Week 50: The Other Beethoven Pianists
One pianist's journey to perform the 32 piano sonatas of Beethoven.
Week 50: The Other Beethoven Pianists
Something special is happening today in the Beethoven piano sonata world.
In the jewel-box setting of Wigmore Hall in London, England, the pianist Boris Giltburg will launch his complete Beethoven sonata cycle. It will be the first of eight concerts.
And it’s live-streamed!
I’ll be there. You can be too, by donning your finest home lounge wear and clicking here. It’s at 7:30 PM, British Summer Time. That is 2:30 PM, Eastern Standard Time, and 3:30 PM for me over here in Atlantic Standard Time.
If you can’t be there live, the concert will be available for some months, I think, afterwards.
Boris is not going to tiptoe into the ocean. Rather, he’s taking a plunge into the deep end, setting out with the biggest sonata of them all, the beastly “Hammerklavier” Sonata No. 29 in B flat, Opus 106.
Not only this, but the sonata he’s pairing it with is that endearing favourite of mine, the one about quails! That is, the Sonata No. 18 in E flat major, Opus 31 No. 3. It’s commonly nicknamed “The Hunt”, and it’s labelled that way in his programme. You can find my take on why I think it’s about quails, and why, if it’s a hunt, the quail has fun and wins, here.
So naturally, I simply must attend.
With eagle eyes and talons waiting to pounce.
I may need some sports snacks.
Just kidding. Sort of. Oh, the world of pianists. We are queens!
When I was in my 20s, at the height of my competitive drive, I was one of those horrible performance jocks (or jerks). The kind, found in any major league performance graduate program, who hears the person in the next practice room playing something fast, waits for them to pause, then plays something faster as loudly as possible so as to be overheard.
Preferably the same piece.
There were those times when actually, you couldn’t play faster. Then you would slink down the hall to the vending machines and do a bit of stress snacking.
This type of emotional immaturity blooms like mold in the sweaty environs of the great performance schools.
I was finally alerted to the existence of another way by an incident involving my doctoral piano teacher. I speak of that musician’s musician, Gilbert Kalish.
I had just begun my first year of doctoral study at Stony Brook University in New York, where Gil was a distinguished professor. One day I arrived a bit late at the solo piano recital of one of my fellow graduate students, slipping into a seat near the back of the small hall just in time. I’d run there from my practice room where I’d just spent a few hours perfecting my own recital program. Still catching my breath, my heart rate was up. I was in hyper-analytical mode, ready to mentally spot errors, ready to compare everything the pianist was doing to my own approach.
Having spent most of the next thirty years as a piano professor, l have long watched all serious piano students going through this phase. It is what it is. They don’t really care how mean an audience this makes them, or that they are helping to turn student recitals into an experience far more hellish that a typical concert in the real world. You can pick out who they are in the audience because they sit alone or in little like clumps, perfectly still and poised. You might see them shift their legs after a wrong note, or emit a well-placed cough.
So that was me, sitting alone in the dark, blind to the degree to which I was in the dark.
I think I had racked up a mental list of a half-dozen critiques of the playing when some movement caught my eye a few rows ahead. My teacher Gil was sitting there. I hadn’t noticed until now. His head was bobbing to the music. I turned my focus to him – perhaps I could detect how he was evaluating the pianist. No luck – he was completely enchanted by the music. His enjoyment radiated through his being. He was vibing with the performer.
I began to breathe. It seems I had forgotten to fully settle into my breathing. Following Gil’s example, I let in the music. Breakthrough insight flooded in. As Jimi Hendrix sang in Manic Depression, “Music, sweet music”!
Creativity and analysis are rapids flowing in opposite directions. You can ride one or the other.
I can analyse my work – as I must – but only at a remove, say by dissecting it in small fragments, marking up the score, or recording my playing and listening back.
When writing this weekly blog, a few ideas may have occurred to me ahead of time, but when Sunday morning comes, I sit down to write with no real idea of what will come out.
I can analyse Beethoven, but I am at a loss to describe the experience of Beethoven the artist speaking to me out of his music as I play it.
“The other Beethoven pianists” experience this too. What I need to call them is “my fellow Beethoven pianists”. This afternoon, I’ll immerse myself in Boris Giltburg’s vision. Later, I’ll write my impressions and publish it here next week. That way, you too can immerse yourself, and live with your own impressions for awhile before you hear anything that I have to say about it.
Lets go to the Wigmore to hear Giltburg!
