Pianists on Playing

by Linda J. Noyle (Editor)

Twelve internationally-known keyboard artists entertainingly discuss their daily lives of practicing and performing in informative interviews, including reflections on learning new music, reviving repertoire, performing, controlling nerves, recording sessions, playing with ensemble groups, touring, playing in competitions, and the future of the piano. The pianists interviewed include: Vladimir Ashkenazy, Jorge Bolet, John Browning, Bella Davidovich, Misha Dichter, Janina Fialkowska, Rudolf Firkusny, Leon Fleisher, Andre-Michel Schub, Abbey Simon, Ralph Votapek, and Andre Watts.

Genres: Music

188 pages, Paperback

First published March 28, 1987

Reviews

[Lobstergirl · Rating 3 out of 5]

(Not a review.) These excerpts were the most interesting (or merely comical - Bolet) to me, and I'm posting them for the benefit of readers who have a particular interest in the subject matter. Ashkenazy is always insightful, always humble. Fleisher in particular dispenses big globs of pedagogical wisdom. He must be the Socrates of piano teachers.

Vladimir Ashkenazy: I have a very good coordination. I think everything’s difficult. I have a relatively small hand, so, obviously, big chords, and big, large, extended textures were always more difficult for me than other textures, that that is simply a mechanical thing…If I had a bigger hand, then I probably would almost have no problems of any kind at the piano….I can’t play a certain chord because my hand just won’t reach. A certain stretch I can’t do, because my fingers won’t take it. So it’s not a question of being difficult, it’s a question of being impossible. I have to drop some notes. I have to spread some things, help with the other hand, if it’s possible. Sometimes it isn’t.

I had heard other pianists like Horowitz…and Richter, some people who really could provide very exciting piano playing. In the case of Horowitz, I thought his piano playing had little to do with music, but the piano playing was quite spectacular in his early years. In the case of Richter, it was spectacular and had a lot to do with music, too, imagination and transcendental vision.

There are some composers who compose just two or three good pieces…that’s not the right word, but pieces that have something to say, something important to say, and to communicate. Those pieces really remain alive, very often for a long, long time. It’s as if they gave everything they had in those couple of pieces, and they didn’t have much more to say. It’s very interesting. But in the case of very few people, like Beethoven and Mozart, they have many works where they express very much because they have so much to say…

I’m not very good at Bach. I’ve tried and I’m never satisfied with it; (not that I’m satisfied with other things). First of all, I think, like Glenn Gould, you have to devote all your life to Bach, in a way, in order to maybe find at the end of your life a way of presenting his thinking. Maybe you never would find it, but in any case, it’s a way of presenting Bach convincingly. Apart from the very late Glenn Gould, I never liked any Bach playing in my life. GG spent his lifetime with Bach, thinking about it, experimenting, and just living with it. Perhaps it’s because that within the last two or three years his Bach performances were of such intensity, and simplicity, that maybe it was worth spending all his life just for that. His earlier Bach playing, when he was in his twenties and thirties, was spectacular. But to me, they weren’t satisfying. I feel they were fantastic in a way, with a tremendous clarity of hearing and a clarity of vision. It was physically attractive because GG has a very clear mind, a very sharp mind, and incredible control. He also had an incredible coordination between his mind and his fingers. Of course, Bach needs tremendous clarity of all the voices and textures, and he had that like nobody else ever had. People kept saying, “Oh, this is unbelievable Bach playing!” I thought it was unbelievable, too, but it wasn’t satisfying to me from the emotional point of view. I was too eccentric for my taste. In his late Bach playing there was a quiet, transcendental understanding and identification with Bach’s mind. It was quite incredible. His last few recordings for some television program, was the only Bach that I ever liked. I could never play it like that. You see, I don’t have a good example of Bach playing, except for the late GG. I think it’s a bit too late in my life to try to achieve something like that.

Jorge Bolet: …when I’m playing I just look at the keyboard; I never do this business of looking up at the cobwebs on the ceiling.

Misha Dichter: I played the Tchaikovsky Concerto a few days ago; I rarely do it. I must say that’s one of the pieces that I have little patience with anymore, probably because the competition spoiled it for me in Moscow.

Janina Fialkowska: The best warm-up exercise …is to play the coda of the Fourth Ballade of Chopin.

Forget about interpretation when you’re a child. It makes me sick, actually. You see these kids who, everyone says, are so brilliant when they’re nine…They’re just little monkeys imitating. What I want to hear in a child is just clarity, good rhythm, and good fingers. Everything else is meaningless.

It was Arthur [Rubinstein] who taught me real projection. He had this beautiful “piano” sound that would sound like a bell, and that was easy. You put on the soft pedal and you play very loud… Arthur went one step further [from letting the whole weight come from the whole arm]. He started from the spine. …he hated the way younger pianists move around at the piano and have their nose in the keys. You know, all that jerking and swaying around. He said, “It just hurts. It offends visually and it hurts the sound production.” …in tone production, it’s so important to sit up very straight and keep your body very still so that all the weight just pours into your hands.

In Mozart you can’t let anything go. It’s not that I try to let anything go in Brahms, but you can get away with much more with Brahms’s details, technical details. When I’m performing Mozart, you can have nights where technically it’s all perfect. If you work hard enough, it’s perfectly possible to have a perfect night. There’s no way in a Brahms concerto that you can ever have a perfect night. Mozart is very much like Chopin. Chopin has to be perfect. …I guess I expect much more of myself when I’m doing Mozart or Chopin than I would when I am doing Beethoven or Brahms…I don’t think that Beethoven wrote very well for the piano. That sounds funny. I’m not saying that the works aren’t genius and great. The thirty-two sonatas are one of the most extraordinary achievements of all time, but for the piano, for a pianist, I don’t think they’re very well written. They’re incredible pieces of music, but pianistically, they’re awful.

Leon Fleisher: I don’t believe in them [warm-up exercises], and for a very specific reason. I do believe that the first time in the day that you approach the piano the muscles are not yet loosened up. They are not yet supple. If you’re practicing a lot the day before…the loosening up process would bring you to a point of suppleness where you were yesterday when you left off. I would much rather that one would play music, pieces, gently, certainly not anything terribly strenuous, but play for a half hour things that would bring you to that stage where you left off the previous day. Playing pieces gently, could be slowly, could be if you play quickly, lightly,…not really exerting any stress.

Learning new music: I’m quite convinced that the best learning does involve stages, and I have the feeling that young performers today are perhaps less than completely willing to accept that as a fact of artistic life. I think they are wont to learn a piece, be able to play a piece, and figure, “Well, that’s it. I’ve learned it. I can play the notes. I can play it as fast as it needs to be played. I can do everything that’s required of it. Now I know it, and I can go out and play it.” I’m not really convinced of that. On the contrary, I’m convinced that in the learning and playing of a new piece that these stages very definitely should be acceded to and that you learn a piece as best as you can up to a certain point, and then drop it. Drop it for…nine months, a year, or more, then come back to it, and in that period of having been dropped, it will have matured, grown, ripened in your subconscious and when you come back to it, it will have evolved. It will have changed. You will see it with different eyes, you will hear it with different ears. Relearn it again, or go on from where you left off, and I would recommend dropping it the second time. And only when you pick it up for the third time do I think that you really have a chance, so to speak, of presenting something in public that has become genetically part of you. This could be modified by the type of piece, the type of repertoire. There are some pieces that are less accessible than others, and those are the ones that I would not rush into the concert experience too quickly. There are other pieces that are less problematical that one could very easily play, probably after the second picking up, maybe even pieces you could play off the bat, that are less musically challenging.

Sometimes, especially with music of today, you will not have had an opportunity to have heard that piece. You might have heard music by that composer, so you might have some general ideas as to the kind of sound that he’s interested in, but it’s not at all sure that you will have heard it. In a way, I find that preferable. It’s very difficult, I think, for a young student today to come in with the Beethoven…Appassionata Sonata, or any other famous warhorse, with completely clean ears. I think what every artist has to do is at least make an effort, a strong effort, to listen to it with new, clean, uninfluenced, unprejudiced ears. I think that’s important in one’s development.

It’s my feeling that most young people today go about the process of learning a new piece in reverse. They sit down and learn the notes. They figure, “Well, we can’t deal with anything until we know the notes,” and I submit that’s just backward of what should be done. I think, ideally speaking, with a new piece one should sit down, probably in a chair away from the piano, and learn it, look at it, take it apart, try to understand it structurally, harmonically, and in all its elements as much as possible. Sing it to yourself. Sing the various components, the various material. Get some kind of idea. It’s not an idea you have to be wedded to for life, but get some kind of idea of what you think it should sound like… Then, when you have gotten as far as you can in this manner, when you’ve become as specific as you can about the material in this manner, then take it to the keyboard, because then you have a goal. Then you have at least a temporary ideal, something to work towards. The basic reason for this is that I think if we learn the notes first, what we become involved with are “those difficult passages.” How and I going to transcend this difficulty? And in approaching it from the purely physical point of view, we make certain adjustments in order to achieve the physical realization of this. Sometimes without realizing it, we’ll think, “Oh, this is a difficult place to get into. Maybe if I kind of spread the tempo, if I slow down a wee bit, I can prepare myself. I can gather my energies and strengths.” This kind of thing begins from the very first time that you play a piece. It begins to take over in place of the musical values, begins to dictate how you’re going to play it, and very often on a totally subconscious level as well as on a conscious level. What you wind up doing, eventually, after you’ve learned the notes, is having to achieve, having to define some musical intention, some musical value. One finds so often that one has to overcome a lot of work that one has done from the purely technical point of view. One has to change that. It’s a waste of time as far as I’m concerned.

There’s another aspect to this. Working on a passage purely physically, purely technically, without a definite musical intention (this of course is very personal), turns out to be a less than satisfying kind of work for the following reason. I have found it to be that when you then impose a musical intention upon the passage that you’ve worked out purely physically, there comes to the physical a different kind of emphasis, stress, tension. I’m using these words that sometimes have pejorative connotations, but I’m not using them in that sense. I’m using them in that kind of intensity that comes with a musical statement in being an emotional, spiritual purpose. So that what happens is that the work that you’ve done collapses under the strain, under the stress of this musical intention. It’s as though you’ve built a building that’s only been made out of sand and water. It won’t support the extra intent, the extra stress of the musical intention, and the work you’ve done is more or less for naught. You feel good, you’ve worked out. …Your muscles are feeling good, but it has done virtually no good for the passage. Also, the problems of getting into the passage and getting out of the passage often present different kinds of physical demands. So then my recommendation is to have a very clear idea of what the musical intent, what the emotional intent of the music is at this point of difficulty, and work with that very much in mind. Then you are building a house out of materials that are stable because you’re building the intention into the physical work…

Singing can be one of the greatest teachers that we can have…to use singing as a teacher means to look at a place that is not satisfying, a place that you’re unhappy with, and sing it. There are two ways that I would recommend singing. To sing the line melodically as best you can, so as to get a real sense of the intervals, the space between the notes. As a pianist, we have a built-in difficulty that is unique only to us, and that difficulty is that every other instrument…is physically involved in the production of sound, the maintaining of sound…So how to sustain that sound [of the piano key] is one of the great challenges of the pianist. One of the ways of singing is to become terribly aware of the amount of tension or density that’s involved in the interval, the space between the pushing down of levers. We get easily into this habit of down, down, down, instead of dowwnnnn, dowwwnnnnn, dowwnnnnn, depending on what the intervallic relationship is. That’s one kind of singing. Another kind of singing that I don’t think is thought of very much but I find terribly important is what you might call metric singing. That is to look at the rhythmic shape of what you are doing, in an orchestral way, meaning not just looking at the rhythmic shape of the melody, but looking at the rhythmic shape as it is distributed between both hands, or as a conductor would do, as it is distributed between all the instruments from the piccolo down to the double bass, and get a clear idea of what that metric rhythmic shape is. You will then discover much more quickly and much more clearly what the metric, rhythmic element is. And when that is clear, almost everything else falls in place. I think, it’s without question that of the three elements in music, rhythm, harmony, and melody, the rhythm is the most important.

Physical Structure: I think people’s physiology, people’s hands, bone structure, muscle structure, lend weight one way or the other to a predisposition toward certain kinds of music-making. I have found I have no idea really of why this is so, but it has certainly been my experience that Oriental students, people from the Far East whose bone structure is really quite slight, do wondrously well with certain kinds of things that other people with broader, more muscular hands have great difficulty with, such as Feux Follets of Liszt and the Etude in Thirds, these things that take a kind of light speed and coordination. I find it absolutely astonishing how some of these young people can have absolutely no problems with a piece that I could never really hope to do, brilliantly, in public.

Posture at the keyboard I think is terribly important.

On Memorizing: I want to speak on the benefits of playing either with one’s eyes closed or looking away from the keyboard. I find that very often so much of our attention is taken up by the act of watching what we do on the keyboard that ther is little space left in our heads for the motivating, the emotional, spiritual motivating of what we are about to do. And the other, the third most difficult activity of the performer, is judging, listening to what we’re doing so that if what is coming out of the instrument is not what we originally planned, we can adjust what we’re doing and get closer to our ideal. And that comes much more quickly if one doesn’t watch the keyboard. There are several benefits from that. You develop a kind of sense of touch, sensitivity of touch, like a blind person. You play by Braille, you begin to related to the keyboard in a different way, and you discover that you learn to play with much greater accuracy, much greater physical precision. Your playing becomes cleaner. That’s one benefit. Another benefit is that one hears much more clearly what is happening, when one is not involved with that sensory activity, the looking at one’s fingers on the keyboard.

Audiences sometimes can be annoying. I think that audiences respond to the performer’s concentration. They’re restless when they feel there’s no concentration. They stop becoming restless when the intention of the performer is so powerful that it overtakes the audience.

On Technique: Technique is merely the ability to do what you want to do. If you want to play the fastest octaves in the world, you will sit there as long as it takes you to do it. If you want to make a certain kind of sound out of a chord with a certain kind of balance, if you can sit down at the instrument and boom, make that kind of sound, you have the best technique in the world. …Technique is the ability to do what you want to do. Therefore, you must want something, not just to go to the instrument to put down levers in a certain succession at a certain speed. You must want a certain musical idea. You must have a certain intention, and the ability to do that is the index of your technique. If it takes you a long time to achieve your intention, your technique is not so hot. If you can immediately achieve what you want to achieve, then you have the best technique in the world. The question, then, is to keep wanting to achieve more, in other words, to make one’s ideal higher and farther and more unachievable.