Here’s my second contribution to the ArtsJournal project.

For my readers to decide: is this Atonement for my three months of silence, or Making It Worse through blog-infidelity?

Since the frequency of my posting here is so stunningly high, I thought it was time to seek out a new forum for my thoughts (and I use the term loosely).

Kidding aside, this week I’m excited to be a guest panelist on Amanda Ameer’s blog at ArtsJournal.com. Amanda, a publicist, has invited four of us from different sides of the musical world to discuss the 21st century expectation that artists distinguish themselves in ways not directly connected to their art. Is this good or bad? Relevant or irrelevant to the art itself? Contributing to the concert experience or detracting from it?

Interesting questions, I think. My initial post can be found here, Amanda’s blog, with all of posts on this topic (plus all of her other posts) here. I think things should get interesting: stay tuned.

Yesterday, my Schubert CD had its U.S. release, and not entirely coincidentally, I began a run of performances of the A Major Sonata, this one in a house concert in London. Schubert, once again, is looming large.

Not that he had stopped doing so, really. But it was wonderful to be reminded yesterday that you can be overwhelmed by what you think you know. There are certain pieces which give the impression, at their outset, of  embarking on a journey. The Schubert A Major is one of them, and the listener (and player, who is hopefully also listening) is richly rewarded for making the trip, for it takes off in unexpected — shocking, really – directions, and leaves us, in the profoundest sense, somewhere other than where we began.

Schubert died at the age of 31, a mere two years older than I currently am. (!) As I’ve said, I neither know what “maturity” means, nor think I possess it,  but the astonishing development that took place in this young man’s final years has brought the subject to mind again. (Just to be clear, I’m not for a moment suggesting that maturity might be all that separates me from Schubert: there is the small matter of his genius.) Many have said that Schubert’s premature death is the greatest loss to have befallen music; I’m unsure. Were the feverish intensity and celestial lyricism that characterize Schubert’s final year a step along a path towards an unfathomed musical language? Or were those qualities available to him only because he knew the end was near, and because he was quickly drowning in his own unhappiness?

We’ll never know, of course. What I do believe firmly is that what distinguishes late Schubert from any other music is not the feelings themselves — many have suffered greatly, after all. Nor is it is compositional ability — great as it was, it did not exceed that of Mozart or Beethoven. What I believe is without precedent and remains unequaled is Schubert’s access to his inner life — his subconscious, even. Even the twentieth century failed to produce a howl as primal as the one that disrupts the songfulness of the A Major Sonata’s second movement. Is this, perhaps, maturity — an awareness of what lies beneath so absolute that it can be put on paper? (Again, genius surely helps.) Or perhaps the meaning of maturity can be found in the open-heartedness of the last movement — music of pure generosity. After Schubert’s very soul is crushed in the slow movement, where exactly does this come from?

I am perpetually wary of drawing connections between a composer’s life and work. (Exhibit A: Heiligenstadt Testament — Beethoven’s Second Symphony.) But I cannot hear the A Major Sonata (or Schwanengesang, or the String Quintet, or the C Major Symphony, or or or…) without being made aware of how much pain Schubert must have endured. Someone once said to me that Schubert’s music is sad when it is in minor keys, and tragic when it is in major keys, and it’s true — even the music that is consoling contains a knowledge of something terrible.

I am unwilling to say that I am grateful to Schubert for enduring whatever it was that made these masterworks possible. But for their existence I am deeply grateful. This is not merely music you listen to; it resides inside you, speaks to you, evolves with you. Please: stop reading, and go listen to Schubert.

On the Wigmore Hall’s current podcast, I talk a bit about the first movement of the C Major Sonata and the second movement of the A Major Sonata, and play some illustrative examples. (My first experiment with such multi-tasking!)

For now, you can listen via the Wigmore’s site, but I’ll post the clips here soon as well.

The other day, for the umpteenth time, I removed from my bookshelf My Life and Music, Artur Schnabel’s sometimes charming, sometimes ornery, always insightful series of lectures on his musical experiences. I opened the book — truly at random — to an exchange in the question-answer portion, which purportedly concerns Schnabel’s student (and my teacher) Leon Fleisher:

Voice: I had the pleasure of meeting and hearing your pupil, the young Mr. X, this summer and I would like to have your opinion of his work?
Mr. Schnabel: He is a highly gifted boy. He plays, for his age, amazingly well. The real difficulties for him lie in his future, for it is more difficult to retain fame than to gain it. I feel certain of his capacity to meet them.
Voice: He seems very much more mature than his seventeen years warrant, though.
Mr. Schnabel: Oh, I wouldn’t use that term: mature. It would in his case sound like an objection, almost a condemnation. He plays well, convincingly, with an already manifest personality of his own.  His type of talent is not too common. He has imagination and courage. He will try things and face the risk of failure. That is nowadays a rather rare quality. Courage is suppressed by the pursuit of safety.

I am reprinting this delightfully on-the-mark analysis and prediction not because (or not merely because) I take pleasure in how on-the-mark it is. Rather, I’m very struck by what Schnabel has to say about maturity. I’ve quite often had the experience of being told that I seem mature, and feeling sort of queasy in response: it’s the queasiness that comes not just from receiving a compliment you don’t feel you deserve, but from feeling a little demeaned by the compliment. An extra layer of queasiness is provided by my inability to locate the precise source of the initial queasiness. (The final layer of queasiness arrives with my guilt over feeling queasy at what was, after all, meant as a compliment, but that is — counting generously — only tangentially related to the subject of this post.)

Schnabel — who did not mince words and did not, as far as I can tell, waste energy feeling queasy about things — cuts right to the heart of the matter. It is interesting, and revealing, to hear him place such value on having “a manifest personality of [one’s] own,” as we tend to associate Schnabel with the virtue of textual fidelity, and this is a nice reminder that textual fidelity is not, in fact, a virtue, in the way that eating brussels sprouts or taking in stray ferrets are virtues, but rather, when the text involved is a timeless masterpiece,  a window into a world of possibility — a world where those with manifest personalities have a vast canvass on which to (forgive me) manifest them.

(Elsewhere in the book, responding to a question about his approach to music, he says, “Love has to be the starting point — love of music. It is one of my firmest convictions, that love always produces some knowledge,  while knowledge only rarely produces something similar to love.” Perhaps, rather than persist with this blog, I should acquire the rights from the publisher, and simply copy Schnabel, line by line, in regular installments.)

These two processes, coming ever closer to the music that we play, and coming closer to ourselves — which, as Schnabel suggests, can and ought to occur in tandem — strike me as the basis of artistic growth. Put another way, they are both about paring down: removing the excess which clouds our vision, and stands in the way of self-knowledge, and thus, real expression.

On that journey, there are no short cuts. Some people may travel down those roads faster than others, but there is no substitute for the passage of time. And that is why, when I hear the word “mature” ascribed to me, or any other comparatively young musician, I wonder what it means. My nervous suspicion is that it implies that the person gives unimpeachable performances — performances in which holes cannot be punched, in which the performer has resorted to easy answers, because he cannot bear unanswered questions.

Schnabel often said that there is “no safe conduct to wisdom,” and these, as much as anything he ever said, strike me as words to live by. The reason that performing, in addition to all of the other things it is, is frightening, is that done properly, it exposes one’s weaknesses along with the rest of one’s qualities.  Of all the memorable performances I have heard, none has been memorable because it was perfect; rather, those performances remain etched in my mind because nothing was hidden from view. With any performer, positive and negative qualities come together to make a unique whole, but no attribute has the potential to move quite so much as doubt. (Or: what moves us is not the sense that the performer has the answers, but rather an awareness that he is asking the questions.) Whatever maturity is, it is not the acquisition of certainty, and it certainly does not come from ignoring the questions.

In my own unsafe journey towards wisdom, or maturity, I am holding on tightly to my questions, and to my vulnerabilities; or, to paraphrase Schnabel once again, I am suppressing safety in the pursuit of courage.

[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.

As my month of recitals is about to begin, one connection between the works on the program which I didn’t write about has been on my mind: both the Schubert and the Kurtág were introduced to me by Alan Marks.

Alan and my mother were frequent recital partners until his untimely death in 1995. He lived in Berlin, so I didn’t see that much of him; the memories I do have of him are of an uncommonly warm and inquisitive musician — his interests (and talents) ranged from the most intimate corners of the chamber music literature, to the most virtuosic works of Liszt, to the thorniest new music, with stopovers for musical theater and curiosities. (A performance of Schubert’s Winterreise  — without a singer! – springs to mind.)

I remember well the arrival in the mail of a selection of the Játékok, with as many pages of instructions as notes. I was probably twelve at the time, and wasn’t entirely sure what to make of them (although I do recall being instantly delighted to know there was a piece of music entitled “Phone Numbers of our Loved Ones”), but it marked my first acquaintance with music which I find more and more compelling by the day, and I’m sure that the energy of Alan’s advocacy for the music was what set me on that path.

Alan’s greatest musical love, though, was Schubert, and not long before he died, he performed a cycle of the 11 completed sonatas — and the unfinished C Major — in Berlin. These wonderful performances were released, virtually unedited, as recordings, and they marked my first exposure to nearly all the sonatas. (When I think of how taken I was with the C Major even then, I can’t understand why it’s taken me 15 years to get around to playing it.)

Music is a very powerful thing, of course, and one of its greatest and most mysterious powers is to bring back people who are sadly in our past. I am unable to play Schubert and Kurtág without them evoking memories of Alan; while it was a great piece of luck to be introduced to them by him, I am equally lucky that they have kept him so vividly in my memory.

Last season, I wrote about the process of putting together one of my recital programs. While many of the priorities of program-building remain the same — a love for each of the individual pieces, a hunch that they will somehow mix well and interestingly — the program I’m preparing at the moment represents enough personal departures — or, rather, enough new and renewed passions — for me to feel it merits writing about.

But I’m not to be trusted, for really, I will seize on any excuse to write about György Kurtág these days.  Listening to him give a masterclass recently,  I was provoked into rethinking some of my most basic assumptions about music (what are dynamics for? what are the limits of musical notation? how does the interpreter deal with those limits? what is a chord, really, and how should one hear it? feel it? play it? etc etc etc), and working on his music has a peeling-the-onion quality — the feeling that each question answered, each problem solved, simply reveals another, more absorbing layer of problems and questions — which I used to associate with only the very greatest music of past centuries. How wonderful to be proven wrong! One thing this immersion in Kurtág has clarified for me is what quality, or set of qualities I most value in new music: a love for, deep understanding of, and connection to the past masters, married to an absolutely unique, original voice.

Not easy to do, particularly after the twentieth century. But Kurtág fits the bill. While there is nothing — really, nothing — derivative about his music, it was made possible by, and constantly responds to Bach and Schubert, Beethoven and Bartók, Schumann and Ligeti. That is why, though the five fleeting selections from the Játékok (”Games”) that I have programmed take only minutes to play, they are, for me at least, at the heart of the evening, and form its organizing principle.

I’m weary of trying to explain why certain composers go well together, lest I sound like one of those earnest, humorless restaurant menus that tries to tell you what wine to drink with your pork chop. (”The oakiness of the Kurtág makes a perfect complement to the fennel-radicchio blend of the Schubert; best of all are the notes of cherry in each’s aftermath.”) But programming around Kurtág makes me feel like a kid in a candy store, because practically every phrase is somehow suggestive of a past master. This occasionally takes the form of a reference (one of the pieces I’m playing is a delicious, absurdist reinvention of a Debussy Prelude), but far more often it’s something more mysterious and witch-doctor-y. Far be it from me to try and explain how the “Birthday Elegy for Judit (for the 2nd finger of her left hand)” connects to Schubert’s almost psychedelically beautiful C Major Sonata. But connect it does, on a level so profound that I’m currently toying with the idea of going from one to the other without a pause.

(There’s another reason for that, on top of whatever mysterious relationship exists between the pieces. The C Major Sonata — like its more famous counterpart, the B flat — is one of those pieces that emerges from silence. On a literal level, this is obviously true of any piece of music. What I mean in this instance is that the silence that precedes the first notes actually feels like part of the piece itself, as if the Schubert C Major Sonata had been occurring, in silent form, for God knows how long, before the first notes of it were intoned. To create that feeling by starting some seconds after applause is very difficult; segueing from a piece with a mystical ending seems much more likely to set the appropriate tone. But I digress.)

And that Schubert! Oh, the Schubert. It is that rarest of species: the centuries-old neglected masterpiece. Much like the Unfinished Symphony, his leaving the 3rd and 4th movements incomplete may have been an accident, but if so, it was a divine accident; on some level, he must have known how completely satisfying the two finished movements are on their own, and how impossible it would have been to write music to successfully follow the second movement — one of the saddest, most unrelenting utterances from a composer who was usually sad and often unrelenting.

Is Schubert the most unfathomable of them all?  Given his wretchedly short life, he should really not have been able to write down the 998 works that have now been published, even if he had simply been taking dictation. When you add to that the struggles he had with large forms (unlike the equally insanely prolific Mozart, who gives the impression of having emerged from the womb writing an unimpeachable rondo), and the incredible development that took place in his sonata writing, it becomes more unthinkable still. (The C Major is a real benchmark in this regard — an exposition with three themes, all with a more-or-less identical melodic outline, a highly unusual scheme of keys…) When you think of how many of these works are heart-breakingly beautiful, it becomes not only overwhelming, but overwhelmingly sad. Surely no one has suffered more to create art of such power. In recent years, I’ve gone through periods of immersion with Mozart, Beethoven and Schumann. These days it is Schubert who is demanding that sort of attention. It feels alarming, sometimes, how overwhelming these composers can become in my life and in my mind…

Artur Schnabel once slyly commented that the difference between him and other pianists was that the second halves of his recitals were just as boring as the first halves. (The model he’s mocking here is the “recital program as dinner,” with a frothy dessert at the end.) I understand what he’s getting at, and often have tried to build my own programs in such a way that the intensity builds through the recital. That said, when I was putting this program together, I was attracted to the idea of it being somehow old-fashioned in construction. Hopefully it goes without saying that I don’t find any of the music I play boring, but when the core of the first half of the program (measured in minutes, at least) consists of two sonatas composed in Vienna,  and the second half is all short and short-ish pieces by Chopin — decidedly not composed in Vienna — the impression is of a dramatic shift having taken place during the intermission. When I’ve been in the audience for a recital and felt that shift, I’ve always found it strangely exciting — the energy in the room suddenly altered, the language being spoken thrillingly unfamiliar.

Chopin, in a sense, marries these two program prototypes (hors d’ouevre-entree-dessert/boring-boring) perfectly, for while his music is decidedly unlike Mozart or Schubert (in some undeniable but indescribable cultural sense) it is profound, and profoundly great. When I was a teenager, I probably played more Chopin than any other composer. For various reasons, my attention has been focused elsewhere lately, and coming back to him has been wonderful. In the late pieces that I am playing here, the impeccable bel canto style that characterizes the early pieces is still much in evidence, but the skies have darkened considerably. The E Major Nocturne might have its roots in Bellini, but what happens between the notes is rarely heard in Italian opera. The mazurkas (and much of the f minor Ballade) have roots in dance, but their twists and turns — their digressions — are what make them memorable. And the magnificent Barcarolle alternates between nostalgia and something like terror, all on top of a constantly — relentlessly — rocking gondalier’s rhythm. Unsurprising, perhaps, as Chopin is in a sense the most paradoxical of all composers: he is, for example, the only composer who can be simultaneously impassioned and cool.

For all of the thought that goes into program-planning, it really is impossible to know in advance how well it will work. For while a recital may be a musical conversation between composers, it is also a three-way conversation between composer(s), performer,  and audience. I have at least some measure of control over my conversation with the composers — that, it seems to me, is what preparation is for. But I have no control over the energy or the reactions of the audience, which is precisely why playing concerts is such a wonderful, terrifying activity. A teacher once said to me, at the end of a Not Easy lesson, “now forget everything I said, and play it like a performance.” And that is what playing recitals is about: working to constantly deepen your relationship with the music, preparing so thoroughly that you feel that the music inhabits you, and then opening yourself absolutely to the public, without any precondition or inhibition.

What a wonderful thing to get to do.

The following conversation, reproduced here verbatim, took place a few days ago, while I was being driven from my home to a rehearsal in Newark with the New Jersey Symphony.

Driver: So what are you, a conductor or an instrumentalist?
J: Instrumentalist.
Driver: What do you play?
J: The piano.
Driver: What do you know!
J: Yeah.
Driver: My least favorite instrument.
J: ___
Driver: Because, you know, everyone bangs on it.
J: Well, that is sometimes the case.
Driver: Why, why do you people always bang on it?
J: Well, I try not to, myself.
Driver: Good.

Fin.

1) The 20th century split of composer and performer into two unique roles is a catastrophe. Whether György Kurtág’s piano-playing is more informed by his experience of writing music (and the “from the inside out” comprehension that comes with it) or his music is more informed by his (obviously loving, tactile) relationship with the piano, I cannot say: both effects are profound. Listening to him play Bach, I felt none of the usual distance between the music itself, and the performance (and performer) of it. It was two titanic musical personalities, effortlessly fused.

2) People often speak of concerts being religious experiences; it seems to me that this is a reference to the transformative power of music, the word “religious” a stand-in for “spiritual.” But to (nonbeliever) me, one of the most appealing aspects of religion, in its purest form, is the mindfulness – the sense of purpose – it aims to inspire in its practitioners: the sense that every act must have an intent, an awareness. While spirituality is hardly in short supply with them, it was in this sense that the Kurtágs’ concert tonight struck me as religious. To me, anyway, it acted both as an inspiration, and as a reproach, for having, on occasion, played a phrase with less than total commitment – without a sense of purpose.

3) Making art is, at its core, about giving love.