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.

“There is an inanimate object which has a capacity to exasperate which no human being will ever attain: a piano.”

— Marcel Proust

The other day, in a conversation with a friend, I mentioned the various countries I’d be visiting on my upcoming (now current) European trip. Her response, apparently free of irony, was “you are becoming a global brand.”

(Through a series of free-associative gymnastics, my thoughts quickly turned to a summer evening, perhaps fifteen years ago. I was in a small Dutch town, walking with a few friends, when we came upon a field filled with cattle. Separated from the herd was a sweet and slightly forlorn looking calf, sporting an enormous tag with a number, on its ear — a sort of postmodern dollar-store earing. It was the first time it had occurred to me that a living being could be a marketable item, and it led to a brief flirtation on my part with vegetarianism.)

In fact, not only was the remark irony-free, it seemed not to have occurred to her that reducing a person to an item for sale might be deeply insulting. I stared at her dumbly for a moment (I was free-associating in my head, see) and then, rather than start an argument, changed the subject.

Upon further reflection, though, I realize that this was not the first indication I’ve received that the demeaning aspect of the person-as-brand concept might not actually be self-evident. About a year ago, shortly after this site went live, I had a meeting with one of my managers. She was uneasy with the site — the blog in particular — because it was “at odds with the image that we have tried to create for you.”

(She went on to say that any professional person — no matter how public, or not, the profession — inevitably had a public and a private persona, and that my blog had crossed the line from one into the other. This definitely struck a chord with me. I completely agree with the concept in principle – it would be difficult not to – and my primary purpose in starting this blog has been to flesh out aspects of my musical life that might be of interest to a reader who has some familiarity with my playing, but not with me. I never would want to introduce my personal life into the blog. [This is not simply a question of being a private person: I am a musician, and I fail to see why my extra-musical life should be of any interest to anyone. This is an area where I am steadfastly old-fashioned. When a musician seeks attention for non-musical activities, it seems to me, it will inevitably lead to focus being taken away from his or her music-making. Worse still, the implicit message is that music, on its own, is not sufficient to hold the listener’s interest.] However – and this is where the question becomes difficult – the line between the musical and the personal in my life is extremely blurry. My relationship to music is not merely, or even primarily, professional — it is tactile, psychic, visceral, and social. Because of this, I’m constantly re-evaluating what is legitimate blog fodder, and what is best left private, and the manager’s remark troubled me.)

And shortly after that, I received stronger evidence still that my antipathy to being trademarked might be far from universal. While a guest on a radio program, I was asked how I “construct my image.” My response (probably at least somewhat less coherently put than it is here) was that I don’t consciously do any such thing: I simply do the things that I find interesting and rewarding, and hope that there is an appreciative audience for them. This was met with a slightly smirking incredulity: so certain was the host of the show that what I was suggesting was impossible, that I left wondering if I was in fact naively kidding myself. Every time I step on stage, I am, it is true, making a statement through what I’ve chosen to play and how I choose to play it. (Not to mention what I’m wearing, how I walk on stage, how much of my hair is standing on end, etc.) Have these decisions been more pragmatic – not to say mercenary – than I was willing to admit?

The thought is very, very troubling to me. I’m not naive enough to think that the concept of imaging is new (even though the grotesque word itself probably is). Think back to the great artists of the past century –Heifetz, Horowitz, Schnabel, Rubinstein, Menuhin, Toscanini — and you will probably find that you are easily able to attach a distinct set of adjectives to each. This surely is not an accident. The business of music has always found it useful to create personas for artists, and it strikes me as possible that when we refer to an artist as “larger than life,” it may not simply be a question of personality, but a reflection of the feeling that the artist represents, in an archetypal way, certain qualities. It probably goes without saying that any great artist — any ordinary person, really — is more complex than a set of adjectives can suggest, which means that these brandings were, in part, the creation of marketers – long before the term, or perhaps even the profession, existed.

Still, in recent years, the profession of music — and, let’s be honest, our society at large — has taken a distressing turn in the direction of everything being about branding. There are some very concrete reasons for this: modern media has made it possible for information to travel the world instantaneously, and modern travel has made it possible to play one hundred and fifty concerts on six continents in one year. I’m not entirely sure if the cart or the horse leads here, but surely if a musician is to be famous world-over, it’s useful for them to be identifiable in a way that is neither complex nor culturally specific.

One big problem with this, it seems to me, is that it does nothing to encourage artistic experimentation or growth – in fact, it is anti-growth. By this model, the artist has a product, which the audience comes to the concert (or buys the record) expecting, in a fairly specific sort of way. Moving away from this product, in the interest of challenging oneself, might then be professionally risky.

But there is another aspect to this, which is more troubling still: if everything is branded, then everything is also for sale. Again, I am perfectly aware that art has been sold for as long as it has existed. However, there is a very important distinction to be drawn here: while it is perfectly OK for art to be for sale, it is emphatically not OK for the artist to be for sale. I know that I am hardly unique, or even unusual, in that I became a musician because I have very, very strong feelings about music — feelings that I cannot entirely explain, and which are as much a part of me as are my ears or my nose. Put another way, one very important reason that I play the way that I do, as opposed to some other way, is that I feel compelled to do so.

This is why I find it very hard to imagine that the way I play has been driven by commercial considerations. There have been moments when I have sensed that altering my repertoire or certain elements of my playing in City X or Y might be professionally beneficial, and I did not do so. Artistic courage did not come into play: I simply could not see an alternative, just as I could not see cutting off my nose. But in a musical model in which one “creates an image,” would it not simply be expedient to make artistic decisions based on public tastes? After all, for what other reason does one create an image?

These are big questions (and, not incidentally, I would be thrilled if this post started a dialogue around them), and I’m well aware that the modern values that I am decrying here are closely related to other modern ones — equality, access to information, respect for other cultures — that I could and would not live without.

But I am equally aware that I’m not a brand: I’m Jonathan. For the foreseeable future, I will continue to be Jonathan, and hope, for better or worse (or, most likely, for better and worse) that it works out OK.

that I still exist. After spending the summer resting and touring, practicing and rehearsing, flying and driving, eating (a lot) and drinking, playing concerts and listening to them, reading chamber music and reading books, I’m ready to convert it all into blog.

While I’m getting my house in order, here are some thoughts on Mozart, with clips from the CD, a few days in advance of its international release. (Release dates will vary by country.) More Mozart thoughts may follow – he looms large in my life these days…

I’ve been reading Kenzaburo Oe’s “A Healing Family” — a wonderful collection of essays on topics related to Oe’s son Hikari, who was born with a severe brain defect, and who became an accomplished pianist and composer. An excerpt:

Sitting nearby with a book, listening to his piano lessons, I can feel the best, most human things in his character finding lively and fluent expression; and when I hear the works he has produced performed by Mrs. Tamura and other musicians who have been generous in their support, I feel in awe of the richness of his inner life. Yet this is a life that, were it not for music, would have remained hidden, would have been utterly unknown to me, to my wife, and Hikari’s younger brother and sister. I am not someone who believes in any faith, but I find it hard to deny that there is something… something akin perhaps to “grace” in this music; indeed, listening to Hikari’s music, being exposed to the world beyond our everyday experience in which it seems to participate, makes me appreciate in it the full meaning of the word; not only “gracefulness” and “virtue” but “a prayer of thanks.”

I have not faced any of the challenges that Hikari has, and yet much of what Oe is describing feels very familiar to me. I’ve often felt that my own “inner life” is expressed with greater precision and dimension when I am making music than it ever could be through words, physical gestures, or any other form of communication of which I am aware. And I too find that music brings me closest to that concept of “grace,” which Oe describes so beautifully.

Oe hears in his son’s music a “prayer of thanks.” I sense this quality in much of the music I play, and as I play it, one of the things I find myself giving thanks to is music itself, for the inexpressible role it has played in my life.

Sunday, I played my last concert of a month-long European tour. A month is longer than I’m used to being away from home at a stretch, and I’ll admit that by the end of it, despite having been in many wonderful places, I was very ready to go home.

The concert was in beautiful Schwetzingen, and the circumstances were close to ideal: the venue was aesthetically beautiful and acoustically even better, the piano was excellent, and the audience was as good as one could ask for — attentive, appreciative, obviously musical. As I finished the concert, I thought to myself that it was the best possible way to cap the month. And then the trouble started.

I was flying home through London, and Schwetzingen is more than an hour from the Frankfurt airport by car. I didn’t have much extra time to get to Frankfurt, my connection in London was fairly tight, and there was no later flight as a back-up -  in short, plenty of opportunities for things to go wrong.

Which is precisely what happened — immediately. I went to the appointed place to meet the driver who would be taking me to the airport, and he was not there. (Probably no one’s fault – just a wires-crossed moment…) Schwetzingen on a Sunday afternoon is not the sort of place where one calls a taxi on the spur of the moment, and I didn’t have any phone numbers in Germany that were of much use at that moment, and so I saw the whole house of cards that was the day’s trip falling down.

A few minutes and a few phone calls later, I had run completely out of ideas. It was at this point that a man approached me.

“You need to go to the airport, yes?”

Affirmative.

“And you’re in trouble, aren’t you?”

Again, affirmative.

“OK, I have a car, I’ll take you.”

When I recovered my power of speech, I happily accepted. It turned out that he had been at the concert with a friend. They had planned to have lunch in town following the concert, but when they overheard me, they decided to offer, as they were going to Frankfurt later in the afternoon anyway. So what looked to be turning into a nightmare say ended up being a pleasure – an afternoon drive with two extremely friendly, interesting people. And to top it all off, an on-time arrival at JFK hours later.

I’ve written before about the frustrations of travel, due to weather, human error, mechanical problems – the works. But in my experience, travel today is frequently unpleasant because of the behavior of people – needlessly unfriendly, unhelpful, inflexible.  At the end of a month which had been exhausting in every possible way, this small and completely unselfish act of kindness made me feel just slightly better about not only the traveling lifestyle, but about the world we live in.

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.

About a month before the launch of this site, I started showing test versions to friends and soliciting their comments; no page received half as many as the bio. These were, ahem, wide-ranging, with “very amusing,” on one end of the spectrum, and “are you out of your stinking mind?” on the other. Thought-provokingly in the middle was the following: “I like your bio – but what on earth do you have against accountants??”

I should probably pay more attention to my friends, as the other day no less august a source than the CBC quoted me, eliciting this nettled but polite response. (I would take exception to the description of the Schumann and Grieg concerti as BORING, but I’m not really operating from a strong position here.)

So, the time has come to set the record straight: not only do I have nothing against accountants, I’m very grateful that they exist, doing work that is in fact both necessary and creative, and which, given the avalanche of papers I refer to rather optimistically as my “files,” clearly I have no aptitude for. (I might add that my grandfather was an accountant, but I fear that might have a certain “some of my best friends are jewish”/”not that there’s anything wrong with that” flavor.) And when I contemplate what I put my accountant through annually at tax time, I really have to wonder what I was thinking picking this fight…

So, for the profession-based bigotry, a sincere apology. And suggestions for how I might replace the sentence in question will be welcomed.

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.