Here is the final post from my Carnegie series. Having previously written primarily about the program, this one is mostly about the hall itself — and while that means it falls somewhat outside the boundaries of what I normally (…) blog about, this wasn’t difficult to write. It’s a little homage to one of my favorite places anywhere.

The recital tour I’m in the midst of comes to Carnegie Hall (you know, that old place) on January 21st. As the date approaches, I’ll be writing several pieces about my preparation for the concert. The first addresses the question of how one works on a piece after having been through the process of recording it — which is the case with two of the four pieces on the program — and can be read here; I’m linking rather than cutting and pasting so that my reader(s?) can enjoy the benefits of Carnegie Hall’s Nice Formatting and Correct Usage of Accents.

[Cough.]

It’s been a while, and the blog, an alert reader points out, has gathered moss.  (This particular moss was never visible to me on my computer, so I can only hope it has been successfully eradicated.) Writing on the blog has always been something I’ve enjoyed, but over the last few months — during which time I’ve been particularly unmossy, or unmoored, myself — at moments when I’ve been inclined to post, the question has tended to be “should I write on the blog or practice another hour?” or “should I write on the blog or sleep another hour?” and, well, in my life practice and sleep tend to win most of their battles. (When they face off, things get interesting.)

But now, I’m sitting on a plane from Tokyo to New York, and I’m at that point in the transpacific flight at which I’ve eaten, slept more-or-less a full night (day? who can tell…), read a Russian novel,  mentally reorganized my closets, eaten again, learned ancient Greek and read the Iliad, and it seems like an excellent time to get back to blogging. In the unlikely event that this flight eventually lands, I will even post what I write.

It’s been an eventful few months. In addition to the concerts, which kept me occupied (and then some), I made a recording, live at the Wigmore Hall, of Schubert sonatas, paired with some Kurtag. I’ll be writing plenty on that subject soon enough, as it was a pretty remarkable experience, which again reshaped my feelings about recording. (Not to mention Schubert…) But for now, while I gather my thoughts, I offer you a list of recent events which could have been, should have been, and in certain cases, still might be blog fodder:

• Playing the Schumann Concerto, without a conductor, in Saint Paul, and subsequently rethinking the relationship of a soloist with an orchestra
• The man with a snake on the A Train in New York/woman with a rabbit on the Hibiya Line in Tokyo. (I was thinking some sort of modern day Aesop fable/cultural diversity combo deal.)
• The experience of walking into the dressing room of the Sociedad Filarmonica in Bilbao and being surrounded by signed photos of Casals, Rubinstein, Schnabel, Menuhin, Cortot,  Szigeti — and my mother and grandmother.
• My intrepid Japanese manager’s successful effort to rebook us — on a different airline! — onto a flight from Osaka to Matsuyama which was leaving precisely 29 minutes after our arrival at the airport. And luggage was involved!
• The ordering process at a Japanese-operated Korean restaurant visited by me and two friends — one Korean, and one a limited speaker of Japanese. My contribution to the process was to veto selections once they had been made, which usually took 10 minutes and involved a combination of two languages and some frantic hand gesturing.
• The always enlightening (sometimes in surprising ways) experience of taking a month away from performing after going at a whirlwind pace for half a year — a bit, I suspect, like quitting smoking cold turkey, though I hope and suspect that the performing is slightly less hazardous to my health.

In short, it’s been intense/exhilarating/insane. This state of affairs looks set to continue for the foreseeable future: expect more frequent reporting from the trenches.

In the past year or so, one question has popped up frequently in interviews I’ve given: “What advice would you give to a young musician?” The question makes me sort of uncomfortable. Have I really reached my wisdom-giving years? I was hoping to acquire some wisdom first…

But now I have an answer to the question: Young musicians, never, ever, place your faith in an alarm clock.

I learned this lesson, the hard way, a couple of weeks ago, in Hamburg. Even now, as I write this, I find it shocking that I would have to learn this lesson The Hard Way, given that I am so preternaturally neurotic and untrusting.  Typically, when taking a pre-concert nap, I have a three, or even four-tiered wake-up system: phone alarm clock, hotel alarm clock, hotel wake-up call, and on occasion, outside wake-up call. I realize this might seem a bit excessive, but with a little imagination, and a dash of paranoia, it becomes easy to see how each of these individual methods could fail.

(Briefly: Phone alarm – only useful if turned off, to avoid unplanned wake-ups. But how can the phone really know to turn itself on at a particular time? Sure, it has done so before, but come on! And what if it magically runs out of battery while off. Stranger things have happened – stonehenge, for instance. Hotel alarm – too many unknowns, too much room for human error. Why are there so many buttons, so many possibilities? Why are there two different ways to control volume? Why are there two alarms? Could the alarm clock be frightened by my overzealousness in setting both, and shut down completely? Stranger things have happened – think UFOs. Hotel wake-up call – now, if the hotel takes 12+ hours to deliver a message/fax, how reliable could they possibly be?  Plus, if the system is manual, the person could always take down the wrong information. And if it’s automated – really, who trusts an automated system? Outside wake-up – they rely on the hotel to place the call, a task that in certain countries proves surprisingly vexing. And plus, can an outsider really appreciate the gravity of the situation? You see?)

And even with these myriad wakeup sources, I hardly ever sleep soundly when taking a nap.  (Would you, if you knew what I knew?)

But in Hamburg, events took over, as they say. First of all, there was jetlag, which is probably the one element of my life I would eliminate if given a magic wish. (When I think of the man who spilled an entire cup of coffee on me one hour into a transatlantic flight this year, I’m forced to contemplate whether the jets themselves are worse than the jetlag – I’m sticking with the jetlag for the moment.) When I am awake, for the fifth consecutive hour, at 8 am, knowing that I have a concert to play and things to do during the day, I come just a little closer to understanding what dementia must feel like. And this was par for the course that week.

Add to that a nasty virus, which knocked me out, yet still failed to help me sleep at the appropriate times. By the time the afternoon came around each day, I was pretty well comatose, which made me considerably more relaxed than normal about the alarm-setting process.

Dear reader, it was a perfect storm. The day of my last concert, I got into bed at 3 in the afternoon, set my phone alarm for 6, and passed out. The idea that I would sleep three solid hours seemed so ludicrous, and the idea of being asleep immediately was so delightful, for once, I didn’t even set a secondary or tertiary (or… tetra-iary?) alarm.

The next thing I knew, the phone was ringing. It was a staff member from the NDR Symphony Orchestra, who asked politely where I was. (The concert was at 8.) I told her I was at the hotel, and asked her the time.

7:57.

To say that I leapt into action would be to underestimate the speed with which I moved, and to overestimate the efficiency. Given the length of Mozart’s Paris Symphony, which opened the program, I needed to be on stage at 8:25, and the hall was a short taxi ride away. Those 28 minutes are something of a blur, but certain moments do stand out, such as my moment of reckoning in the hotel elevator when I realized I had forgotten my coat (it was snowing outside), and the 15 Euro tip I gave the taxi driver, as I didn’t want to wait for change.

I walked into the hall, in street clothes, at 8:05. 20 minutes, and one incident of cheek mutilation (= shaving) later, I walked onstage, in concert clothes, wondering what on earth would happen when I started playing. To my amazement, playing felt almost entirely normal, suggesting that all my self-imposed rules about playing concerts – always be awake at least 2 hours prior, always be in the hall an hour prior to warm up – have far more to do with the psychological, rather than the physical, aspect of playing the piano. (Subject for another post.)

So it all turned out alright. Still, I do not recommend it. While complete panic turns out to be an effective substitute for cardiovascular exercise,  it’s not the sort of thing one should put oneself through on a regular basis.

Kids, never trust an alarm clock.

So, it’s taken me somewhat longer than planned to post this follow-up, but I needed some time to process the extraordinary experience I had two weeks ago.

I was excited at the prospect of making this recording, but it’s fair to say there was some trepidation as well. In addition to being my first ever live recording, it was my first orchestra recording. And since Orpheus plays without a conductor, that was another element of unfamiliarity inserted into the process. (I had played conductorless before, but not with anything approaching the frequency with which I’ve played concerti with conductors.)

There were also logistical differences between this and my previous recordings: until now, I’d always recorded in London, which meant sticking – obsessively, some might say – to a routine. I stayed in the same hotel, ate the same things for breakfast, ran in the same park, left at the same time every morning. This time I was in New York, which meant that I was at home: nice, but psychologically different. (In my life, being at home usually means not working – or at least not performing.)

All of which is to say that the element of the unknown was very, very present. The details of the recording had been more-or-less in place since the summer, so I had a long time to think about the implications of all this. I’ve written in the past that a recording, to me, simply represents a snapshot of my thoughts about the piece on the day, but the truth is somewhat more complicated: however impossible it might be, the permanence of recording has always caused to me to fantasize about an idealized performance of a piece. And because I always record a piece after I’ve played a series of performances of it, there’s an urge to see the recording as a kind of summation of the process – a chance to meld all of the prior performances, and hope for a “the-whole-is-more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts” kind of result.

There’s a big downside to this attitude: not only does it discourage spontaneity, it is anti-spontaneity, as it carries the implication that everything that will happen in the recording studio has been experienced already. It also, I believe, leads to the making of a recording whose value is more theoretical than real – a recording that can be admired, but not loved. The snapshot analogy still holds, but the question becomes: is a photograph a document of a moment, or a highly posed creation?

Needless to say, I’ve given this issue a lot of thought, and in previous sessions I’ve felt that these two concepts of recording were doing battle with one another. I would have liked to have let go entirely of any expectation of perfection, or idealization, but the foreverness of the CD was often in the back of my mind. (Schnabel used to talk about the process of “verplattung” – which in German means both “disc-making” and “flattening out.”)

One of the advantages – or challenges, depending on your point of view – of recording live was that the decision as to which attitude I would take towards the recording was made for me. While the dress rehearsal was also recorded, and we had a brief patch session after the concert, the number of hours devoted to recording this album was a tiny fraction of what I spent making the Schumann and Beethoven CDs. The opportunity to play things over and over until I had found – or at least approached – what I had in my ear at the beginning of the day was simply not there. In its place was a very different opportunity: the chance to make a recording in which spontaneity was not only not shied away from, but actually the primary element involved. It’s not that my preparation for this recording was any less thorough: if anything, the mental and physical preparation for this disc was more intense than ever. It’s that the goal of the preparation was not to eliminate the element of uncertainty, of chance, but to free me to take chances. As cliched as it may be, my goal for this recording was to meet the moment.

As luck would have it, several elements combined to ensure that the odds were stacked in my favor. First of all, the music itself asked for this approach. Whereas in a Beethoven movement, creating a sense of the architecture of the whole is perhaps the biggest key to making the performance work, with Mozart, a sense of the mercurial – the sensation that the character of a phrase is being determined as it is played, as a reaction to the provocation that was the previous phrase – is of utmost importance. And that cannot be faked – you can only give the impression of being in the moment by actually being in the moment.

Second, I had the huge fortune of playing with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. In addition to their fantastic playing, their energy and enthusiasm were incredibly contagious, and the level of involvement each of them had in the music-making is something I will not soon forget. And any fear I may have had about playing without a conductor in a recording session proved unjustified: the lack of conductor – and the security one brings – forced everyone to listen that much more intently, which changed everything. It made the ensemble tighter, facilitated greater flexibility, and most importantly, it meant that whenever I tried something on the spur of the moment – a different dynamic shape, a slight leaning on a note – the orchestra not only accommodated it, but responded in kind. Never, playing this repertoire, have I had such a strong sense of a conversation being written on the spot.

Suffice it to say, the experience on the whole was memorable, and the concert itself had a joyousness – a pleasure in music-making – which I wouldn’t have imagined possible beforehand, given the pressure created by the circumstances. I’ve yet to listen to the tapes, but the making of the recording was so gratifying, the end result somehow doesn’t seem so important. (Another sharp contrast with my previous recordings, when the arrival of the first edit was a momentious – and nerve-wracking – moment.) What is important is the way the week confirmed my deepest-held feelings about music-making, so often compromised, and occasionally even obscured, by the pressure of recording and performing to the standard that great music demands: that it is all about communication. That if you strive to play in the most open, egoless way possible, you can reach people in a way that only music can. That it is, at its best, a more wonderful means of communication than speech.

I am very, very lucky to do what I do. Making this recording, I felt that as strongly as I ever have in my life.

Back in August, I wrote about the experience of making my Beethoven recording. As I said then, one of the aspects of recording which I always find challenging – and interesting – is the lack of an audience. Or, at least, the lack of an audience that is palpable while the playing occurs. So, as I’ve often said, my greatest goal for a recording is creating the feeling of a live performance. This has often led to the question, “how do you feel about live recording?”

Well, I’m about to find out. This weekend, I’ll be recording two Mozart Concerti live, with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, at Queens College. The process of preparing for the recording has been extremely fascinating – it has challenged, and in some cases altered, my beliefs on what recordings are for, and how they differ from live performances.  It has also forced me to examine, to a greater extent than I ever had before, how I listen to music, and what qualities I consider essential to great music-making.

Big questions, those. I’m going into recording hibernation now – I’ll be back with a full report on the experience next week.

As usual, I’m posting this at the very last minute, but WCLV will be broadcasting a performance I gave back in December of the Beethoven 4th Concerto with the Cleveland Orchestra and James Conlon today at 4 PM, Eastern Time. (Actually, the concert broadcast begins then, which means that the Beethoven should be closer to 5 PM.)  WCLV’s broadcasts are streamed through their website, so it can be heard live online at that time. Starting the following day, it will also be available on-demand through the website until February 11th.

I try to keep the self-aggrandizement to a minimum on this site,  but the performance is at any rate worth hearing for the improbably beautiful playing of the Cleveland Orchestra.