Sophie Menter and Liszt Un Sospiro

Sophie Menter (1846-1918) was an awesome pianist, and probably Liszt's favourite female piano pupil.
You can here her perform Liszt Un Sospiro here:

Interestingly she adds a few bars of music in the middle, and changes the timing at the end. The first time I heard it I thought "Ah yes these 19th century pianists were so free". But it turns out it was the composer himself who authorised the changes to his score, and Ms Menter was being a good student, embracing the changing, developing music. 

For more information, let's turn to Rachmaninoff's teacher and cousin, Alexander Siloti. Siloti like Sophie Menter was a pupil of Liszt. In Siloti's edition of this piece (publ Carl Fischer), Siloti notates many extra notes and tweaks which coincide with what Menter plays. Siloti writes p186 "Franz Liszt's playing of this Etude differed greatly from the published version. In fact he changed it so greatly and added so much that was new that I found it impossible to mark every individual change..."

We so often think that music must be a thing, like a statue, static, which we read on the music page and then try to interpret. But it's not like that. It's essence is liquid, like a flowing river. It takes alchemy to conjure up a living interpretation, and courage to depart from the block of ice which is the standard score.

Dutilleux and Piano technique

The other day I was in the library at Normal University in Shida. Great library! Anyway I was reading through a stack of books including Dutilleux and Benjamin Britten. Someone said something like: it's like you have the horse saddled up, but you should be comfortable in the saddle. That's it! You have to figure out all the bits and pieces of technique, the finger, hand, wrist arm, shoulder...But then you have to be comfortable and journey comfortably. Now I just have to go back and find where exactly did I read that!..

Meanwhile anyone wishing for a great piano composer, look no further than Dutilleux! What a star! More humane than Boulez, more selective in his output than the verbose Messiaen, he is definitely my favourite French composer from the second half of the 20th century. (Actually he passed away only last year). Snubbed by the french government and status quo, he ignored this, and quietly continued with his precise refined compositions. It did him no harm that his wife Genevieve Joy was such a fine pianist!
Benjamin Britten, meanwhile, didn't actually like the piano sound, so he favoured words with music, inspired by his partner Peter Pears. In some ways this cultured, literary musician was parallel to Francois Poulenc, who was so very enamoured of the poetry of Eluard, Apollinaire et al, whose poetry he set to voice and accompanied Pierre Bernac. Such hidden cultural riches!

Body Mapping

Reading a very good book "What every pianist needs to know about the body" by Thomas Mark, which I'd recommend warmly to every pianist and teacher. But there is one thing not right, I think: "The concept of the body map and the power of Body Mapping in improving movement and curing injury among musicians were the joint discovery of Barbara and William Conable" (Preface, p X).
I believe many people discovered the concept of body mapping before then.
Moshe Feldenkrais, to name but one, in his 1964 article Aspects d'une technique:l'expression corporelle, translated into English in 1988 as Bodily Expressions by Thomas Hanna, editor of Somatics magazine [and quoted in full in the book: Embodied Wisdom: Collected Papers of Moshe Feldenkrais, publ. North Atlantic Books, Berkeley, CA, 2010].

"The behaviour of human beings is firmly based on the self-image they have made for themselves. Accordingly, if one wishes to change one's behaviour, it will be necessary to change this image. What is a self-image? It is a body image; namely, it is the shape and relationship of the bodily parts, which means the spatial and temporal relationships, as well as the kinesthetic feelings..."

Yehudi Menuhin was an enthusiastic advocate of Feldenkrais, but admittedly the teachings are not specifically for musicians, who will need to apply them to their individual instrument.
An earlier book (1903), specifically for musicians is Artistic Piano Playing as taught by Ludwig Deppe, by Elisabeth Caland. Page 29 of the 1903 edition refers to "a mental map of the entire route from brain to finger tips". 

The edition I bought is printed by amazon.co.uk - yes, printed by amazon. You can decide for yourself whether the presentation is competent, or not. There is no vol. 2, btw.

 

Ignaz Friedman (above) gave some valuable advice to Australian pianist Mack JOst:

"The way you create it is to hear the sound in the heavens, then try to reproduce it in your arm. The only way is to free them [the arms], and I can always remember him saying 'draw out the sound on the last one... think of drawing out the tone.' Not hitting the key. You're really thinking of hauling it out."

Indian dance

Just returned to Taipei after a 9 day trip to southern India. We watched a lot of Indian classical dance at the Mamallapuram dance festival.

The complexity of the dance steps, the arm and hand motions, the facial expressions, were impressive. But most of all, the very good dancers unify it all and convey a sincerity of expression that is very moving.
In piano performances these days, while the fingers, arms and pedalling are energetic and have a surface appearance of being difficult, nevertheless a sense of meaningful, sincere, expressive effect is often quite absent.
Why does Rachmaninoff write in octaves? He is expressing warm-heartedness and passionate sincerity. It is no good just playing octaves to be loud or to show off skill if there is no warmth.
There needs to be a connection between the outward expression of a thing, and the inner essence which is being expressed.
Piano recitals these days are like a digital image of the fruit peel, without any taste of juice, pulp or seed. 
 

Who was the greatest piano teacher of the 19th century?

The candidates for this prize must include Chopin, Liszt, Leschetizky, the lesser known Ludwig Deppe, and Rubinstein (Anton).
Form a teacher does one seek a cogent method, or the passing on of a bright flame, burning and hard to contain?
About Chopin we have many comments from pupils, collected in a wonderful book by Eigeldinger, which I came across quite by chance in the town where it was published when I was giving a recital in Neuchatel in 1989. Chopin book. Chopin's teaching methods were geared toward refined, musical, singing, supple playing. With his high prices and aristocratic manner, Chopin was the teacher of choice for the female Parisian aristocrat, as witness the dedicatees of the majority of his piano music (eg Madame la Baronne de Rothschild for Waltz Op 64). But he did not leave a strong team of publically performing disciples to carry the flame.
Liszt did attract many ambitious male pupils, including Sauer, Siloti, Rosenthal, da Motta; and with Liszt one has a stronger sense of a lineage of playing (via for example Siloti to Rachmaninoff, or d'Albert to Dohnanyi to Ervin Nyiregyházi) but descriptions of his classes, while inspiring, are not the sort of thing you can put in a bottle and replicate.
Likewise Leschetizky  and Anton Rubinstein - fine pianists both, but in an inspirational rather than a methodical style. Rubsinstein's star pupil Josef Hofmann asked him how he should play a certain note and got the reply 'play it with your nose for all I care - so long as it sounds right!" According to Artur Schnabel there was no such thing as  a Leschetizky method, but this did not stop some of Leschetizky's pupils attempted to cash in on his cachet! eg Leschetizky Method (?!)

. 

As of today I am awarding first prize to Ludwig Deppe, whose Deppe Method is EXCELLENT. It makes sense, and unifies disparate elements of the playing process, such as the needs for elegant movement, effortlessness, concentration on musical tone. Granted it was written over a hundred years ago; but the instrument of the piano has not changed, and his advice can be taken with a pinch of salt here and there. Having read probably 150 books on piano playing, I think his is the best.

Avoid Forum Auditorium Taipei

Hmm. 5 weeks after my lecture recital and still not received payment from the concert hall. Many aspects of the management at Forum Auditorium were not the standards you might expect at a professional concert hall. If you are looking for somewhere with a good piano and good acoustic to give a recital in Taipei I sadly recommend you find somewhere else (until there is some change of management).

Piano Competitions and the Wizard of Oz

I don't know if you have watched the classic movie the Wizard of Oz? When Dorothy finally arrives at Emerald City and peeps behind the curtain, she realises that the mighty Oz was an illusion. Smoke and mirrors. I have been wondering the same about piano competitions recently. So much huff and puff, and... are the rewards actually worth it for the performer?  I decided to conduct an objective experiment to evaluate - are the winners of piano competitions actually getting the solo recitals that their efforts deserve? Here is how I conducted my experiment.

1) I checked out the results of the two most famous competitions: Tchaikovsky Piano Competition in Moscow, and the Leeds Piano Competition, UK. A full table of winners is here: Leeds competition winners. I decided to randomly select 5 prize winners from the past and check how many recitals they have advertised on their websites in the coming 6 months.

2) Using the wikipedia table, I assigned a number to each prize-winner as follows: top line, Federico C. is number 1 [1-6 reading L to R]; 2nd line, Sofya G. is number 7,  [7-12 reading L to R]etc.

3) Then I visited a 'random number generator website,  'random number generator website, and selected five numbers between 1 and 42. (In my case it gave me 15, 1, 9, 41, 38). So this gave me the names of five Leeds prize-winners between 1993 and 2012.

4) Then I looked online for the websites of these performers, or their agents, and found their concert schedule / concert diary / upcoming engagements etc.

5) Grand total. The number of solo recitals in the next 18 months for the five prize-winning pianists, all added together into one big total, was ... drumroll... 25.  So an average of five 5 recitals per prize-winner over the next 6 months.  Some of these recitals were in pretty small venues such as the tiny Scottish town of Nairn (8,401 population). [Nairn Community and Arts Centre (15 November 2013),  Holy Trinity Church, Nairn, 16 November etc, for Alessandro T., performer number 9].

Now I am absolutely sure that these competition winners play better than me, and that the concert-going public of small towns are great listeners, I have no doubt about it. But the question remains: does the evidence suggest that competition winners are genuinely launched into productive careers on the solo platform, or not?

If you want to check other competition results, I challenge you to find out how many upcoming recitals you can find by Ayako Uehara, 1st prize winner of the Tchaikovsky piano competition.
Is their effort worth it? Perhaps not. You probably know how hard it is to win a major international piano competition, right? Think becoming a brain surgeon, winning Miss World / Mr Universe, and learning to write Arabic.

The point is, perhaps the concert-going public is no longer buying the whole piano competition thing. Consciously or unconsciously, have we reached a tipping-point where people realise that a gladiatorial system is not best suited to expressive artistry? Perhaps the public is over-saturated with pianists performing very similar repertoire (Gaspard de la Nuit, Liszt Sonata, etc), so that it may have become a disadvantage to be a competition winner. 

What the public IS buying is pianists who have NOT won competitions. Paris and Tokyo and New York are buying Yuja Wang, Arkadi Volodos, Yvgeny Kissin, Marc-Andre Hamelin, Daniel Barenboim, Valentina Lisitsa, etc etc

1st prize winner, Vienna Piano Competition, playing Gaspard de la Nuit with his left hand alone

But, I hear you cry, what about great performers who have won competitions?  Like Radu Lupu and Daniil Trifonov. Well, I suspect that, like Yuja Wang and Volodos, they would have come to the attention of concert agents, the public, and record companies, with or without competitions.

I admit any counting method is open to debate: pianists may have failed to update their website; or you need to search in the home language of the performer (eg in Japanese for a Japanese winner). Having said that, if you look up Yuja Wang's upcoming schedule, it is pretty clear, even if you don't search in Chinese script.

But I am not asking you to accept my figures  - be brave, take a peek behind the curtain of the Wizard of Oz, see what is (or is not) behind the curtain!

Rosina Lhevinne

Just heard a great story from my friend Professor Lynn Raley. The illustrious grande dame of pianists, Rosina Lhevinne (teacher of Van Cliburn and wife of pianist Josef Lhevinne), was due to perform Chopin E minor concerto at the tender age of 82. She was asked by an interviewer on radio how she went about preparing for public performance at her advanced age. In a high pitched Russian accent she replied: Well young man what I do is to dim the lights, close the door, and lie on my couch, with my music score on my lap, and then, very slowly and deliberately, I finger my passages.

Upcoming Lecture Recital

Piano Mastery Secrets Unlocked 

Part 1: Rachmaninoff and his circle

Lecture recital presented from the keyboard by pianist Kong Tienxi (Matthew Koumis) in English, with visual presentations and simultaneous Mandarin translation (90 minutes total duration)

Works performed include
Liadov / Siloti: I danced with a Mosquito
Tchaikovsky / Pabst: Lullaby Op 16:1
Rachmaninoff: Prelude in G-sharp minor Op 32:12
Strauss / Godowsky: Standchen Op17:2
Rachmaninoff: Lilacs Op 21:5
Rachmaninoff: Prelude in C minor Op 23:7

Through what alchemy does the early 20th century Russian school of pianism succeed in touching our hearts so deeply? And what role did literature and painting play in inspiring their piano compositions? Technical elements, including fingering, pedalling, tone production and phrasing, will be explained from the editions, writings and recordings of Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873-1943); his piano teacher Alexander Siloti (1863-1945); his senior colleague Paul Pabst (1854-97); and two pianists whom Rachmaninoff greatly admired, Josef Hofmann (1876-1957) and Leopold Godowsky (1870-1938).

 Booking through this link here; Tickets: 300 NTD, unreserved.

new concert series in Taipei

I've been asked to promote an exciting new series of concerts for young performers aged 17-19 here in Taipei. Just click for details in mandarin, or contact me for english language info! Good luck everyone!

click here for concert details

wouldn't wish to change a note

Here is a trio of classical music performances that really capture the different moods of relationships just right. As Moriz Rosenthal said, "it's not servants of art we need, it's masters!" and these are all masterful interpreters.

For Russian singing these days you can't beat Anna Netrebko, in Rachmaninoff she is superb, also in Rimsky Korsakov; if this doesn't remind of your passsionate first love... as Anna de Noailles wrote, music promises more than love...

As for Rachmaninoff's friend Chaliapin, you can't beat this performance of Glinka for conveying the paranoid mood of the song to perfection, this really makes the hairs stand up on the back of your neck.

But if it's vocal style of piano playing you are looking for, Shura Cherkassky is your man, as in this setting of a Tchaikovsky Lullaby, transcribed by Pabst. When Cherkassky was asked what he had learnt from his legendary teacher Hofmann, he replied: "Pedalling, dynamics, general vibration". Well, his general vibration is sounding pretty darned good!