody asked me to do that, but I would like to do the Faust Symphony. Maybe it’s not totally convincing, but it’s a genuine piece. Liszt was definitely a genius.
VA: Ah, unbelievable! (looks up) He was really economical in his music. His late music is beyond comment, both on a spiritual and musical level. It’s organic, it makes sense. He was not going ahead of his time for the sake of going ahead. He was unlike Schönberg with his dodecaphonic music. I don’t like Schönberg’s attitude to art. Alban Berg was gifted though..
VA: No, I don’t...
VA: That’s a brillant piece of a young composer, I like it, but it’s mostly played with orchestra. I didn’t get to it, I apologize for my omission, but it was not delibirate... there are many great recordings, they won’t miss mine...
VA: It’s a student piece, Chopin was about fourteen or fifteen years old when he composed it. It’s embryonic and not very good.
VA: Yes, John Ogdon composed five Preludes for me, I played them.
VA: No, but they are very idiomatic musically! Rautavaara also composed a piano concerto for me, that’s a very interesting sound world. And Andre Previn also composed a concerto for me.
VA: No, that’s not true, Andre exaggerated my ability to learn. He is a good friend. Besides, of course it took time to learn the concerto which I liked very much. You see, that’s how legends get created. Don’t trust everything you hear! I will give you an example of how unreliable the press is. I was reading the Herald Tribune of last Monday (18 April 2005, WB) and in the section “People” I saw my name. I had been nominated conductor laureate for the season 2007-2008 of the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra. I agreed when they asked me, because it’s a good orchestra. The newspaper wrote: “Ashkenazy heard the Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra for the first time when he was eleven years old and he was so moved when he heard them do Mahler first Symphony”. Now in 1948, I was living in Russia, and at the time I had never heard of Mahler or the Liverpool Philharmonic! It appeared that the editor of the Herald Tribune confused the biographies of Sir Simon Rattle and myself! It’s not a crime, but why? Why can’t they be accurate? It’s just unprofessional to write such things!
VA: He is fine. We just played Ravel’s La Valse on two pianos at a Steinway gala in Hamburg. He now teaches in Angoulème, in France.
VA: Yes, it’s difficult... it doesn’t help things!
VA: Respighi’s Feste Romane, a very loud piece! But the orchestra is very good!
© Willem Boone 2005
Almere, 4 juni 2017
Willem Brons (WB): I really liked the director of the hotel, who was a friend of Hans Duijf from Cristofori. I once played a concert in the hotel garden that started at 8.30 pm, you had to pay attention to the church bells of the Westerchurch that rang at nine o’clock…
WB: Maybe his interpretation was less dramatic. The penultimate Schubert sonata is the most all-encompassing of the entire cycle and: it shows misery, mildness, spirituality, tenderness, despair, happiness, nostalgia, etc. I have always felt this way about the sonata, from the moment I started playing it!
WB: Yes, that’s correct, although she studied with me for only a short period of time. She was not sure whether to study biology or music. Whenever you have doubts, you shouldn’t choose music, at least that’s what my teachers told me when I was 17 or 18 years old. “What do you want to achieve in music?” people asked me, to which I answered: “I have no idea, but I want to know everything about it instead of staying an outsider, i.e. an amateur pianist.” Later on, Robijn overcame her doubts and decided to study music with Frank Mol, a very gifted musician who unfortunately died young.
WB: I never gave it much thought, I hardly ever think of it.. Generally speaking, you get more recognition when you get older and when you realise you have become better known. A career has its ups and downs. In the 70’s, I played four consecutive seasons with the Concertgebouw Orchestra, but then its new director Hein van Royen didn’t like my playing and I haven’t performed with the orchestra ever since. What I really like, is that I play more and more often abroad, people are more open-minded there. For instance I play every year in Russia and I get nowhere so much acclaim as there, whereas there are countless pianists in that country who play more brilliantly. They obviously like what I do, that sounds better than the word “success”, which I dislike. I played in Japan for about 30 years where I do everything what I like: I play concerts, give lectures and masterclasses. The latter is something I do less and less in the Netherlands, because nobody asks me. However, for the radio station “Concertzender” I comment every month a different composition. A while ago, I spoke about Beethovens Third Concerto, pianist Hannes Minnaar who just recorded the concerto sent me a friendly mail about it.
WB: Yes, you can, I played the recording of Perahia with the Concertgebouw Orchestra in the first two movements, for the last movement I preferred the tempo of Haskil, as well as her lively spirituality.
WB: The scale was originally a rhetoric figure. Do you know by the way who invented the scale as a technical exercise?
WB: That was Czerny, in Bach´s time, there were no scales. When you played an ascending motive, it was something special, e.g. at the end of the first fugue of the Wohltemperiertes Klavier. Back to Beethoven, I think the motive you mentioned has to do with Mozart, he did the same at the end of his Fantasy in C-minor KV 475. There are more influences of Mozart in Beethoven’s Third Piano Concerto.
WB: No, not really. Every key has its own characteristics. It’s strange that people understand so little about this; every key represented a certain “territory” for certain composers. That originates from the baroque when every key had a degree of purity or impurity. B-minor represented compassion, F-major faith in God. With Beethoven, C-minor is a dramatic key, whereas with Bach it stands for something serious and sad.
WB: I don’t remember, the word “mission” is slightly pretentious. I am more aware of what I want now. A lot of teachers are piano teachers instead of music teachers and it’s all about technique. It’s difficult to build up knowledge in music: to discover its secrets means going on a long discovery tour. Before the start of my concerts I have a ritual: before leavomg my dressing room, my wife says only one word: “Discover!” It means that you are open to the impressions of that particular moment, I believe in it. Sometimes you feel resistance, but whenever something goes wrong, I no longer think all people dislike my playing. Those who like your playing don’t mind and those who do mind, say: “You see, he can’t pull it off either” (laughs)
WB: Sometimes it happens, yes, when you play a wrong note in the most beautiful bar of a piece, you want to crawl away! I hope a listener can accept that an artist is also a human being…
WB: That question is difficult to answer. I haven’t heard Lupu lately, but I can hardly imagine that it has anything to do with technique. He had a massive technique and that isn’t simply gone. It’s probably more a matter of mentality: he has always been a wayward musician and he probably no longer enjoys concert life. My ideal is to improve myself every time. By the way, I am dissatisfied with a lot of interpretations by great pianists nowadays: there is little expression and they tend to exaggerate. Quite a lot of them misinterpret tempo indications, and a s a result they tell a different musical story. This is often obvious in Chopins Etudes, they sound downright ugly when they are only considered as an athletic achievement.
WB; I think so. But in general pianists are capable of a lot more nowadays and that’s tempting. I no longer have idols, however, there are a lot of musicians I respect. Music life is dominated by hypes and trends. Schumann’s Kreisleriana used to be a rather obscure piece, nobody played it. It strikes me that the beginning is always played too fast. The score says “Ausserst bewegt” which means: “not extremely fast, but very turbulent”
WB: Yes, because it sounds too fast! (He shows that the voice in the right hand has a three voiced dialogue with itself and the left hand has an underlying fourth voice, “that’s what Schumann learnt from Bach”).
WB: Very polyphonous, I often notice that pianists play the beginning of Kreisleriana too fast (shows in an exaggerated way), that’s idiot! Schumann wrote long lines that are purely based on motives consisting of two notes only.
WB: I guess so (Since this sparked my curiosity I listened to the recording of Claudio Arrau at home. Arrau was famous for his faithfulness to the score and indeed with him, the same passage sounds very clear and not overly fast, WBo).
WB: Maybe I shouldn’t have used that word “transcendence”. What I meant is that you experience something that is impossible to explain in words. It’s beautiful when someone comes around after a concert and is not able to say a word. Then you realize how deeply music can touch people’s hearts. It’s mainly amateurs who react in such a way, although I experienced the same with professional musicians. I prefer to play pieces that cover all the aspects of life, such as Schubert’s sonatas.
“Ecstasy”is a dangerous word: you should never go over the edge, otherwise you lose control. It does not always happen that you go to the far extreme, but I really know the feeling. Sometimes you feel completely shaken up after a performance!
WB: First of all, it has to do with the piece itself. Schumann’s Fantasy is a good example: when you have reached the last pages, you feel you are ready to play them, since there was so much that prepared the end in an ideal way. The last movement wouldn’t have had the same impact without the preceding two movements. I experience a similar feeling with the Gesänge der Frühe: it has do with eternity. They are not often performed, I find the late Schumann oppressive and dark, but sometimes he manages to break away from this, which has a liberating effect and which happens in such a penetrating way in the fifth Gesang.
WB: With me, it’s the opposite: I find the late Schumann much more touching. The Gesänge der Frühe are among my favourites. The tempo with his late works is always more slowly than we imagine it to be, you have to be open to this. But it’s true that the quality of his oeuvre is sometimes slightly uneven. I think however that it’s the musician´s fault when Schumann’s music doesn’t sound convincing. His music is vulnerable and is particularly prone to distortion.
(I tell about my own transcending experiences, three of them: Martha Argerich in recital in April 1979, Leonard Bernstein conducting Mahler 4th Symphony in 1987 and Richer playing Bach in 1991)
WB: The musicians I admire are mainly great conductors: Abbado, especially in his last years, Haitink, Janssons. They don’t have to play the notes themselves, but to make sure that such a group of musicians give the best they have, that’s beautiful! I have to do it all alone…!
WB: An ideal world. His song “Schöne Welt, wo bist du?“ describes this.
WB: Yes, that’s true, it seems easy. My own teacher said: “If you don’t understand that universe, I can’t explain.” The better you understand a composer, the more you realize what you need to serve his music. I sometimes make jokes about Mozart and say:”If you spent as much time on his music as on Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto, it can’t be that difficult.” People say Mozart is the most difficult of all composers, since you hear every wrong note, but wrong notes disturb me in Chopin and Ravel as well! I think Bach is the most difficult, his music is complex. But I’d like to say something about playing the piano in general: pianists tend to concentrate too much on the right hand and that’s simplistic. Whenever they get injuries, it’s always the right hand. You should pay attention to all voices and experience all of them, not only the so called melody. A pianist has to realize all this by himself, which is very different from a string quartet for instance. I am always aware of the relationship between horizontal and vertical and I am tired of those who make a difference between homophony and polyphony. For me there is only polyphony.
WB: To hear something and being aware of what you haven’t heard yet. If you don’t regularly learn from your lessons, then you do something wrong, you keep repeating yourself.
WB: You have to put this in perspective: I started in 1971 at the former “muzieklyceum” and when this so called invasion started, I had worked as a teacher for 16 years. Until that time, I seldom had a talented student. In Japan I had to work hard, because I had to teach pieces I had never taught before, like Chopin or Scriabin Sonatas or Le Tombeau de Couperin. The talented students in the Netherlands went to work with Jan Wijn and they still do.
WB: Yes, although 60% of them comes from abroad!
WB: It didn’t happen a lot, but yes, it was accepted. As long as you played Bach expressively, you were accused of romanticism, but I didn’t care. I didn’t play his music mechanically, but I experienced it (beleefde het). One of the critics Hans Reichenfeld came to see me during the intermission, whereas he knew a pianist needs rest. He called my Bach “liberating”, after the intermission I played an English Suite and I had a memory lapse, but he didn’t mind and didn’t mention it in his review.
WB: I had the courage to use my musicality and my musical imagination. In 1966, I disappeared for two years and went to Geneva: I didn’t do well I thought, the only thing that went well, was Bach. In 1968 I played in a series that was devoted to three debutants at the Stadhuis, the last three Beethoven sonatas. Reichenfeld came again and wrote that I had a rare affinity with the late Beethoven. It was special that such an authority came to listen to a debutant! The year after, I played the Diabelli Variations and the Hammerklaviersonata and every time, Reichenfeld came to listen to me.
My teacher Hilbrand had a lot of affinity with Beethoven, he could build up structures note after note, I stayed in touch until his death in 1983. I learnt most when I was no longer a regular student of his, but I kept visiting and asking him for advice.
WB: In the Wohltemporiertes Klavier, you see enormous contrasts: Bach masters the stile antico, the old polyphony from the Renaissance, but you also see homophony and personal expression. Quite often, it’s pure dance music and that’s noticeable in the choice of the measure. However, you shouldn’t play everything as if it’s dance music! I can no longer listen to the Brandenburg Concerts these days, they always sound too fast and superficial. By the way, the religious part plays an important role with Bach. I do feel the same with Beethoven, Schubert, Franck though.
WB: Yes, indeed. Old music is centered aroung the heart beat, it can increase, but not in extremis. This is nowadays considered as “boring”. Take for instance “Blitz und Donner” from St Matthew´s Passion, Bach composed this in 3/8, but not as if four bars form the measure as you often hear it! And the theme of the Goldberg Variations: it’s often played as a funeral march, whereas it was written in G major! That key has a wholly different character: it stands for “liebenswürdig.”
WB: I planned to do so, but it has to do with finances. I was not so satisfied about that recording, but I tried to play the book as a whole and that worked well.
WB: I completely agree with him.
WB: Carel van der Linden wrote a booklet about the difference between “religious” and “not religious” and according to him, it’s not as big as you would expect. My father in law said that you had to play Franck as a religious person, even as if you were praying. He didn’t believe in God, but he did say this to me, so he probably wasn’t that far away.. If you are a total atheist, you don’t understand anything about music, because it’s about things that are timeless and unimaginable and this has a link with the religious aspect. Take Haydn in his “Sieben letzte Worte” or Liszt in his Via Cruxis.
WB: About Liszt, it was said that it was a pose, but that’s nonsense of course. Bartok was known to be an atheist, yet the second movement of his Third Piano Concerto is entitled “Andante religioso”. If someone doesn’t believe in anything, I ask: “What’s that music about then? Only about something that can be explained in an academic way? I really hope not!”
WB: Music goes beyond anything that is timeliness, it’s part of the religious domain. I wrote a comment on Beethovens sonata opus 110 and related this to the caption: 25 December. That’s the date of birth of Christ, I regard this piece as a musical reflexion on the life of Jesus Christ. The key of A-flat major stands for simplicity and peace. In the arioso dolente, someone undergoes suffering, in the second arioso someone can’t breathe anymore and surrenders completely. In the second fugue that leads to ecstasy, we experience resurrection. Beethoven wrote this sonata while working on his Missa Solemnis. He had been interested in religion for years, the theme of the fugue of the sonata opus 110 comes back in a comparable form in the Missa Solemnis. I try to explain to my students that you have to be open to all aspects of music, if you play Beethovens 4th Concerto a tad too fast, you are lost and rapid passages sound only brilliant, like in a piano concerto by Hummel.
WB: It is a much more complex composition (Goodness me, if I want to explain all this, it takes me at least half an hour..). I once played the Diabelli variations and I got one of the best reviews ever from Reichenfeld. He asked me whether I played the Hammerklavier sonata as well and I answered: “No, but I’ll play it next year”. I didn’t play the sonata, but then I had to learn it. At first, I blocked, because I tried to follow Beethovens impossible metronome indications. I heard Friedrich Gulda and Eduardo del Pueyo play it live, but I didn’t understand much of the composition. People are impressed when you play it by heart, but they cannot really enjoy the music. The first movement – if you are faithful to Beethovens metronome indication – resembles a tantrum, but the first motif is taken from an unfinished cantata: Vivat, vivat Rudolphos, he wanted to dedicate it to archduke Rudolph, as he did with this sonata.
WB: Yes, certainly and especially in the incredibly beautiful Adagio, where Beethoven achieves a depth that is indescribable. The late Beethoven strikes with his ability to compose in a condensed way: within a short time, he manages to express a lot with few notes. That makes the music so fascinating. The condensed writing is also noticeable in the voicing, the harmonic finesse, the masterly building-up of tensions, the colours, etc. With a work this long, it is a difficult task to do justice to all his intentions. And that is what makes the Hammerklavier so difficult, not mainly the technical demands, although these are not simple.
WB: The tempo of the last movement is “Allegro risoluto”, therefore it cannot be a race against the clock. Beethoven writes more than once a sforzato on every beat, so you cannot play it extremely fast. Everybody slows down at the middle section. If you take that part as a basis for the tempo of the entire movement, it becomes a different composition altogether! In all movements, there is a lot of beauty and a wide variety of intentions. Its character is certainly not only titanic or inhospitable.
WB: Yes, that how it is often played. But there is so much more, for instance an incredibly positive vitality, moments of despair and even lyric. Why else are there indications in the score like “dolce” and “cantabile”? Beethoven once said: “The piano is an incomplete instrument”. Schubert can sound very beautiful on a period instrument, but some of Beethovens compositions don’t sound good on such an instrument, not even on a modern piano. In his string quartets, Beethoven is extreme in his writing, contrary to Mozart and Schubert who didn’t ask the impossible. He wrote his Hammerklaviersonata in worrisome circumstances. At first, the fugue works as a liberation, but it remains an enormously difficult attempt to transcend himself. You do not hear the the total liberation as in the 9th Symphony. It is a triumph, but it remains a phyrric victory. Shortly before the end of the fugue, there is a phrase in b flat minor, where the sadness of the adagio seems to come back, but then the composer pulls himself together and he ends the fugue with a new eruption of positive energy.
WB: It was fun to do, I like Russian music and like to play Rachmaninoff, but unfortunately I don’t have the right hands for it. I did play his second concerto thirteen times and sometimes it went really well!
WB: Yes, it happened when I was young, but it is no longer the case now. That animal is not of much use with Schubert and Beethoven, their music is first and foremost about content. With Liszt, I prefer the works where it is not mainly about virtuosity, such as his Variations on “Weinen, Klagen”. I prefer to leave the animal alone, although I played Scriabins etude opus 8/12 and people told me: “That was not half bad!”
WB: That’s what they say sometimes… I think it’s rather the fact that I am not good with PR or websites. Of course, you are modest, I once read a beautiful interview with Andras Schiff who said that performing artists needed to be more modest. He is not the type of artist who brags a lot himself. These days, I often play a short piece by Kees Olthuis, which he dedicated to me. When I play it, I hardly take a bow, I walk towards him and give him the credits. The genius composers are the ones who should get the credits! Musicians sometimes make use of the enormous qualities of composers. The public tends to give credits to someone who plays fantastically, but it is actually turning things topsy-turvy! We have every reason to be modest!
Nijmegen, 16 October 2009
Yevgeny Sudbin (YS): I wanted to bring him to life through the piano. His sonatas were of course written for different instruments such as the harpsichord and sometimes for organ. Playing them on a modern piano is some sort of a transcription in a way, which allows you much more freedom. A piano offers so much variety! Haydn’s music is similar; he doesn’t like rules, he breaks them all the time. It’s full of life and humor.
YS: The overwhelming feeling of life-force he injects into his music. He captures Spanish life so well, you hear people dancing, guitars, drums... The variety of moods is incredible.
YS: Some of the sonatas I recorded are very poignant and painful. In these pieces, as Horowitz remarked, he clearly speaks to God, in other ones he speaks to the people. I played so much Scarlatti lately, I need a break from his music. Some people tell me I have to play more big encores, therefore I didn’t do Scarlatti tonight (instead of this, he played his own transcription of Rachmaninov’s song Floods of Spring, WB).
YS: Bach is different, he always communicates with God. Unlike Scarlatti, he is not portraying people’s life, there is always a spiritual dimension. Although I am not religious, I clearly feel this while playing his music. You are right in a way that you can perform his music with freedom too. I don’t like pianists who perform Bach in a detached way and without pedal. That’s the way it’s sometimes taught in Russia. I noticed that many young pianists make their debut recordings with Bach. If it is done well, it can be a big success. Bach can sound very well on a modern piano, but Scarlatti allows more variety in approach I feel.
YS: I haven’t played any of it at all; can you recommend good recordings of his music?
YS: No, I am afraid maybe only four people would stay for that! I have been asked to do all Scarlatti recitals, but it is maybe a bit too much for the audience. For my Wigmore debut, I did two Haydn sonatas, which takes about 35 minutes. It is possible to play Haydn during the first half of a recital. You have to pay attention to the programme of a recital. If they are not well programmed it may be difficult for the audience to stay focused.
YS: Humor is humor, if you are able to tell a joke, people will understand it.. Of course, you can make it overly intellectual or sophisticated, but it’s not necessary. Haydn’s music has very earthy elements, he had a big connection to life. His music can be very outrageous, but sarcasm and humour is always prevalent.
YS: You managed to listen to the whole piece?!
YS: It is difficult to understand when you hear it for the first time. It is not for everybody. Medtner was a genius in my view and his compositions are very logical. Rachmaninov was sometimes envious of Medtner, however they admired each other and never copied each other’s music. The structure of the First Piano Concerto is strict, it is one big movement. The problem is that the melodies are so difficult and the thematic elements are complex that it’s easy to lose attention. There are no big tunes either unlike in Rachmaninov. Have you tried to listen to his Second Concerto?
YS: Easier to listen yes, easier to play no!
YS: If you listen more to it, you feel it makes sense after a while. I listened to all of his music and it is not easy for the first time. But the more I heard it, the more addictive it became. Furthermore, his music is very pianistically written. Medtner was tormented between a career as a pianist and as a composer. He didn’t know what to pursue. He switched back and forth between these two careers.
YS: That has more to do with the audience than the pianist I would suggest. The music is difficult to sight read of course, but the onus is with the audience whether something is popular or not. The concertos though are rarely played, not many pianists championed them in the past either which has maybe to do with the programming and orchestras. Horowitz apparently played a lot of his music when he was still in Russia, but he recorded only one short piece. He had plans to record the First Concerto, but they never materialized.
YS: Actually, his music is much less coherent than Medtner’s! For my Scriabin CD, I started with early pieces and ended with late works, maybe that way you can relate better. Surprisingly, the late pieces are much easier to play than the early ones! The Waltz opus 38 or the early Etudes are very difficult, roughly all his compositions until opus 30 are awkward to play from a technical point of view while the late works are more emotionally demanding. Scriabin is like Szymanovsky, they both established their style at the end of their lifes. As a musician, you know what you have to do. For Scriabin’s late music, you have to read the adjectives in the score, he wrote little poems for some of the pieces, that may help as well to understand his music better. Actually, it doesn’t matter whether or not you do, since the late pieces are full of mystery and sometimes entirely insane...
The Piano Concerto I played tonight is very difficult too, have you heard it before?
YS: It is still fresh music for me and it’s the second time I am playing it in public.
YS: It could be, although it is not always the case when a piece is neglected. There are also quite some neglected compositions by Chopin!
YS: The Impromptus, not the 4th of course, but the first three Impromptus are rarely played. The same goes for a lot of Mazurkas, many pianists prefer to play the Scherzi and Ballades.
YS: Probably a lot more, he was constantly revising his compositions. In the revised version we know nowadays, he made most changes in the last movement. He tried to make it more popular with a big tune at the end. But either versions, are not considered to be one of his strongest works.It is on the border of modern music and still very romantic.
YS: The rhythm is very jazzy. There are a lot of syncopations, Rachmaninov took this example from Medtner who often used interesting rhythmic patterns. In the original version, the orchestra sounds sometimes chaotic, it is a potpourri of different things.
YS: Yes, it’s much longer, over 100 bars.
YS: Yes, indeed.
YS: All the pianists you mentioned are considered contemporary. I was referring to the Golden Age pianists. Some clearly had it in their repertoire but it was never performed.
YS: It is the revised version with some slight variations in the orchestral part.
YS: No, I haven’t. The notes are different, but the thematic differences are not huge. I am not sure whether his revisions were always an improvement in general. He was very paranoid, he revised so many things that didn’t need revision. I think for instance that the original of the Second Sonata is a much better piece.
YS: It is much more difficult than the Third, which is actually very comfortable to play! The Second Concerto has some awkward moments too.
YS: It is very pianistic, but I don’t like it very much.
YS: It doesn’t offer much freedom for a pianist, it is as if you are accompanying the orchestra. I feel the piano part is constrained by the orchestra.
YS: I omitted the fugue-like twelfth variation and the coda, which destroys the tranquil atmosphere of the previous meno mosso section. Rachmaninov in fact made variations VII, X, XII and the coda optional for performance. He only wrote the cascading coda as a crowd pleaser, it has no musical reason really.
YS: It is crazy, I feel embarassed and don’t like it being quoted. Agents however often like finding catchy quotes.
YS: Yes, it does. It is not like in sports, it’s a highly subjective matter and everyone will have a preference.
YS: No, I am terrified! I can’t read positive reviews nor can I read negative ones. I wish positive reviews made me as happy as negative ones make me miserable, so I try not to read any at all! I was so nervous when my Scarlatti CD came out before my Wigmore Hall debut. It was a very positive review, but after that I never read any of them any more. I am terrified of extreme reactions and you know, things can turn very quickly. There have been pianists who were first praised and then heavily critisized...
YS: No, I don’t want to mention names.
YS: I will do a Haydn disc and the Beethoven Concertos with the Minnesota Orchestra and Osmo Vänskä. There will be Chopin and probably Liszt. Then a CD with solo works by Medtner. I have already done the 7th Sonata by Prokofiev, but I am not sure what else will be on the CD. I’d like to do a recording with all of his war sonatas. I also recorded Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, probably coupled to the Miroirs... Do you prefer CD’s with only one composer?
YS: I am sometimes constrained by the idea that it is hard to categorize them in a shop when there are two composers on the same CD. They don’t know where to put them!
YS: I don’t like it. Did I look like I enjoyed it after tonight’s concert?
YS: The audience usually likes it, but ideally I wouldn’t. You don’t need them, they often trivilize concerts as they are often flashy.
YS: I respect Arrau, and wish I could do it, but I also have a responsability towards the audience and if they enjoy it, and I think they do more often than don’t, it is not a huge issue. When I feel it is a huge issue, I don’t play encores.
YS: You could write a book about that; 90 % of my practice is slow. Depending on whether I know a piece or whether I don’t, it is combined with fast practice. I hate when people listen to me practise.
YS: She probably hears me practise, but I don’t think she listens.
YS: The idea is that we have so many senses, if you switch off one, the others will compensate. I don’t do it very often though.
YS: It could be useful, for instance with Liszt who sometimes writes big jumps. I sometimes practise without sound too, on a silent keyboard.
YS: Because then I won’t be distracted by the sound.
YS: Yes, I often do that, looking at the score helps the memory. I sometimes go through scores before I go to bed, although it makes you sleepy too which is a good thing as I can’t fall asleep after concerts...
YS: Normally yes, but two weeks is short to learn a new concerto or piece. It normally takes up to five or six weeks.
YS: My confidence is always at the lowest before I play. I would like to have more confidence in general. You are never completely relaxed, but I usually get more confident during the actual performance. On the other hand, it is good to be nervous and excited, since it also helps you to give the best of yourself.
YS: I don’t play much Bach in public, but generally my fears are not related to composers. Not having enough time to prepare is more of a real fear. Or not being well prepared physically or being overbooked...Sometimes, I am not confortable with Rachmaninov’s music in concert, e.g his Fourth Concerto, Second Sonata or Chopin Variations, etc.
YS: No, because I like challenges.
YS: I like to write texts. I don’t like to only play the piano, there might be other things I enjoy doing!
YS: My cat hates the piano!
YS: It isn’t.. I am not sure it is a compliment if the looks impress more than the playing! But I know that’s not what was meant.
YS: Anybody can be famous in classical music. It is one of the few things you can do in public, be a kind of celebrity, while still looking hideous... Being handsome could be a disadvantage sometimes! Maybe for cross-over artists, it might play an important role, but in classical music it doesn’t make any difference!
Before the interview started, during the intermission and the second part of the concert (I was able to hear the Arnhem Philharmonic Orchestra play Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances!), Yevgeny Sudbin was worried about the taxi that was supposed to drive him back to his hotel in Arnhem. Since Arnhem is not very far away from Nijmegen, I offered to drive him back. He agreed and the taxi was cancelled. The good thing about this was that it allowed me to continue the interview and ask him all sorts of other questions even while walking back to my car and driving to Arnhem. Questions about his favourite pianists (“Sokolov, to whom I’d like to play, Pletniev, whom I admire, even if I don’t like everything he does, Kissin, Argerich for whom I’d like to play too and among the pianists of the past Horowitz, Cherkassky, Moiseiwitsch”), chamber music (“I like it, but don’t do it often, a few times a year”), instruments (“I’d like to take my own piano with me if I had the money, I first would have to get a full-size piano, since I “only” play on a Steinway B, which is still a wonderful instrument”), the difficulty of having to play on different pianos every time (“Espcially in the USA, although I got a good Hamburg Steinway in New York, which I ask for when I am there, unfortunately they couldn’t take it to Minnesota when I recorded Beethoven’s Fourth Concerto”), his Proms Debut with Rachmaninov’s First Concerto (“The Albert Hall is extremely tricky, you can’t project your sound and you hear the orchestra as if they are playing in a small room”), masterclasses he attended (“Bashkirov was nice to me, I think he liked me, although I know he has an incredibly powerful personality, he is my favourite in the Scriabin Concerto actually! Fleisher was great, paid a lot of attention to sound, Perahia was very strict about structure), and the job of being a pianist (When I said to him “It is quite a profession”, he answered “It is an unhealthy profession, but somehow I seem to need it. I try not to stay away too long from the audience, the longest was two months I think”).
Arnhem, 24 May 2013
Yuja Wang took the world by storm, only a few years ago. At the piano, she is fearless and actually during interviews she is not afraid either to give her opinion on a lot of different subjects. She was a delight to speak to: self-critical, realistic, yet very witty. And disarmingly honest. She made me smile when she said in the middle of the interview: “Wow, I am talking a lot, which I sometimes don’t do during interviews, you must be nice!” I took it as a compliment…
Yuja Wang (YW): I don’t think of music and technique separately, there is no dichotomy. If I am good in technique, I am good with the music too. The programme of this recital covers a short period of time, except the first piece, Gargoyles by Lowell Liebermann. It is a bit of a schizophrenic piece.
YW: In a schizophrenic way (laughs). I like Scriabin; I know his second sonata, which I recorded. However, the 6th sonata is very new to me, its character is unfathomable. It evokes a scary, mysterious and alien world. I was so scared to play the first chord, since it is so dark! Everything seems to crumble down there … Something similar happens in La Valse, at the end everything seems to collapse.
YW: I think it is meant in the sense of “terrifying”. There are a lot of indications in his music like “concentrated” , “hysterious” and sometimes also in French, for instance ”ailé”, but what do they mean after all?
YW: Yes, very good clues. The more I play the 6th sonata, the more I find it really genius. Scriabin adds a lot of colours. The whole composition is formless, it is assembled in a crazy way. It is disorganized and in this respect it is the opposite of La Valse. I am curious about discovering such a new sound world and I like it.
YW: He was in the beginning of losing it… The 6th, 7th and 8th sonatas are really hard to play, the 9th and 10th are easier to understand.
YW: It was really hard, but once I know the harmonies and hidden melodies, I am ok.
YW: I started at Christmas, but it hardly took me two weeks. I had to, because it was in my schedule!
YW: I hate to do this, but agents always ask me certain pieces in advance, so I scheduled it when I did not know the piece yet!
YW: O yes, so much! There is a lot of Brahms I have not done and someone suggested Kapustin which I have never tried. I am also interested in Iberia and new composers…
YW: Yes, I am afraid of Bach! He was the first composer I learnt when I was young. It may sound as a cliché, but his music is peaceful and good for the soul. However, Bach is something I’d like to play for myself. I would be so scared to play one of his Partitas! By the way, I am a big admirer of Glenn Gould..
YW: I love his operas, but right now I am not into Mozart. He is maybe overrated, since people always call him “a genius” , I think he is for people before 12 and after 60 (laughs). Compared to Mozart, Prokofiev and Rachmaninov are way easier! I have to say that I like Horowitz’s Mozart playing…
YW: We are both women and have black hair, but other than that, it is a cliché. She was the best of her generation and I want to be the best of my generation. In Tokyo they compare me to Kissin and Pollini..
YW: The only comparison I like is with Horowitz, although I do not like his Beethoven and Chopin. People think he had a brilliant technique, but it was not all about technique. He was basically a magician, there was a very strong theatrical aspect in his playing.
YW: You cannot say that, as soon as he plays, you know it is him, that is not something everybody has! There was this concert in Tokyo where he played very badly (It was in 1983 when Horowitz was on medication).. I watch it every time I feel bad about my own playing…
YW: I never went that far.. Horowitz took risks during concerts, he risked himself..
YW: I have no idea, ask the Japanese (laughs). I love Pollini, he and Kissin are both perfection
YW: They say the same about me!
YW: No, it does not really matter, during a concert, nobody is playing but myself and only I know how good or bad I am doing! As to Pollini, he was the first pianist I heard when I was young, Kissin is one of my idols, too. It is probably true that both became colder and more intellectual over the years. There are other pianists I like: Pletniev, Pogorelich, Volodos, Sokolov..
YW: He can hardly talk. However, I took a lesson on Prokofiev 6th sonata with him in Verbier. Interestingly, his teacher who always travels with him heard me practise and she thought it was him..
YW: It was amazing, all difficulties disappeared when he taught. It was really vivid and inspiring. He is also very intuitive. I was in love with his lessons!
YW: It was back in 2010. He was there when I played Rachmaninov Second Concerto. But you know, I do not like my own Rachmaninov playing, I like myself better in Prokofiev.
YW: The music should be giving back to you when you play, when I perform Rachmaninov I put in so much, but nothing comes back…
YW: I do not think in terms of “a job”, I do not have a job, it is my life. I have lived a lot more years than my age!
YW: Probably because I like it. It is a fulfilling life; I have been playing the piano for ever, but I do not want to be a piano player. I want to do something through music. Classical music offers so much variety; you fall in love with music and you enrich people’s lives (thinks) … this sounds like bullshit, she knows how to do smooth talk (laughs).
YW: Yes, it is the second time I will play there. The first time I did Prokofiev’s Third Piano Concerto with the Concertgebouw Orchestra. Before this concert, I gave a recital at Carnegie Hall.
YW: The same programme as tonight and after Amsterdam, I will go to Vienna.
YW: I will be playing Shostakovitch First Piano Concerto with Maris Janssons, but that is another composition I have not studied yet…