International Piano

NO.35 JAN/FEB 2016

£5.50
www.international-piano.com

INSIDE
SHEET MUSIC
DIVISIVE GENIUS RICHARD RODNEY BENNETT
THREE MINIATURES
How will Horowitz PUBLISHED BY ALFRED MUSIC
SEE PAGE 55
be remembered?

WARSAW WIN
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

CONCERTOS A 50-CD box set

Poetry and panache
at the Chopin Competition
ENTENTE CORDIALE
Celebrating a new
generation of French
pianists in London
of Vladimir Horowitz
The Unreleased Live
Recordings 1966-83
Plus
Jonathan Plowright on
interpreting Brahms
Freddy Kempf’s
5 favourite discs

TAMARA Bebop pioneer

Elmo Hope

STEFANOVICH
Quiet revolutionary
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www.international-piano.com

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 CONTENTS

24 43

© MARCO BORGGREVE

© TULLY POTTER COLLECTION

61 86
© SONY MUSIC ENTERTAINMENT

Contents
5 EDITORIAL 40 PERSONAL TOUCH 72 LIVE REVIEWS SPECIAL FEATURES
Competition fever Jonathan Plowright An outstanding start to
challenges the status the London season 24 TOUCHING COMPLEXITY
6 LETTERS quo on Brahms Serbian-born pianist
Your thoughts and 74 DEBUT ON DISC Tamara Stefanovich
comments 43 SYMPOSIUM Sabine Weyer plays shares her passion for
Subtlety and excess in Debussy and Rameau music with the power to
9 NEWS & EVENTS the music of Messiaen irritate, shock and amaze
The latest updates from 75 NEW RELEASES
the piano world, plus 49 HELPING HANDS CDs, DVDs, sheet music 31 MUTUAL BENEFITS
IP’s pick of the best Conquering nerves We explore the volatile
summer courses in 2016 82 BOOKS yet often fruitful
51 MASTERCLASS Essays and lectures by relationship between
18 ONE TO WATCH Fruitful fingering Alfred Brendel composers and their
Competition veteran foremost interpreters
Lukas Geniušas 55 SHEET MUSIC 83 NEXT ISSUE
Three miniatures by Take a sneak peek at 35 À LA FRANÇAISE
21 COMMENT Richard Rodney Bennett next month’s issue Celebrating a new
Meaningless cliché: generation of French
‘internationally 66 WARSAW CONCERTOS 84 TAKE FIVE pianists in London
renowned’ Poetry and panache at Bebop pioneer
the Chopin Competition Elmo Hope 61 PLAYING WITH FIRE
23 DIARY OF AN Why the wild wizardry
ACCOMPANIST 70 EPIC CYCLE 86 MUSIC OF MY LIFE of Vladimir Horowitz
Michael Round Warren Mailley-Smith Freddy Kempf’s five continues to divide
prefers naturals on Chopin favourite discs critics

January/February 2016 International Piano 3

IPJF16_003_Contents0712OM.indd 3 08/12/2015 16:24
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Story CHOPIN Polonaise Héroïque · Revolutionary Etude BACH Badinerie · Toccata and Fugue · Goldberg Aria DEBUSSY Clair de Lune
SCHUMANN Träumerei RODRIGO Concierto de Aranjuez ELGAR Pomp and Circumstance SCHUBERT Ave Maria · Moment Musical no. 3
SHOSTAKOVICH Waltz no. 2 KHACHATURIAN Sabre Dance BIZET Carmen BRAHMS Lullaby MENDELSSOHN Wedding March · Spring Song
TCHAIKOVSKY Flower Waltz HAENDEL Hallelujah · Sarabande PIAZZOLA La Misma Pena RACHMANINOV Concerto no. 3 ADDINSELL
Warsaw Concerto ALBINONI Adagio PACHELBEL Canon RIMSKY-KORSAKOV/CZIFFRA The Flight of the Bumble Bee GERSHWIN
Liza STRAUSS II Tales from the Vienna Woods HILL Happy Birthday to you GRUBER Silent Night MASSENET Méditation (Thaïs)
DELIBES Coppélia MARCELLO Adagio SAINT-SAËNS The Swan VIVALDI The Four Seasons WEILL Die Dreigroschenoper WAGNER
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IPJF16.indd 4 11/12/2015 15:48:23
 Welcome
T
he latter part of 2015 proved a fruitful time Editor Owen Mortimer
for piano competitions, with three of the most Associate Editor Ashutosh Khandekar
important – Tchaikovsky, Leeds and Chopin – Head of Design & Production /
Designer Beck Ward Murphy
all falling within the space of a few months. The
Production Controller Gordon Wallis
Tchaikovsky, arguably the biggest of them all, took the Advertising Sales Edward Croome
lion’s share of publicity with record numbers of viewers Edward.Croome@rhinegold.co.uk
on the streaming channel Medici.tv, but the others also Marketing Manager Alfred Jahn
Managing Director Ciaran Morton
attracted widespread interest. Music blogs and online
Publisher Derek B Smith
forums were awash with speculation and debate about
Printed by Latimer Trend Ltd, Estover Road,
the juries’ decisions, while some questioned the whole Estover, Plymouth, Devon PL6 7PY
enterprise of competitions for placing too much Distributed by Comag Specialist Division
emphasis on technical perfection and flashy Tel: +44 (0)1895 433800
showmanship. Advertising
In our report from the 2015 Chopin Competition Tel: +44 (0)20 7333 1733
Fax: +44 (0)20 7333 1736
(page 66), Stephen Wigler digs deep into the mechanics of the voting system and
Production
provides an interesting analysis of what makes a winner. The devil proves to be in the
Tel: +44 (0)20 7333 1751
detail, confirming one of the most frequent criticisms of competitions: pianists with Fax: +44 (0)20 7333 1768
strong musical personalities are more likely to divide opinion and miss out on the top Editorial
prize. Pianists who are competent but lack flair tend to win competitions because they Tel: +44 (0)7824 884 882
achieve more consistent marks across the board from jurors. Just consider the list of past international.piano@rhinegold.co.uk
www.rhinegold.co.uk | www.international-piano.com
competitors who failed to win the Leeds but have gone on to enjoy big careers: Mitsuko Twitter: @IP_mag
Uchida, András Schiff, Boris Berezovsky, Lars Vogt, Louis Lortie, Kathryn Stott, Peter Subscriptions
Donohoe and Noriko Ogawa. Tel: +44 (0)1795 414 650
Whether the right people win or not, competitions have the virtue of keeping pianists internationalpiano@servicehelpline.co.uk
800 Guillat Avenue, Kent Science Park,
and the art of pianism in the public eye. In fact, some of their staunchest advocates are Sittingbourne, ME9 8GU, UK
young artists who need every opportunity to gain exposure and reach audiences. We No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
talk to the 25-year-old pianist Lukas Geniušas (page 18), who has been pipped to the post system or transmitted in any form or any means (electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior
twice in recent years – including the 2015 Tchaikovsky Competition – but says he keeps permission of Rhinegold Publishing Ltd. The views expressed here
are those of the authors and not of the publisher, editor, Rhinegold
on entering competitions to keep his career in the spotlight. Critics might regard this Publishing Ltd or its employees. We welcome letters but reserve
the right to edit for reasons of grammar, length and legality. No
approach as too self-promoting, but as Geniušas says: ‘I used to think we should be shy responsibility is accepted for returning photographs or manuscripts.
We cannot acknowledge or return unsolicited material.
about being too much “out there”, but then I realised this was false modesty, because we
International Piano, 977204207700507, is published bi-monthly by
have to do it for the art – to put the art out there too.’ Rhinegold Publishing, 20 Rugby Street, London, WC1N 3QZ, UK.

A
The US annual subscription price is US$83.00. Airfreight and mailing
in the USA by agent named Worldnet Shipping Inc., 156-15, 146th
pianist who needs no introduction is the eccentric virtuoso Vladimir Horowitz, Avenue, 2nd Floor, Jamaica, NY 11434, USA. Periodicals postage paid
at Jamaica NY 11431.
who has recently been celebrated with a new 50-CD box set from Sony Classical: US Postmaster: Send address changes to International Piano,

Vladimir Horowitz – The Unreleased Live Recordings 1966-83. This issue of IP

Worldnet Shipping Inc., 156-15, 146th Avenue, 2nd Floor, Jamaica,
NY 11434, USA
includes a fresh assessment of Horowitz’s genius, which continues to inspire intense Air Business Ltd is acting as our mailing agent.

rivalry between his advocates and critics. Bryce Morrison, who met Horowitz on several Editorial and image research services for International Piano are
provided by C Sharp LLP
occasions, offers a balanced appraisal of the man’s extraordinary artistry and personal
foibles. There’s also an opportunity for readers to win a copy of the mammoth box set –
details on page 64.
OWEN MORTIMER
EDITOR

© Copyright Rhinegold Publishing 2016

IP is available as an interactive
International Piano

NO.35 JAN/FEB 2016

£5.50

digital magazine from

www.international-piano.com

DIVISIVE GENIUS
INSIDE
SHEET MUSIC
RICHARD RODNEY BENNETT
International Piano is proud to be a
pocketmags.com, iTunes and
THREE MINIATURES
How will Horowitz PUBLISHED BY ALFRED MUSIC

media partner of the International

SEE PAGE 55
be remembered?

WARSAW WIN
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

CONCERTOS A 50-CD box set

of Vladimir Horowitz

GooglePlay – read on your

Poetry and panache
The Unreleased Live

Piano Series at Southbank Centre

at the Chopin Competition Recordings 1966-83
ENTENTE CORDIALE Plus
Celebrating a new
Jonathan Plowright on
generation of French interpreting Brahms

iPad, iPhone, Android device,

pianists in London
Freddy Kempf’s
5 favourite discs

TAMARA Bebop pioneer

Elmo Hope

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Quiet revolutionary
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January/February 2016 International Piano 5

IPJF16_005_Editorial_0812OM.indd 5 11/12/2015 17:08:40

LETTERS
Write to International Piano, 20 Rugby Street, London, WC1N 3QZ, email
international.piano@rhinegold.co.uk or tweet @IP_mag. Star letters will receive
a free CD from Hyperion’s best-selling Romantic Piano Concerto series
A GIFT TO THE WORLD
In your CD reviews last summer (IP
July/August 2015, page 70), Jeremy
Siepmann states that Anatole Kitain
had a ‘miniaturist mentality’. I wish to
provide some historic context for the discs
reviewed by Mr Siepmann.
In 1927 because of Russia’s civil war,
the Kitain family crossed from Siberia
to China. It took three years travelling
without passports to reach Paris. In
Russia, aged nine, Kitain had performed
Beethoven’s first concerto with conductor
Alexander Orlov, and in 1933 Kitain was
a prizewinner at the International Franz
Liszt Piano Competition. Before leaving
Paris, he performed dozens of times in
London and Paris. In late 1940, he fled Paris,
hours ahead of Nazi soldiers. His younger
brother, denied an exit visa was murdered
at Auschwitz – at that time no one wanted
Russian Jews, including France and the UK.
Imagine yourself being a refugee for
28 years, moving constantly, and forced
to obtain entrance/exit visas sub rosa, by
bribing corrupt officials!
In 1947, Kitain became a US citizen. He
lived in Mexico with his family 1956-63
and performed all over Latin America.
From 1963-76 Kitain gave a series of
recitals and taught masterclasses in San
Francisco. In his final recital in September
1976 Kitain included Beethoven’s Op 111
and Mozart’s K333 sonatas.
To the very end of his life, Kitain cherished
his award from the first Liszt Competition
and a letter of congratulations from
Rachmaninov. He died in the arms of his
lover Pina Antonelli in 1980.
During his life Kitain performed over 500
recitals in cities all over the world. Starting
in 1941, he gave 14 recitals in Carnegie
Hall, never repeating a programme. Major
critics at that time had superb praise for his
performances (for example, read Noel Straus
of the New York Times, Jerome D. Bohm and
the great critic Virgil Thomson.)
Kitain’s teachers placed him in the
6 International Piano January/February 2016
IPJF16_006_Letters_0612OM.indd 6
LETTERS
same class as Horowitz, Barere, Brailowsky
and Uninsky. He routinely performed
Rachmaninov’s concertos, including the
D minor, plus Beethoven’s last sonatas – so
never had ‘a miniaturist mentality!’
Furthermore, any review of classical
music which invokes rabbits can’t be
taken seriously. Did the author mean
to be flippant? Kitain, Horowitz and
Rachmaninov were heroes who raised us
up. That was their gift to the world. De
mortuis nil nisi bonum!
Dr David A Welsh, Blackrock, Sacramento,
US. Former agent for Anatole Kitain
CRITICAL PERSPECTIVE
Bryce Morrison, in his review of Fanny
Waterman’s book My Life in Music
(IP November/December 2015, page
86), overstates his case (and somewhat
belittles the Leeds by the way). I would
not disagree that Fanny Waterman can
come over as somewhat overbearing and
her view of the Leeds (her ‘baby’) would
obviously be protective of her legacy.
However, sweeping statements such as
‘Leeds glory days … are long past, and the
majority of First Prize-winners have sunk
without trace’ and ‘the Leeds is certainly
far from negligible but in the long time
it is surely peripheral’ are overstating the
position. Certainly, it is true that some of
the finalists have gone on to enjoy bigger
reputations than the First Prize-winners
(eg Mitsuko Uchida, András Schiff, Boris
Berezovsky, Peter Donohoe, Noriko
Ogawa, Louis Lortie, Kathryn Stott and
Lars Vogt). However, not all the more
recent winners have ‘sunk without trace’:
Artur Pizarro, Alessio Bax and Sunwook
Kim, for example, have all developed
reasonable if not growing reputations.
Others like Louis Schwizgebel have
benefitted from the extra exposure of the
BBC’s New Generation Artists scheme.
It remains to be seen how things change
in the post-Waterman era, but the Leeds
Competition has built a reputation,
SPONS OR ED BY
H Y PER ION R EC OR DS
rightly or wrongly, for choosing real
musicians over technical brilliance.
Witness this year’s final, in which Vitaly
Pisarenko gave a towering and pretty well
faultless performance of Rachmaninov’s
third concerto whereas the winner’s
Brahms Concerto No 2 was not totally
faultless, although still very impressive.
I think the only thing we will all
agree on is to disagree with one or more
judgements of the jury.
John Greenaway, via email
Bryce Morrison replies:
Many thanks for your response and
your understandable wish for a more
generous view of things. I can only say
that, having been a jury member of over
50 international piano competitions, I am
experienced in the many problems – their
ups and downs, their joys and sorrows
– that competitions represent. I have no
desire to ‘belittle Leeds’, but winning such
a widely publicised event is not without
its dangers. Federico Colli’s euphoria
on his triumph is understandable, for
example, but saying that he now has the
musical world in his hands would be
wishful thinking.
I am more than aware that true gold
often lies further down the list and the
careers of great artists such as Uchida,
Brendel and Schiff tell their own tale.
The formation of a responsible jury
is tricky. A closed circle of mutually
appointed jury members is an unpleasant
reality (the late Claude Frank referred
to ‘jury tarts’) and star pianists do not
necessarily make for a good or balanced
line-up. My own jury colleagues
have included Ashkenazy and Lazar
Berman who behaved in a way that was
unacceptable.
I should add that I have known Fanny
Waterman as a colleague (we were jury
members together in Japan), both at her
most limited and abrasive, as well as at her
most shrewd and affectionate.
07/12/2015 12:09
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Anun_InternationalPiano_2015_Layout 1 9/23/15 4:53 PM Page 1

5TH BNDES INTERNATIONAL

PIANO COMPETITION
RIO DE JANEIRO - BRAZIL
Tribute to LUCIA BRANCO and CAMARGO GUARNIERI
November 30 – December 10, 2016
Total amount of prizes BRL 280,000.00
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in Brazil, USA and Europe

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2014 edition winners – from left to right: Daria Kiseleva (1st prize),
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IPJF16.indd 8 11/12/2015 15:48:24

 NEWS & EVENTS

news events
BARENBOIM CELEBRATES 60 YEARS ON THE WORLD STAGE
D
ANIEL BARENBOIM WILL BE

© CHRIS CHRISTODOLOU
celebrating the 60th anniversary
of his historic London debut
when he makes an appearance at this
year’s International Orchestral Series at
the Southbank on 17 January. Barenboim
returns to the stage where, aged 13, he
launched his career in 1956. He will be
performing both of Brahms’ piano concertos
with Gustavo Dudamel and the Simón
Bolívar Symphony Orchestra, the first time
they have all performed together in the UK.
Barenboim has strong associations
with London’s Southbank Centre: over
the past 60 years he has appeared at the
Royal Festival Hall, Queen Elizabeth Hall
Daniel Barenboim performs for a full
and Purcell Room as a pianist, conductor,
house at London’s Southbank Centre
chamber musician and festival curator.
His most recent appearance featured a
sold-out three-month residency during Royal Festival Hall foyer is mounting an the venue was just five years old and over
the spring when he launched a new piano, exhibition over the anniversary weekend. the past 60 years, I have made thousands
drawing audiences of over 18,000. To mark Daniel Barenboim said: ‘I first of wonderful memories there.’
this relationship, the Archive Studio in the performed at the Royal Fes­tival Hall when www.danielbarenboim.com

STEINWAY LAUNCHES NEW DESIGNER PIANO

A
Ma
NEW STEINWAY PIANO crystal maker Lalique. The new model, most talented designers and artists have ap
ed
has been launched to mark its called Heliconia, continues a century-old worked with Steinway & Sons to create a
association with the French tradition whereby some of the world’s unique and striking range of pianos.
The Heliconia piano celebrates the
craftsmanship of Steinway & Sons and
the design traditions of Lalique. The
Heliconia flower is a signature piece
originally created by Marie-Claude
Lalique, granddaughter of René Lalique.
The 75 Lalique crystals that decorate
each piano are all pressed, fashioned,
cut, engraved, polished and signed at the
Lalique factory in Alsace; each crystal is
then carefully placed on every individual
piano at the Steinway factory in Hamburg.
© STEINWAY & SONS

The design of the Heliconia flower is

Putting the finishing touches to
Steinway’s new Heliconia
a combination of crystals and metal
incrustations and can be found on the lid,
the legs and the case of the piano.
www.steinway.com

January/February 2016 International Piano 9

IPJF16_009_News.indd 9 08/12/2015 10:44

ARGERICH AWARDED RPS GOLD MEDAL
© CLIVE BARDA
Martha Argerich with
RPS chairman John Gilhooly
CLEVELAND COMPETITION DIRECTOR RECEIVES TOP INDUSTRY AWARD
C
LEVELAND INTERNATIONAL
Piano Competition President and
CEO Pierre van der Westhuizen
has been named as a 2015 ‘Musical America
Influencer’ and will be profiled in Musical
America’s special report entitled Key
Industry Influencers – Professionals of the Year.
Musical America Professionals of the Year
are chosen for their qualities as innovators
and movers and shakers in the arts.
© CIPC
Van der Westhuizen, himself a concert
pianist who features in the Westhuizen
Piano Duo with his wife Sophié, is president
and CEO of the Cleveland International
Piano Competition, a position he has held
since 2012. Celebrating its 40th anniversary
this year, the influential Competition now
includes a major festival featuring guest
artist concerts, films, roundtable discussions,
and social events — all part of van der
Westhuizen’s vision to expand the event
beyond the competition performance hall
10 International Piano January/Febriary 2016
IPJF16_010_News_0712BWM.indd 10
NEWS & EVENTS
and provide engaging programming that
appeals to a broad-based audience.
The Cleveland International Piano
Competition runs from 24 July to 7 August
2016. All rounds take place at the Cleveland
Museum of Art, culminating in the concerto
finals with The Cleveland Orchestra at
Severance Hall. www.clevelandpiano.org
Pierre van der Westhuizen
IN
The G
M
crown
ARTHA ARGERICH HAS in Lon
been awarded the prestigious artistry
J Strau
Royal Philharmonic Society’s Ander
Gold Medal, its highest honour presented record
for outstanding musicianship. She joins a Maria
select group of recipients including Brahms, Piano
Richard Strauss, Stravinsky and Bernstein. www.
RPS chairman John Gilhooly presented
On 27
the pianist with the award at Wigmore of Bea
Hall on 2 November, announcing the Piano
RPS’s citation which says: ‘Martha Pappa
Argerich’s combination of technical Cecilia
couple
mastery and passionate artistry make
has be
her one of the most compelling and Prokofi
expressive pianists, and her extraordinary www.
live performances are a musical and
intellectual tour de force.’ Vladim
Serge
Argerich is the 101st recipient since the
who ta
Medal was founded in 1870 to mark the Russia
centenary of Beethoven’s birth. Current compl
RPS Gold Medallists include Janet Baker, he fou
Daniel Barenboim, Pierre Boulez, Bernard www.
Haitink, Nikolaus Harnoncourt, György
Kurtág, Simon Rattle, András Schiff,
Mitsuko Uchida and Antonio Pappano.
www.royalphilharmonicsociety.org.uk
NEW KEYBOARD HEAD AT TRINITY
LABAN CONSERVATOIRE
L
ONDON’S TRINITY LABAN
Conservatoire of Music & Dance
has appointed Peter Tuite as its
new head of keyboard studies. He succeeds
Deniz Gelenbe, who will continue to teach
at the Conservatoire.
Tuite comes to Trinity Laban from the
Royal Irish Academy of Music, where
he was head of the keyboard faculty
and then senior dean. He has recently
finished making a new film of the Goldberg
Variations in the Long Room Library at
Trinity College Dublin. Future projects
include the recording and filming of the
complete Haydn sonatas for keyboard and
a new series of compositions based on
short portraits of Dublin.
He joins a department including
Margaret Fingerhut, Pascal Rogé, Elena
Riu, Steven Devine and Eugene Asti.
www.trinitylaban.ac.uk
08/12/2015 16:28
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Karen Taylor and David Cartledge,
Directors

June 26 – July 16, 2016

Grades 7 through 12
Hans Boepple, Sean Chen, Read Gainsford,
Jean-Louis Haguenauer, Joseph Kalichstein,
Emile Naoumoff, Menahem Pressler,
Karen Shaw, and more.

Office of Pre-College
and Summer Programs
musicsp@indiana.edu
812-855-6025

music.indiana.edu/precollege/summer/piano

IPJF16.indd 12 11/12/2015 15:48:26

 NEWS & EVENTS

TURECK AND CURTIS INSTITUTE IN NEW MERGER

H

© TULLY POTTER COLLECTION

ONOURING THE LEGACY
of the great Bach interpreter
Rosalyn Tureck, the Curtis
Institute of Music has acquired the Tureck
Bach Research Institute, which has gifted
its assets and intellectual property rights
to the school.
Founded by Rosalyn Tureck (1913–
2003), the Bach Research Institute holds
materials amassed over an 80-year career,
including manuscripts of essays, books,
correspondence and other documents, as
well as recordings of her live performances,
lectures, and masterclasses. These archives
will remain housed at Boston University’s
Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center
and the New York Public Library for the
Performing Arts.
President of the Tureck Institute, Kevin
Kleinmann, said: ‘Curtis was the perfect
choice for us. As a world-renowned
institution of higher musical learning,
it embodies all of the required criteria
and vision that will enable it to carry on
the goals of the Tureck Bach Research Rosalyn Tureck (1913-2003)
Institute.’
Inaugurating a series of pubic events marking the culmination of celebrated
dedicated to the legacy of Rosalyn Tureck, pedagogue Miriam Fried’s 2015/16 LID SHUTS ON HISTORIC
Curtis will be presenting recital featuring residency at the Curtis Institute. COLLECTION OF PIANOS

O
an all-Bach programme on 12 February, www.tureckbach.com
NE OF THE WORLD’S
greatest collections of historic
pianos will be undergoing a
RINA SALA GALLO INTERNATIONAL PIANO COMPETITION major shake-up following the closure of
The Rina Sala Gallo Association has announced that the 24th International Piano Finchcock’s Musical Museum, housed in
Competition will take place from 25 September to 2 October 2016 at Teatro Manzoni in a Grade I-listed Georgian manor house in
Monza, Italy. Applications for this biennial competition can be submitted online at Goudhurst, Kent.
www.concorsosalagallo.it from 15 January until 10 April 2016.
Katrina Burnett, 78, who has been at the
helm of the musical hub with her concert
Vovka Ashkenazy remains artistic director of the event, while musicologist and artistic
director Enzo Restagno will serve as jury chairman. La Verdi Orchestra will perform with the pianist husband Richard for over four
soloists in the final concerto round and at the winners’ concert on 2 October 2016. decades, said, ‘I think 45 years is a good
innings. It’s getting harder to keep the
Prizes include money and grants to the value of €31,500 and a series of concerts in Italy’s place up – it’s a big job’.
leading venues and most important classical music seasons. A smaller collection of the finest
instruments will be kept together with its
Rina Sala Gallo (1898-1980) began her career as a concert pianist aged 10, winning charitable status intact, enabling events to
immediate international acclaim. In 1947, together with Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli continue for the Friends of Finchcocks. The
and a host of other leading Italian musicians, she established her own piano competition rest of the collection will be sold at auction
in Monza. Since 2009, the Competition has been a member of the World Federation of
in May. ‘We have got a wonderful team of
International Music Competitions.
musicians who can play and teach on these
Complete rules, requirements and all rounds’ detailed programmes can be found at remarkable instruments, and we are keeping
www.concorsosalagallo.it the team together,’ explained Katrina Burnett.
www.finchcocks.co.uk

January/February 2016 International Piano 13

IPJF16_013_News_0712BWM.indd 13 08/12/2015 10:13

summer courses
From the beginner to the aspiring professional,
there’s a piano summer course to suit every need.
IP introduces some highlights of this year’s crop
UK
Chetham’s International Summer School
and Festival for Pianists
Open to all ages from Grade 1 to concert
standard, this one-week residential
course in Manchester includes at least
two concerts every evening, plus lectures,
workshops and intensive one-to-one
teaching from an outstanding team of
performers and teachers. Participants
have access to over 100 state-of-the-art
practice rooms. Other highlights include
performing and CD opportunities, a young
pianists’ programme, harpsichord, jazz,
composition, adult amateur, duet, organ,
sight-reading and improvisation courses.
Dates: 12 to 18 & 18 to 24 August 2016
Fees: From £295 (a limited number of scholarships are +44 (0)7986 807376; +33 2 31 63 12 63; MacKenzie Awards.
available); daily observer rate £50 normandypianocourses@hotmail.com
+44 (0)1625 266899
info@pianosummerschool.com
www.pianosummerschool.com
PIANO TEACHERS’
COURSE EPTA UK
The Piano Teachers’ Course run by
EPTA (European Piano Teachers
Association) equips piano teachers
with the full range of professional skills
needed for a successful career, together
with the opportunity to connect with
an inspiring and informative network
of pianists. It provides excellent
preparation for all piano teaching
diplomas, including those from the
ABRSM, Trinity Guildhall and London
College, through exposure to the latest
in piano teaching pedagogy. It is a
part-time course lasting one academic
year from October to June, consisting
of three residential weekends, three
single Sundays and independent study
spread throughout the year. The course
is held at the Purcell School of Music in
Hertfordshire, UK.
Dates: October 2016 to June 2017
Fees: £2,450 including accommodation and meals
+44 (0)7831 164430 The historic village of Montefalcone
info@pianoteacherscourse.co.uk
www.pianoteacherscourse.org Music Holidays Italy
14 International Piano January/February 2016
IPJF16_014_Listings_0812OM.indd 14
NEWS & EVENTS
EUROPE
Jersey International Festival
for Amateur Pianists tuition; guest fee £850
This residential course for amateur pianists
takes place annually at the Jersey Academy
of Music on the Channel Islands. It offers
serious pianists the ideal environment in
which to develop their playing and gain
freedom at the piano. The curriculum
includes an introduction to the piano
method of Alfred Cortot. Ample practice
facilities are available all day – one piano
per person and lots of possibilities to
perform. Closing concert to be recorded by
BBC Radio Jersey.
Dates: 29 May to 5 June 2016
Fees: £325 to 975 in the festival’s internal competition, the
www.normandypianocourses.com Fees: $950 for participants
Music Holiday Italy
Music Holiday Italy is for pianists who
love music, sunshine and Italy. Amateur
pianists, teachers and students are given
the opportunity to learn from colleagues
in an inspirational, relaxed setting. The
provides a breathtaking setting for
informal one-week courses run from April
to October at Montemuse, deep in the heart
of the Apennine mountains near Macerata.
The atmosphere is non-competitive,
and there is no minimum standard to
participate: if you enjoy learning through
collaboration and shared experience and
want to perform for a supportive and
informed audience, whether you have
just passed Grade 5 or are aiming for a
diploma, you will have something valuable
to contribute.
Dates: April to October
Fees: £1,000 for group courses, £2,000 for one-to-one
www.musicholidayitaly.com
NORTH AMERICA
International Keyboard Institute
and Festival
IKIF features masterclasses, concerts and
lectures on the art of the piano aimed at
intermediate to advanced players. All events
take place at Hunter College in New York
City, including 28 daytime and evening
concerts. Institute participants can compete
Dates: 18 July to 2 August 2015
+1 212 665 2446
info@ikif.org
www.ikif.org
ASIA
Morningside Music Bridge
Morningside Music Bridge is a summer
classical music training programme for
advanced piano, violin, viola, cello and
clarinet students aged 12 to 18. Each year,
60 young musicians from around the world
gather to learn from top international
instructors, perform in memorable public
venues, participate in prestigious concerto
and chamber music competitions and
bond with one another through the shared
experience of making music. Celebrating
its 20th year, the 2016 Morningside Music
Bridge will be held in Beijing, China.
For further information on the 2016
programme, audition requirements
and how to apply, contact info@mmb.
international
Dates: 4 to 29 July 2016
Fees: Students are admitted on a full scholarship basis
+1 403 440 6768
info@mmb.international
www.mtroyal.ca/musicbridge
10/12/2015 15:00:37
 JUNE 19–25, 2016
Fort Worth, Texas USA
For outstanding, non-professional
pianists age 35 and older

OLGA KERN, jury chairman

Final Round performances with the
Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra
Jacomo Rafael Bairos, conductor

ELIGIBILITY AND REPERTOIRE REQUIREMENTS AT CLIBURN.ORG

APPLICATIONS DUE MARCH 1, 2016 • TICKETS ON SALE FEBRUARY 2016

Amateur2016_InternationalPiano_Jan2016.indd 1 12/1/15 12:21 PM

IPJF16.indd 15 11/12/2015 15:48:26

FACULTY NEWS
ESLARN, GERMANY
Biermeir arrives at the Bruckner
Musikschule
The Anton-Bruckner-Musikschule Eslarn
has announced the hiring of Sven Biermeier
as piano, keyboard and organ instructor
After studies with Klara Bäumler,
Biermeier honed his piano skills with Ruth
Kern at the Vocational School for Music
in Sulzbach-Rosenberg. He followed this
by preparing with Rudolf Ramming at
the Hochschule für Musik Würzburg.
Much interested in lied accompaniment,
Biermeier performs regularly with the
bass-baritone Elias Wolf.
MARKDORF, GERMANY
Popular repertoire given a boost
Hubertus Conrady has joined the
Musikschule Markdorf to teach popular
piano repertoire, including jazz, rock,
pop and improvisation. Born in 1963 in
Hildesheim, Conrady has worked with
Peter von Wienhardt, Jörg Schweinbenz,
and Philipp Moerke, among others. He
recently told the Südkurier newspaper: ‘For
me there is no strict separation between
musical styles; fingering and articulation
apply to both classical and jazz…You have
to invest a lot of time – without practice,
the music just does not make sense.’
EAST LANSING,
MICHIGAN, US
Chinese professor joins MSU
Haobing Zhu has been named adjunct
assistant professor of piano at the MSU
College of Music. She continues to teach
as assistant professor of piano at the music
college of Shanghai Normal University.
A student of Jianzhong Wang at the
Shanghai Conservatory of Music, Haobing
earned a master of music degree in piano
performance with Wha Kyung Byun at
the New England Conservatory of Music.
Studying with Deborah Moriarty, Haobing
went on to receive a doctor of musical
arts degree at Michigan State University.
She recently recorded a CD of traditional
piano music by Wang Jianzhong (b. 1933),
a composer who like all fellow musicians
16 International Piano January/February 2016
IPJF16_016_R_FacultyNews_0612OM.indd 16
EDUC AT ION
© MICHIGAN STATE UNIVERSITY
Haobing Zhu
endured much suffering during the Maoist
Cultural Revolution.
COLUMBUS, GEORGIA, US
Pianist named new lecturer of music
Columbus State University has announced
the appointment of the pianist Beibei
Lin as lecturer of music. Lin is a doctoral
candidate in piano performance at
Florida State University, where she works
with Heidi Louise Williams. Born in
Guangzhou, China, Lin grew up in
Wichita, Kansas and earned a master’s of
music in piano pedagogy and performance
at Florida State University, following a
bachelor of music in piano performance
degree from Arizona State University
where she studied with Walter Cosand.
BOULDER, COLORADO, US
Juilliard-trained pianist joins faculty
Jennifer Hayghe recently joined the faculty of
the University of Colorado Boulder College
of Music. Hayghe holds bachelor’s and
master’s degrees from the Juilliard School of
Music as a pupil of Adele Marcus. Previously
employed by the School of Music at New
York’s Ithaca College, Hayghe has recorded
a CD of visually inspired compositions,
Paintings from the Piano (Centaur).
PIANISTS REMEMBERED
Thelma Hunter
The American pianist Thelma Hunter died
on 18 August aged 90, leaving a teaching
and performing legacy that spanned over
six decades. She joined the University
of Minnesota piano faculty in 1947 and
remained on the school’s advisory council
until last year. Born in New York City to a
Norwegian immigrant family – her mother
Thordis Emile was a pianist and vocal coach
– Hunter performed in Carnegie Hall as
a five-year-old prodigy. At 10, she toured
Norway with her younger brother, Robert,
a violinist, giving 26 concerts in a month.
Coached by Percy Grainger, she studied
with Egon Petri at Cornell University. An
obituary notice in the Minneapolis Star
Tribune observed: ‘[Hunter] never stopped
practicing the piano and was well known
to her family and friends as someone you
might find at all hours, seated at the piano
in her basement, glasses poised on her
nose, buried in her music as she prepared
for yet another upcoming performance.’
George Brough
A mainstay of the collaborative pianist
faculty at Canada’s Banff Centre for over
40 summers and a teacher at the University
of Toronto from 1965 to 1990, the pianist
George Brough died on 15 September aged
97. Born in Boston, UK, Brough thrived
in Canada as an accompanist for such star
musicians as Heinz Holliger, Gervase de
Peyer, Henri Temianka and Jon Vickers.
Brough’s recordings include a 1973 studio
version of Dohnányi’s Violin Sonata with
the violinist David Zafer. An obituary in
the Toronto Star paid tribute to Brough’s
‘natural ability to make musical sense on
sight of any score put in front of him, no
matter how diverse or difficult, which
made him a much appreciated and sought-
after colleague; his natural quiet charm
earned the affection of many.’
BENJAMIN IVRY
08/12/2015 12:24
 INTERNATIONAL
KEYBOARD
INSTITUTE &
FESTIVAL
NEW YORK CITY

HUNTER COLLEGE
Concerts in The Kaye Playhouse and Lang Recital Hall

Concerts, Lectures & Masterclasses

PARTICIPANTS MAY COMPETE FOR

$10,000 USD MACKENZIE SCHOLARSHIP AWARDS

Programs, Schedule, Application, & Inquiries

www.ikif.org info@ikif.org

IPJF16.indd 17 11/12/2015 15:48:26

 O N E T O WAT C H
Winner takes it all
Aged 25, the Lithuanian-Russian piano virtuoso Lukas Geniušas is
already a veteran of major competitions. He explains to Ismene Brown
that in a media-driven world, such events provide an important
platform for career-building and public recognition
W
HAT PART DOES WINNING A COMPETITION
play in building a rewarding career? The question is
fierily debated whenever the great contests come round
– never more so than in the past few months with the coincidence
of the Tchaikovsky, Chopin and Leeds piano competitions.
One young pianist is going about quietly succeeding, both in
competitions and in building a concert reputation: among the
artists presented in the Southbank Centre’s current International
Piano Series is the 25-year-old Lithuanian-Russian Lukas Geniušas.
Geniušas’s track record in competitions is impressive: joint
second in last year’s Tchaikovsky; second in the 2010 Chopin; and
winner of that year’s Gina Bachauer Competition. Although aged
only 19 when he entered the latter two, Geniušas was already a
veteran of the Russian piano school. He is the third-generation
scion of a piano dynasty. His mother Xenia Knorre teaches at the
Moscow Conservatoire, his father Petras Geniušas has taught at the
Wholly cultured:
Lukas Geniušas
18 International Piano January/February 2016
IPJF16_018_R_OnetoWatch_0612OM.indd 18
Royal Academy of Music, and his grandmother Vera Gornostayeva
was for 56 years a leading professor at the Moscow Conservatoire
(Ivo Pogorelich was one of her students).
Gornostayeva, who died last January aged 85, was a student of
Heinrich Neuhaus, the legendary tutor of Sviatoslav Richter and
Emil Gilels. It felt natural, says her grandson, that she should
take over supervision of his piano studies when he was 12. She
transmitted to him Neuhaus’s imperative for a pianist to be ‘wholly
cultured’, in literature and art as well as all kinds of music. This,
says Geniušas, is really what the ‘Russian Piano School’ stands for
– though he points out that in fact, the approach was formulated
by Germans and Jews, namely Neuhaus, Alexander Goldenweiser,
and Samuel Feinberg.
‘My grandmother brought me up culturally,’ says Geniušas. ‘She
was something of an expert in Russian literature, and she would
speak about music in terms of poetry, and vice versa. This was
08/12/2015 12:22
 O N E T O WAT C H
Neuhaus’s signature style, the integration of literature and music. I
think it’s helpful to have a world of the imagination, a metaphorical
world of poetry in mind when speaking about music, and to apply
these worlds to making music.’
Lithuanian, with German and Polish roots, Geniušas still
describes himself as immersed in the Russian tradition, aiming to
unite both the technical grandeur and the fantasy that has been
taken for granted in that country’s pianists since the Soviet heydays
of Gilels and Richter.
On entering the Tchaikovsky Competition last summer (where
he was bumped out of first place by a much less experienced
pianist, Dmitry Masleev), he already had a satisfactorily full diary
of engagements all around the world, including the IPS recital in
London. Nevertheless, the young Lithuanian explains soberly that
competitions are essential in building a career these days, even
given the risk of not winning: ‘You might think because I have so
many engagements that I don’t need competitions any more, and
it might seem greedy for me to enter one again, but I don’t agree.
Our profession requires that we keep reminding society about
ourselves to get performances, which is why I enter competitions
again and again. The Tchaikovsky was in fact quite a stimulus to
new concerts, although I was having a busy year already, thanks to
Chopin 2010. This autumn, following the Tchaikovsky, I’ve played
around 25 concerts: five different concertos, two different recital
programmes, three chamber concerts…’
Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, artistic director
Ingrid Fliter | Nelson Freire | Marc-Andre Hamelin
Bertrand Chamayou | Joachim Carr | Lofoten Festival Strings
Engegard Quartet | Johannes Weisser, baryton
Dates: July 11 - July 17 2016
www.lofotenfestival
See our web pages for our festival package of lodging and tickets
IPJF16_018_R_OnetoWatch_0612OM.indd 19
Geniušas has changed his mind about the need for self-
promotion: ‘I used to think we should be shy about being too
much “out there”, but then I realised this was fake modesty, because
we have to do that for the art, in a way, to put the art out there too.’
His International Piano Series recital fields a conservative
programme of Beethoven, Brahms and Bartók, together with that
calling-card of all Russian pianists, Prokofiev’s seventh sonata.
Geniušas has described himself as a conservative of a ‘positive kind’,
but he wishes he were powerful enough in the market to insist on
playing his beloved Hindemith, or recent Russian piano music by
Leonid Desyatnikov.
‘Desyatnikov is a dominant influence for me,’ Geniušas explains.
‘He is an exceptional personality and a fantastic talent. I’ve
recorded his music – mostly the lighter side of his work. I devised
a programme of three Russian contemporary composers, calling
it Emancipation of Consonance, in reaction to Schoenberg’s treatise
from the 1920s on the ‘emancipation of dissonance’. It’s all about
restoring melody, and about modern composers exploring their
links with a classical repertoire – a Soviet popular tradition, a
Russian folk tradition. It’s not easy to sell, even in Russia, and I’m
not sure that the time has come for me to dictate my repertoire to
international promoters. That’s a sad reality.’ e
Lucas Geniušas will appear as part of the International Piano Series on
12 January at St John’s Smith Square, London. http://geniusas.com
January/February 2016 International Piano 19
08/12/2015 12:22
 Senior Competition (18-30 years old)
March 27th to April 2nd, 2017
Palm Desert, California USA
Solo and Concerto Divisions plus Master Classes - Concerto Finals with Orchestra
Application Deadline / Oct. 15, 2016
Application materials and other details at www.vwipc.org / 760-773-2575
Over $35,000 in prize money plus performance opportunities.

June
12-19 2016
GUEST ARTISTS
SERGEI BABAYAN
ANN SCHEIN
JULIAN MARTIN
JASON KWAK
SOYEON LEE AND RAN DANK
ERIC LU

Marina Lomazov, Artistic Director

Joseph Rackers, Program Director

and
Arthur Fraser
International Piano Competition
southeasternpianofestival.com

IPJF16.indd 20 11/12/2015 15:48:27


Order of merit
Pianists are often
called ‘internationally
renowned’ when in
fact they are nothing
of the kind. Jeremy
Nicholas pleads for
credit only where it
is really due
J OURNALISTS
newspapers
ON
cannot
NATIONAL
always
relied upon to have an extensive
be
knowledge of classical music. This gap
means that they will habitually reach for
an adjective to describe an individual
that is more colourful than merited.
‘Opera singer Kathleen Jenkins’ and
‘Classical singer Russell Watson’ are
routine instances of the kind of thing
I mean.
I spotted another example in the
obituary of Margaret, Lady FitzWalter,
who died in September at the grand old
age of 92. The introduction told us that she
‘gave up a promising career as a pianist to
help her husband restore his historic family
home’. We learned that having developed a
passion for the piano as a teenager, ‘in 1942
she gained a place at the Royal Academy
of Music in London, passing out as LRAM
[sic] in 1947. From this date she was taught
by the renowned German concert pianist,
Franz Osborn. Music was to remain a
passion for Margaret FitzWalter; she
would perform with friends or accompany
talented young musicians in exams’.
Well, good for her ladyship; but
‘passing out as LRAM’ is not going to
lead anywhere close to ‘a promising
career as a pianist’, nor did she seem very
determined to pursue that course. She
married, had five sons and, as we’ve seen,
devoted her energies to her husband’s no
doubt admirable conservationist agenda.
Meanwhile, it is surely stretching things
IPJF16_021_R_Comment_0612OM.indd 21
COMMENT
to describe Franz Osborn as ‘renowned’.
True, he was a talented student of Artur
Schnabel but he scarcely had a career of
sufficiently high profile or distinction
to be put in the same exalted category as
his teacher.
In the case of an obituary, the
misattributions very often derive from
friends or family. ‘Oh, so-and so could have
been a concert pianist,’ they say proudly to
each other. No, so-and-so couldn’t. So-and-
so never had the talent or commitment or
burning desire or whatever else it takes
to be a concert pianist. So-and-so simply
played the piano and enjoyed doing it –
perhaps to a very high standard – but never
in a million years could be described as a
concert pianist. Not even manqué.
There are many Lady FitzWalters in
our society. In Margin Released, his book
of reminiscences and reflections, J B
Priestley calls the last chapter ‘I Had the
Time’ because of ‘the hundreds of people
who have told me [during the past 30 years
or so] they could write a good novel, play,
book of essays, if only they had the time.
Artur Schnabel:
worthy of the epithet
‘internationally renowned’
January/February 2016 International Piano
Well,’ writes Priestley, ‘I had the time.’
In August the papers told us of the tragic
death of Natalia Strelchenko: ‘The partner
of a world-renowned concert pianist
has been arrested after she was found
battered to death.’ Was Ms. Strelchenko
world-renowned? Google says so: ‘Natalia
Strelchenko was a world-renowned
Norwegian concert pianist.’ What, like
Leif Ove Andsnes? Clearly not. She was
an interesting and very talented pianist,
beginning to make a name for herself in
a crowded marketplace when she was
murdered. Her death was an appalling and
disturbing event, but ‘the world of classical
music’ did not pay tribute to her, as the
Daily Mail suggested, for the simple reason
that she was still virtually unknown and
had yet to earn the ‘international respect’
the newspaper accorded her.
How do these over-inflated soubriquets
become attached to musicians?
Artists exaggerate their reputations
on their own websites. Agents have
been known to inflate the credentials
of their clients (yes, honestly!).
‘Internationally famous /
renowned’ is usually a label
applied to a name by an
abysmally lazy journalist
who thinks the words
‘international’, ‘famous’,
‘concert’ and ‘pianist’ are
somehow inseparable. Cut
and paste from Wikipedia –
job done. No wonder, since
to some journalists brought
up on a diet of The X Factor
and Britain’s Got Talent,
anyone who can play Für
Elise from memory must be a
concert pianist.
Using these adjectives
inaccurately devalues them.
They should be reserved for
a chosen few. ‘Internationally
© TULLY POTTER COLLECTION
renowned’ belongs to the likes
of Horowitz, Kissin, Argerich
and Lang Lang. ‘Concert
pianist’ should be applied
solely to those who make their
living by playing classical
works on the piano. e
21
07/12/2015 12:18
 Hosted by

March 4-11
Fri 4 1.10pm Alexander Ullman piano recital
Fri 4 7.30pm The David Rees-Williams Trio
Sat 5 2pm CONC
E
Y
FAMIL RT
When Yesterday we Met... Storytelling
through song

Sat 5 7.30pm Benny Goodman & Glenn Miller

at Carnegie Hall 1939
Wed 9 7.30pm Angela Hewitt piano recital
Fri 11 7.30pm BBC Philharmonic with Martin Roscoe

ious
hilar
G
MOVIN
PROFOUND
www.birminghampianofestival.com

Music Chapel
59 young artists in residence
22 different nationalities MuCH more than a school,
6 Masters in residence it’s an experience!

Artemis Quartet, chamber music

José van Dam, voice
Augustin Dumay, violin
Gary Hoffman, cello
Maria João Pires, piano
Miguel da Silva, viola & chamber music
Main Sponsor

Info: www.musicchapel.org Co-sponsors

IPJF16.indd 22 14/12/2015 11:12:37

 D I A RY O F A N AC C O M PA N I S T
Diary
of an
accompanist
In which Michael Round prefers naturals
WEDNESDAY FULL DAY OF VIOLIN
auditions with London orchestra. Set piece
must be chosen from the last three Mozart
concertos (orchestra stipulation) – first
movements already intimately familiar
to accompanists from countless long-ago
auditions, so easygoing day in prospect.
Ponder in what ways auditionees will strive
to stand out.
First auditionee has cleverly chosen not
first but third movement, on grounds that
orchestra did not specify otherwise. Risky
move: could be interpreted as maverick
behaviour. Well-meant, though: auditionee
explains that had hoped to be scheduled for
end of day, by which time panel would be
sick of first movements and automatically
look kindly on anyone playing
something different. Being scheduled
first was therefore bad luck: also requires
accompanist to be wide awake from outset,
playing music seldom encountered rather
than warming up on autopilot.
Day proceeds. Am audibly reminded
of snags with each set piece: G major
concerto starts with vigorous chord likely
to go out of control under pressure; high
‘A’s in first few bars of D major seem to
frighten everyone; A major starts with long
notes designed to betray bow trembling
through nerves, while also at mercy of
accompanist, who has to set perfect tempo.
ILLUSTRATION © URSULA ROUND
Place imaginary bet on D major as day’s
favourite, overall.
Break: panel emerges, chuckling. Seems
last auditionee, in fit of bluster through
extreme nerves, had announced, ‘Show
me the piece of music I can’t sight-read!’
Panel revealed piece. Reaction, ‘Yup, that’s
the one.’
IPJF16_023_R_Diary_0612OM.indd 23
Change of mood. Next auditionee
irritable: got lost backstage, so missed
most of preliminary warm-up with
accompanist. Tells panel, ‘I’d just like to
say, I was expecting far more warm-up
time than I got. Backstage signs unhelpful
and unacceptable.’ Not a good move from
someone expecting to fit snugly into
established violin section. Notice panel no
longer chuckling.
Lunch. Return early. Browse pile of
printed auditionee CVs while waiting:
intrigued to read that next player ‘worked
for a season with LSO.’ Name not familiar
from players I know there: L perhaps not
for London but Luton(?), Loughborough?
Next auditionee irritable: not a good move from
someone expecting to fit snugly into established
violin section
Liberia?? Will press for details in due course.
Player arrives: rehearsal and audition no
better than average. Probe ‘LSO’ status: yes,
L for London, but seems had never played
in it, only driven orchestra’s van for a while.
Auditionee unabashed. ‘Well, counts as
work, innit?’
Wish I had placed real-money bet on
D major as audition favourite, though
quiet satisfaction beckons nevertheless:
seventh auditionee to choose it has
forgotten piano part, so accompany her
from memory. Easy by this end of the day,
but auditionee much impressed.
January/February 2016 International Piano
THURSDAY Change of pace. Now
accompanying schoolchildren in grade exams.
Am momentarily nonplussed during one
rehearsal by beginner clarinettist earnestly
asking, ‘Please sir, should I use a No 1 or
a 1½ reed?’ Have never played clarinet,
and have no idea how reeds are graded.
Omniscient adult equals secure child, so
think quickly: ‘1’ must be one extreme
of range, more likely at beginner level to
be ‘softest’ not ‘hardest’. Guess soft reeds
easier to play on, especially if nervous, so
pretend confidence, cross fingers, and reply,
‘Definitely a No 1’. Child reassured.
Higher-grade exam accompaniments
more interesting, though not for musical
reasons. Play from internet downloads
including (i) Vivaldi aria in C minor with
all B naturals replaced by printed C-flats
(chord V looks very odd thus); and (ii) Girl
from Ipanema, computer-transposed into
A-sharp major and producing eye-watering
chord-symbols like B#m7-5. Classic
examples of mishandled ‘prefer flats/sharps’
on-screen options. Ignore all, and play by
ear. Best part of day is dialogue with senior-
school pupil. Pupil: ‘How much do I owe
you?’ Me: ‘£15 the rehearsal, £30 the exam.’
Pupil: ‘Er – how much is that, altogether?’
Contemplate saying ‘£250’ but resist.
Continues: ‘My maths are crap, that’s why I
switched to music.’ Wonder how she counts
bars’ rest, or, for that matter, beats? At least
is not playing a Mozart concerto. e
23
07/12/2015 12:19
 C OV E R S TORY
© MARCO BORGGREVE

Touching complexity

Touching
complexity ⌂

Insofar as the pianist follows the

composer’s instructions and leads
the audience in a listening experiment, the
player’s authority and charisma are essential
24 International Piano January/February 2016

IPJF16_024-028_F_CvrStory_0812OM.indd 24 08/12/2015 14:32

 C OV E R S TORY

The Serbian-born pianist Tamara Stefanovich has enjoyed a steady

rise to the top of her field, performing everything from Bach to
Boulez and beyond, often in surprising and thought-provoking
juxtapositions of core repertoire and contemporary works. She talks
to Owen Mortimer about her journey from the Balkans to her
current home in Berlin, and how the challenge of re-starting her life
several times over has enriched her understanding of music

P
erhaps it is understandable that I
should have found the prospect
of meeting Tamara Stefanovich
daunting. After all, her biography told me
that she ‘became the youngest student at
the University of Belgrade at the age of 13’
and ‘received her Masters degree in piano at
the age of 19’. These striking facts, together
with her reputation for performing some
of the most technically challenging and
intellectually demanding music of the
late 20th and early 21st centuries, led me
to imagine Stefanovich as a cerebral and
steely personality unwilling to suffer fools.
Within moments of our meeting, however,
she put me at my ease with her warmth
and quickness of humour – qualities that
belie the fact she is a deep thinker and very
serious about her art.
Stefanovich hails from family of high
achievers who were encouraged rather
than pushed by parents with ‘very strong
ideas about how we should be educated’.
She and her two elder siblings ‘each
had to speak foreign languages, do a
⌂ sport and learn a musical instrument
to a high level’. Although she says there
was never any pressure to ‘be really good
in any one field,’ all three children have
gone on to pursue careers as professional
musicians, which she partly puts down
to her parents’ own talents: ‘My mother
was a wonderful singer – she sang in an
amateur choir that toured to the US,
where she sang in Carnegie Hall when
in-hand with Stefanovich’s formidable
education: ‘On one occasion when I was
five, my father recorded me reading the
famous monologue from Hamlet – it’s
hilarious now to hear my squeaky voice
and my long pauses between words!’
This early exposure to the arts blossomed
into deep a love of literature and music,
and by the time she joined the University,
Stefanovich admits to having read the
complete works of Thomas Mann. ‘I was
studying music as my major study, but also
had papers in psychology, sociology and
education,’ she explains. ‘So I was more of
a kid who had a wide range of interests – I
was not a Wunderkind in the sense of being
able to play all the Chopin Études at the age
of 12.’
Nevertheless, Stefanovich did sufficiently
well to pass out with her Masters within six
years and gained a place at Philadelphia’s
Curtis Institute, where she came under the
tutelage of Claude Frank. His bias towards
the German tradition (he had been a pupil
of Schnabel) meant that Stefanovich ‘spent
three years really learning my Beethoven,
Schubert, Schumann and Brahms’; yet
her yearning for fresh repertoire was
already making her something of a rebel:
‘I wanted to play some Ravel at Curtis, but
encountered resistance. It was just not seen
as necessary. When I brought scores by
Ravel and Bartók the response was along
the lines of “great, but you can do it on
your own”.’
where she went to study after Curtis. It
was here that her thunderbolt conversion
to contemporary music took place: ‘Pierre-
Laurent Aimard came and gave a workshop
on Structures II by Boulez. I still have a
strong memory of seeing the poster. On
the first line it said “Boulez” and I thought,
“He must be the conductor”. Then came
Structures II – I wondered, “What kind
of title is this for a piece?” Finally it said
“Pierre-Laurent Aimard”, also new to me.
So I was presented with three unknown
things, which made me decide to attend.
Most people, however, did the opposite –
they decided not to go because they didn’t
know the names.’
This revealing anecdote embodies
Stefanovich’s philosophy that art exists to
take us beyond our comfort zone, rather
than providing reassuring experiences:
‘People want to repeat the knowledge that
they already know,’ she says. ‘It’s like a
child who always wants to hear the same
song, sung in the same way over and over
again. It’s important to break through this.’
Structures II offered Stefanovich her own
breakthrough, accompanied by a sense
of shock: ‘For the first time I didn’t have
any reference points, and didn’t know if I
liked this music or not. That was a
wonderful feeling!’
Such willingness to experiment has
its roots in Stefanovich’s experiences of
dislocation – a boldness born of needing ‘to
restart my life three or four times because

she was 20-something. My father was a
journalist, but he knows Haydn’s string
quartets better than me and can improvise
at the piano.’ Other memories recall the
playfulness of family life that went hand-
N
of historical challenges; I’m not someone
O SUCH BA R R IER S who’s looking for a nice flow of things’. Yet
prevented Stefanovich from alongside this emphasis on discontinuity,
giving free rein to her her concert programming often highlights ⌂
inquisitiveness at Cologne’s Hochschule, affinities between seemingly disparate

January/February 2016 International Piano 25

IPJF16_024-028_F_CvrStory_0812OM.indd 25 08/12/2015 12:58
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July 4 - 29, 2016
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Apply by Feb. 17, 2016
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IPJF16.indd 26 11/12/2015 15:48:30


‘Today, people are
seeking such a
degree of simplicity
that we ignore the
richness of experience’
⌂ idioms – for example Messiaen paired
with Liszt, Beethoven with Bartók, or
Rachmaninov with Ligeti. The approach
is valid, she believes, because it reflects
the true nature of history, which doesn’t
stop or fall into neatly defined ‘periods’,
however useful these may be for academic
purposes. ‘I offer a bridge and say let’s not
stop musical history but just go on. Let’s
see how, for example, Schumann and
Kurtág can correspond, how the quirky
little things in Kurtág can be just as quirky
as Schumann and vice versa.’
It’s an approach that has won her a
distinguished critical following as well
as exposing audiences to works they
might not be tempted to hear as part of
an all-contemporary programme. This
suggestion piques her, and prompts an
impassioned rebuttal of what she regards
as a general tendency these days to reject
complexity: ‘Why are we now so concerned
with immediacy?’ she asks. ‘We have to
break through the idea that we need
instant recognition and instant pleasure.
Also, what do “beauty” and “pleasure”
actually mean? They can also be found in
complexity. Today, people are seeking such
a degree of simplicity that we ignore the
richness of experience.’
S T
TEFANOVICH’S MEETING WITH
Pierre-Laurent Aimard in Cologne
was important for another reason
apart from opening her ears to Boulez: the
two pianists are now partners and have a
one-year-old son. They also collaborate
regularly on the concert platform, though
their first duo performance happened
almost by accident: ‘We began playing
together when another pianist cancelled
and I jumped in,’ says Stefanovich. ‘That
was in 2003, during a Ligeti celebration
tour featuring Bartók’s Sonata for Two
Pianos and Percussion, plus some pieces
IPJF16_024-028_F_CvrStory_0812OM.indd 27
C OV E R S TORY
by Ligeti, Kurtág and Nancarrow.’
Surely, I speculate, living and working so
closely together must have its downsides
as well as its benefits? ‘I think we’re
extremely different in our approach to
the instrument,’ she explains. ‘Each of
us needs a lot of space, in the sense that
we’re not going to give each other a lot of
ground. So we have this energy, but it’s
quite challenging for both of us.’
She is equally candid when it comes
to the subject of her son, and the impact
of becoming a mother on her career and
playing. Although she did cancel one
engagement in month that her son was
born, she didn’t stay away from the stage
for long. Where motherhood has made the
greatest difference, however, is at home –
particularly when it comes to practising:
‘You have to restructure your feeling
of importance, which means not only
practising when you’re really inspired.
Sometimes I have to practise at night when
he’s asleep.’
Stefanovich adores being with her son
and says she would spend all her time
with him if she could. This has made her
more choosy about the projects she gets
involved in. ‘If I do something it really has
to make sense,’ she says. ‘This world is a
disaster: there are so many terrible things
January/February 2016 International Piano
going on you could cry about it the whole
time. For example, when I see the current
migrant crisis I think about all the awful
things that have happened to my country.
What I do may not be relevant for ever,
in fact it may no longer be relevant in a
couple of decades. But for the moment, if
I am going to do it I must consider which
piece I am playing, why and how. Am I
bringing something really necessary to
it? Is it a composer and a work that has
a place in my programme, and why? Is it
appropriate for this venue, this audience,
this organiser? When I am booked, it is
not because I am Tamara Stefanovich, but
because of the programme I bring – at least
that’s how I would like it to be.’
© MARCO BORGGREVE
Tamara Stefanovich: ‘If I do
something it really has to make sense’
he composers Stefanovich
has picked for her upcoming
Southbank International Piano
Series at London’s St John’s Smith Square
showcase a century of American music:
Ives, Copland and Carter. The real rarity
will be Charles Ives’ Piano Sonata No 1
(1909-16), a more sprawling and diffuse
work than his later and better known
Concord Sonata. ‘In the Concord Sonata,
Ives was not ashamed of writing a big work
to show his monumentality, and was very
proud of it’, says Stefanovich. ‘But what I
⌂
like about the first sonata is that you get
27
08/12/2015 12:58
 © MARCO BORGGREVE C OV E R S TORY

‘When I am booked, it is not

because I am Tamara Stefanovich,
but because of the programme
I bring – at least that’s how
I would like it to be’

28 International Piano January/February 2016

IPJF16_024-028_F_CvrStory_0812OM.indd 28 08/12/2015 12:58

 C OV E R S TORY

⌂ lost all the time: you start with one thing,

you get lost, then suddenly a marching TAMARA STEFANOVICH’S DIARY
band appears... and so on. It is like arriving
in a new city without a map. Somebody January 15 October 16
taps you on the shoulder and starts TAMPERE, FINLAND AMSTERDAM,
singing, then you turn your head and are Burleske in D minor NETHERLANDS
lost again in an improvisatory world. I like by Richard Strauss Recital of works by
Tampere Philharmonic György Kurtág
this laissez-faire way of making music! It’s
Orchestra / cond. Anu Tali Asko | Schönberg Ensemble
very unpretentious, very spontaneous.’
Muziekgebouw
Other future engagements include a
January 28
recital in June with the young British horn www.tamara-stefanovich.com
virtuoso Alec Frank-Gemmill at London’s
PARIS, FRANCE
Mantra by Stockhausen
Wigmore Hall to perform the horn trios of
Recital with Pierre-Laurent
Brahms and Ligeti, followed by two events
in July and October that mark this year’s
Aimard WIN A PAIR OF
Philharmonie de Paris
centenary of the Hungarian composer TICKETS TO
György Kurtág. Also due for release in
2016, Stefanovich has recorded a disc of
February 26 HEAR TAMARA
LONDON, UK
Kurtág’s Double Concerto (alongside Jean- Solo recital: works by
STEFANOVICH
Guihen Queyras) and the piano concerto Copland, Carter and Ives LIVE IN LONDON!
…quasi una fantasia… with ensemble Southbank International
Asko|Schönberg under Reinbert de Leeuw. Piano Series Tamara Stefanovich
One place Stefanovich does not play St John’s Smith Square
will perform at St
regularly these days is her native Serbia,
John’s Smith Square
though both her parents still live there. March 16
on Friday 26 February
Moreover, settling in Germany has been a MADRID, SPAIN
very conscious choice – specifically Berlin, Solo recital: works by as part of this year’s
‘not only for its cultural life but because it Benjamin and Messiaen Southbank International
has been able to transform itself after such Fundación Juan March Piano Series. Her all-
a disaster. I admire Germany very much American programme
for this. I wish that my own country will May 7 includes Copland’s Piano
do the same’. COLOGNE, GERMANY Variations, Charles Ives’
Is there any new music this remarkable Solo recital: the complete piano monumental Sonata
artist cannot tackle, I wonder – or sonatas of Galina Ustvolskaya
No 1 and a series of late
perhaps prefers to avoid? ‘New Simplicity Kölner Philharmonie
miniatures by Eliott
and Minimalism are definitely not for
June 21 Carter.
me. I believe in being simple, but not
overdoing it!’ jokes Stefanovich. For LONDON, UK
Horn trios by Brahms and Ligeti To enter, simply drop
her, music must be challenging in some
way. ‘If it only demands a small piece Recital with Alec Frank-Gemmill us an email with the
Wigmore Hall subject ‘STEFANOVICH’
of me as an interpreter or as a person,
then I am not interested. If it challenges to competitions@
me to mobilise myself and experience a July 20 rhinegold.co.uk, or send
transformation, to overcome boundaries SANTIAGO, CHILE a postcard to Rhinegold
Solo recital: works by
and go further, not simply to caress one’s Competitions, 20 Rugby
Bach/Busoni, Liszt,
instincts and pleasures … that’s what I Street, London WC1N
Rachmaninov and Ligeti
think art should do.’ It’s a philosophy she Teatro Municipal 3QZ.
applies to personal relationships as much
as music. ‘I’m not looking for people
July 31 Please include your
who’ll tell me how wonderful I am –
LA GRAVE, FRANCE full name, address and
I need people who go deeper and tell
Solo recital: works by Messiaen, a contact telephone
you things that are not necessarily nice Benjamin and Kurtág
but true. You need the essence: something number. (Deadline for
Festival Messiaen
to move, irritate, explode, shock and Église Notre Dame de
entries: 16 January 2016.)
amaze you. Otherwise, why live? And why l’Assomption
play music?’ e

January/February 2016 International Piano 29

IPJF16_024-029_F_CvrStory_0812OM.indd 29 08/12/2015 16:31
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Oxford Piano
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100 Marios Papadopoulos
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IPJF16.indd 30 11/12/2015 15:52:43

 FOR EMOST INTER PR ETERS

Mutual benefits
Throughout history, composers have designated particular
performers as ‘foremost interpreters’ of their music. Benjamin
Ivry investigates the mysterious chemistry between the creators
of new work and the performers who bring it to life,
uncovering musical friendships that have proved frustrating
and volatile, yet often fruitful

T
HE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN
living composers and performers
who interpret their music is a
complex one. How free can a performer
really be under the scrutiny of someone
who actually created the work that they
have set out to interpret?
As the Scottish pianist and musicologist
Roy Howat pointed out in Music &
Letters (August, 2002), the composer
Claude Debussy was ‘satisfied by very
few performers, and those he praised in
(1819-1896) performed her husband
Robert Schumann’s works in a way
which he and a generation of piano
lovers found unsurpassed. Recordings
by a few students of Franz Liszt, such
as the Russian-born Arthur Friedheim
(1859-1932), gain extra authenticity not
just from their inherent quality, but also
statements from contemporaries who
confirm that Friedheim’s playing was
akin to Liszt’s own virtuosity. In declaring
favourites, composers can also be swayed
Concerto No 1 in B-flat minor. However,
after Tchaikovsky played it through for the
virtuoso, Rubinstein rejected the work; so
Tchaikovsky duly found a distinguished
replacement for the premiere, the German
pianist Hans von Bülow. Soon Rubinstein
had revised his opinion, even conducting
the concerto’s Moscow premiere in 1875.
He further promised to play the first
performance of Tchaikovsky’s second
concerto, and would have done so, had he
not died shortly before its 1881 premiere.

public could be the object of less flattering
private remarks’. Pianists who excel in
playing music of their contemporaries
are rarely full-time specialists in new
music; they might not be the most
obvious allies of a particular composer;
and their accomplishments might be fully
appreciated only by posterity. Tracing the
notion of a ‘foremost interpreter’ of a new
oeuvre reveals a surprisingly unstable and
shifting status.
Howat’s assessment of Debussy
continues: ‘…he wasn’t the only composer
– I’ve seen living ones do it – to mask his
feelings about a performer, knowing the
available alternatives to be worse. He also
was undoubtedly demanding, fussy, and
probably moody from day to day about
what he liked. And for all his determination
to notate his intentions exactly, results can
still vary wildly.’
To give a historical context to the
idea of the ‘foremost interpreter’ it can
be reassuring to look back at composer-
pianist teams linked either by marriage
or a teacher-pupil bond. Clara Schumann
IPJF16_031-033_F_Interpreters_0712BWM.indd 31
T
by considerations other than musical
ones: Johannes Brahms was extremely hese shifting stances from composer
sympathetic to the performances of his and soloist are not so rare when it
works by the Hungarian Ilona Eibenschütz comes to new works. In the case of
(1872-1967), apparently because of her early associations with the piano works of
beauty as well as her keyboard acumen. Debussy, the Frenchwoman Marguerite
Regardless of looks, however, a Long (1874-1966) is always mentioned.
composer’s desires cannot conquer any Her memoir At the Piano with Debussy was
prospective interpreter who is recalcitrant translated in 1972, even though her role as
about the music itself. Around 1875, a society doyenne and teacher were more
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky had hoped that distinguished than her innate pianistic
the mighty soloist Nikolai Rubinstein talent. Indeed, Maurice Ravel, another ⌂
would be the first performer of his Piano of the composers about whom Long
Insofar as the pianist follows the
composer’s instructions and leads
the audience in a listening experiment, the
player’s authority and charisma are essential
January/February 2016 International Piano 31
08/12/2015 10:16
 FOR EMOST INTER PR ETERS
⌂ exaggeratedly claimed to have personal
insight, referred to her as ‘that lady who
doesn’t play the piano very well’.
Another early Debussy interpreter,
Ricardo Viñes (1875-1943), has received
more deserved acclaim, and his dynamic
recordings of Debussy’s works explain
why he was sought after to premiere new
works. Yet the freewheeling spontaneity of
Viñes’ few recordings may be the reason
why some of his composer friends felt
less certain of his interpretive skills. Viñes
left no recordings of Ravel’s music and
disagreed with the composer on questions
of interpretation. In 1922, Ravel wrote to
a friend that he would not ask Viñes to
record his celebrated suite Gaspard de la
Nuit because the pianist ‘never wanted
to perform these pieces – in particular
“Le Gibet” – according to the composer’s
Hans von Bülow (left) gave the premiere of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No 1
after Nikolai Rubinstein (right) declined the composer’s invitation
intentions’. Ravel preferred the younger
pianist Robert Casadesus (1899-1972) as
an interpreter of his music, and indeed
chose him to make piano rolls of some of
his works to be sold as if Ravel himself had
performed them
Meanwhile, Viñes also was apt to take
liberties with Debussy’s instructions. His
1930 recording of Poissons d’or is brisk, even
when Debussy clearly indicates at bar 94
that the pianist should slow down. Instead
of Long or Viñes, a spotlight has been cast
32 International Piano January/February 2016
IPJF16_031-033_F_Interpreters_0712BWM.indd 32
on other early interpreters of Debussy,
such as America’s George Copeland (1882-
1971), England’s Harold Bauer (1873-1951),
and German-born Walter Morse Rummel
(1887-1953). Possibly because none of these
three was French, they have sometimes been
overlooked by Gallo-centric historians,
although Bauer premiered Debussy’s
Children Corner Suite in Paris in 1908.
Bauer’s full-toned recordings of Debussy’s
music, like Copeland’s sinuously elegant
ones, immediately explain their primacy
among Debussy interpreters. Rummel,
on the other hand, left no recordings of le
maître’s work and had to wait until around
1990, when previously unpublished letters
were discovered, eventually leading to
Charles Timbrell’s Prince of Virtuosos: A
Life of Walter Rummel, American Pianist
(Scarecrow Press, 2005). In 1916 Debussy
wrote to Rummel, ‘Are you still practicing
your tennis? This game of princes, in which
simultaneous passion and self-control are
required, must suit you perfectly.’
P
assion, but not much self-control,
was a calling card of Percy Grainger
(1882-1961) the dashing Australian-
born composer, pianist, and aficionado
of sadomasochism and Aryan supremacy
theories. Much has been written about
the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg’s
fondness for Grainger, yet surviving
recordings tell us that the less prepossessing
Belgian Arthur de Greef (1862-1940), a
pupil of Franz Liszt, really deserves the
status of foremost interpreter of Grieg, as
the composer himself admitted.
Leading interpreter status can be gained
by looks or social position, over the more
fundamental issues of performance quality
and reliability. It is a matter of ‘elective
affinities’, much in the way friendships are
born – or not. Around 1939, the Czech
pianist Rudolf Firkušný (1912–1994), a
pupil of Vilém Kurz and Artur Schnabel,
befriended the composer Bohuslav Martinů
and helped him to escape Fascist Europe
to America during the war years. Martinů
dedicated a number of works to Firkušný,
including his third piano concerto; in all
his many recordings of Martinů’s music,
Firkušný displays a familiarity which
conveys a unique personality, not over-
focused on the urbane Gallic inspiration
of Martinů’s music, but retaining Central
European spiky individuality.
With this kind of obvious affinity
between performer and composer, a mere
marriage bond can pale in comparison.
Much has been made about the longtime
status of the composer Olivier Messiaen’s
second wife, the pianist and teacher
Yvonne Loriod, as his foremost interpreter.
Yet somewhat later performers of
Messiaen’s music are no less satisfying in
this music, such as France’s Roger Muraro
and Norway’s Håkon Austbø, who also
worked with Messiaen.
Alongside the vainglory of having
‘foremost’ status, a becoming modesty
is welcome. Anyone who attended the
recitals of the American pianist and
composer David Tudor (1926-1996) will
recall the humble, no-frills approach to
the music. Tudor, who had studied with
Irma Wolpe, the wife of composer Stefan
Wolpe, gave premiere and otherwise
definitive performances of such works
as Pierre Boulez’s second piano sonata
(US premiere, 1950), John Cage’s Music
of Changes and some of Karlheinz
Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke. Yet Tudor
is still best remembered for the first,
definitive performance of John Cage’s 4’33’’
in 1952 in Woodstock, New York. Tudor
sat at the piano and closed the keyboard
lid, counted measures to mark time, and
08/12/2015 10:16
 FOR EMOST INTER PR ETERS
opened it later to designate the end of the
first movement. Never touching the piano
keys, he did not use a stopwatch, although
he did so in later performances. Ambient
noise, which Cage wished the audience to
appreciate, grew as Tudor reiterated these
steps for the second and third movements,
always with dignity and seriousness.
Still dismissed as a futile jape by some
critics, 4’33” needed a self-abnegating
and sincere interpreter to convey that
the composer, who could certainly be a
buffoon, was not jesting in this instance. In
his Oxford History of Western Music (2009)
the musicologist Richard Taruskin claimed
that 4’33’’ is an example of automatism,
since the pianist and composer cannot
control what ambient sounds will be
heard by the audience. Yet insofar as the
pianist follows the composer’s instructions
and leads the audience in a listening
experiment, the player’s authority and
charisma are essential. Had a random
member of the audience, or Taruskin
himself, sat at the keyboard during that
premiere performance, the effect would
not have been the same as the simplicity
and high seriousness of Tudor.
Sometimes the affinities of friendship
between composer and interpreter are
richly documented in writing, although
rarely in such a sustained way as in the
case of pianist Charles Rosen (1927-2012)
and composer Elliott Carter. The clean
lines of buoyant ratiocination were both
paramount to these American musical
thinkers, just as they were in the more
expressively Italian friendship between
pianist Maurizio Pollini and composer
Luigi Nono.
Nono’s 1976 work for piano and tape,
...sofferte onde serene… was written to
commemorate deaths in the composer’s
and pianist’s families: it evokes Venice with
undulating sea and tolling bells, as Pollini
performed along with a recording of
himself. Nono later recalled, ‘This shared
experience brought us even closer, in the
endless grieving smiles of ...serene waves
endured...’ This elegiac work, like Nono’s
1972 work Como una ola de fuerza y luz (Like
a wave of strength and light) for piano,
soprano, orchestra and tape, also inspired
and instigated by Pollini, reflects a shared
spiritual bond. In an essay reprinted in his
Écrits (Bourgois, 1993), Nono explained
IPJF16_031-033_F_Interpreters_0712BWM.indd 33
Power play: (left to right) Claudio Abbado, Luigi Nono and
Maurizio Pollini between rehearsals for the 1972 premiere of
Nono’s Como una ola de fuerza y luz at La Scala in Milan
that ancient Jewish mystical texts were a
key to understanding his musical thought.
Surely Pollini absorbed some of the
metaphysical concerns of Nono, which
continue to inform his interpretations
even today?
L
ike Pollini, other leading pianists
of today who largely focus on
the classical repertory have made
rewarding forays into contemporary
music. The American Peter Serkin has
made definitive recordings of music by
composer-friends as different in spirit as
the Japanese master Toru Takemitsku and
the American intellectual Leon Kirchner.
Serkin renders Takemitsu’s works, from
Litany (1950) to For Away (1973), with
angular, atmospheric integrity. His
forthright renditions of the music of
Kirchner, in the American modernist vein,
are no less authoritative.
In a similar way, the American pianist
Richard Goode, almost entirely known
for classical repertoire, found a musical
soulmate in the American composer
George Perle. Goode’s landmark 1985
recording of Perle’s music (Nonesuch
79108) expresses the composer’s
personality in the witty slyness of the
Serenade No 3 for Piano and Orchestra,
the fleet, balletic Ballade for Piano and
pensive Concertino for Piano, Winds and
Timpani. Obituaries explained Perle’s
importance as a composer, teacher, and
January/February 2016 International Piano
© TEATRO LA SCALA
musicologist specialising in the works of
Alban Berg; but Goode’s performances tell
us what he was like as a person. As Goode
wrote in his liner notes to the recording: ‘In
its sobriety and playfulness, its rhythmic
unpredictability, its delicate balance of
harmonic and contrapuntal energies,
[Perle’s music] often brings Haydn to
mind. The free flow of ideas can seem as
witty and allusive as good conversation
... and there is a constant pleasure for the
listener in following the unexpected twists
and turns of the narrative, and actually
hearing the design take shape.’
Similarly, András Schiff, another pianist
who rarely records contemporary music,
made an exception for Sándor Veress
(Teldec CD 19992), a piano student of
Béla Bartók, who in turn became the
teacher of such composers as György
Ligeti and György Kurtág. Schiff conveys
spontaneously the earthy humour of
Veress’ Six Csárdás for Piano, making it
clear that relishing composers’ friendship
can help to appreciate and share their wit
in performance. Could it be that achieving
the status of foremost interpreter, which of
course is independent of gender, may be
ultimately determined by the mystery of
personal interactions? I’m reminded of the
16th-century essayist Michel de Montaigne
laconically explaining his deep friendship
for the political philosopher Étienne de
La Boétie: ‘Because it was him, because it
was me.’ e
33
14/12/2015 11:01:18
 A FESTIVAL CELEBRATING
ALL FORMS OF PIANO

18-20 MARCH 2016

at the Institut français
www.itsallaboutpiano.co.uk

CHLOE MUN 1st Prize 2015

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IPJF16.indd 34 11/12/2015 15:59:22

 © TULLY POTTER COLLECTION F E S T I VA L F O C U S

The early years of the

21st century have seen
the steady rise of French
pianists and French
repertoire, finally
gaining international
recognition after
decades of neglect.
Robert Turnbull takes
stock of the shifting axis
of Europe’s finest
piano-playing talent
in favour of France ⌂

À LA
FRANÇAISE

The Swiss-born Alfred Cortot (1877-1962) was among the first

French-trained pianists to be recorded extensively

January/February 2016 International Piano 35

IPJF16_035-038_F_French pianists_0612OM.indd 35 14/12/2015 11:52

T
HE PIANO WORLD HAS TAKEN
⌂ its time to appreciate a distinctive
style of pianism that has grown
up in France over the course of a century.
There have always been great French
pianists, of course: Alfred Cortot, Marcelle
Meyer and Samson François were among
the first to be recorded extensively.
(François was hailed in Britain for touring
factories and camps during the war years.)
However, one didn’t seek them out to
hear the great cornerstones of German
and Russian repertoire. The cognoscenti
looked elsewhere, towards Berlin, New
Golden age: the notoriously rigorous Paris Conservatoire is producing a new generation of
French pianists, including the rising stars Adam Laloum (left) and David Kadouch (right)
York and Moscow for their interpretations
of the warhorses. They wanted the heavier
and more muscular sound of Bosendörfers
and Steinways (with its new third pedal),
rather than the lighter Pleyels and Erards.
Back then, French pianists tended to be
written off as stylists or colourists, limited
in repertory and perhaps too precious to
convey the requisite passion or grandeur.
Many French critics agreed! It wasn’t
really until the tardy establishment of
French piano music within the standard
36 International Piano January/February 2016
IPJF16_035-038_F_French pianists_0612OM.indd 36
F E S T I VA L F O C U S
concert repertory that things changed. As ‘policing the fingers’, with ‘brand name’
the works of Debussy, Ravel and, latterly, teachers such Michel Béroff, Frank Braley
Messiaen became mainstream, so French and Michel Dalberto expecting students to
pianists began to enter our consciousness. sacrifice everything to practise all day. Not
Things are very different today. Lucas everyone takes to it.
Debargue’s dazzling playing during It’s a ‘complex environment’, according
last year’s Tchaikovsky Competition in to the Serbian-American Ivan Ilić, an
Moscow was yet another example of what iconoclast whose experiences at the
many piano lovers suspect – that we are CNSM helped form his musical values
entering a golden age of French pianism. and catalyse his unique and multi-faceted
Attention has focused on France’s mighty career. ‘The CNSM produces a higher level
training grounds, and in particular of pianistic accomplishment,’ he says, ‘but
that most conservative of bastions, the it’s also an unhealthy environment that
1,200-strong Conservatoire National makes pianists peak too early, is absurdly
© CAROLE BELLAICHE / MIRARE
© CAROLE BELLAICHE
Supérieur du Musique (CNSM) in Paris. narrow when it comes to repertory and
Debargue is the latest of a plethora of rising limits their abilities later on in life.’ For
20-something French stars to emerge from llić ‘the real heroes of the French musical
this formidable institution, alongside the establishment are the no-name teachers
likes of Adam Laloum, David Kadouch in the regional conservatories who sweat
and David Bismuth. blood to get their students into the CNSM’.
T
Ilić’s preference for ‘the more lax
HE CNSM IS NOTORIOUSLY and broad-minded approach of British
hard to enter: most applicants are colleges’ is shared by Guillaume Sigier,
expected to be already ‘formed’, currently a professor of a chamber music
so the competition is blisteringly intense. at CNSM. ‘You are allowed few errors, and
It prides itself on rigorous discipline and get little moral support,’ says Sigier. ‘It’s a
07/12/2015 12:33

very different environment to a London
college, where enjoying music with a sense
of camaraderie is more important than
being judged.’
The style may be different, but what
of the old Anglophone/Francophone
divide? Does it still exist? The only British
pianist to appear at France’s most famous
and longest-running piano festival at La
Roque d’Antheron last year was Benjamin
Grosvenor, who for the French is currently
rosbif du jour. Paul Lewis and Stephen
Hough have profiles in France, but neither
Stephen Osborne nor Charles Owen enjoy
a strong presence, even though both
specialise in French music. This is also true
of younger generation of pianists such as
Daniel Grimwood and Claire Hammond.
Perhaps British talent itself is drying up?
After all, not a single entry in the 2009
Leeds competition was British, although
that number improved to three out of 71
competitors last year. If French pianists
peak too earlier, it’s also probably true
that British pianists get better, later. There
is, moreover, another crucially important
IPJF16_035-038_F_French pianists_0612OM.indd 37
F E S T I VA L F O C U S
‘Who gets to play what and where is as much
about representation as talent or nationality’
factor: it seems who gets to play what and
where is as much about representation
as talent or nationality. The reason that
some artists have a strong presence in one
country and not at all in another is more
than anything about business.
‘The French have a very different way
of doing things,’ says Françoise Clerc
who runs the classical music programme
at London’s Institut Français, which aims
to forge closer links between the two
countries. ‘Rather than talk to middle
men, it’s a point of pride for French
promotors to be able to call artists directly
to make the invitation and negotiate a fee.’
Clerc feels that many French managers
simply don’t know how to address their
British counterparts. ‘The French aren’t
great strategists and would prefer not to
do the kind of networking that the British
consider part of the job.’
Of course there are exceptions. Cédric
Tiberghien has been taken on by the
agency Askonas Holt, just as Hélène
Grimaud, Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Alexandre
Tharad and Pierre-Laurent Aimard are
global figures through the tentacles of their
management companies. Chamayou’s
profile in Britain has been rising since he
joined HarrisonParrott.
This management-heavy approach
has hindered not only British careers
but French ones too. Clerc cites Philippe
Bianconi, Phillippe Cassard, Vanessa
Wagner and Romaine Descharmes as
examples of artists with very low profiles
in the UK. When Cyprien Katsaris, a big
name in the US, was invited to play in
London two years ago it was his first time
in 14 years, in spite of a career that spans
January/February 2016 International Piano
continents. An interesting case of ‘reverse
discrimination’ is that of Tiberghien, a
BBC New Generation artist, who having
become very popular in the UK couldn’t
get work in France for many years.
For the serious professional, London has
to be ‘cracked’. Fees may be lower in under-
subsidised Britain, but it’s still considered
a worthy investment for the French to
perform there and a stepping stone to the
United States and ultimately the Carnegie
Hall. Language is crucial. The French
media is read in France – that’s it. The
English language media is disseminated
around the world.
A
S IS OFTEN POINTED OUT,
technical skills are not enough.
Once upon a time, the Everest
for most piano students was Ravel’s
‘Scarbo’ from Gaspard de la Nuit. Today
any aspiring French pianist can play it in
their sleep, as the plethora of practically
indistinguishable videos on YouTube
demonstrates. The focus instead is how
to carve out your niche in an era where
technical perfection is a prerequisite, in
other words, to ‘brand’ yourself.
‘I have heard incredible musicians
who failed to have a big career. They just
wanted to focus on music and waited to
be noticed. That approach doesn’t work
anymore’, says Sigier. ‘Today, French
pianists attend seminars teaching them
how to create a project but also how to
sell it, how to present it, how to seduce
concert organisers, not to mention agents.’
Networks exist to help pianists but to enter
them you need more than talent. To that
extent it’s up to you! e
37
07/12/2015 12:33
 F E S T I VA L F O C U S
IT’S ALL ABOUT PIANO!
It started with a piano. A Steinway Model C in need of
some serious attention became the fragile seed that
flowered into a piano festival at London’s Institut Français
at Queensbury Place in South Kensington. A Trust of
Friends raised money for the refurbishment and the three-
day event was launched sotto voce in 2013. Over three
years, It’s All About Piano! invited over 80 artists and
reached a total audience of more than 6,000.
The exclamation mark is telling. The piano is the
instrument that has dominated so many lives over so long.
No self-respecting 19th-century European household was
without one, just as in China today millions of children are
devouring Chopin, in optimistic emulation of Lang Lang.
Indeed, like its contemporary the steam engine, it’s still a
An expectant audience
queues up at London’s
Institut Français for
It’s All About Piano!
source of wonder and magic to many people who haven’t
quite figured out how it works. Unlike the steam engine,
however, it has proved irreplaceable.
The festival takes a holistic look at all aspects of
the instrument, from its historic role in society to the
mechanics of the instrument itself. Aside from a long
weekend of solo recitals every year, there is a plethora of
related events, from children’s activities, talks and master-
classes to comedy shows and even opera. Poulenc’s La
voix humaine with Felicity Lott and Graham Johnson was
broadcast in 2013.
Or if just having a glass of wine and enjoying the
atmosphere of the friendly jazz café in the Institut’s bistro
is your thing, then you’re in luck – that is also part of the
programme. What’s more – thanks to an Arts Council
grant, several loyal partnerships and private donors – it’s
cheap. Tickets cost about half of what you would pay for a
Leicester Square cinema ticket.
The current Artistic Director, Françoise Clerc, has
spent over 25 years planning concerts in major French
institutions, from the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris to the
38 International Piano January/February 2016
IPJF16_035-038_F_French pianists_0612OM.indd 38
Valloires Festival in the Somme. Just as there she was
responsible for introducing French audiences to a number
of top British artists, in her current employ as head of
classical music at the French Institute, she is doing the
opposite. If tearing down the Anglophone/Francophone
wall has been, in some sense a pleasure, Clerc also runs a
Franco-British programme Diaphonique which facilitates
exchanges between France and the UK in the field of
contemporary music.
With It’s All About Piano! there’s obviously a French
bias, says Clerc, but also a platform for top-ranking
pianists from around the globe who have little profile in
the UK. ‘It gives the audience an chance to hear some
established names for less than they would usually
pay – Alexei Lubimov, Pascal
Rogé for instance – while offering
opportunities for young talent to
© INSTITUT FRANÇAIS
start building a profile in the UK,
or even in certain cases to find
managers.’
Piano festivals rarely conform
to what you see on the packet
and this one is no exception.
Last year there was a recital for
the ‘piano à bretelles’ – that’s we
would call an accordion – and this
year a harpsichordist will deliver
improvisations on Scarlatti. ‘We
like to stretch definitions and break
rules,’ says Clerc, cheerfully.
This year Joanna McGregor opens
the festival with a focus on Satie.
The young and talented French
harpsichordist Jean Rondeau, the
aforementioned Scarlatti expert,
will play the sonatas first and, after
an interval, jazz improvisations on
the same sonatas. The 34-year old
British jazz pianist Gwilym Simcock
is coming, as well as the well-known
American interpreter of Philip Glass
and John Adams, Bruce Brubaker. 
For the third time, BBC Radio 3 will broadcast a concert
of young pianists from London’s Royal Academy of Music
and their peers from Paris Conservatoire. The festival has
also commissioned two young composers to write new
pieces for eight hands in the style of Satie to mark the
occasion.
Another to return is the young Frenchman David Kadouch,
who offered to bring his compatriot Adam Laloum for
a four-hand recital. Laloum is one of the emerging stars
among today’s French pianists but has rarely played in
Britain. ‘I thought it would make sense to have the two of
them together. The idea of showing pianists playing together
is important, as a pianist’s life is so solitary,’ says Clerc.  With
anticipation growing and crowds gathering at the Institut
Français, solitude will be the last thing on offer. What you
will find is fresh and exciting music-making, quite unlike any
conventional concert format.
It’s All About Piano! takes place at the Institut Français in
London from 18 to 20 March 2016
www.institut-francais.org.uk/itsallaboutpiano
08/12/2015 16:41
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 R ECI TA L PR EV IEW

PERSONAL TOUCH
It’s time to clear the air when it comes to Brahms’ solo
piano works, says Jonathan Plowright. For too long, the
composer has been subject to overindulgent
interpretations, without any regard for the subtle
textures and careful markings in his scores

B
RAHMS HAS ALWAYS HELD pedalled. Examine the score, however, and Four Klavierstücke Op 119. There’s
a particular fascination for me and you’ll find that whenever there is any a perfect example of what I mean about
because of his style, the way he kind of moving bass that involves quavers pedalling in the Rhapsody Op 119, No
writes for the piano, and the poetry in his or semiquavers, Brahms jumps up an 4, about two-thirds of the way through.
music. Also, I believe he is (after Bach) the octave from the initial bass note. In other A section marked pp ma ben marcato is
most ‘linear’ composer: his writing is very words he clears it and thins the texture by followed 16 bars later by a five-bar phrase
contrapuntal and full of hidden canons. In pushing the bass up an octave (sometimes with three ascending pedal Gs. Brahms
fact, I think his music has everything. two) higher. asks you to shut the pedal down even
The first piece of Brahms I learnt, aged The next, and third, volume of my though it’s all over the same harmony –
17, was the F minor Sonata. I am fortunate complete recordings of Brahms’ solo piano otherwise the texture would become far
never to have really struggled with the works includes the Hungarian Variations, too thick.
technical difficulties of this or of any other Eight Klavierstücke Op 76, 16 Waltzes, The most frequently used word in
piece by Brahms. That is probably because and Six Klavierstücke Op 118. At the Brahms’ scores is leggiero. Look at the start
his music suits the way I play. When I was time of writing this I’m working on the of the Intermezzo Op 119, No 3: molto piano
recording the Variations and Fugue on a fourth volume, to be recorded in January e leggiero; or the Intermezzo before that:
Theme by Handel, I looked at the autograph 2016: Two Rhapsodies Op 79; two sets of piano sotto voce e dolce. At the start of the
score online. There were a few corrections Paganini variations; the Ballades Op 10, B minor Ballade (Op 10, No 4), the music
that Brahms had made in pencil, in
addition to adding some fingerings. It was
interesting to see how he must have used Jonathan Plowright: ‘I think
Brahms’ music has everything ‘
his hands by looking at the way he fingered
his music. I realised then that I tend to use
my hands in a very similar way to create a
particular effect.
This may sound contentious, but I
have rarely heard Brahms played how I
think it should be, and I am constantly
disappointed by people’s perception of his
music as heavy and bombastic. Pianists
tend to play Brahms with a lot of pedal,
and I think this is completely wrong. In
fact, if you look closely at the score, this is
not what is written. Brahms puts in pedal
marks specifically where he wants them.
He alters the accompaniment to change
the texture, and he is constantly ‘thinning
out’ the sound. Pianists seem to have an
almost pathological fear of losing a bass
note, and as a result everything gets over-

40 International Piano January/February 2016

IPJF16_040-041_F_PTouch_0612OM.indd 40 08/12/2015 15:02


I am constantly
disappointed by
people’s perception of
Brahms’ music as
heavy and bombastic
looks almost like curtains hanging down.
Brahms puts two quaver rests after the first
quavers in the left hand (B naturals). Only
in the last two bars of that figure – 45 bars
further on – does he finally ask for full
pedal. He makes exactly the same request in
the first page of the Ballade No 2. Of course
you would use a little pedal here, but not
fully sustained until the final two bars.
The pianist who I think gets closest to
Brahms is Radu Lupu. I also like a lot of
what Katchen does. Katchen is the Erroll
IPJF16_040-041_F_PTouch_0612OM.indd 41
R ECI TA L PR EV IEW
Flynn of Brahms players, giving us a
swashbuckling view of the composer! It
The third volume in Jonathan Plowright’s
survey of Brahms’ complete piano music is
is clear he has thought carefully about the
music, even though I would prefer a little
now available on the BIS label (BIS 2127).
more poetry.
I’m not sure why Brahms has been so
misrepresented – I suspect not because
of any particular interpretation. Maybe
it’s because over time concert halls have
become larger and pianists felt the need to
fill the space; or perhaps having played the
two concertos in a way that cuts through
the thick orchestral texture, they then
approached the solo music in the same
manner? However, some pianists do take a
rather cavalier attitude – as if what is written Plowright will perform a Rhinegold LIVE
in the score is not really that important. It recital at London’s Conway Hall on
is as though the notes are so beautiful they Thursday 4 February 2016. The evening
are just there to be enjoyed. That is when includes a drinks reception at 6.15pm
the piece gets lost or is clouded by personal followed by the performance at 7.00pm,
preference, instead of looking at what featuring music by Brahms, Mozart,
Brahms is actually trying to say. Chopin and Paderewski. Sign up for free
tickets at www.rhinegoldlive.co.uk
INTERVIEW BY JEREMY NICHOLAS
January/February 2016 International Piano 41
08/12/2015 14:32
 FU

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 CSOY VMEPRO SS ITUOM
RY
THE COLOUR OF GENIUS
From epoch-making subtlety to the brink of excess, the music of
Olivier Messiaen creates and inhabits an expressive world all its
own. Jeremy Siepmann joins seven of the composer’s foremost
interpreters to explore his vast and extraordinary oeuvre
JEREMY SIEPMANN: All great
composers are unique, yet some, it
would seem, are more unique than
others. Olivier Messiaen’s uniqueness
was multi-layered. We remember him,
of course, through and because of his
music. Its individuality is a part of his
spell. He influenced generations, his
pupils included Jean Barraqué, George
Benjamin, Pierre Boulez, Peter Maxwell
Davis, Alexander Goehr, Oliver Knussen,
György Kurtág, Karlheinz Stockhausen,
Yannis Xenakis and many more, none
of whom sound like him, or like each
other. Who else in his generation could
boast such a list? Who else stood in the
vanguard of 20th-century modernism
while eliciting in audiences all over the
world something very much resembling
love? In an ever more secular world,
the pervasive depth of his religious
inspiration did not isolate him but
intensified the spiritual experience of
THE PANEL (left his listeners, including non-believers.
to right, top to
bottom): Pierre- Of the seven eminent champions
Laurent Aimard, of his music gathered here, almost all
Håkon Austbø,
Paul Crossley, knew Messiaen, and each of these was
Peter Donohoe, in some way his pupil. Two – Håkon
Peter Hill, Joanna
MacGregor, Steven
Austbö and Peter Hill – have recorded
Osborne Messiaen’s complete piano music; the
rest have played much or most of it. All
January/February 2016 International Piano
IPJF16_043-047_R_Symposium_0612OM.indd 43
feel permanently in his debt.
How universal, I wondered, is his
appeal? Is this, for instance, music for
children? Or does its appreciation
require an adult perspective?
PIERRE-LAURENT AIMARD: In
contrast (even in opposition) to his epoch,
Messiaen renewed contact both with nature
(in the broad sense, one could say the
cosmos, or the environment) and with the
spiritual. In these respects he anticipated
his time and ushered in the following era.
That prophetic quality, at the very least,
gives him a universal dimension. But no, it’s
certainly not music for children. Rather, in
my view, it’s for adults who have retained, if
not a child’s soul, at least a singular capacity
for wonder, and the capacity to marvel.
HÅKON AUSTBØ: His music reaches out
to people of all cultures, despite his own
statement that it was meant for Roman
Catholics. Children can also appreciate his
colours, his melodies and his inspiration
from nature (I’ve even heard children
exclaim, without any foreknowledge, ‘It
sounds like birds!’).
PAUL CROSSLEY: Messiaen really is one
⌂
of the all-time greats. His organ music, by
43
08/12/2015 12:15

⌂ any standards, is the greatest since JS Bach
and his piano music is by far the best of
the second half of the 20th century – and
some of the best ever written. Indeed much
of it, like the Quatuor pour la fin du temps,
has long since become standard repertoire.
As for the second part of this question, all
music is for children! It’s for adults to get
back to the wonder and immediacy of the
child’s world.
PETER DONOHOE: I think children are
actually better able to accept unfamiliar
music than adults, if only because our
definitions of acceptability gradually narrow
as we get older. Messiaen certainly never
condescended towards his listeners; he never
wrote specifically with a young audience
in mind – partly, perhaps, because he was,
almost naively, somewhat disconnected
from the practical world. Look at the
immense technical demands he makes of his
performers, his indifference to the gigantic
cost of his instrumentations, and the total
absence of inhibition in his music.
JOANNA MACGREGOR: In my
experience young children absolutely love
something loud, dissonant and exciting.
There’s a thrilling amount of colour and
swirling movement in many of Messiaen’s
works to delight someone young – Joie
du sang des Étoiles being one example.
But there are many entry points. I would
have thought that the story of the first
performance of the Quatuor pour la fin du
temps would fascinate teenagers working
on the Second World War – and along
the way they’d find some of that music
enthralling. I think most of us can’t take in
everything immediately.
STEVEN OSBORNE: Children often
respond, too, to things which are directly
expressive, and Messiaen is frequently
‘Messiaen’s music takes adults back to the
wonder and immediacy of the child’s world’
PAUL CROSSLEY
44 International Piano January/February 2016
IPJF16_043-047_R_Symposium_0612OM.indd 44
SYMPOSIUM
that. But the scale of many of the pieces
is probably too large to be accessible to
most children: 70 minutes for Turangalîla,
over two hours for the Vingt regards. Even
the Quatuor is fifty-five minutes. As for
universality, I think he’s probably one of
the most accessible of all later 20th century
composers. Many times, after I’ve played
the Vingt regards, someone has come up to
me and said they were slightly apprehensive
before the start, but were soon amazed at
how gripped they were. I think it’s down
to a combination of a very large emotional
range, and the basic humility of the man –
he wasn’t afraid to write simple, beautiful
music; at one time he was even mocked
for it. Yet the juxtaposition of these ‘naive’
melodies with music of great complexity is
extremely potent.
PETER HILL: I think everyone can sense
the integrity and power of Messiaen’s
music, its huge emotional generosity. Also
the way he doesn’t tie himself to any
particular movement, but speaks with his
own voice. He had the greatest courage,
taking on gigantic projects, even as old
age and infirmity approached. In the most
vivid terms, he was unafraid to express his
religious faith, and his belief in nature and
the birds – all at a time when programme
music was deeply unfashionable.
JS: What about the challenges for the
performer? Are there any difficulties
unique or definitively peculiar to
Messiaen?
AUSTBØ: The challenges are both
technical and intellectual at first. You
have to understand his techniques of
composition and be able to cope with
the purely physical challenges. Then get
sufficient mastery of all that to set out on
the ecstatic voyage that awaits you.
AIMARD: The first challenge is to observe
the greatest meticulousness in realising the
sonority and rhythm, while giving one’s
interpretation the necessary vision and
breath. The second is to realise the infinite
variety of his colouristic world, without
falling into the trap of the systematic and
repetitive side of his harmonic language.
CROSSLEY: It’s technically very, very
difficult music – most of it way beyond
the reach of even the most gifted amateur
(though the Préludes might be an
exception). In terms of challenges, as with
all French music, it requires a particular
‘sensitivity of touch’. There are also long
sequences of chords in each hand.
DONOHOE: Two things in particular
stand out for me. One is the way in which
his harmonic language (in particular his
‘modes of limited transposition’) leads to
patterns of virtuosity which are unique
to his music. For example, the downward
cascades of six-part chords in the section
in D-flat major in No. 10 of the Vingt
regards, or certain passages in the fifth or
tenth movements of Turangalîla. These
are gestures not required for the music of
any other major composer. It’s a harmonic
language that needs to be absorbed into
one’s overall technique in the same way
as tonal scales and arpeggios need to be
assimilated for the playing of Mozart or any
other Classical composer. The other thing is
the dynamic range required – sometimes for
very lengthy periods. To be able to sustain
the extremes he requires for so long, without
becoming either distant and insipid or harsh
and colourless, is an immense challenge.
In between the extremes of fortissimo and
pianissimo there’s every other conceivable
dynamic level and colour. This applies,
of course, to a greater or lesser degree, in
all music, but Messiaen’s demands in this
respect are very extreme indeed.
HILL: He often said to me that the most
difficult passages must always sound
musical and ‘melodic’, never like an étude.
No easy thing to achieve! The Messiaen
playing I like least are those performances
which, however meritorious, sound over
drilled, while the best are full of grace
and beauty as well as emotional power.
Messiaen was a master at structuring music
08/12/2015 10:21

Naïve intellectual: Olivier Messiaen (1908-92)
over huge spans of time, and performers
need to recognise how he’s made a
particular moment so overwhelming by
preparing it with the utmost care.
MACGREGOR: For pianists, if you’ve
played Bach, there’ll be resonances in
Messiaen’s constant fascination with
numerology and counterpoint. It doesn’t
make the music dry, but it gives it fantastic,
Gothic architecture; the music is always
IPJF16_043-047_R_Symposium_0612OM.indd 45
SYMPOSIUM
underpinned by foundations that are
rock solid. There are two things, though,
that will always be a challenge when first
playing Messiaen: the size and speed of his
chords (those modes do become second
nature, eventually, but only after several
years); and his asymmetric rhythms. He
was deeply immersed in Greek and Indian
rhythmic patterns, right from the start,
and it takes time to convey these with
naturalness. They shouldn’t ever sound
January/February 2016 International Piano
© WTULLY POTTER COLLECTION
stuck or ‘difficult’. As a student I got hold of
his monograph Technique de mon language
musicale, in which he lays open his style
and influences very transparently, with
many examples. I highly recommend it!
The English translation is available online.
OSBORNE: I find that Messiaen’s music
really suits both my technical and musical
instincts, so I feel very comfortable
⌂
with most of it. Yet there are some truly
45
14/12/2015 11:54:31

⌂ fiendish things, particularly the quasi-fugal
movement from the Vingt regards which
is really very awkward; Brendel’s phrase
‘unsurpassable pianistic perversions’
comes to mind! As for musical challenges,
the slow movements call for an ability to
radically alter one’s sense of time. How
long does the first phrase of a melody
generally last? Maybe up to 30 seconds?
In the Quatuor pour la fin du temps, the
cello has a melody which takes around
90 seconds for the first phrase (and this
is typical of Messiaen’s style). It feels like
walking in super-slow motion and it can be
a tremendous challenge to make it sound
coherent without speeding it up to make
it easier.
JS: What is the extent of his emotional/
spiritual/expressive range?
AUSTBØ: It’s enormous! – greater than that
of hardly any other composer, I would say.
CROSSLEY: Just take the titles of two of
his pieces, Des canyons aux étoiles and Éclairs
sur l’au-delà (I’m trying to tell people how
to translate this properly – the official
translation is ‘Illuminations of the Beyond’
but what the French words really mean are
‘Glimpses of the Hereafter’). The spiritual
range here goes from the most earthly to
the most ethereal to the most paradisal
(depending on what metaphors you
choose to express these) and everything in
between!
DONOHOE: The emotional/spiritual
element is perhaps the most significant
single aspect of Messiaen’s music. The
one emotion that is somewhat thin on the
ground in his works is humour. However,
it’s there (as it was in the man himself) if
one looks for it.
MACGREGOR: Vingt regards, to take one
stupendous example, is massive – almost
unruly in its overflow of energy and
colour, teeming with gorgeous sonorities
and intellectually rigorous ideas. Each
movement is quite literally a meditation on
a theological aspect of Messiaen’s Roman
Catholic beliefs, yet the contemplations
are meticulously and dramatically paced:
they can be serene, fierce, languid, rigidly
doctrinal or even humorous (yes!).
46 International Piano January/February 2016
IPJF16_043-047_R_Symposium_0612OM.indd 46
SYMPOSIUM
Another truly remarkable quality is
Messiaen’s knowledge and love of Eastern
music and philosophy. He challenges our
Western notions of time and structure.
The whole work of Vingt regards may well
represent the austere and magnificent
edifice of a Gothic cathedral, but the
detail and pacing of each movement owes
a lot to Hindu rhythms and the sonority
of the Balinese Gamelan. In these pieces
we really see Messiaen’s view of God,
his Son, the Virgin Mary, Angels and
birds – but we see far beyond the material
world and begin to contemplate abstract
ideas, as well as feel the passion of
Messiaen’s beliefs, rooted in sensuality as
well as theology.
AIMARD: He was a creator who loved
excess! We find this in his treatment of
dynamics, for example he was always
asking for greater extremes, and the same
applies to his tempi.
CROSSLEY: Whatever he turned his hand
to, the ‘sound’ of the piece was always re-
invented – no piano music, no organ music,
no orchestral music ever sounded the
same twice. Indeed, for all the orchestral
pieces, he assembled a completely different
set of instruments. That’s really very
remarkable. This is a man who loved the
music of his chosen predecessors, but,
in an extraordinary alchemy, he distilled
from them something that scarcely even
resembled them!
JS: What pieces would you recommend
to the newcomer through which to
discover and explore his unique sound
world?
AUSTBØ: For pianists, some of the
Préludes are relatively accessible, as well as
a few of the pieces from Vingt regards. For
the listener, the Quatuor could be a good
opening, along with some organ works,
La Nativité du Seigneur and the song cycle
Harawi.
CROSSLEY: Too many to mention – but,
let’s single out Le Banquet celeste, Quatuor,
Turangalîla, some of the Préludes, some of
the Vingt regards, the string movements of
Éclairs, Poèmes pour Mi and the chorales in
La transfiguration.
DONOHOE: The most obvious
suggestion would be the Turangalîla
Symphony – probably the work that most
comprehensively represents both the
composer and his vision: the immensity,
the colour, the wonderful orchestration,
the virtuosity, the emotional impact, the
spiritual uplift that can leave one feeling
as if one is floating on air. However,
conciseness is not a key feature of this
work, and if the listener is looking for that,
perhaps Cantéyodjayâ would be a good
place to start; it has a very definite shape,
rising to a climax at the end in a seemingly
inevitable way that’s not really the case in
most of his other works. It’s very compact
and has immediate impact. It is, however,
unusually, consistently atonal, and doesn’t
include any of the sensuous tonal harmony
used in Turangalîla.
HILL: Very little of Messiaen’s piano music
is suitable for more elementary pianists.
But I would certainly recommend the eight
Préludes. These may be early pieces but
already they have the hallmarks of Messiaen’s
style. The first, for example, ‘La colombe’
(The Dove), has the typical layering, with
the melody in the middle voice, harmony
in the left hand, and a descant of fluttering
chords which are difficult to play as softly as
Messiaen requires. All the Préludes are lovely,
and one in particular – ‘Cloches d’angoisse
et larmes d’adieu’ – looks forward to the
power of the later music, an immense slow
movement divided between grief (the first
half) and consolation. Many of the Vingt
regards are quite approachable, and Nos
11 and 15 make good concert pieces on
their own. I loved and still love the tough
‘experimental’ works composed around
1949-50. In Catalogue d’oiseaux the most
approachable piece in terms of pianism
is ‘L’alouette lulu’ (The Woodlark), an
entrancingly beautiful introduction to
Messiaen’s world of birds and nature.
AIMARD: My own favoured line of
approach here would be through his music
for organ, his own instrument par excellence,
which determined his way of writing for
other instruments, like the piano, or for
a group. Then, perhaps, certain works for
ensemble or orchestra that give an idea
of his prodigious colouristic imagination
(Des Canyons aux Étoiles, for example);
08/12/2015 10:22

‘Even the most difficult passages in Messiaen’s
music must always sound musical and melodic’
PETER HILL
⌂ and finally, to grasp the experimental
dimension of his soundworld (but also
his fundamental work on time), Modes de
valeurs et d’intensités, that very experimental
piano étude, which he didn’t much like,
actually, but which attests to his radical
reflections on a resolutely new sonorous
vocabulary.
JS: To what extent, if any, would
you describe him as an intellectual
composer?
AIMARD: Messiaen read enormously
and had great erudition – albeit of a very
peculiar kind. His reflections nourished
his creations, which I’d say were those of a
‘naïve intellectual’.
AUSTBØ: Every truly great composer,
it seems to me, is intellectual as well
as emotional. The basic emotions and
instincts driving the creative force will
be enhanced by the great intellectual
insight of those composers, of whom
there are in actually very few. Messiaen
would never have achieved his tremendous
emotional impact if he hadn’t constructed
a musical language of utmost logic and
uncompromising consequence.
CROSSLEY: If you think of his theoretical
writings, he’s at pains to show you how
his music is made. Even in the prefaces to
the scores themselves, he lists devices and
techniques that he’s deployed. Happily,
none of the music ever sounds ‘intellectual’.
He tried it in a few pieces like Modes de
Valeurs et d’intensitiés and Livre d’Orgue,
but for me those aren’t the happiest of
his inventions. You just need to appreciate
that as a composer he ‘assembles’. But then,
as Witold Lutosławski once said to me:
‘Listen to the first movement of Brahms’s D
minor piano concerto – form? It’s just one
fantastic piece of invention after the other!’
DONOHOE: I agree with Håkon. All the
IPJF16_043-047_R_Symposium_0612OM.indd 47
SYMPOSIUM
great composers are intellectual, and their
greatness, in the end, is defined by the
degree to which they use their intellect as
a means to a far greater end than a display
of cleverness. Messiaen’s extraordinary
intellect, his wonderful ability to verbalise
his theories and lay bare his musical
language, was absolutely in the service
of such overwhelming emotion. It’s one
of the key features of what he stands for,
why he’s such an important figure in
musical history, why his influence on so
many younger composers was so great, and
perhaps also one of the reasons why his style
is so inimitable. His emotional response
to the world and his religious convictions
were so strong that his intellectual capacity
was simply there – unselfconsciously and
unpretentiously.
HILL: I had imagined he might be rather
cerebral about music, but in fact he
was quite the reverse: he was absolutely
passionate – so that when I performed a
piece from, say, Catalogue d’oiseaux the
music really had to ‘be’ the birds and
the scenery.
JS: Is a thorough grounding in the tonal,
developmental, Germanic tradition
helpful, irrelevant or inimical to the
interpretation of Messiean’s piano
music?
DONOHOE: I believe it’s essential, but
then so is an instinctive capacity to sense
the colours of French music, and the sound
palette necessary to perform it. That the
two seem sometimes to be contradictory is
an illusion. Both traditions spill over and
influence the other.
HILL: True enough, but I do feel Messiaen
has been misunderstood, even by some of
his biographers. Again and again one reads
that his music is essentially static, living in
the moment, with harmony that’s colourful
but not functional. This has never struck
January/February 2016 International Piano
me. I find his music not only beautiful
but thrillingly exciting. How could it not
be in, say, the ‘Amen de la Consommation’
from Visions de l’Amen, where one is driven
irresistibly forwards, wave upon wave?
Think of those slow movements where the
tempo may be ‘infinitely slow’ (as it is in
the Quatuor pour la fin du temps) but never
stops, precisely because of the intrinsic
momentum in Messiaen’s harmony, which
draws one forwards. If one loses the
sense of the whole huge shape then the
performance fails.
AUSTBØ: A grounding in the Germanic
tradition is required, although the
French way of looking at harmony was
Messiaen’s starting point. And his means
of developing material is very different
from Beethovenian procedures, though he
knew them well and wrote about them in
his treatise. I would say a broad knowledge
of harmony, counterpoint and analysis,
along with familiarity with his own
compositional procedures, are all essential
for performing his music.
CROSSLEY: Despite appearances to the
contrary, he adored the ‘German tradition’. I
remember in 1986, when the city of Bonn
mounted a Beethoven/Messiaen Festival,
and Messiaen was given the Freedom of
the City. The Burgermeister made his
speech and presented Messiaen with his
‘key’. Messiaen thanked him and then
said, ‘In honour of the city of Bonn, I will
now analyse for you the first movement
of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony’ – which
he proceeded to do with exactly the
same rigour that he used with his pupils.
How’s that for respect for the Germanic
tradition! e
The English edition of Messiaen’s Technique
de mon language musicale is available to
download from www.monoskop.org
This year’s Festival Messiaen will feature the
composer’s complete piano works performed
by a raft of leading interpreters, including
Michel Béroff, François-Frédéric Guy, Peter
Hill and this month’s IP cover artist Tamara
Stefanovich. All events take place in and
around in La Grave, Hautes-Alpes, France
from 23 to 31 July 2016.
www.festival-messiaen.com
47
08/12/2015 10:22
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International Piano

NO.35 JAN/FEB 2016

£5.50
Zlata Chochieva is currently a hot topic in piano circles.
www.international-piano.com
she talks to Jeremy Nicholas about rachmaninov, competitions
and studying with Mikhail Pletnev
witH
Z
lata ChoChIeva was born In MosCow. she has
been playing in public for 25 of her 30 years, and is a seasoned
artist whose first two recordings (one of rachmaninov, one
of Chopin) have won unusually ecstatic reviews. Chochieva, it would
jury members. but then I stopped about three or four years ago. I
couldn’t find any reason to play in competitions any more. If you
have brave ideas, the competition world doesn’t work.’
nevertheless, it was through a competition that Chochieva
care
appear, is about to come into her own. at present, she makes her
home in salzburg, where she moved three years ago. In between
made contact with Piano Classics. ‘In 2010 I won the agropoly
Contest in Italy and they offered me a contract. I recorded the
Dorothy taubman’s methodology
concerts, she occasionally teaches at the city’s Mozarteum University. rachmaninov Chopin variations and the First sonata, pieces that – which teaches how to make music

INSIDE
‘everything started when my brother began to study the piano,’ are not played that often. rachmaninov and Chopin are two
she says. ‘My mother didn’t want to leave me alone so I went to composers who are very special to me, very close to my soul. My next without fatigue, pain or injury – has Edna Golandsky was one

transformed pianists’ lives the world

listen to his lessons. he is five years older than me. since I was quite goal is to record all the etudes-tableaux, which we will do this June. of Dorothy Taubman’s key
collaborators and went on
an ambitious child, I always wanted to do the same as he did. his I wish to find my own rachmaninov, to get closer to his own

SHEET MUSIC
to co-found the Golandsky
over, writes Audrey Schneider
teacher at the Flier Music school was a brilliant musician but she interpretation and style.’ Institute in 2003
had no experience of teaching a young child – I was four and a half. last year, she played
but she tried, and in less than a year I appeared on stage playing two rachmaninov’s second Piano
pieces from tchaikovsky’s Children’s album. after that I played in Concerto and rhapsody on

F
concerts quite often. My first competition was in 1993, when I was a theme of Paganini in the

DIVISIVE GENIUS RICHARD RODNEY BENNETT

eight. I won first prize playing the last two movements of Mozart’s tchaikovsky Concert hall or the Past eleven years, advanced age, many younger pianists utilises almost invisible hand and arm
Concerto no 17 in the Great hall of the Moscow Conservatory. It in Moscow with the russian musicians, teachers and students have been sidelined in their 20s and 30s, motions to facilitate movements of the
was after that I decided to become a professional musician.’ national Philharmonic under from all over the world have gathered purportedly because of ‘overpractising’. fingers across the keyboard, eliminating

THREE MINIATURES Chochieva’s mother is a pianist and her late father was, she says, ‘a
very creative person. he played double bass in a jazz group. he had
the brilliant young ben
Gernon. ‘I should love to
annually at Princeton University in new
Jersey, Us, for a seven-day symposium on
taubman (1917-2013) and her colleagues
quickly realised that many of these
overuse or forced misuse of fingers alone
for power, speed and covering distance.

How will Horowitz PUBLISHED BY ALFRED MUSIC an amazing memory, very good ears and was very talented. I was record all the rachmaninov the taubman approach. the methodology problems were due to misuse, not overuse. taubman’s combined understanding of

C
surrounded by music as a child.’ her disc of the complete Chopin concertos one day, of course! appeals to a broad range of pianists – from human physiology and the mechanical

SEE PAGE 55 etudes, recorded last February, is dedicated to her father’s memory. amazing music – and not seasoned professionals and dedicated onsIDerInG the sUBtletIes possibilities of the piano yielded a system

w
completely discovered yet, in teachers to gifted amateurs – all of whom and complexities involved in of totally economical motion.

be remembered? hen ChoChIeva was 14 she was InvIted to

play with Mikhail Pletnev’s ensemble, the russian
national orchestra. ‘we played the rimsky-Korsakov
Piano Concerto. then he offered to teach me. he had only two
my opinion. I think I can find
something new there because
I think today’s interpretations
go rather in the same
come together to share the fascinating
pedagogy and artistry of Dorothy taubman’s
unique technique.
although awareness of musicians’
playing any instrument, it is easy
to understand why many physical problems
have previously defied detection: most
movements are minuscule and some aren’t t
he taUBMan aPProaCh has
undergone scientific validation
studies and emerged as ‘the only
pupils – me and sergei basukinsky – and it was an amazing direction. we should take injuries increased during the last two even visible. Most traditional training movement retraining approach with

© AlenA BerezinA
WIN
experience.’ she studied with Pletnev from 2000 to 2003. ‘I believe the composer’s recordings decades of the 20th century, the roots was based on observation of the visible, any non-anecdotal evidence of efficacy
he is the last of the three greatest russian pianists, with horowitz into account more. they’re of the problem are as old as the art of with disregard for what was operating with regard to repetitive stress injuries’

WARSAW
and rachmaninov. It’s my dream to follow this line. and maybe extremely important. he was performing. In the late 17th century, underneath. taubman’s approach, on the (W Pereira et al, proceedings of the 13th
JANUARY/FEBRUARY 2016

Michelangeli. I find them quite similar. they follow the same such an outstanding pianist.’ physician Bernardino ramazzini was other hand, was in line with nobel Prize- triennial Congress of the International
direction, in my opinion – especially with the sound. of course this season, Chochieva is presenting a programme of scriabin the first to describe ‘cumulative micro- winning hungarian physiologist albert ergonomics association, vol 4, pp384-
they’re very different, all four of them, but their sound and their (sonata no 2 and the ‘black Mass’ sonata) and rachmaninov trauma’ as the main cause of ‘occupational szent-Györgyi’s assertion: ‘Discovery 386, 1997).

CONCERTOS A 50-CD box set

approach is really very close. anyway, Pletnev was my first and my (the complete etudes-tableaux and Chopin variations). ‘but,’ she disease’. We know that some of the most consists of seeing what everybody has seen edna Golandsky is the person with
biggest influence. he helped me with my technique, my sound and enthuses, ‘Mozart is also very important to me and I recently played revered pianists of the past suffered and thinking what nobody has thought.’ whom Dorothy taubman worked most
musical ideas. he encouraged me to have brave ideas.’ a programme in salzburg of two fantasies and two sonatas, and also pain, sporadically or constantly: Clara In essence, taubman’s approach closely. taubman wrote: ‘I consider her
Paradoxically, Chochieva became a serial winner on the one of the concertos. so I think at present it’s important for me to schumann, Paderewski, scriabin, explains how the fingers, hand and arm the leading authority on the taubman

of Vladimir Horowitz
international competition circuit (ten in all) – an arena that, by stay in salzburg!’  schnabel, rachmaninov and Glenn Gould should function in order to make music approach to instrumental playing.’

Poetry and panache

and large, does not look favourably on ‘brave’ pianists. Chochieva all cited discomfort throughout their without fatigue, pain or injury. this together, they established the taubman
concurs. ‘exactly. at one time, I was playing in competitions almost Zlata Chochieva’s latest recording – Rachmaninov’s Variations on a careers. and although the likes of arrau, prevents problems from occurring in Institute in 1976, where pianists could

The Unreleased Live

every year. It’s good to have that kind of experience. You build Theme of Chopin and Sonata No 1 – is available on Piano Classics rubinstein, horowitz, horszowski, earl the first place and provides retraining come together for one to two weeks to
⌂
your repertoire and it’s nice to play in front of great musicians, the (PCL0047) Wild and Jorge Bolet all played well into pathways for those already injured. It pursue intensive study. the institute was

at the Chopin Competition Recordings 1966-83 IP0315_17_OnetoWatch_CJ.indd 17

March/April 2015 International Piano 17
17/02/2015 13:33:50 IP0315_48_50_Taubmann_CJ.indd 49
March/April 2015 International Piano 49
17/02/2015 15:55:01

ENTENTE CORDIALE Plus

music & au t ism music & au t ism

J
amIe does not communIcate conception of Jamie’s concerts 11 years

Celebrating a new Beyond Ogawa hosted the first Jamie’s Concert

at Kawasaki’s Symphony Hall in 2004
verbally, cannot make eye contact, is
hypersensitive to musical sounds and
ago. ‘I realised that if Janice calmed down,
Jamie was easier to handle. so I decided to

Jonathan Plowright on
is extremely particular about his diet. help Janice, not Jamie. Without looking

the notes
generation of French
From babyhood, Jamie took no pleasure in
listening to music, finding it an intrusive
and unpleasant sensory experience, and
at me, he told me that he didn’t like
me interfering.’
ogawa realised how restricted a lifestyle

interpreting Brahms Pianist noriko

he would never accept any food cooked Jamie’s parents were obliged to lead: ‘they

pianists in London
by ogawa. ‘to this day, Jamie won’t eat could not go out very much, not to dinner,
rice – not even a single grain. It’s a signal not to a film. Jamie would get upset if

Ogawa is expanding of cooking by me, an outsider in his home.’

ogawa explains that Jamie, in many
he was left alone for an evening with a
stranger.’ she identified that the loneliness

Freddy Kempf’s her Jamie’s Concerts

series for the parents
senses, rejected her. ‘He always knew that
I was not his mother and I was not his
sister.’ ogawa tells me this not with a sense
and stress of parenting an autistic child
could be partly assuaged through the
healing power of music. ‘What about

5 favourite discs and carers of people

of sadness, but in wonderment of Jamie’s
emotional intelligence and integrity:
‘so many mothers carry this sorrow: my
a concert during the day, while Jamie
was at school? He comes home at three
so I designed a concert to start at 11am.
there’s a lot of crying, but much laughter
too. sometimes music can permeate more

TAMARA
with autism. autistic child doesn’t look at me. does he
know I am his mother? I can tell them that
the important thing for me was not to
compromise artistic standards in any way.
than words. I strongly believe that this
couple of hours of mutual understanding
she tells Duncan
Bebop pioneer Honeybourne about
yes, they do know. Jamie knew so clearly
what Janice was to him – his mother. I
was a lodger from another country, and he
I wanted proper repertoire, nice clothing
and a high standard of performance.
By doing this, I could help parents and,
and high-quality music gets through to
parents and carers, and eventually to the
children themselves.’

Elmo Hope her personal

connection to a
knew that. Jamie was the one who knew,
more than anyone else in the family.’
ogawa desperately wanted to help Jamie,
indirectly, the autistic children themselves.
But I leave the children to decide whether
they want to come themselves. For Jamie,
It is a devotion that has led to ogawa’s
appointment as a cultural ambassador
with the nas. Jamie’s mother was the first

STEFANOVICH
but wondered how. then she noticed a the sound is too much, but some autistic person ogawa rang to share the news of

complex condition pattern in Jamie’s response to his mother’s

mood. ‘When Jamie had difficulty sleeping
he would run around and take books off
Ogawa with Jamie in 1994,
children can’t get enough music.’
the first Jamie’s concert took place at the
muza Kawasaki symphony Hall in autumn
2004. ‘I was laughed at in the beginning,’
recalls ogawa. ‘many people couldn’t
understand how such an idea could help
her new role. ‘Janice knows what a strong
impact Jamie has made on my life. I’m not
playing the piano simply to be successful;
he’s given me more than that. It may not
be visible to an outsider what is going on,
but I am pioneering a way of thinking, an

A
shortly after his diagnosis autistic children and their parents.’ then acceptance not only of those who have
utIsm, In Its mAny And keep an open mind to the strengths, Jamie was born; a long-awaited son. a special needs educationalist leapt to autism themselves, but of those close to

Quiet revolutionary
varied expressions, remains a weaknesses, struggles and insights of everyone was very happy.’ ogawa’s defence. ‘she stated that what them who live and care for them. It’s a
much misunderstood condition. each individual. needs are complex, ever Ogawa had always been attuned to I was proposing was not rubbish. Her kind of healing, in a way.’ 
01>

the autism spectrum is vast, ranging from changing and all consuming, and so are the sensitivities of the human condition. endorsement opened the door.’
Jamie’s concerts have since taken place Duncan Honeybourne is a pianist whose
www.international-piano.com

those who exhibit impressive recall in a
specific topic but struggle to engage with
colleagues’ small talk, to the entirely non-
verbal individual who displays little or no
engagement with the outside world.
077005
the demands made on families and carers.
noriko Ogawa knows this better than
most, and that’s what led her to launch
a special series called Jamie’s Concerts,
with its roots not only in Ogawa’s
‘since I was a teenager I’ve had this fantasy
of being a psychiatrist,’ she admits. A regularly in Japan, and in 2010 ogawa life and career have been shaped by his
friend with autism had given her an launched the series in the uK. now, Autism Spectrum Condition. He has given
insight into the workings of the autistic thanks to a new partnership with the talks on a wide range of autism-related
mind, a framework she quickly recognised national autistic society (nas), Jamie’s topics and promotes the understanding of

the confusing realities of autism scintillating pianism, but also in a far in Jamie’s behavioural patterns: ‘I realised concerts are set to expand in this country. autistic spectrum conditions.
are always infinitesimally subtle and, more human experience. Jamie wouldn’t turn around when we ogawa was announced as a cultural

H
within a loose-fitting framework, each
person is different. the media carries
a constant stream of real-life stories
772042
called his name, and he got stressed very ambassador for the society in september The next UK Jamie’s Concerts are in
AvIng wOn tHIrd PrIze easily. Jamie was unique in many respects. and her new role will be formally launched Manchester on 22 April and London on 5
at the Leeds International Piano He fascinated me no end.’ in april. the society will help to promote May. There will also be an evening concert

that enrich public awareness, but
society’s growing familiarity with the
concept of autism can foster a set of
stereotypes that inhibit broader curiosity,
discovery and understanding. If you
think you know what it’s all about,
9
Competition in 1987, Ogawa
found lodgings with a musician couple
named Peter and Janice. ‘After I got
the prize, I had lots of concerts and needed
a place to live,’ she tells me over lunch
at a cafe in wimbledon village. ‘Ben
It was Ogawa who first suggested to
Peter and Janice the reason for Jamie’s
uniqueness. ‘when Jamie was two-and-
a-half, I sat them down in the lounge. I
told them to go to the doctor, because I
believed he was autistic.’ A diagnosis of
shelves; we’d watch him do it. the more
Janice tried to stop him, the worse it got.
When we had a cup of tea and calmly
watched him, Jamie seemed to relax and
Jamie’s concerts and get more parents and
carers involved.
the concerts can be moving: ‘the
audience members feel a connection
through shared experiences,’ says ogawa.
‘there is an extraordinary understanding
to raise awareness of Jamie’s Concerts and
launch Ogawa’s role as a cultural ambassador
for the NAS at Eaton Square on 9 April. For
more information, visit
http://uk.jamiesconcerts.com

it’s all too easy to make a quick judgement Kaplan [Ogawa’s teacher] introduced me severe autism followed and life for Jamie’s things got better.’ ogawa’s observation in the room, as mums and dads exchange Donations to Jamie’s Concerts can be made
and, most devastatingly of all, harder to to Peter and Janice. A few years later parents changed immeasurably. was a vital ingredient in the eventual stories and meet other parents and carers. at www.justgiving.com/noriko-ogawa1

24 International Piano March/April 2015 March/April 2015 International Piano 25

IPJF16_001_Cover_0712OM.indd 2 09/12/2015 10:34:27 IP0315_24_25_Autism_CJ.indd 24 17/02/2015 09:31:58 IP0315_24_25_Autism_CJ.indd 25 17/02/2015 15:50:20

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IPJF16.indd 48 11/12/2015 15:50:29


Performance anxiety
T
HERE IS AN OLD SCHOOL
of thought that says the best way
to overcome nerves during a
performance is to prepare beforehand as
thoroughly as possible: ‘No matter how
nervous you feel, if you have practised enough,
your preparation will carry you through.’
Most teachers are bound to have said this to
their pupils on numerous occasions.
A common reason for nerves cited by many
inexperienced pianists is the sensation of
being out of control at the keyboard. During
a performance, many amateur players feel
that they have lost track of where they are in
the music. Other frequent symptoms are that
their brains go blank and their fingers seem
to seize up. This is extremely disconcerting
when it happens, but with guidance and
support, it should be avoidable. Though
stage-fright is a subject worthy of a complete
book in itself, a few guidelines can start the
process of overcoming anxiety. The aim is to
develop a measure of control, so that terror
is transformed into a sense of excitement –
even enjoyment.
You can strengthen your spirit and
self-esteem considerably by trying out
examination or concert programmes
several times in advance in a dress-rehearsal
scenario. Schedule a few play-through
sessions with friends and family. Dress up
as though it is the real thing, and ask your
nearest and dearest to act out the role of
being examiners, adjudicators, audience
members or officials. Record these ‘mock
concerts’, listen back to review them, and
keep it up until you can cope with the
added pressure of playing in front of others.
These preview concerts are extremely
important in developing psychological
resilience. They will help you to cope
with ‘real’ events. You also need to practise
visualisation regularly in advance of an
exam or concert. It is vital to be positive
and to visualise regularly and in detail all
that you hope to achieve. If you feel you will
IPJF16_049_R_HelpingHands_0612OM.indd 49
HELPING H A NDS
Murray McLachlan offers some hints for
overcoming the worst effects of nerves at
the keyboard
play badly, then you will; but if you can play
through in your mind the equivalent of a film
scene in which everything goes fantastically
well, then you will achieve success. During
a performance it is important to live in the
present and not to think ahead or, even
worse, to dwell on things that have just gone
less than brilliantly.
The composer-pianist Ronald Stevenson
has said that nerves should be ‘tuned
to concert pitch’, meaning that while
too much nervous anxiety is clearly
undesirable, too little leads to playing that
is lacklustre and ‘flat’. A vital way to harness
musical tension positively is to be aware of
how you breathe when you play. Musical
punctuation and ‘space’ between the notes
is essential for the music you play to gain
character and comprehensibility. Learning
to breathe in ‘commas’, ‘full stops’ and
between musical paragraphs in the pieces
To feel a sense of ownership and control it
is important to ‘internalise’ every note
you play can give you a far greater sense of
control and understanding of the score.
Closely allied to breathing is the need
to feel connected to the rhythmic pulse
of the music. Strong rhythm is far more
important than note-for-note accuracy, so
make sure that you really feel, dance and
swing internally in time to the music you
are studying. When the going gets tough
on a concert stage, there is nothing more
important than digging into the pulse.
In terms of mechanical control, a lack
of contact with the keyboard often leads
to technical disaster in performance.
Alongside strong rhythm should come firm
articulation: grip each note firmly with
your fingertips when you practise (but be
January/February 2016 International Piano
careful not to do this with tension/stiffness
in your wrists and arms). Awareness and
control of fingering leads to security and
ease in performance, so it is never too late
to return to hands-separate practice in
order to re-energise and refresh decisions
made during the earliest stages of learning.
My final piece of advice in this all-too-
brief discussion of nerves is to remember
the Boy Scouts’ motto: ‘Be prepared’. For
a pianist, preparation means more than
simply knowing the notes and playing
them at an acceptable tempo. If you really
want to feel a sense of ownership and
control, it is important to ‘internalise’ every
note that you play. By that, I mean that you
should be able to hear your entire concert
programme in your inner ear. Whether you
intend to use music or not in performance,
make sure that you can play your repertoire
from memory. In order to help this process,
it makes sense to be able to play fluently
all of the left-hand parts in your repertoire
from memory. The harmonic foundation
of most of what we do at the piano is
contained in the bass clef. When you can
play the left-hand part of any piece by
heart, you will feel much more confident
about playing hands together.
If you find it hard to hear music in
your head away from the piano, try
‘playing’ short fragments of pieces on
your knees while imagining the notes in
your head. Experience has shown that
this will progress impressively with time
and perseverance, leading to such internal
control and awareness that nerves simply
cease to be an issue at all. e
49
08/12/2015 10:23
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IPJF16.indd 50 11/12/2015 16:00:18

 M A ST ERCL A SS
F
INGERING IS A VAST MUSICAl
subject that can lead to a lifetime
COUNTING of inspired creativity
experimentation. It is closely associated
and
ON FINGERS with musical interpretation. The old and
mistaken belief that good piano technique
requires an ‘equalisation of the fingers’ has
done a lot of harm over the years. Rather than
neutralise 10 fingers into a generic whole,
it is essential to develop each one to their
full potential. Our thumbs and eight fingers
each have distinct musical personalities,
strengths and weaknesses. These should be
put to musical use: if you want maximum
strength and clarity in a moderately fast or
slowly paced scale passage, try playing with
the thumb and second fingers alone rather
than with all five digits. If you wish to avoid
accentuation in a melodic line, try playing
with no thumbs. If a delicate, wistful aura
is striven for in a filigree passage of ethereal
demisemiquavers, try using fingers three,
four and five in succession rather than one,
two and three.
Every decision taken over fingering has a
huge significance, not only for the style and
character of the music we are interpreting,
but also for the articulation and phrasing in
the score. How sad, then, that decisions are
often taken by students to finger primarily
for convenience or ease, especially if the
‘easy’ solution obliterates the markings in
How you finger the score. Our priorities should be to serve
the music we interpret, rather than our
a piano piece egos. It therefore follows that fingerings
need to be put in place which are not
can make all the necessarily the most comfortable.
Of course a lack of confidence and belief
difference to in the reliability of our so called ‘weaker’
communicating its fingers (generally fingers three and four
are considered less ‘strong’ than the others)
style and character. can lead students to finger passages in
ways that avoid their use. For this reason
Murray McLachlan it is important to build up facility – and
self-esteem – via studies and exercises.
explains why the Finger-independence exercises with
most obvious trills in triplets are especially good at
developing confidence and control with
choices of fingering the weaker fingers.
It is also true that the shape and size of
aren’t always the hands varies enormously from player to
player. Clearly this last point is a crucial
best or the most practical consideration when it comes
interesting to fingering. Players with smaller hands
have to become experienced in the art of
‘cheating’, whereby passages are ‘arranged’
January/February 2016 International Piano
IPJF16_051-052_R_Masterclass0612OM.indd 51
between the hands that would be taken in
one hand by pianists with larger stretches.
If the listener is unaware of the ‘cheat’ then
that’s fine. Pianists often do not realise that
cheating fingerings need to be practised
just as much as non-cheating fingerings!
If a composer has written a Herculean
flourish for one hand, then it is totally
unacceptable to make the passage sound
easy when you rearrange it for two hands.
Even your simplified arrangement should
sound challenging and exhausting, if that
was the composer’s intention!
The three examples that follow all come
from the first movement of Beethoven’s
third sonata, Op 2, No 3. The opening of
this work has frequently caused anxiety,
even terror amongst students over the
years, with ‘solutions’ being proposed that
indicate a lack of faith and confidence in
playing double thirds with conviction.
Our fingers each
have distinct musical
personalities,
strengths and
weaknesses.
These should be
put to musical use
Example 1 provides a possible solution
with fingering that keeps the thumb in the
centre of the hand rather than on the left
hand side (this seems to aid co-ordination).
The most important thing is to celebrate
the detailed articulation provided in
Beethoven’s score: if you separate the two
quavers at the ends of bars one and three
from the groups of four double-note legato
semiquavers the technical difficulties of
executing the latter becomes much less
onerous. During practice the ‘gap’ in each
bar can be extended to make it even easier
to realise.
Example 2 comes is from bars 25 and 26.
⌂
The phrase needs to finish with a sense of
51
08/12/2015 10:23
 M A ST ERCL A SS

⌂ Example 1: Beethoven Sonata Op 2, No 3: bars 1-4

Example 2: Beethoven Sonata Op 2, No 3: bars 25-26

Example 3: Beethoven Sonata Op 2, No 3: bars 61-63

energy and dynamism on the low G. The
passage is typical of many in Beethoven
in that the ‘obvious’ fingering (putting
the fifth finger of the left hand on the last
note, G) is possibly easier than the more
musically desirable approach (finishing on
a thumb. The reason why the latter is better
than the former is twofold: the thumb is
stronger and will give more tonal authority
than the fifth finger. Moreover, the use of
the thumb implies that the scale could
have continued afterwards, but that the
rests rudely interrupt the musical flow. This
sense of ‘interruption’ therefore becomes
musically charged with expectation and
instability.
Finally, in example 3 (bars 61 to 63)
we have an extremely exciting, highly
articulate and powerfully charged outburst
of bravura semiquavers. ‘Safety merchants’
may well be tempted to play the last four
notes in bar 62 in the left hand, fearing
wrong notes caused by a change of
position if all the semiquavers were played
by the right hand alone. How sad, though,
to lose out on the momentum and drive of
descending like a proverbial comet from
the high E into bar 63.
As Artur Schnabel famously said: ‘Safety
last!’ Far better to be a little untidy and
capture the power and drive inherent
in this music’s bravura nature than to
play accurately but over-cautiously. Let’s
celebrate and enjoy a sense of danger,
especially if it enhances the musical
message of the notes we are playing. e

52 International Piano January/February 2016

IPJF16_051-052_R_Masterclass0612OM.indd 52 14/12/2015 11:03:25

 International Piano Sept2015.ai 1 21/07/2015 17:37:14

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 international
SHEET MUSIC
Days of the Week and A Week of Birthdays
by Richard Rodney Bennett
(Alfred Music UK)
About the music
Alfred Music UK is pleased to bring two of Richard Rodney
Bennett’s delightful contemporary solo piano collections back
into print.
Days of the Week (MM949)
Days of the Week was composed in 1963 for beginning students
and complements Bennett’s earlier volume A Week of Birthdays.
Although the pieces in the set are slight, they are charming
miniatures and an ideal introduction to the picaresque tones of
contemporary music. Selections from Days of the Week regularly
feature on the ABRSM Piano Syllabus and make ideal teaching
companions. Quite apart from their enduring lyricism and
rhythmic vitality, they allow early year’s students to acquire a
taste for modern sounds which will prepare them well for the
rewards of 20th-century repertoire.
Wednesday is a piece that can be used for more advanced
students too as a one-handed study. Either hand can manage the
arpeggios separately; then try alternating between the two as a
useful exercise in balance and finally play both hands together
– ideal preparation for the future challenges of Rachmaninov’s
Corelli Variations Op 42 finale.
A Week of Birthdays (MM780)
More challenging than Days of the Week and published two years
earlier (1961), these seven short pieces for children are delicate and
unpredictable, with a colourful but accessible harmonic language.
They build on the experience of Days of the Week and challenge
students in the new sounds of contemporary piano literature. There
are overtones of jazz and Shostakovich, but also that lingering sense
of nostalgia that is such a feature of the English sensibility. As the
composer himself put it: ‘It uses a poem based on the old fashioned
idea that people were different according to the day they were born.’
Capturing the sense of the poetry is part of their excellence:
contemporary Nicholas Maw wrote, ‘Small in design, but large in
accomplishment.’
IPJF16_055_R_SheetMusicIntro_0612OM.indd 55
Richard Rodney Bennett
was keen for pianists to acquire
greater contrapuntal expertise as
early as possible so several pieces
in the set feature interweaving
melodic material drifting through
unrelated keys that surprise and
delight in equal measure. Alfred
Music is pleased to offer two
selections from the set here: the
reflective innocence of (…fair
of face…) Monday’s Child and
the capricious exuberance of (…
bonny and blithe, and good and gay…) The Child That is Born on
the Sabbath Day.
Monday’s Child starts with a quiet inquisitiveness: introspective
and cautious, a hesitant theme suddenly finds fluency in the
interplay between the hands. This quasi-Baroque counterpoint
leads through unrelated tonalities to a bolder variation of
the opening bars, now an octave lower; more cascading
motivic sequential work follows, arriving at a recapitulation
of the theme. Once again the composer, suggesting ‘Baroque’
influences, surprises the player – firstly with the unusual B-flat
minor-E major ‘perfect’ cadence and then the tierce de Picardie.
The Child That is Born on the Sabbath Day flexes impressionistic
muscles with a rapid-fire toccata. It also introduces some useful
technical challenges: legato/staccato subito; variable rhythmic
co-ordination between the hands; and a final leap to a bottom G
at the end. A delightful piece in its own right, and a wonderful
crowd pleaser to close the set, it is also perfect preparation for
Debussy’s Children’s Corner.
Richard Rodney Bennett’s Days of the Week and A Week of
Birthdays are now available from Alfred Music UK.
www.alfred-music.co.uk
08/12/2015 10:24
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 www.promethean-editions.com

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Photo: Morten Berentsen
www.promethean-editions.com www.43.co.nz

IPJF16.indd 60 11/12/2015 16:00:22

 IN R ET ROSPEC T
© TULLY POTTER COLLECTION
Playing
with fire
Unpredictable and uncompromising,
Vladimir Horowitz’s performances
displayed a wild wizardry that propelled
his audiences beyond their comfort zone.
His fearless playing set the music world
ablaze, inspiring adoration and loathing
in equal measure. Bryce Morrison recalls a
series of encounters with an idiosyncratic
musical genius
January/February 2016 International Piano
IPJF16_061-064_R_InRetro_0612OM.indd 61
W
HO WAS VLADIMIR
Horowitz? I tried to bring
the man and the legendary
musician into focus when I was invited
to talk to him by his distinguished agent,
Harold Shaw. I was, perhaps predictably,
confronted less by clarity than by a strange
and elusive mystery. He was an enigma:
naivety and mischievousness went hand
in hand. Watched over by his intimidating
wife Wanda (every inch Toscanini’s
daughter), I found that my questions were
often parried, meeting with curiously
slanted replies: ‘No. I don’t play Spanish
music. You see, I’m a Russian gypsy not a
Spanish one’; ‘You say you finally got to see
as well as hear me live on the television and
would learn something, would find out my
secrets. Well, did you?’ (The question was
accompanied with a naughty twinkle.)
Then, turning the tables on me, he posited:
‘I can make many different colours
because I have a good technique. Do you
think I have a good technique? There is a
great difference between technique and
mechanics, and you know Sigi [Alexis]
Weissenberg thinks he sounds like me.
But, he doesn’t!’ To my suggestion that
he was devilish, that his playing was like
the unleashing of a giant coiled spring he
replied, ‘Ah, but I can play like an angel’.
The truth is that Horowitz was far
from angelic, leaving more comfortable,
domestic musical experiences to others.
From the start he was a wild, untutored
phoenix devouring quantities of
symphonies, chamber music and, most of
all, operas. He once told me, ‘I knew all
Brahms Lieder long before I played any
of his piano music’. Several teachers tried
unsuccessfully to curb what they saw as an
unruly nature and only his early studies
with Felix Blumenfeld allowed him the
freedom he craved.
By the age of 17 he exhibited such
astounding pianistic wizardry that small
audiences became capacity crowds. His
tours with the violinist Nathan Milstein
showed a broadening of his musical
horizons, but it was his performance of
Tchaikovsky’s Concerto No 1 with Sir
Thomas Beecham that prompted references
to ‘a tornado from the Steppes’. Stung by
Sir Thomas’s slow tempi he responded
with ‘I’ll show you, my English lord’, ⌂
accelerating with a coltish brilliance that
61
08/12/2015 10:26
 IN R ET ROSPEC T

H
⌂ left Sir Thomas not far from the starting orowitz has – to quote a hymn
post. The last pages were sufficiently – been crowned with many
cataclysmic to draw all eyes and ears to crowns. Such largesse is hardly
Horowitz rather than Beecham. surprising when you consider that he was
a pianist whose  curiosity  concerning  his
performance of Saint-Saëns Étude en forme
de valse was motivated by technical rather
than musical interest.

D
once described in grandest hyperbole as Horowitz  returned fire: for him,
uring the rest of his long career ‘the greatest pianist, dead, living or still to Ashkenazy was ‘good once. Not now’.
Horowitz was plagued with come’ (Neville Cardus). For Rudolf Serkin, Gould ‘a stupid ass. He was not normal’.
illnesses and mental break-downs his Chopin was ‘like a fire-ball exploding’ Hofmann, ‘a good pianist but a second-
that led to increasingly lengthy sabbaticals and, most tellingly from William Kapell rate musician’. Solomon, ‘dull.’ Arrau,
as he attempted to recuperate from so much (the great if tragically short-lived American ‘terrible. He plays so slow – ugh!’. Andre
fiery projection. He recalled a particular pianist), ‘if people knew what Horowitz’s Watts has ‘fantastic fingers but musically he
performance of Chopin’s A-flat Polonaise of tone meant, he’d be banned from the is terrible’. There was enthusiasm for Earl
incredible rawness, its very nerve-endings keyboard’. Wild and astonishment at a beautiful young
exposed. Overhearing a comment from a Yet such seductive, high-octane praise girl whose performance of the Prokofiev
member of his audience, ‘You ain’t heard was counter-balanced from the start. Toccata rivalled his own (Martha Argerich
nothing yet’, he felt drained and depleted, For waspish Virgil Thompson, Horowitz at the start of her career). And so we have
dreading the rest of his programme.
There was much discussion about
The cameras move in for a
repertoire, including an amusing memory
close shot during Horowitz’s
of a performance Horowitz gave in Paris legendary 1968 TV concert
of Ravel’s Jeux d’eau: ‘This little man came
up to me afterwards telling me what a
fine pianist I was, “though here in France we
play a little more impressionistically, not so
Lisztian”. I was most entertained only to find
that the gentleman in question was Ravel!’
His approach to Fauré, meanwhile, was
pragmatic in the extreme: ‘I know all his
songs as well as his piano music, but with
few exceptions I don’t perform him in
public. You see, he’s not commercial.’ Finally,
© DON HUNSTEIN / SANDY SPEISER

Horowitz offered to play for me. Moving

over to the piano he launched into Medtner,
sections of the Night-Wind Sonata and one of
the Fairy Tales: ‘I haven’t played any of this
for years, but we’ll see how it goes.’
It ‘went’ with a vividness and propulsion
that left me bemused and shell-shocked.
I left Horowitz both bewitched and with
a sense of unreality. Some years later we
talked again in London, but that first
experience remains indelible. No less so is
the imprint left by Sony’s overwhelming
recognition of Horowitz’s genius on
the label’s new 50-CD box set Vladimir
Horowitz: The Unreleased Live Recordings
1966-83. Lavishly presented, it contains
works new to Horowitz’s discography –
Schumann’s Carnaval, Chopin’s B minor
‘Octave’ Étude (Op 25, No 10) and Scriabin’s
Prelude for the Left Hand (Op 9, No 1) –
together with more familiar repertoire
made thrillingly unfamiliar in different
interpretations. These come from several
American locations, reflecting many facets
of Horowitz’s mercurial character.
was ‘a master of musical distortion’; for
Ashkenazy, he was ultimately a figure-
skater who, for all his phenomenal
mastery, took little interest in music’s
depth or spiritual life. For John Lill he
was ‘neurotic’, while for Rubinstein,
stung by Horowitz’s superior acclaim,
‘he was a great pianist, but I was the finer
musician’. For Guardian critic Andrew
Clements,  Horowitz  remains a ‘hollow
genius’, and for a guarded and exquisitely
polite Lipatti, ‘Horowitz will be the most
extraordinary pianist of all time the day
he is content to accept himself as he is’.
Less cautiously, Cortot felt contempt for
point-counter-point along with an array
of comments that, like reversed alchemy,
turn knowledge into opinion, a string
of alternating praise and derision hardly
covered by that blessed term ‘controversial.’
A colleague once claimed that he kept
his Horowitz records apart because, for
better or worse, everything  emerged
reinvented in the pianist’s rather than
the composer’s image; thus Beethoven-
Horowitz, Chopin-Horowitz, etc. Turning
to Horowitz’s Chopin, it is often clear that
he saw him as a vehicle principally for
an ear-catching caprice, making it hard
to discern the composer behind so  much

62 International Piano January/February 2016

IPJF16_061-064_R_InRetro_0612OM.indd 62 14/12/2015 11:08:18


teasing idiosyncrasy and sophistication.
This is notably true of late masterpieces
such as the Barcarolle and Polonaise-
Fantasie, where the thundering bass line
and splintering treble of that very special
piano (‘nonsense, it’s exactly the same as
anyone else’s piano – and next question
please’ – the formidable Wanda Horowitz
at a New York Press conference) take
precedence over an elegance inseparable
from Chopin’s genius: that fine balance
between Slavic passion and Gallic
precision, exemplified in the playing of
Rubinstein and most of all Lipatti.
Then there is Horowitz’s way with the
Second Sonata, his early RCA recording
described in that august publication The
Record Guide as a reduction  ‘to the level
of a Victorian melodrama’. Yet in 1966,
when he was still at the height of his
powers, there is much to wonder at and
enthral: the Scherzo’s central trio ravishes
the senses in Horowitz’s billowing and
receding sonority, and the Trio from the
Funeral March (that central Elysium in a
death-haunted work) is both beguiling
and, thankfully, simple. Sony also includes
a performance of the Funeral March alone,
given in the wake of Martin Luther King’s
assassination – a not entirely altruistic
gesture, though one that included a refusal
IPJF16_061-064_R_InRetro_0612OM.indd 63
IN R ET ROSPEC T
to play in Southern States that supported
racial segregation.
M
any years ago in one of  several
conversations, Horowitz told
me he would like to record
several versions of Chopin’s First Ballade
over a period of time and  see how his
interpretation evolved. Here on the new
Sony collection, there are four versions
from which to choose. Yet if the ground
plan of these extraordinary performances
remains the same, the earliest 1976 reading
is the finest. The opening grand gateway
leads to a slow waltz that can rarely have
sounded more plaintive or remote. The
range of drama with which he invests
every note would have astonished and
possibly piqued Chopin as he conjures
a myriad of moods and images from a
familiar score. Who but Horowitz could
recreate Chopin’s  demand for the coda
(appassionata, il più forte possibile and
presto con fuoco), the descending chords the
musical equivalent of savage clips round
the ear, the final ascents like flashes of
lightening across the keyboard.
  For many Russians,  Schumann was
always the skeleton in the cupboard,
whether for composers  or pianists.
For Moiseiwitsch, Gilels, Richter and
January/February 2016 International Piano
Horowitz he was the most romantic of
all keyboard composers and remained at
the heart of their repertoires. For Bernard
Horowitz, Sony’s essayist, Horowitz’s
live performance of the ever-elusive
Humoresque is of another calibre from
his studio account. Here, indeed, he is
hauntingly intent on Schumann’s inner
life and spirit. Volatile, tender, and full of
piquant detail, this is tirelessly inventive
and illuminating playing.
Sadly, the same could hardly be said
of Horowitz’s long-awaited Carnaval.
Disastrously performed in Japan and
leading to a serious rethink concerning  a
prescribed  cocktail of drugs, this was
© DON HUNSTEIN
Horowitz steps out before his
adoring fans at Carnegie Hall
followed by two performances in
America, given in 1983. Both performances
suggest a desperate fight to stay in control,
full of wrong notes and memory lapses.
A more inaccurate Carnaval does not
exist on record. Here Horowitz’s febrile
temperament disintegrates into confusion,
and a once seemingly impregnable
technique and charisma fall apart. At the
same time I have to say that there are no
concessions, and the courage with which
Horowitz storms through  the Florestan-
inspired characters tells you that he was,
even under  fraught circumstances, to ⌂
quote his own words, ‘a trouper.’
63
14/12/2015 11:08:41

⌂ Carnaval turns out to be a poisoned
chalice, but not so Chopin’s ‘Octave’
Étude, also available here for the first time.
Horowitz delivers it with an elemental
uproar that prompted the Chopin scholar
Arthur Hedley to exclaim, ‘after this, the
only thing to do is to have a heart-attack’.
F
ew people came to hear Horowitz
in the great Viennese Classics –
Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert.
And so it is that in the A major Sonata (Op
101), his single foray into late Beethoven,
there is an uncomfortable sense of a pianist
longing to break free and go his own rather
than Beethoven’s way. Horowitz was never
at his finest when confined within the
classical idiom.
Elsewhere there are those familiar bonne
bouches: Moszkowski’s Étincells; the Bizet-
Horowitz Carmen Fantasy (prompting a
swipe from Rubinstein: ‘you know that
after he’d turned himself inside out in
his Carmen Fantasy, a woman shouted
out  from the audience, “un peu de Tosca
si vous plaît”. Poor Horowitz!’); and
perhaps most of all, the Rachmaninov
Polka. Here, Rachmaninov abandons his
dour countenance (‘six foot two of Russian
gloom,’ quipped Stravinsky) to frolic and
joke with his listeners and where, to quote
my own words from Harold Schonberg’s
Horowitz: His Life and Music, ‘Horowitz’s
sense of Romantic polyphony could scatter
or realign any harmony or texture at will’.
At his greatest Horowitz was a nonpareil
in Scriabin and Rachmaninov. In their
one concerto offering, Sony include the
latter’s Third Concerto with Zubin Mehta.
Horowitz’s fifth recording of his calling-card
it may not rival the 1941  live version  with
Barbirolli or the 1951 with Fritz Reiner,
but the central Intermezzo blazes to an
unforgettable climax – and who but a
puritan could not get caught up in the chase
as Horowitz thunders to the exultant close of
this most daunting of  Romantic concertos.
Described by Rachmaninov as ‘the only
player in the world’ of this piece, the
composer had earlier listened in disbelief to
Horowitz’s 1941 Carnegie Hall performance,
when his friend and compatriot set his music
ablaze from end to end.
Then there is Liszt, where Horowitz
conveys much of the eerily phantom world of
the first Valse oubliée and also Au bord d’une
source (prefaced with lines by Schiller, ‘in
64 International Piano January/February 2016
IPJF16_061-064_R_InRetro_0612OM.indd 64
IN R ET ROSPEC T
murmuring coolness the play of young
nature begins’), though others, including
Horowitz, have achieved more with less
extravagant means. However, no discussion
of Horowitz’s Liszt is complete without
mention of the Piano Sonata (CD 28, 1976).
Here more than anywhere else is a voice
from another age. No-one could or should
play with such reckless abandon intent
only on  the spirit rather than the letter of
the score. True, there are crises unthinkable
in our own polished and more impersonal
age and this performance takes his RCA
studio performance to another extreme.
Horowitz was the first to play this seemingly
unplayable and incomprehensible work in
public and his 1932 recording (dazzling,
personal and less caricatured than later)
remains of iconic status. Yet I could never be
without this latest offering, an astonishing
example of how times have changed. Jorge
Bolet once told me that no-one came to hear
Hofmann in Beethoven or anyone else; they
came to hear Hofmann. The same could
be said of Horowitz; people came to hear
Horowitz rather than the composer. Today,
for Ashkenazy, ‘we are more music’s servants
than its masters’. For Horowitz the reverse
was true.
Finally, there is France and a performance
of Debussy’s Prélude ‘Bruyères’ that is rapt
and magically withdrawn. Lines, colours
and sounds fluctuate in a manner unique
to Horowitz, and in the different virtuoso
world of L’ilse joyeuse the final bars remind
you of Claudio Arrau’s advice to Garrick
Ohlsson, ‘it must be like ... an orgasm’.
S
o if you ask, ‘Who is Horowitz?’ (a
question asked by many music college
students ignorant of all but the
present),  the answer comes in Sony’s
sumptuously presented box set. Horowitz
may well have forbidden the issue of many
of these performances but for lesser mortals
there is a rich inclusiveness, of greatness and
contrariness, of a transcendental pianism that
could eclipse all others, and a technicolour
world of flaunting violence and sensuality
– a ‘look at me, listen to me’ display, alien
to today’s more puritan ethic. All these
performances receive rapturous applause
from their American audiences, clearly
responding to Horowitz’s aplomb more
readily than their European counterparts.
For Horowitz fans (and they are as the sands
of the sea in number) their hero could do no
wrong and Sony’s album is a true rather than
whitewashed musical biography.
Constant references to young pianists
who have ‘inherited the mantle of
Horowitz’ remain wide of the mark.
Horowitz’s intrinsic nature was entirely his
own. Horowitz was always Horowitz. As
Harold Schonberg put it,  every Horowitz
recording is snapped up like so much
gold-dust, prompting him to predict, ‘the
public will most certainly be deluged with
“new” Horowitz recordings for many years
to come’. Written in 1992, this comment
could hardly have anticipated a deluge on
Sony’s scale, yet this album is indispensable
for all that it tells you about a figure whose
name conjures up storms of applause, a
pianist beyond compare and a musician
who will always excite wildly conflicting
discussion. It is not difficult to detect
jealousy, the presence of the ‘green-eyed
monster’ behind Horowitz’s more limited
and carping critics. You may dislike what
you hear but, my goodness, how you wish
you could play like that! Perhaps after all
there are worse things in musical life than
being seduced by the devil. e
Win a copy of Vladimir Horowitz:
The Unreleased Live Recordings
1966-83!
This 50-CD collector’s edition features 13 programmes
recorded at 25 solo recitals in 14 different concert
halls across the US. A few extracts from these live
recordings have previously been released as award-
winning albums, but the vast majority rested
untouched and unreleased for more than 30 years.
Presented in state-of-the-art 24 bit / 96 kHz mastering.
Sony Classical (88843054582)
For a chance to win a copy, simply drop us an email with
the subject ‘HOROWITZ’ to competitions@rhinegold.
co.uk, or send a postcard to Rhinegold Competitions,
20 Rugby Street, London WC1N 3QZ. Please include your
full name, address and a contact telephone number.
(Deadline for entries: 28 February 2015.)
14/12/2015 11:09:02
IPJF16.indd 65 11/12/2015 16:00:23
 COMPET IT ION R EPORT

GLORY DAYS
The results from this year’s International Chopin Piano
Competition seemed clear cut, with the winners placed points
ahead of their rivals in the final reckoning. However, a closer
investigation of the jury’s marking gives a somewhat different twist
to the story. Stephen Wigler reports from Warsaw
Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho won first prize with a lovely
performance of Chopin’s Concerto in E minor

© BARTEK SADOWSKI / NIFC

T
he reason for the prominence of the
International Chopin Competition
in Warsaw is that it has been a more
accurate predictor of successful careers
than any other piano contest. Proponents
of leading international competitions in
Moscow, Brussels and Fort Worth might
debate the point. However, the list of
prizewinners – not just winners of the first
prize – from A (Ashkenazy and Argerich)
to Z (Zimerman and Zaritskaya) is too
impressive to argue with.
If the past is a prologue for what’s to
come, does that mean that at least some
of the six winners in 2015 are destined
to achieve successful careers? This year’s
prizewinners are undoubtedly impressive
pianists. However, after spending more
than two weeks at the International Chopin
Competition, I feel somewhat less confident
about the future of these young players than I
have in previous years. The Russian presence,
which has dominated in the past, was largely
absent in Warsaw. That’s because most of the
best young Russians were too busy preparing
for the Tchaikovsky Competition, which had
concluded in Moscow just three months
earlier. The demands of the Tchaikovsky,
with its more varied programme and its
heavy emphasis on Russian music, all but
precludes preparation for Warsaw, dedicated
exclusively to works by Chopin. Indeed, the
only Russian entrants in this year’s Chopin
event, including Shishkin, were those who
failed to make it past the first round in
Moscow. The same was true of pianists from
other countries who preferred to enter the
Tchaikovsky.
Nevertheless, the first five prizes in
Warsaw went to pianists whose talent and
whose experience (at least in two cases)
certainly suggested they would not have
been out of their depth in Moscow. The
first with the necessary experience was
Seong-Jin Cho, who, though only 21, has
been enjoying a busy career because of
victories in several major competitions.
His superb pianistic equipment may
have been less important than his superb
preparation. His playing projected more
confidence than any of his rivals.

66 International Piano January/February 2016

IPJF16_066-068_R_Comp Report_0712BWM.indd 66 08/12/2015 10:29

 COMPET IT ION R EPORT
The second was Charles Richard-Hamelin,
26, who came with a less impressive resumé
than Cho’s, though still beyond that of the
three pianists who finished immediately
beneath him: Kate Liu, 21, a finalist in
Montreal in 2014 and a prizewinner at several
much smaller competitions; Eric Lu, 17, who
had won first prize at several competitions
for young pianists, including the Ninth
National Chopin Piano Competition for
young Americans in Miami last March;
and Yike Yang, 16, appearing at a major
competition for the first time and whose
fifth prize made him the youngest winner in
the Chopin’s 88-year history.
© BARTEK SADOWSKI / NIFC
I
N SOME RESPECTS, THE FINALS
in Warsaw were not even close. We
know this because the competition’s
rules insist on utter transparency. The
results of the votes and the identities of
the jurors who made them were published
the day after the announcement of the
winners. The competition uses the points
system: in the first, second and third
rounds, the jurors rate each participant
on an ascending scale from 1 to 25. They
also use a ‘yes/no’ system which admits
selected participants into the following
round. After the final round, in which
the 10 finalists perform either Chopin’s E
minor or F minor concertos, jurors rate
the participants from 1 to 10. The final
IPJF16_066-068_R_Comp Report_0712BWM.indd 67
decision regarding medal winners depends
entirely on this final vote.
Take a look at the table of winners (below,
page 68), and there seems no suggestion
that the jurors had any trouble reaching
their decision. However, analysing the
votes of individual jurors tells a different
story. Kate Liu’s playing, particularly,
elicited divergent opinions right from the
beginning, and what transpired in the
final voting may not have been entirely
fair. (Honesty compels me to say that Liu
was my favorite candidate for first prize,
followed rather closely by Lu and Wang.)
Nevertheless, in the first round, five of the
Kate Liu’s playing elicited divergent
opinions from the beginning
17 jurors had voted ‘no’ to her going on to
the second round.
The only other entrant who received so
many negative votes en route to the final
was Dmitry Shishkin – in my opinion, the
weakest of the six prizewinners. The other
four eventual finalists all received a ‘yes’
on their way to the second round. In the
second round, Liu received only one ‘no’
– from Yundi Li, who voted against her
in every round. Her best round was the
third – the only one in which her score
(23.4) was slightly more than Cho’s (23.3),
but not quite as high as Richard-Hamelin’s
(23.5). However, she received more perfect
scores (6) of 25 than either the Canadian
(5) or the South Korean (1).
January/February 2016 International Piano
What is also rather strange is that in the
finals – the concerto round, in which she
finished third behind Cho and Richard-
Hamelin – Liu received more perfect
scores of 10 (3) than either of them (2 each).
So what was happening here? Noting that
Liu had increasing scores in the three solo
repertory rounds, was she actually getting
better? Did the jury did only begin to take
her seriously in the later rounds? And was
her performance of Chopin’s Concerto in
E minor really worse than the concerto
playing of Cho and Richard-Hamelin?
From my perspective, Liu played equally
well in all three of the solo repertory
rounds. Her performances of some of
Chopin’s most musically and technically
demanding pieces in each round were
among the finest I’ve heard in recent years.
In the Fantasy in F minor (round one),
there was a combination of personality,
color and poetry that I thought superior to
Cho (also round one). Despite his strong,
musical playing, he did not match Liu’s
fuller realisation of the poetic content,
which was genuinely ravishing.
Much the same thing could be said
about her F minor Ballade in round two,
in which, while preserving its undulating
flow, she still managed the different lines
of the piece effortlessly. Her performance
of the Polonaise-Fantasy in round three
was also the best I heard in Warsaw:
its multitude of textures were not only
extremely clear, but also filled with nuance.
Throughout the Competition, Liu
seemed particularly attuned to Chopin’s
Polish works, and it is significant that she
was awarded the special prize for the best
performances of Mazurkas – the most
idiomatic of Chopin’s folkdance-inspired
genres and perhaps the most difficult,
especially for someone not born in Poland,
to master. What particularly interested me
was this: had only its Polish members been
on the jury, Liu would have easily won
first prize. Among the seven distinguished
Polish jurors, her concerto performance,
which received the biggest ovation from
the audience accorded any of the 10
finalists, garnered a total of 65 points, those
of Cho and Richard-Hamelin, 60 and 53
respectively. It was the votes of five foreign
jurors – particularly the inexplicably low
ones of Martha Argerich (4), Akiko Ebi (3) ⌂
and Nelson Goerner (5), all of whom gave
67
08/12/2015 16:46
 COMPET IT ION R EPORT
Simply phenomenal: 16-year-old Yike Yang
⌂ Cho and Richard-Hamelin either a 9 or 10
– that doomed her chances for first prize.
I thought her performance of the
Concerto in E minor was just as persuasive
as those she gave of solo repertory. It was
definitely not the kind one is accustomed
to hearing. She played the first movement
more slowly than usual. It was Chopin
playing – unlike that of most pianists,
including the celebrated Argerich – that
kept drama at a distance; Chopin stripped
of polish and veneer, with none of the
histrionics indulged in by younger pianists
nowadays. If there was less excitement
than customary, she compensated with
remarkable insight that brought to mind
Chopin’s admiration for Mozart. Her
textures had crystalline clarity and she
gave each note, whether in the melody or
accompaniment, its rightful place.
The performances of Cho and Richard-
Hamelin were each quite lovely in their
more conventional manner. Yet if there
was less of interest in their interpretations,
there was also less at which to take offence.
I think we may be hearing more from
Cho in the future; I am less sure about
Richard-Hamelin.
I
AM CONFIDENT THAT WE WILL
hear more from Liu – at least, I hope
so. I also think we will be hearing
more from Lu and Yang, the two youngest
68 International Piano January/February 2016
IPJF16_066-068_R_Comp Report_0712BWM.indd 68
© BARTEK SADOWSKI / NIFC
finalists. Lu shares many of Liu’s qualities An album of
– particularly her ability to find nuance highlights from
and new things to express in very familiar Seong-Jin Cho’s
music. His performance of Chopin’s 24 prizewinning
Préludes – remarkable in their detail and performances at
powerful in the arc of their narrative – was the International
the Competition’s best. Chopin Piano
As for the 16-year-old Yang, he is simply Competition in
phenomenal – probably the most gifted Warsaw is now available from Deutsche
16-year-old I’ve heard since Evgeny Kissin Grammophon (DG 4795332).
and Lang Lang were his age. Only a mishap
in the final movement of his performance Seong-Jin Cho will present a recital of works
of the Concerto in E minor – when he by Chopin as part of this year’s Southbank
fell off the piano bench and lost his International Piano Series at St John’s Smith
concentration – kept him from competing Square in London on 16 March 2016.
more closely. In the earlier rounds he
played the Polonaise in A-flat (‘The
Heroic’), the Scherzo in C-sharp minor
and the Sonata in B-flat minor with more PRIZEWINNERS AT
panache than anyone else I heard during THE 2015 CHOPIN
my fortnight in Warsaw. In solo repertory, COMPETITION
only the nostalgia-drenched lyricism of the
F minor Ballade seemed emotionally, if not Average marks from the jury in
musically or technically, beyond him. He the final round:
would have been wiser to choose the fiery
F major Ballade, which, with its explosions 1: Seong-Jin Cho (South Korea),
and eruptions of bravura, needs a pianist 8.4
with wrists of steel, fingers with built-in 2: Charles Richard-Hamelin
(Canada), 8.1
telescopes at each tip and a tiger’s strength
3: Kate Liu (United States), 7.5
and grace. In other words, a pianist exactly
4: Eric Lu (United States), 6.5
like Yang. He has a great future. e
5: Yike (Tony) Yang (Canada), 4.6
6: Dmitry Shishkin (Russia), 4.4
www.chopincompetition2015.com
08/12/2015 10:29
 Freddy KempF next event
JUNE 2016

Kerikeri | Northland | New Zealand

COMPETITION DATES
30 June – 3 July 2016
Open to pianists of any nationality
born on or after 30 June 1988
e
AS ENTRIES CLOSE – 11 March 2016
Le
re TOTAL PRIZE POOL NZ$33,000
W
Ne Adjudicators: Jan Jiracek von Arnim (Vienna)
BIS2140 (Hybrid SACd)
Eleanor Wong (Hong Kong) Albert Tiu (Singapore)
New Zealand
www.kipc.nz
Tchaikovsky’s Grand Sonata & The Seasons
“There is real beauty to
Kempf’s sound…”
BBC Music Magazine,
August 2013

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“…glittering technique, ANDREW TYSON

supple touch and
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in Stravinsky’s Three
ALEKSANDR SHAIKIN
Movements from
Petrushka…”

BISSACd1810 (Hybrid SACd)

Gramophone, July 2011 ROLANDO ROLIM

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IPJF16.indd 69 11/12/2015 16:00:25

 R ECI TA L PR EV IEW

THE COMPLETE
PICTURE

Warren Mailley-Smith’s epic

undertaking to perform all the
solo piano music of Chopin is
gathering momentum. He
explains how he has prepared
for the mental, emotional and
© BENJAMIN EALOVEGA

physical demands of the

11-concert cycle at St John’s
Smith Square

It’s a courageous step to take on the
entire solo piano oeuvre of Chopin.
When did you first have the idea of
climbing this musical Everest, and how
did your series at SJSS come about?
I’ve always felt it is important to create
opportunities rather than sit around and
hope for them to happen – life is short. So
I approached St John’s Smith Square’s new
director, Richard Heason, and we decided to
make it happen. A few years ago I noticed that
Chopin’s music was forming an increasingly
large part of my repertoire, so it didn’t seem
like such a daunting step to ‘fill in the gaps’.
But of course this project has been much
more than that: It’s a genuinely thrilling and
enriching experience to be able to devote
oneself to the work of such a genius for such
an extended period of time.
You’ve avoided a chronological approach
in favour of a mix of repertoire, with
each concert featuring one of the most
substantial and well-known works.
How did you go about constructing this
programme?
A chronological format can be an
informative way of charting Chopin’s
development as a composer, since his
writing went through a number of changes.
However, from the outset I was very keen
to put myself in the shoes of the audience.
I felt it was essential that each programme
could stand alone, making a satisfying, self-
contained experience. With such a prolific
output, the possibilities are vast. So I came
up with the following principles:  each
programme should contain a contrast of
early and mature works; each has to have
sufficient contrasts of mood and tempo;
and each must include a major work or
group of works at its heart. I also decided to
maintain a chronological thread through
the series with the Mazurkas, allocating five
to each programme. After all, they were the
form that Chopin returned to consistently
throughout his life.
Do you think that any of Chopin’s music
has been unjustly neglected?
Chopin is certainly one of the most played
of all composers. However, the same
pieces do get played over and over, while a
considerable amount of his output is rarely
heard. It tends to be his earlier works that
get left on the shelf in favour of his mature
masterpieces. The overwhelming beauty
of his later works is simply too great to
resist for most pianists, myself included.
However his teenage years produced not
only works of mere academic interest, but
of great genius, charm and originality, not
to mention enormous technical difficulty.
For me the first sonata stands out as a
piece that has been unfairly lambasted by
academics and pianists over the decades.
It’s full of beauty, drama and subtle
counterpoint and is hugely rewarding to
play, as you can feel the delight that the
young composer-pianist was taking in his
own virtuosity. Likewise, the four Rondos
are more than just immature blueprints
for the Ballades or Scherzos. The second
Rondo à la Mazur for example is a highly
sophisticated synthesis of all the important
influences in Chopin’s music, overflowing
with harmonically inventive bravura and
a never-faltering cantabile line. It’s quite

70 International Piano January/February 2016

IPJF16_070-071_Q&A_0812OM.indd 70 08/12/2015 12:47


breathtaking writing, even if one were to
disregard the fact that he was only 15 years
old at the time.
You began your opening concert with
Chopin’s Rondo Op 1 and closed the
first half with the Polonaise-Fantasie Op
61. It was fascinating to hear that, despite
the huge stylistic differences between
these works, their common authorship
is unmistakable. Has this also been a
learning curve for you?
It’s a huge learning curve!   One of the
main reasons I embarked on the project
was to stretch the boundaries of what I
was capable of, as a pianist and a human
being, and to continue developing as an
artist. The learning process is one of the
things that draws me to the piano. It’s
a constant process of re-evaluation of
touch, technique and sound; and what
better way to explore this than through
the music of one of the greatest masters of
the piano? Chopin’s writing underwent
major developments through his late
teens, his 20s and mid-30s. His use of
harmony became increasingly daring and
complex, and though emotional depth is
ever-present in his music, it became more
pronounced. The Polonaise-Fantasie is one
of the best examples of  Chopin pushing
compositional form and use of harmony to
new places in his later years and, as a result,
the piece was little understood and rarely
played until many years after his death,
when musical understanding had begun to
catch up with him.
Apart from your  daily practice, what
have you done to prepare emotionally,
physically and intellectually for this
project?  powerful and heartfelt emotion.
So many notes mean a lot of extra practice.
I’ve had to plan my schedule very carefully
to ensure everything is learnt in good
time. With the increased workload comes
a risk of overdoing things, so I’ve paid
particular attention to technical work
and good posture. For a project like this,
physical and mental stamina are absolutely
crucial, as performing anything well from
memory (for me) requires great familiarity
and much repetition.  I’ve been running
and cycling more, as well as trying to get
more sleep in order to be in a good physical
and mental condition. I have relied a lot on
IPJF16_070-071_Q&A_0612OM.indd 71
R ECI TA L PR EV IEW
the support and encouragement of people
who are close to me, and I could never
have considered embarking on the project
without the love and support of my long-
suffering wife and soprano, Susan Parkes.
I have been reading as much as possible
about Chopin’s life and music. I’ve also
taken every opportunity to listen to the
music: aural familiarity makes the learning
process so much quicker for me. And of
course I have been studying and analysing
scores, wherever  I am:  I would have been
lost without my iPad!
In your opinion, what qualities in
Chopin’s music make him such a
perennial favourite with pianists and
audiences?
As a pianist himself, Chopin had a highly
individual style of playing, and he calls
for a combination of many contradicting
factors: lightness and strength; control and
freedom of movement; refinement and pure
abandonment. His writing sits under the
fingers and creates a comfortable sensation
in the hand that isn’t present to the same
extent in other composers. The way that
he builds up to the climaxes in almost
every piece is particularly  exhilarating.
His popularity derives from the directness
of communication that cuts through
cultural background and social context. In
his own teaching, Chopin focused on the
importance of ‘singing with the fingers’
at the piano – and  I think it’s probably
this quality in his music that resonates so
greatly with audiences.
Chopin’s music falls at the fulcrum
between Classicism and Romanticism,
combining purity and structure with
As a performer, what interpretative
challenges does this pose?    recordings to a desert island it would be
Pedalling, extremes of dynamics and rubato
are all aspects to be treated with special
care in Chopin. In terms of rhythmic
excesses,  I always try to remind myself
that Chopin himself was a great advocate
of the metronome, and that freedom in
the melodic line (usually the right hand)
had to be within the confines of what the
underlying pulse allows. I think the biggest
challenge is not to give too much away too
soon. Almost every phrase has something to
tempt the performer into over-indulgence,
January/February 2016 International Piano
which can be somewhat tiresome, if not
irksome for the listener. There is always a
fine balance to be struck between restraint,
refinement and emotional abandon.  
There have been so many great
interpreters of Chopin, and numerous
recordings of his works. How do you
go about finding your own voice in the
context of such a strong tradition?
Listening to great recordings is hugely
informative. But I think it has to be the
starting point – you hear things you like
and things you don’t, from which you form
your own ideas. By all accounts of Chopin’s
own playing, he was a hugely spontaneous
pianist and his music opens itself up to the
imagination. So there’s considerable scope
for one’s own ideas without needing to
replicate what has been said  before. His
music is so personal it really allows you to
say whatever you want, which in my case
differs from day to day. Chopin’s music
was often born out of his improvisations,
and the process of composition was
about encapsulating on paper what had
fallen effortlessly from his fingers ‘in the
moment’. So I think the most successful
performances of his music need that sense
of improvisation without neglecting his
meticulous directions in the process.
Whose recordings of Chopin do you
most admire?
I have many recordings of his all his music
and there’s something  to admire in all of
them. I particularly love Moiseiwitsch
for his emotional depth and colour in
the Preludes, Haskil for her sublime bel
canto, Perahia for his amazing structural
cohesion in the Ballades, and  Ashkenazy
and  Argerich for their general
brilliance!  But if I had to take one pianist’s
Rubenstein (no surprises there), for his
poise and breathtaking musicianship, and
the humanity he brings to his playing of
all Chopin. e
Warren Mailley-Smith’s cycle of Chopin’s
complete solo piano music is taking place
at St John’s Smith Square, London. The
remaining eight recitals are on 15 January,
19 February, 4 March, 8 April, 29 April,
27 May, 17 June and 15 July 2016.
www.warrenmailley-smith.com
71
08/12/2015 10:30
 REVIEWS Recital and concerto round-up
LONDON  sequence ended, as it should, in a magnificent blaze. After winding
St John’s Smith Square Denis Kozhukhin, 13 October;
Nikolai Demidenko, 3 November
Wigmore Hall Behzod Abduraimov, 16 September;
Amir Katz, 24 September; Nelson Goerner, 28 September;
Stefan Ćirić, 22 October
Barbican Centre Murray Perahia, 20 September
Bloomsbury Festival James Brawn,
Marios Panteliadis, 1 November
 
St John’s Smith Square, a church-turned-concert venue, didn’t
seem a promising stopgap for the Southbank’s temporarily closed
Queen Elizabeth Hall, but it is proving surprisingly congenial. The
acoustic is entirely different, but with curtains softening the ‘wet’
effect of the huge altar window, the sound is nicely focused and the
atmosphere refreshingly human. This is where I heard two of the
most outstanding events of the autumn.
The Russian pianist Denis Kozhukhin is just 28, but his
exquisite musicality recalls that of Gilels. In his hands, the opening
movement of Haydn’s Sonata in D major HobXVI/24 moved
like quicksilver, and the Adagio was etched on silk. For Brahms’s
Theme and Variations in D minor, he sculpted the sound in great
waves, and what struck me about the way he played the same
composer’s Fantasies Op 116 was his way of massaging a melodic
line with something much subtler than conventional rubato; this
72 International Piano January/February 2016
IPJF16_072-073_R_RecitalRU_0612OM.indd 72
up with Liszt and Bartók – the latter’s Out of Doors imbued with a
rough-hewn rusticity – he played two Scarlatti encores, the second
of which went like the wind. What stayed in the mind after this
brilliant recital was Kozhukhin’s sheer joy in playing. 
Then it was Nikolai Demidenko’s turn in this transplanted
Southbank International Piano Series. In this great Russian
pianist’s account of Brahms’s homage to Schumann in his sixteen
Opus 9 Variations – a work too seldom performed – I was reminded
of something he told me in an interview in 1995: ‘There is a
confidence, an integrity of thought and feeling in Romantic music,
which is now lost for ever.’ This was the spirit in which he played
both these variations as well as Brahms’s Sonata in F-sharp minor
– with a mighty wistfulness that went straight to the heart. His
Prokofiev was magisterial too, with an account by turns pugilistic
and playful of the Sonata No 2, and a mercurial delivery of the
Visions fugitives – miniatures which in his powerful hands acquired
big implications. What stayed in the mind here was Demidenko’s
unique amalgam of power and refinement.
Nelson Goerner’s Wigmore recital was no less sensational:
this Argentinian pianist always produces a high-octane blend of
artistry and virtuosity, and he did so here in a programme reflecting
his stylistic versatility. After delivering the variations of Handel’s
Chaconne in G HWV435 with ringing Baroque clarity, he gave
© FELIX BROEDE
Exquisite musicality: Denis Kozhukhin
08/12/2015 10:31
 Rare is the pianist who never
suffers from technical glitches.
One of the measures of
professionalism is way they deal
with these things
a sensitively idiomatic account of Schumann’s Fantasie in C
Op 17, making a virtue of the abrupt mood changes in the episodic
first movement, finding a Kinderszenen-type poetry in the second,
and majestic grandeur in the finale. Yet there’s a downside to this
brilliance, as we saw in his delivery of two Chopin Nocturnes, which
were pulled about with such exaggerated rubato as to become
denatured: it’s fatal to try to inflate small pieces into big ones. On
the other hand, Goerner gave us a majestic Chopin Ballade and
Scherzo, and a meditative/explosive Sonata No 5 by Scriabin which
seemed surrounded by clouds of incense. The Fandango from
Granados’ Goyescas that he played as an encore was intensely lyrical.
After a recital by Behzod Abduraimov, people always leave with
smiles on their faces. At the Wigmore, this young Uzbek did not
disappoint. Creating long arcs of beauty, his account of Schubert’s
D935 Impromptus was glowingly vivid and fastidiously calibrated;
in Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No 1, the killer glissandi alternated with
the sweetest and warmest cantabile; to Musorgsky’s Pictures at an
Exhibition, he brought an orchestral richness.
Those same Impromptus were played by the Israeli pianist
Amir Katz, preceded by a coruscating account of the earlier D899
set. Katz turned his eight-piece recital into a riveting journey,
beginning with the most resonant performance of the C minor
D899 I have ever heard. His approach to these works was highly
individual, and if he stumbled badly at the opening of the final
piece in the D935 set, the whirlwind pace at which he took it was
fair compensation.
A month later in these excellent lunchtime Wigmore recitals
– managed by the indefatigable Lisa Peacock – we heard the
young Serbian pianist Stefan Ćirić. Ćirić’s programming is often
adventurous – viz his premiering of Federico González Orduña’s
modernistic piano concerto at the Southbank in June. He stayed
on familiar ground for the Wigmore, yet what he did with Mozart’s
Sonata in A major K331 was revelatory, allowing that hackneyed
work to bloom in close-up and thus appear new and unfamiliar.
Ćirić is one of the most technically immaculate pianists on the
circuit, and his one smudged note in the opening of Kreisleriana
was as nothing compared to the blizzard of similar smudges in
Cortot’s notorious recording. Ćirić drew on a wide palette of
colours to characterise each piece in this wonderful compendium,
IPJF16_072-073_R_RecitalRU_0612OM.indd 73
© CRISTIAN FATU
Behzod Abduraimov brought an orchestral
richness to Musorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition
bringing it to a gracefully syncopated close. After the controlled
anarchy of Ravel’s La Valse he brought things magisterially full
circle with Volodos’s crazily virtuosic arrangement of Mozart’s
Rondo alla turca.  
Rare is the pianist who never suffers from technical glitches or
memory lapses: one of the measures of professionalism is way they
deal with these things. Amir Katz was living dangerously, but saved
the situation with skill, as did Murray Perahia when he came
seriously to grief in the first virtuosic flourish of Beethoven’s Piano
Concerto No 4 at the Barbican: he soon reasserted his dominance.
Two young pianists at the Bloomsbury Festival were not so lucky,
however. After competently delivering five Chopin Études, James
Brawn hit big trouble in the third movement of Beethoven’s
Sonata in D major Op 10 No 3, losing his way twice in the same
repeated passage (it was unfair that he should have had to perform
on a beaten-up old Broadwood). Marios Panteliadis, playing a
Steinway, brought out lovely poetry from Kreisleriana, but came
so badly unstuck with one piece that he had to start it again; he
redeemed himself by extracting an authentically smoky resonance
from Scriabin’s Sonata No 3.
One should not forget that there are grand precedents for
such disasters – most notably the celebrated occasion when Piotr
Anderszewski was so dissatisfied with his performance of Bach’s
French Suite No 5 at the Wigmore Hall that, as an encore, he
played the entire work again. e
January/February 2016 International Piano 73
08/12/2015 17:03

T
O BE HAILED AS THE
brightest of a new generation of
Luxembourgian pianists might not
sound like the most ringing of endorsements,
yet 27-year old Sabine Weyer is as proud of
her tiny country as any Austrian, Australian
or American would be of their larger land
mass. ‘We might not have a top-ranking
conservatoire like the Guildhall,’ she admits,
‘but since serious piano students from
Luxembourg have to train abroad so early in
their careers, they very quickly discover the
extent of the competition out there – which
may not be such a bad thing.’
Weyer’s flourishing career had
precocious beginnings, taking lessons
at Luxembourg’s Music Conservatory at
the tender age of seven. Since then, her
technique and style has been shaped by
a string of international mentors. After
participating in London Master Classes
with the great British pedagogue Norma
Fisher in 2010, there were encounters with
Sir András Schiff and Oxana Yablonskaya,
both among her heroes. At Brussels’s
Koninklijk Conservatory for two years,
it was the Serbian pianist Aleksandar
Madžar who taught her the importance
of phrasing, or what she calls ‘the tension
between notes which is really the inner
force’. Her sense of discipline she credits to
the authoritarian Bulgarian Vassil Guenov,
who completely overhauled her technique
after a rocky start as a child.
Weyer feels that the pressure for pianists
to carve an individual niche has never been
greater. Some play in an almost ‘neutral’
way, she says: ‘In their struggle for technical
perfection, you don’t get to know much
about their soul. For me to survive in a world
constantly seeking perfection requires a kind
of emotional transparency, which is about
expressing exactly who I am as a person.’
74 International Piano January/February 2016
IPJF16_074_F_Debut_0612OM.indd 74
DEBUT ON DISC
The young Luxembourgian pianist Sabine
Weyer has made an unusual start to her
recording career by bringing together Rameau
and Debussy on disc. She explains to Robert
Turnbull that spatial awareness is an essential
component in both composers’ music
Her individuality shines through in
the repertoire choices that she makes: for
her first recording, released last August
by Orlando Records, Weyer opted to pair
her beloved Debussy with Rameau, a
composer whom Debussy revered.
‘Discovering the keyboard Suites of
Rameau was a revelation’, she says, knowing
full well that these were written somewhat
earlier than the invention of the pianoforte.
‘The writing is incredibly modern. You have
strong dissonances on weak beats and the
© MARTIN TESCHNER
notion of space is very important, especially
if the music is to dance – and much of it is
essentially dance music.
‘This is also a very important aspect of
Sabine Weyer
Debussy’s music: through his vast palate
of harmonies and variety of colours, he
opens up a space, giving a place for new
vibrations. The delicacy with which you a band created in 1881 and which has
can shape the sound on the piano is, in spawned one of Europe’s leading piano
my opinion, hugely enriching to the music festivals. It’s an early piece that remains
and its expressive possibilities.’ little recorded, but abounds in sumptuous
The recording, says Weyer, was an melodies born out of just the sort of
exhausting experience: it took two and the emotional conflict that Weyer finds
half days to record the Rameau alone. ‘The stimulating. ‘After recording Rameau
studio piano, a Steinway Model B, had a and Debussy and then Bach, I needed
very heavy touch making all those fast something very different – something big
trills virtually impossible,’ Weyer recalls. and romantic, with rich sound textures
‘So we had to call in the technician who and the expression of extremely tormented
put a small piece of wood right under the feelings.’ e
keys, so they didn’t need to go down all
the way. Such engineering! Then there’s Sabine Weyer’s
all the listening, selecting the good takes, debut disc of
rejecting the bad ones. It’s a process that Rameau’s Suite
will get easier with time.’ in A major/minor
Two new CDs are planned for next from Pièces de
year: the first features two piano concertos Clavecin and
by J S Bach, with Weyer partnering with Debussy’s Images
François-Xavier Poizat and the Camerata Books I & II is
Berlin; the other disc is of Scriabin’s Piano now available from
Concerto, accompanied by Latvia’s Liepaja Orlando Records (OR0015).
Symphony ‘Amber Sound’ Orchestra, www.sabine-weyer.com
08/12/2015 10:32

Chopin Scherzo No 1 in B minor; Scherzo
No 2 in B-flat minor; Scherzo No 3 in
C-sharp minor; Scherzo No 4 in E major
Tchaikovsky The Seasons
Lang Lang (pf)
Sony Classical 88875146929 (DVD);
88875117612 (CD)
l
If tinsel town Chopin is to your taste then
this is for you. True, Lang Lang can, as they
say, ‘get around’. He has mechanical facility
and energy in super-abundance; but like
Liberace, he takes an alternative route to
mega-fame and fortune. His playing is
so sugar-coated that it becomes palatable to
even the most indifferent and innocent
listener.
All this makes Chopin particularly
vulnerable. The DVD Lang Lang live in
Versailles is uncomfortable viewing as you
watch his posturing, star-gazing and
arm-waving attempts to act out the
emotional life of the music he plays. Hardly
the sort of pianist to allow a composer his
own voice, he sentimentalises and distorts,
reducing Chopin to the level of a Victorian
melodrama. Few pianists, presented on film
with all the trappings of super-stardom,
have shown a more obvious desire to move
and be moved, and scarcely a single bar
escapes the aura of false glamour.
Free of such a visual assault, the CD Lang
Lang in Paris is more acceptable. However,
even if Tchaikovsky’s The Seasons are less
distorted, they rarely escape the heavy hand
of the exhibitionist. This disc is excellently
recorded and lavishly presented, yet while
the sleeve design wisely concentrates on the
music rather than its performance, the
reference to ‘a pianist of Lang Lang’s
stature’ is unfortunate.
There is no competition for Pavel
Kolesnikov’s fluent and aristocratic
Tchaikovsky on Hyperion, and any of the
many versions of the Chopin Scherzos are
preferable to this one.
BRYCE MORRISON
IPJF16_075_R_CD&DVDRevs_0612OM.indd 75
REVIEWS DVDs & CDs
Chopin Préludes, Op. 28; Prélude in C-sharp
minor, Op 45; Prélude in A-flat, Op posth.
Yundi (pf)
Deutsche Grammophon 481 1910, 39 mins
lll
The idea of a new-release disc offering a
playing time shy of 40 minutes hearkens
back to the days of DG’s short-measure
Pollini LPs. Yundi is no Pollini, though,
despite also winning the Chopin
Competition in Warsaw. Yundi is at his
best in the more reflective Préludes (the B
minor, No 6, for example), and technically
there are no detectable problems
anywhere. No 8 in F-sharp minor offers a
stunning vortex of notes, while the B-flat
minor, No 16, presents fluid legato at
breakneck velocity.
Yet the panorama of the D-flat Prélude
(No 15) is reined-in, a procession of
excellent moments with little sense of
overarching, cogent structure; and Yundi
sounds unconvinced by the dynamic
terracing of the C minor (No 20). There
are, in fairness, compensatory factors: the
high drama of the F minor (No 18), for
example; but even there some may find his
touch too hard, a criticism apt also for the
G-sharp minor (No 12). The final D minor
Prélude is dynamic, active, yet in the final
analysis less than involving.
There are two ‘fillers’ (something of a
misnomer given the playing time): the
well-known C-sharp minor Prélude, Op 45,
in a rather diffuse performance; and the
posthumously published A-flat (1834), a
piece that stylistically sounds as if it had
escaped from Op 28, here lovely and
fluent.
Given the competition in Op 28
(Pollini, Argerich, Sokolov, Blechacz to
name but four), it is difficult to
recommend this issue wholeheartedly.
COLIN CLARKE
January/February 2016 International Piano
Ravel Piano Concertos: G major; Left Hand
in D Fauré Ballade in F sharp, Op. 19
Yuja Wang (pf); Tonhalle-Orchestra Zürich /
Lionel Bringuier
Deutsche Grammophon DG 479 4954, 50 mins
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Yuja Wang made her made her European
debut with the Zurich Tonhalle Orchestra,
so this disc of Ravel and solo Fauré (Wang’s
first all-French album) holds some
documentary value as well as offering fine
performances. The major problem, it turns
out, comes from the engineers: the
orchestra is placed too far back in both
concertos. A shame, as there is clear rapport
between Wang and her conductor Lionel
Bringuier and, despite the placing, it is clear
that orchestral balance and detail is
carefully considered.
In the G major (up against the likes of
Michelangeli and Zimerman, of course),
Wang acquits herself well, with perfect
trills, so important in the first two
movements, and a real sense of Gallic
lyricism. The helter-skelter of the finale is
correspondingly well caught.
Ravel’s Concerto for the Left Hand finds
both pianist and orchestra bringing real
power to the experience. Wang seems
perfectly within the piece (technically, there
is some truly awesome playing here), her
delivery at times riven with grandeur, at
others the very definition of tender.
Sandwiched between the two concertos is a
solo item by Fauré, a 12-minute Ballade,
nicely if a tad superficially played and in a
different, warmer and somewhat less clear
acoustic (Teldex Studio Berlin).
There is so much to admire here that is
seems churlish not to accord a full house of
stars for the rating; yet the recording
balance, the slightly low playing time and
the exalted nature of some existing
recordings are the reason for my four-star
verdict. CC
75
08/12/2015 10:33
 REVIEWS CDs
Egon Petri: The Complete Columbia &
Electrola Solo and Concerto Recordings
Beethoven Sonatas Op 10/2; Op 27/2; Op
78; Op 90; Op 106; Op 111 Brahms Handel
Variations; Paganini Variations; 3 Rhapsodies;
4 Ballades Op 10; 6 Piano Pieces Op 118
Busoni Fantasia after J S Bach; Indian Diary;
2 Sonatinas; Serenade; Albumblatt No 3;
Giga, bolero e variazione Bach/Busoni
Chaconne; 4 Chorale Preludes; Liszt/
Busoni Rhapsodie Espagnole (Minneapolis
Symphony Orchestra / Mitropoulos) Chopin
Préludes Op 28; Polonaise Op 53; Waltz Op
42 Franck Prélude, choral et fugue Liszt
Piano Concerto No 2; Fantasia on Motifs
from Beethoven’s Ruins of Athens (London
Philharmonic Orchestra / Heward); 5 Études;
Transcriptions from Schubert, Beethoven,
Gounod, Verdi and Wagner Bach/Petri
Minuet; Gluck/Sgambati Mélodie;
Schubert/Tausig Andantino & Variations
Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No 1 (London
Philharmonic Orchestra / Goehr)
Egon Petri (pf)
APR 7701, 7 CDs, 9 hrs
llll
Thanks to Mike Spring’s indefatigable
industry, his APR series of great pianists of
the past continues with this 7-CD album of
Egon Petri. A pianist of monumental
strength and grandeur Petri scorned easy
glamour. The reverse of, say, Rubinstein or
Horowitz who enslaved and, indeed,
seduced their capacity audiences, Petri kept
them at arm’s length, forbidding more than
passing intimacy. There was, to quote from
John and Anna Gillespie’s superb Notable
Twentieth-Century Pianists, ‘a manifest
honesty; there was no artifice in his playing’.
Moreover, Petri was always true to his own
lights, reflecting in the grandeur and
occasional severity of his performances the
presiding spirit of his beloved teacher,
Busoni.
On the debit side, Petri’s Chopin is less
than revelatory or beguiling. Why is the
Prélude No 2 more Allegro than Lento
76 International Piano January/February 2016
IPJF16_076_077_R_CDRevs_0612OM.indd 76
(a familiar failing, almost as if the pianist
wished to erase Chopin’s morbidity as
quickly as possible)? He can be matter-of-
fact when he should be magical: it’s hard to
correlate this performance of Prélude No 23
with James Huneker’s description of music
that is ‘aerial, imponderable and like a
sun-shot spider’s web oscillating in the
breeze of summer, its hues changing at
every puff .’ Such things are not for Petri; a
tough reasonableness backed by an
awe-inspiring technique was his calling
card. Yet there is no lack of underlying
poetry in his way with Liszt’s second
concerto. Considered and mature, his
playing is free from arrogance.
There is tremendous mastery in both the
Brahms Handel and Paganini Variations: try
Variations 3, 9 and 11 from the second
book of the Paganini (Clara Schumann’s
‘witch’ variations) for an imperious
authority that can make even Michelangeli
sound yielding by comparison. Petri’s
approach to the slow waltzes of Variation 4
also offers a radical alternative to Géza
Anda’s dewy-eyed response. By contrast,
Brahms’s Four Ballades are disquietingly
brusque, straightforward to the point of
bluntness.
Petri’s mix of the terse and the giving, of
the severe and the devotional are at their
height in Franck’s Prélude, choral et fugue.
There is Busoni’s piano and orchestra
version of Liszt’s Spanish Rhapsody where
glitter is added to glitter and where, to
quote one critic, Petri’s playing ‘packs a
mighty wallop’. Most of all in Beethoven’s
Hammerklavier Sonata, you are reminded
that Petri was at his greatest in music of a
Himalayan scale and grandeur.
This is an invaluable album for all lovers
of a musical greatness that survived many
trials and tribulations (as detailed in Bryan
Crimp’s notes). Inexplicably, Petri was
omitted from Philips’ Great Pianists of the
Twentieth Century,’ the letter ‘P’ represented
by André Previn, who must have been
astonished to find himself next to the likes
of Arrau and Michelangeli. Petri’s towering
if formidable stature remains incontestable.
BM
Brahms Paganini Variations, Op 35; Liszt
Consolation No 3; Mephisto Waltz No 1;
Isoldens Liebestod; Danse macabre; ‘Tarantelle’
from Venezia e Napoli
Alexander Gavrylyuk (pf)
Piano Classics PCL0086, 1 CD
llll
Ten years ago Alexander Gavrylyuk, aged
20, created a sensation at the Miami
International Piano Festival with a
stunning recital issued on CD and DVD
soon after. On the programme were
sonatas by Prokofiev and Scriabin,
Mendelssohn-Liszt-Horowitz’s Wedding
March and Brahms’s Paganini Variations.
Four years later, Gavrylyuk recorded all
five piano concertos by Prokofiev live in
concert with conductor Vladimir
Ashkenazy in just over a fortnight.
Recently he has played all the
Rachmaninov concertos (including the
Rhapsody) in two evenings.
A daredevil virtuoso? That and more:
Gavrylyuk with his latest CD returns to
Brahms, with ‘fingers of steel, the courage
of a lion and a heart of burning lava’ (the
requirements James Huneker considered
necessary for playing these variations). His
interpretation is comparable to the
greatest recordings in the catalogue: Anda,
Katchen, Michelangeli…
Gavrylyuk’s unique tonal palette, with
the subtlest shadings, brings together
poetry and profoundness. He certainly
takes time in the slow pieces, while always
moving forward. He is neither self-
indulgent nor sentimental, and ever
mindful of the structure. The pianist thus
creates a narration rich in symphonic
allure.
His Liszt is similarly a celebration of the
highest standards imaginable.
Unfortunately, neither the overall quality
of the recording nor of the piano itself do
justice to Gavrylyuk’s performance: this
artist deserves much better.
ERIC SCHOONES
08/12/2015 10:33

CHOICE
Bach Goldberg Variations Beethoven
Diabelli Variations Rzewski The People
United Will Never Be Defeated
Igor Levit (pf)
Sony Classical 88875060962, 3 CDs, 194 mins
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This is Igor Levit’s third recording for Sony
(after Beethoven: The Late Piano Sonatas and
Bach: Partitas). Both previous offerings have
garnered huge critical praise, and this
fascinating programme of variations
continues the trend. Having accorded
Tharaud’s Goldberg Variations five stars in
this issue, Levit tempts me to a forbidden
sixth (only the final return of the aria not
carrying the expected balm withholds this).
Throughout there is a feeling of a voyage of
discovery, during which nothing is rushed
but neither is any emotion underplayed.
This is one of the finest performances
available.
Levit’s Diabelli is equally fine. The theme
claims no greatness as the initiator of one of
the greatest sets of variations; it is left to
Beethoven to unfold the multitude of
ramifications. Just as Levit’s Goldberg was
impeccably ‘Bachian’, so his sense of
Beethoven style is beyond criticism. There is
a core of gritty strength underpinning the
entire performance. The technical standard
is beyond reproach and Levit now takes his
place amongst a pantheon populated by the
likes of Pollini, Arrau and Brendel.
Finally, there is Rzewski’s master set of
variations on a popular Chilean song.
Recorded by both the composer and its
dedicatee, Ursula Oppens, there are many
fine recordings available (Corey Hamm
among them). Throughout, Levit
emphasises the fantastical as well as
revelling in the technical demands. As with
the Bach and the Beethoven, the return of
the theme at the close is designed to carry
great emotional force.
This is an extraordinary set, presented in
sterling sound. CC
IPJF16_076_077_R_CDRevs_0612OM.indd 77
Bach Goldberg Variations
Alexandre Tharaud (pf)
Erato 0825646051779, 75 mins + DVD
lllll
Apparently Alexandre Tharaud took nine
months off giving concerts purely to
prepare for his first performance of Bach’s
variation masterpiece in Barcelona in
2011. Intriguingly, there is not only this
CD plus DVD account available but also
an LP (not reviewed here), a response
perhaps to a vinyl renaissance.
Tharaud has spoken of the luxury of, for
example, spending five hours on one bar
during his sabbatical, and there is certainly
a dizzying attention to detail on display
here. Try the pearly articulation of the
second variation or, at a higher velocity,
the fifth, or the perfect weight accorded to
each and every note in the slower
variations.
Sometimes one hears the modernity of
Bach’s writing in its skeletal textures; in
others, the references to pre-extant forms
are obvious. Although Gould is obviously
a hero of Tharaud, it is Argerich’s Bach
that seems analogous. There is less of the
X-ray in Tharaud than there is in Gould,
more of a sense of flow that moves
inevitably (albeit along very varied
terrain) to the restatement of the
opening Aria – a return to a
recontextualised place of peace.
The accompanying film, directed by
Stéphane Aubé, is beautifully shot.
Narrated initially by Tharaud describing
how the piece has slowly matured within
him, the piano performance itself is
underscored rather than contradicted by a
plethora of phenomenal camera angles,
from underneath the hands to the interior
of the piano. Sophistication is the keyword
here, as if mirroring the suave heart of
Bach’s masterpiece. An excellent set. CC
January/February 2016 International Piano
REVIEWS CDs
Beethoven Piano Sonatas: No 8 in C
minor, Pathétique, Op 13; No 21 in C major,
Waldstein, Op 53; No 32 in C minor, Op 111
Boris Giltburg (pf)
Naxos 8.573400, 69 mins
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Following his well-received disc for
Naxos of early Schumann, Boris Giltburg
has turned his attention to Beethoven, in
an imaginative programme of sonatas
in C from the early and middle periods
culminating in the last. And what a
formidable trio of sonatas this is: three of
the most familiar and the finest.
Giltburg rises well to the challenge.
His Pathétique is well thought through
and rather more convincingly achieved
than Scherbakov’s (reviewed in IP issue
No 33). In tempo, he is closer to
Goldstone (Divine Arts) than Lewis
(Harmonia Mundi) and his shaping of
the music is nicely done although he
does not displace either rival.
In the Waldstein (a performance of
which has appeared on disc before, in Avi
Music’s Ruhr Festival collection),
Gilrburg’s poetic gifts are even more
keenly heard, interwoven with a degree
of muscle the early sonatas do not
require. I particularly liked his way with
the Rondo, one of Beethoven’s greatest
piano sonata movements. His
interpretation of Sonata No 32 takes him,
perhaps, to the limits of his technical and
interpretative range.
Naxos’ sound is clear and natural
though not quite as intimate as
Goldstone’s in the Pathétique, or as vivid
as Freddy Kempf enjoyed for BIS in his
marginally superior account of Op 111.
My first choice in all these sonatas
remains Paul Lewis; but if you want just
these particular works on a single disc,
Giltburg is a virtuosic and thoughtful
executant. Recommended.
GUY RICKARDS
77
08/12/2015 17:04
 REVIEWS CDs
Rachmaninov Rhapsody on a Theme of
Paganini, Op 43; Variations on a Theme of
Chopin, Op 22; Variations on a Theme of
Corelli, Op 42 Trifonov Rachmaniana, suite
for piano
Daniil Trifonov (pf); Philadelphia Orchestra
/ Yannick Nézet-Séguin
DG 479 4970, 79 mins

This is a fine traversal of Rachmaninov’s
three free-standings sets of variations,
gathered round Trifonov’s brief, evocative
tribute to his compatriot composer-pianist.
The programme is laid out very effectively,
opening with the overplayed Paganini
Rhapsody and juxtaposing it with the
earliest and most virtuosic set, based on
Chopin’s Prélude No 20. The Corelli
Variations (actually based on the
anonymous tune La Folia) forms the finale
after Trifonov’s Rachmaniana (2010).
Trifonov’s Rhapsody is not the quickest
on disc, but is a crisp and tight account
partnered by the Philadelphia Orchestra
(which accompanied the composer in the
first performances and recording) on fine
form. This and the near-contemporaneous
Corelli Variations are played straight and
uncut. Trifonov brings out their lyrical
poetry with enviable finesse, and does not
stint on excitement in the more vigorous
passages. His accounts rival the best on
record.
His performance of the Chopin Variations,
however, will divide opinion. Fluent and
compelling in its way, it may upset purists
in omitting three of the 22 variations (11,
18 & 19) and dovetailing Nos 10 and 12.
On the other hand, the excision of the
Presto coda (one of many cuts sanctioned by
Rachmaninov who never codified a final,
definitive version of the score) should
offend very few. I have to say, as one of
purist leanings, that Trifonov brings off his
vision of the score consummately well.
DG’s sound is excellent. GR
78 International Piano January/February 2016
IPJF16_078_R_CDRevs_0612OM.indd 78
Russian Piano Music for 4 Hands: Glinka
Kamarinskaya (arr Balakirev); Valse-Fantaisie
in B minor (arr Lyapunov); Capriccio on
Russian Themes in A major; Cavalry Trots
Nos 1-2; Polka Initiale in B-flat minor
Tchaikovsky 50 Russian Folk Songs
Cyprien Katsaris, Alexander Ghindin (pfs)
Piano 21 P21 046-N, 66 mins

I have heard it said that Russians hear
Petrushka as a set of folk-song arrangements.
It is only when one encounters familiar
‘Stravinskyan’ tunes in other, earlier
contexts that this becomes obvious, as in
the collection of the 50 Russian Folk Songs
that Tchaikovsky arranged in 1868, some of
which Stravinsky drew upon.
Tchaikovsky also pillaged his own
collection, which can sound like a whistle-
stop tour through some of his most familiar
works – the first quartet, the Serenade for
Strings, second symphony, Tempest Overture
(whose quoted tune also crops up in
Musorgsky’s Khovanshchina) and the 1812
Overture! Fifteen pieces do not exceed half a
minute, while the longest – the ubiquitous
Song of the Volga Boatmen, given a full-on
symphonic treatment in miniature – does
not make it past two.
Three of Glinka’s pieces are all
considerably longer than the Volga Boatmen,
the best known being the delightful,
pioneering Kamarinskaya (1848, given here
in Balakirev’s 1902 transcription). This
imaginative fantasy on a wedding song and
a dance is considered the first concert work
based on Russian folk tunes. In fact, the
Capriccio on Russian Themes predated
Kamarinskaya by 14 years, though it wasn’t
performed in public until 1904. The other
Glinka pieces on this disc are slighter,
largely light music of the ho-hum variety.
Nonetheless, Katsaris and Ghindin
despatch them with élan, as they do the
entire programme. Throughout, Piano21’s
sound is beautifully realised. GR
CHOICE
Rachmaninov Piano duets: Fantaisie-
Tableaux, Op 5; Suite No 2, Op 17; Symphonic
Dances, Op 45
Louis Lortie, Hélène Mercier (pfs)
Chandos CHAN 10882, 79 mins

Rachmaninov’s music for two pianos is
well established in the repertoire. There
have been a good number of recordings
down the years and nearly a dozen of this
particular threesome are currently available
(Argerich with various partners, Ashkenazy
and Previn, Shelley and Macnamara,
Donohoe and Roscoe, amongst others),
plus more still swapping out the Symphonic
Dances for the Six Pieces Op 11.
So where do Lortie and Mercier rank in
such august contemporary company? Very
highly indeed. Their playing boasts superb
ensemble and real attack in the many
vigorous movements on offer here.
Highlights include their incandescent
realisation of the rapturous clangour of
bells in the finale of the Fantaisie-Tableaux,
and the whirling toccata of Suite No 2’s
opening Alla marcia.
The music is viscerally exciting, but so
often performances don’t quite achieve
that. In this case, allied to Chandos’s
brilliantly vivid sound, Lortie and Mercier
catch the breathtaking sweep of
Rachmaninov’s invention, heard tangibly
in the opening (and best) movement of the
Symphonic Dances. In fact, they make this
uneven triptych cohere better than any
account I have heard.
They are even better in the softer, lilting
sections, such as the waltz-fantasies in the
second suite and Symphonic Dances. Here,
their collective delicate touch wrings
beautifully nuanced, crystal clear colours
from their pair of Faziolis.
This disc is superb: buy it! GR
14/12/2015 13:37:18

Mozart Piano Concertos: No 8 in C, K246;
No 11 in F, K413; No 13 in C, K415 Ronald
Brautigam (fortepiano); Die Kölner
Akademie / Michael Alexander Willens
BIS SACD 2074, 68 mins
lllll
Captured in stunning, vital sound, Ronald
Brautigam gives stylish, involved
performances of three Mozart piano
concertos that deserve more frequent airings.
The instrument used is a Paul McNulty 2013
fortepiano, after a c1802 Walter und Sohn.
Presenting the concertos in reverse
numerical order means that K415, possibly
the best known of the three here, comes first.
Fresh as a daisy, contrasts are visceral: fortes
can be buzzily punchy; contrasting passages
are the height of gentillesse. Here, as
throughout, the orchestra offers constant
delight. Brautigam’s use of agogic accents is
kept just within Mozartian boundaries, yet
he remains freely expressive. He finds
unexpected depths in the finale of K246,
while the central Larghetto of K413 is
beautifully, eerily disembodied.
Recommended. CC
Mozart: Piano Sonatas, Vol 4
No 7 in C major, K309; No 11 in A major,
K331; No 15 in F major, K533/494; No 18 in D
major, K576 Christian Blackshaw (pf)
Wigmore Hall Live
WHLive0078/2, 2CDs, 93 mins
lllll
This final instalment in Blackshaw’s
acclaimed live survey of Mozart’s 18 piano
sonatas prefaces two later works with a pair
of – relatively – early ones. The 11th is
perhaps the best known, or rather the
sonata with the best-known music.
Blackshaw’s account of its evergreen
Turkish finale deservedly brings the house
down. His interpretations are highly
cultured and lucid, models of poise and
IPJF16_079-080_R_CDsinBrief_0712BWM.indd 79
REVIEWS CDs in brief
CHOICE
natural spontaneity. Just as Paul Lewis’
Beethoven sonata recordings had an air of
the composer at the keyboard, the same is
true of Blackshaw and Mozart here.
Suggested similarities with Gieseking’s
approach are underlined in No 18 by
comparisons with the latter’s account on
Homocord which I reviewed two years ago
– not to Blackshaw’s detriment, either.
Enchanting. GR
Chopin 55 Mazurkas Dmitri Alexeev (pf)
Frederic Chopin Institute
NIFCCD 204/5, 2CDs, 145 mins
lllll
Dmitri Alexeev is heard to full advantage
here in a superb, full-dynamic recording
that captures a beautifully prepared piano.
He plays on a modern Steinway with
crystalline clarity and real tenderness (a
good example is the famous A minor
Mazurka from 1827, while Op 7/2 is a
magnificent study in intimacy). Alexeev
reveals the multifaceted glory of these
pieces perfectly, from the fragmentary,
enigmatic Op 17/3 to the sophistication of
Op 24/2 or the fragile, gently accruing lines
of Op 50/3. The late Mazurka Op 63/2 is
almost proto-Scriabin: within one form,
Chopin offers a whole world of pianism.
Documentation is exemplary, offering an
essay on Russian exponents of Chopin’s
piano music and a survey of other
recordings of these jewels. Superb. CC
Chopin Polonaise No. 5 in F-sharp minor,
Op. 44; Berceuse in D-flat major, Op. 57;
Barcarolle in F-sharp major, Op. 60; 24
Préludes, Op. 28 Nelson Goerner (pf)
Alpha ALPHA224, 59 mins
llll
Nelson Goerner is a pianist of formidable
articulacy and focus, as this and his
January/February 2016 International Piano
previous releases attest. Reeling off the
F-sharp minor Polonaise’s streams of
octaves with unfaltering assurance he is no
less attuned to the central oasis of calm,
keeping everything on the move without a
trace of sentimentality. Elsewhere (notably
in the Berceuse and Prélude No 17), the
playing is too restless and thrusting to
capture the full range of Chopin’s poetry.
Yet you won’t easily hear a more dazzling
performance of Prélude No 16, even if the
last word in incandescence goes to Goerner’s
fellow Argentinian, Martha Argerich. The
Barcarolle (Goerner’s second recording) is,
again, determinedly unsentimental. If you
love Chopin with edge, this is for you, the
overall impression emphasised by Alpha’s
brightly-lit sound. BM
Brahms: Works for Solo Piano, Vol 5
Intermezzos Op 76, Nos 3-4; Op 118, Nos
1, 4; 2 Sarabandes, WoO 5 posth. Nos 1-2’
Variations on a Theme by Niccolò Paganini,
Op 35 Bk 2; Variations on an Original Theme,
Op 21/1; Scherzo, Op 4; Hungarian Dances –
WoO 1, Nos 1, 3, 5; Variations on a Hungarian
Song, Op 21/2 Barry Douglas (pf)
Chandos CHAN 10878, 67 mins
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This penultimate issue in the series once
again mixes Intermezzos and dances from
Brahms’ various collections with larger works,
in this case three sets of variations and the
coruscating Scherzo Op 4. It’s an approach
that will not please purists, though in context
its works very well, with the final pair of
Hungarian Dances providing a delicious
encore. Douglas’ playing is, as always,
beautifully manicured, rhythmically alert and
awash with colour. It may be a touch uneven
in places and there are more vivacious
accounts of the livelier individual tracks, but
Douglas’ shaping of the three variation sets is
masterly, as is his playing of the Scherzo.
Chandos’ sound is bright and clear. GR
79
08/12/2015 10:36
 REVIEWS CDs in brief
Turina Piano Music, Vol 2: Verbena
madrileña, Op 42; En la zapatería, Op 71;
Linterna mágica, Op 101; El circo, Op 68;
Radio Madrid, Op 62 Jordi Masó (pf)
Naxos 8.573401, 61 mins
lll
Jordi Masó has been an indefatigable
servant to Spanish music down the years
and his survey of Turina is a worthy
addition to his discography. This second
volume features a clutch of multi-
movement evocations of Spanish life,
including a Madrid fiesta (Verbena
madrileña), the life of shoemaker (En la
zapatería), the cinema (Linterna mágica),
circus (El circo) and radio broadcasts (Radio
Madrid). None of this is great music, and it
would be a challenge to guess from Turina’s
(admittedly tongue-in-cheek) pastiche the
profession of the occupant of the zapatería.
Nonetheless, the music is well crafted and
Masó’s accounts are idiomatic and nicely
nuanced. With naturally clear (if
unspectacular) Naxos sound, there are
worse ways to spend an hour. GR
Poulenc Piano Concerto, S1462; Aubade,
concerto choréographique, S512; Concerto in D
minor for 2 pianos & orchestra, S611-2; Sonata
for piano, four hands, S81; Élégie (en accords
alternés), S1751. L’Embarquement pour Cythère,
S1501 Louis Lortie, Hélène Mercier (pfs);
BBC Philharmonic Orchestra / Edward Gardner
Chandos CHAN 10875, 73 mins
llll
As a listener, I often find a tension in
Poulenc’s music between the trivial and the
inspired; so it proves again in this
beautifully produced disc of music for two
pianos. If L’Embarquement pour Cythère
(written in 1951 as an encore, or bombe-
surprise) tends to the inconsequential, the
early duet Sonata (1918, revised in 1939) is
gently iconoclastic, while Élégie (1959) has
80 International Piano January/February 2016
IPJF16_079-080_R_CDsinBrief_0712BWM.indd 80
true poetry in its pages. Best of all is the D
minor Concerto (1932) with its haunting
evocations of Balinese gamelan and Mozart,
magically played by Lortie and Mercier. The
programme is fleshed out significantly by
the piano concertos (no place here for the
lame Concert champêtre transcription!) very
nicely delivered by Lortie alone. The BBC
Philharmonic and Gardner accompany
impeccably. GR
Ivan Ilić plays Morton Feldman
Ivan Ilić (pf)
Paraty 135305, 68 mins
llll
Morton Feldman once said silence was his
counterpoint: ‘It’s nothing against
something.’ He was a wonderful composer
of ‘nothing’ and For Bunita Marcus, like his
other long, slow, near-silent late works,
employs it to entrancing effect. Ivan Ilić’s
enthusiasm for the music (this disc
completes his ‘Morton Feldman Trilogy’)
perhaps explains the occasional over-
excited moment – John Tilbury’s
exemplary recording takes nearly 10
minutes longer – as well as his curious
decision to split the piece into 22 tracks, so
people needn’t listen to the whole work in
one sitting. This contrasts oddly with his
argument that Feldman’s music weaves its
spell incrementally, over time, until, as
dedicatee Bunita Marcus said, you feel like
you’re ‘drifting and floating’. Not if you’re
jumping up and down to skip between
tracks! GL
Kurtág Játékok Bugallo-Williams Piano
Duo (pfs)
Wergo WER 6766 2, 76 mins
llll
Kurtág’s Játékok (Hungarian for ‘Games’),
which he started in 1973 as a set of teaching
CHOICE
exercises, have now grown into an eight-
volume series of musical sketchbooks, filled
with what the CD-booklet calls ‘homages,
reminiscences and compositional
experiments’ – although, crucially, many are
under a minute long. Helena Bugallo and
Amy Williams have collected the 35 scored
for piano duet (four hands) and two pianos,
and added a selection of Kurtág’s equally
fleeting transcriptions of early music,
Machaut to Bach, plus his tiny 1956 Suite for
piano duet. They don’t quite match the
playful charm of Kurtág and his wife Márta
on their recordings of Játékok selections,
but they play with panache and are
sensitive to the transcriptions’ diffident
beauty. The disc also offers 21 previously
unrecorded pieces. GL
Insomnia: Piano Music by Gershwin, Cage,
Crumb, Belet, Stark Kai Schumacher (pf)
Hänssler Classic SCM CD 93-334, 52 mins
llll
Insomnia, says Kai Schumacher, is ‘a world
poised between pure black and flickering
neon, between melancholy and mania’. It’s
also his enterprising programme of
American night music, from Gershwin’s
edgy Sleepless Night (Prelude) to a set of
Urban Nocturnes by Bruce Stark, which
Schumacher commissioned specifically for
this recording. The disc’s centrepiece is
George Crumb’s A Little Night Music – nine
‘ruminations’ on Thelonious Monk’s
classic Round Midnight, which he
transforms into a trickle of quirky
vignettes, employing various pianistic
techniques to ghostly effect. Cage’s ethereal
Dream precedes these midnight musings,
while Brian Belet’s Summer Phantoms:
Nocturne, for piano and electronics, follows
them with a little surreal sleeplessness.
Schumacher executes this imaginative
‘nocturnal odyssey’ with a wide-awake
meticulousness. GL
08/12/2015 10:36

William Alwyn
Selected Works for Piano Solo (Volume 1)
The William Alwyn Foundation
ISMN 979-0-708087-05-2
The English composer William Alwyn
(1905-85) is best remembered as the
prolific and skilful composer of more than
50 film scores. His late-Romantic style can
also be heard in his concert works for
piano solo. These were championed
magnificently by the late John Ogdon
(Chandos) and include strikingly
individual works such as the Fantasy
Waltzes (clearly influenced by Ravel and
Schubert) and a rhythmically incisive
Sonata alla Toccata.
Alwyn’s concert pieces are but the tip of
a substantial iceberg, as this first volume of
his piano works makes clear. In fact, he
wrote around 150 pieces for piano in total.
Volume 1 focuses on the composer’s most
technically approachable miniatures, most
of which will be unknown to the majority
of pianists and teachers. This is a pity, as
there is much that is not only worthy here,
but also a number of pieces that are
poignant and charged in a way that
deserves attention.
Included in this category is Spring
Morning, an exquisite miniature suite of
three pieces which are economically
constructed yet with tremendous character.
Tactile pleasure can also be found in the
collections of easy pieces entitled Peter in
the Park and The Weather Vane. Look out
too for the laudable if rather less individual
Wooden Walls: A Suite of Sea Pieces, together
with Alwyn’s last solo piano work, Twelve
Diversions for the Five Fingers.
Much of this music is being published
for the first time and offers a feast of worthy
material mainly for players of Grades 1-3
level, but with some useful pieces for those
hovering around Grades 4-5.
MURRAY MCLACHLAN
IPJF16_081_R_SheetMusicRevs_0712OM.indd 81
REVIEWS Sheet music
Chopin/Liszt/Hiller
Easy Piano Pieces with Practice Tips
Wiener Urtext Edition edited by Nils Franke
Schott/Universal Edition
ISBN978-3-85055-760-3
This is an extremely useful volume for
students who have just graduated from the
‘beginner tutor’ stage and are ready for
musically satisfying material that will
inspire their progress.
The Preludes and Mazurkas of Chopin
included here are extremely well known,
but it is particularly valuable to have two
early Bourrées and the exquisite one-page
Cantabile, as well as Sostenuto, an early
Polonaise and Waltz. Introducing Grade
4-plus players to these challenges will help
them to cope with rhythmic subtleties,
demands of pedalling and tonal balance,
making an important contribution to
artistic development.
Though Hiller’s music is less memorable
than Chopin’s, the present selection of
miniatures shows this neglected but
significant figure to be a master of pianistic
layout and understanding. The selection is
nicely contrasted and offers a wide range of
mood, texture and key, including six dances
inspired by different countries (Ireland,
Scotland, Italy, Poland, Russia and Spain).
Finally, the dozen Liszt pieces have a
religious bias and are notable for their
immediacy, evocative powers and brevity.
How wonderful to be able to introduce a
Grade 4 player to La cloche sonne – 29 bars of
pure magic! Liszt’s piano works are not
generally thought to be accessible to players
below the Grade 8 mark, so this selection
will surprise many. Indeed even pre-Grade 4
players could make a fair attempt at the
eight-bar fragment Adagio – religioso
(provided they have reasonably large hands),
though the more substantial musical
message projected in Die Hirten an der Krippe
(‘The shepherds at the manger’) may require
players with more experience. MM
January/February 2016 International Piano
Beauty and Hope in the 21st Century
Editions Musica Ferrum
ISMN 979-0-801-164-60-5
Beauty & Hope is an intriguing collection of
substantial piano works by nine living
composers from around the globe, brought
together by Editions Musica Ferrum and its
founder Nikolas Sideris. The anthology is
prefaced with an impassioned plea to look to
music for hope and beauty ‘in a world
plagued by fear and hatred’, and this makes for
a moving leitmotif throughout the anthology,
a connecting vision for all the contrasted
styles that are presented side by side.
Indeed the contrast is considerable,
beginning with Andrew Sigler’s wistfully
simple yet memorable Alquimia, it
progresses with angular dissonance
through the gripping logic of Paul Poston’s
Urban Sprawl, complete with its strikingly
spartan central interlude. Voice of the People
from Carlos Álvarez Torno is quietly
menacing and ominous, while the
obsessive ostinatos in Nickos Harizanos’s
The Butterfly Fixer are beguilingly hypnotic.
Virtuoso players will relish the quasi-
orchestral challenges laid out in Barnaby
Hollington’s adventurous Prosthesis. Puddle
by Jaap Cramer may be more conventional,
but its dark hues are evocative in a
lugubrious way. The volume concludes
with Scott Miller’s sparkling, mercurial
Beyond Icarus and Christos Papageorgiou’s
9-11 after, complete with clusters inside the
piano and a sense that ‘Dies irae’ is about to
be quoted at any moment!
With moving, sometimes distressing but
always striking drawings for each piece
from three artists, plus an excellent
companion disc of performances of all nine
compositions from Greek pianist Myrto
Akrivou (also available as a download), this
is an illustrious, elegant and beautiful
production worthy of exploration. MM
81
08/12/2015 10:37
 REVIEWS Books
CHOICE
Music, Sense and Nonsense
By Alfred Brendel
Biteback Publishing
464 pages, £20
Discussion of Brendel’s essays and lectures
requires a book in itself to encompass fully
the rarest instance of perception, wit and
wisdom. Alone among the great artists of
our time Brendel clearly derives his musical
wealth from an inclusive overview of life
itself, an all-embracing reach that moves,
startles, provokes and above all  enlarges
knowledge. Many of these essays have
appeared in print before, but their profound
sense of curiosity and wonder makes
revisiting them worthwhile.
  While celebrating the need for practical
knowledge of how music works, Brendel is
keen to point out the limitations of academic
analysis. For him, music is a transcendental
art, one where feeling comes first, taking you
far beyond the readily explicable. Time and
again he lights on an illuminating  phrase
–  notably his love of Novalis’s claim that
great art is ‘chaos shimmering through the
veil of order’.
Personally, I remain grateful for suggestive
rather than dogmatic comments that have
led me to the core of musical experience.
Cortot’s description of the central section of
Fauré’s Third Impromptu as ‘like an avenue
of fans folding and unfolding’, or a reference
to  Schubert’s short Sonata in A major
Op 120 as ‘succinct and full of the smiling
lights and colours of a spring day’,  have
outshone references to harmonic procedure
and this or that modulation.
Nonetheless Brendel’s  studies
on his greatest loves – on Mozart,
Beethoven,  Schubert and Liszt – are
as rigorous as they are imaginative, sending
out ripples that prompt you to think again
and again. He can slap down the ‘Mozart
of yesteryear’, which ‘permitted no strong
forte, and no disturbing accents’ (a Dresden
82 International Piano January/February 2016
IPJF16_082_R_Books_0812BWM.indd 82
porcelain view of Mozart) and point out
instead how  boldly Mozart could darken
beauty. His admiration for the noble as
opposed to flamboyant Liszt stems from
his feeling that Liszt has been used and
abused by self-seeking virtuosi.  There is
a masterly and much quoted look at the
change from Liszt’s ‘exuberance of the heart’
to the ‘bitterness of the heart’ exemplified
in, for example, the transition from the ‘La
Campanella’ Étude to the ‘Angelus’ from
the third volume of Années de pèlerinage;
from  the early glanz or glitter period to
a cloistered and bleak sobriety
His mind on higher things, Brendel
resists even a mention of the more
superficial aspects of the music scene, on
the competition arena or on the publicity-
seeking careers of pianists such as Lang
Lang and Pogorelich. Instead there are
tributes to Cortot and Kempff and most of
all to his beloved teacher Edwin  Fisher –
great artists first, pianists second. There are
also passing tributes to Pollini and Pierre-
Laurent Aimard for their devotion to the
contemporary cause.
There are, however, a  few touches of
steel behind the outwardly benign surface:
Brendel has nothing but disdain for  those
foolish enough to think that ‘there are no
bad pianos, only bad pianists’; for record
producers who consider the end product to
For Brendel, music is a
transcendental art
be their own creative achievement; and for
the assumption that the older the pianist
the better the playing. More generally, there
is a telling attack on ‘the havoc caused by
religion throughout history, and  the havoc
it continues to cause today’.
Brendel’s reflections on the recording
process and on the 60 or so CDs he has made
during his long career, on live, studio and
mixed recordings, are wise and searching.
Wherever you turn in this series of unique
essays – unique in the sense that they come
from a great pianist irresistibly drawn to
philosophical discussion – it makes you
forgive a less than liberal view of the French
repertoire and also of Rachmaninov (‘the art
of elevated conversation’). No more probing
or ultimately heart-warming book on music
– and so much else – exists.
BRYCE MORRISON
Stories, Images and Magic
from the Piano Literature
By Neil Rutman
Torchflame Books
226 pages, £24.95
There are a plethora of books in the literature
of piano playing that focus on everything from
performing technique to musical analysis and
biography. Very few are written primarily to
stimulate the imagination of the performer.
This is what Neil Rutman, a professional
concert pianist and artist-in-residence at the
University of Central Arkansas, sets out to do
in Stories, Images and Magic. Rutman has sifted
through a vast quantity of documentation
to pull together an idiosyncratic assembly
of quotes, anecdotes, fragments of letters,
visual imagery and biographical notes that
illuminate pieces often from an unusual angle.
Much of the book is centred around
what composers, performers and first-hand
observers have written about individual
pieces of music, variable in quality and often
in the form of programmatic commentary
(such as George Sand’s novelettish
annotations of Chopin). Of the 18 chapters,
16 are devoted to individual composers from
Bach to Scriabin, while the final chapter
features a miscellaneous crew which oddly
lumps Schubert and Mozart alongside the
likes of Rameau and Edward MacDowell.
Rutman is aware that his approach may
not be fashionable in the 21st-century, but his
admirable aim is to bring a more subjective,
human dimension to contemporary
pianism, which so often gets lost in the rather
clinical emphasis on a perfect technique.
While stressing that a lively imagination
is no substitute for technical competency,
he quotes Alfred Corot who once said that
‘the image itself is neither necessary for the
audience to know nor essentially connected
to the architecture of the piece, but it is
essential in unlocking the imagination of
the student and the performer during the
learning process’. FRANZ WULF
08/12/2015 12:17
 Rhinegold
LIVE

Free rush hour

Next issue
MARCH/APRIL 2016
concerts in the heart

© PETER RIGAUD
Yvgeny Sudbin

of London
© DIANE SHAW

EMBELLISHING THE PAST

Thursday 4 February 2016
Jonathan Plowright
Hailed by reviewers as “a colossal musical
mind” with a “transcendent technique”,
Jonathan Plowright is recognised globally as
a truly exceptional pianist. To coincide with
the launch of the third disc in his acclaimed
Brahms series on the BIS label, Jonathan
will perform Brahms’s Rhapsody in B minor,
Ballade Op.10 No.4 and works by Mozart,
Paderewski and Chopin.
The Russian-born virtuoso Yvgeny Sudbin
celebrates the 10th anniversary of his first
triumph on disc with a new recording
of Scarlatti sonatas, bringing a fresh
improvisatory approach
SUBLIME LYRICISM
IP pays homage to the super-pianistic
talent of Georges Cziffra

This concert is followed by an informal Q&A ON KEY

conducted by Owen Mortimer, editor of
International Piano.
FREE recitals, including complimentary
drinks reception and a Q&A with the artist!
RESERVE YOUR FREE TICKET AT
RHINEGOLDLIVE.CO.UK
Michael Church surveys the latest musical
and technological advances in the world
of digital pianos
NEW AGE VIBES
Popular Italian composer Ludovico
Einaudi prepares for the world premiere
of his first piano concerto

ON SALE 20 FEBRUARY

IPJF16_083_R_NxtIssue.indd 83 10/12/2015 16:25:00

 TA K E FI V E

ELMO HOPE T
OWARDS THE END OF JAMES
Baldwin’s 1957 story Sonny’s Blues, the
narrator sits in a nightclub listening as his
brother, Sonny, a bebop pianist and recovering
heroin addict, begins to play the blues. Though he’s
deeply moved by his brother’s musical testifying,
the narrator remains apprehensive, aware ‘that
the world waited outside, as hungry as a tiger, and
that trouble stretched above us, longer than the
sky’. There are several bebop pianists who might
have served as the model for Baldwin’s Sonny, but
whenever I read the story I think of Elmo Hope.
He played the blues superbly, struggled with a
heroin habit and his brief life unfolded beneath
very troubled skies.

S
T ELMO SYLVSTER HOPE WAS BORN
in Harlem in 1923 and grew up playing
music with his friends Bud Powell and
Thelonious Monk, three young musicians
exchanging ideas that would later shape the
language of bebop piano.
However, in 1940, Hope was shot and almost
killed by the police, who also tried to frame him
A troubled life and premature for assault. The charges were dropped, but he
spent a long time in hospital and then enlisted in the army. His
death meant that Elmo Hope absence from the scene when the bebop revolution erupted in New
York explains why many critics have dismissed him as a disciple
has been cast as a tragic figure, of Powell and Monk, although his music is subtly original and, as

clouding the contribution he

Down Beat’s Larry Kart has argued, ‘its oblique, vulnerable beauty
gives it a special place in the history of jazz’.

made to the development of jazz

After the war ended, Hope worked on the R&B circuit and
it wasn’t until 1953 that he recorded his first jazz, initially as a

in postwar America. Graham sideman on a Lou Donaldson/Clifford Brown date (where his De-
Dah is a minor bebop classic). He went on to lead his own trio

Lock reaffirms Hope’s reputation on a 10-inch Blue Note LP. These discs established his talent for
intricate harmonies, polyrhythmic dexterity and unpredictable,

as a highly original blues quicksilver runs: the exciting Hot Sauce, laced with pell-mell piano,
ably demonstrates his bebop prowess. Subsequent discs included a
musician and one of the quintet set on a second Blue Note 10-inch, various sideman and all-
star sessions (with Sonny Rollins, Jackie McLean, John Coltrane)
architects of bebop piano and trio and quintet recordings for Prestige. His 1955 trio album
Meditations is arguably the best of this later bunch, not least for
Blue Mo, an elegant blues graced with delicate, flowing piano.
Take Five: Elmo Hope By the mid-50s, Hope had spent time in gaol for drug use and
1. Hot Sauce (1953), from Trio and Quintet was prohibited from playing in New York’s clubs. He went on the
(Blue Note) road, then in 1957 settled in Los Angeles, where he recorded with
2. Blue Mo (1955), from Meditations bassist Curtis Counce (Exploring the Future) and tenor-man Harold
(Prestige) Land (The Fox), who declared Hope ‘truly had a touch of genius’.
3. Like Someone in Love (1959), from Elmo His own Elmo Hope Trio LP, an album of bright, nimble bop and
Hope Trio (Contemporary) poignant ballads, received a rare five-star review in Down Beat,
4. B’s A-Plenty (1959), from Elmo Hope which claimed the ‘essence’ of Hope’s music was its ‘bittersweet
Trio (Contemporary) melancholy’. If that’s an apt description of his daringly slow
treatment of Like Someone in Love, with heart-stopping intervals
5. Toothsome Threesome (1966), from
and offbeat accents, it’s less apposite for the irrepressibly joyful
Final Sessions (Evidence)
energy of B’s A-Plenty, which has one of those fleet Hope solos

84 International Piano January/February 2016

IPJF16_084-085_R_Take5_0712OM.indd 84 08/12/2015 10:39

 TA K E FI V E

where, to quote Hard Bop author David

H Rosenthal, ‘ideas and fragments of
ideas abruptly spill over and intersect each
other, as if the pianist’s hands could barely
keep pace with his emotions’.
Despite these successes, Hope found
the LA music scene uninspiring. In 1961
he returned to New York and recorded
two fine albums for the Riverside label:
Homecoming, a set of trio and quintet
tracks, reaffirmed his mastery of modern
jazz’s three Bs – bebop, blues and ballads;
Hope-Full, while mostly solo, included
three piano duets with his new wife,
Bertha. Unfortunately, work remained
hard to find, and his last years were plagued
by ill health and further bouts of drug use.
The title of his 1963 LP, Sounds from Rikers
Island, referenced the notorious New York
prison where many drug offenders were
incarcerated.
In 1967, while recovering from
pneumonia, Hope died unexpectedly
from heart failure. It would be another
10 years before his final recordings were
His recordings established Hope’s talent for
intricate harmonies, polyrhythmic dexterity and
unpredictable, quicksilver runs
released (and many more before they
were issued unedited). Comprising two
1966 trio sessions, the discs featured some
of his most expansive playing, from a
scintillating Punch That and the tender
reverie of A Kiss for My Love (aka Bertha,
My Dear) to the elemental, introspective
blues of Toothsome Threesome. Here, as
Nat Hentoff wrote, Hope ‘transmutes
these deepest of all jazz roots’ into a
‘penetratingly personal statement’ and
‘thoughtfully, subtly, lovingly adds his
own life to the always open-ended blues’. e

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Pianoforte.indd 1 10/03/2015 11:07

January/February 2016 International Piano 85
IPJF16_084-085_R_Take5_0712OM.indd 85 10/12/2015 16:20:08
 Music of my life
From childhood memories of Mozart to
the stirring strains of Bruckner, Freddy
Kempf’s musical recollections are closely
connected with the physical world
around him
I
MUST HAVE BEEN EIGHT OR
nine years old. My father had a tape
of Wilhelm Kempff playing Mozart’s
Piano Concertos Nos 21 and 22 (K467 and
K482). Whenever he drove me to a piano
lesson or to school, we’d listen to them on
the road to Folkestone or Deal on the Kent
coast. I must have heard both concertos a
few hundred times! They always take me
back to my childhood. One thing that
connects that time with the present is that
I never played K482 until this year when I
performed it in a place called Voronezh,
the capital city of the Black Earth Region
of Russia. If there has been any influence on
my playing by my near namesake, it must
be subconscious; but recently I have listened
to other Wilhelm Kempff recordings and
thought how similar his concept was to the
way I see things.
I think the recording of Julius Katchen
playing Rachmaninov’s Piano Concerto
No 2 was on the cover CD of a magazine
that my parents bought. I got hold of it
and I listened to it by myself. It was one of
the first large-scale Romantic works that I
heard and I loved the sound of the piano.
That was the main motivation for my
learning the instrument – just the sound of
it, whether in a band, in the background or
on television, classical or not. I must have
been 11 or 12 when I first thought, I want
to get good enough to play this piece. I
didn’t really know who Julius Katchen was
then. It’s a good version, though he’s all
but forgotten now.
The Dvořák Cello Concerto was a piece
that was around me when, as a young
adult, I felt my first strong emotions, the
first stirrings of being in love. I guess it was
86 International Piano January/February 2016
IPJF16_086_R_MusicOML_0612OM.indd 86
the first piece of music that I fell in love
with. (I was in love with a cellist at the
time, so that may have had something to
do with it!) I still feel today that it’s one
of the most perfect concertos for any
instrument. It is so well written, especially
given how hard it is to compose for solo
cello and orchestra. Just listen to the
opening tutti and the tempo changes that
Karajan makes. How on earth did he pull
that off ? Added to which I love Dvořák the
orchestrator. It was one of the first non-
piano pieces that I really got to know.
Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No 3
represents another turning point in my life.
It was the first concerto I directed from the
keyboard. It wasn’t an active decision on
my part – just something I hadn’t said ‘no’
to. The next thing I knew, it was the first
rehearsal with the Royal Philharmonic!
The first time I ever stood in front of an
orchestra was on the afternoon of the day
of the concert, with 1,800 tickets sold. I
had done a lot of preparation beforehand,
of course, deciding how I wanted to do
things. Then a friend of mine played me
the recording with Leonard Bernstein.
There was a tutti in the slow movement
which was completely the opposite of what
I had planned, and I thought it was a much
better way of doing it – so free and very
romantic, drawing the music out. Suddenly
the whole movement made sense.
I love Giulini and I think he is at
his best in his Bruckner recordings.
The Symphony No 9 with the Vienna
Philharmonic is a firm favourite, even
though he was getting on a bit: the quality
of the sound, the wonderful playing from
the orchestra with everything that Giulini
Mozart
Piano Concertos Nos 21 and 22
Wilhelm Kempff / Bavarian Radio SO /
Bernhard Klee
Rachmaninov
Piano Concerto No 2
Julius Katchen / London Symphony /
Georg Solti
Dvořák
Cello Concerto
Mstislav Rostropovich / Berlin
Philharmonic / Herbert von Karajan
Beethoven
Piano Concerto No 3
Krystian Zimerman / Vienna Philharmonic /
Leonard Bernstein
Bruckner
Symphony No 9
Vienna Philharmonic / Carlo Maria Giulini
has to offer – I feel inspired when I hear
that recording. I love the way he uses the
orchestra, the space and the pace he gives
to the music, and those huge long lines,
which is what Bruckner is all about. He’s
not afraid to make the orchestra sound
like a huge organ. These days, I live south
of Munich in the Alps, not far from where
Bruckner lived and worked in the midst
of very similar scenery. Whenever I hear
that symphony, it’s like seeing the sun
come up, creeping over the tops of the
mountains. e
INTERVIEW BY JEREMY NICHOLAS
Freddy Kempf’s recording of The Seasons
by Tchaikovsky is now available on the BIS
label. www.freddy-kempf.com
08/12/2015 10:39
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International Piano - June 2015 VB3.indd 1 13/06/2015 12:07:22