I've been reluctantly shuffling through stacks of cassette tapes of my own performances over the years, some being my yearly faculty recitals at the SF Conservatory, others chamber performances of various sorts together with a smattering of appearances with larger ensembles. The earliest tape I have dates from 1971 when I was a senior in high school, with the bulk starting in 1975. I have no audio documents from my time at Baltimore's Peabody Institute.
I describe myself as reluctant because I detest my piano playing from before the mid-1990s. Despite fleeting tolerable moments, it was for the most part steely, aggressive, strident, and far too obsessed with technical bling for its own good. I quit the piano in 1990 and promised myself that I would give myself five years without giving recitals before reassessing the situation. The need for such a drastic step is abundantly—and painfully—on display via the tape of a faculty recital from January 9, 1989. It is the playing of a man who absolutely loathes the instrument but doesn't actually know that his heart is filled with aversion. I don't believe I have ever heard a more ruthless traversal of the first Chopin scherzo; hysterically paced, machine-gunned down by brutally insensitive fingers, slammed and slapped and slandered into cringing submission, it's not so much an interpretation as a mugging. The Bach A-minor Partita that opens the program has a few decent moments (both the Allemande and Sarabande are at least sensitive albeit mannered) but overall does little but snarl and tear at the music. And as for Bartók's Out of Doors Suite—well. No point even talking about that.
It's all so clear to me now. I completely jumped the track at one point in my development. I can even spot precisely when it was: my relocation to California. I was languishing at Peabody, but I would have begun to draw out of what was undoubtedly a temporary funk. I had required a complete rebuilding during my Freshman year, and I had started to wake up musically during my Sophomore year. By the end of that year I was playing well enough but without individuality; the renovation was finished but I had yet to move into my new digs. I was working with a staunchly anti-virtuoso teacher who was feeding me a solid diet of Bach, Schubert, Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven while keeping me resolutely away from the slam-bang virtuoso stuff. Everything was geared towards listening and thinking and feeling. Yes, I was a tad frigid. But I would have thawed out. I should have stayed put.
Instead, I came West and deliberately chose teachers that I knew would be permissive. I resolutely refused to study with the one teacher at the SF Conservatory who would have been perfect for me—not because I disliked him, but because he was a strong advocate of that same Austro-Germanic mindset and literature, and I wanted a break from all that. Well, I got my break. It was the worst possible thing for me at the time, but of course I didn't know that.
I was appointed to the faculty of the SF Conservatory at a far-too tender age and started serving as my own mentor and guide. That's par for the course, but I sure made some cruddy decisions, the worst of which was to cultivate high-voltage virtuosity. I became obsessed with technique. I started chowing down those murderous Godowsky studies that bitch-slap multiple Chopin etudes into one box, not because I liked the obnoxious things, but because most pianists couldn't handle them. I played the two Charles Ives sonatas in graduate school, again not out of artistic longing (to be honest I've never liked either of them) but because nobody else had the chops. I kept doing that sort of thing—playing catastrophically gnarly piano music such as the Granados Goyescas, the Godowsky paraphrase of Kunstlerleben, big modernist stuff such as the Copland Piano Fantasy and the Sessions Second Sonata. I practiced torrentially and incessantly, always honing velocity and flash and bling.
I never stopped to consider what all that was doing to my musical sensibility. I ignored the warning signs: practice sessions characterized by fits of irritation, chain smoking, and obsessive repetition; an ever-shortening fuse that ignited sharp mood swings; mannered, harsh, and ridiculously athletic recitals. Occasionally I emerged from my self-plumbed sewer, such as in the mid-1980s when I put on a series of four recitals devoted to the complete piano music of Debussy. But only occasionally. Mostly that stack of cassettes is a big pile o' ugly.
I was never cut out to be a virtuoso-type pianist. I was always at my best as a player of lyrical music, stuff requiring more brains and heart than fingers. My biggest success at Peabody was the Schubert B-flat posthumous piano sonata, hardly repertoire suitable for a piano-trash headbanger. Furthermore I've always been a fertile improviser at the keyboard. It all makes sense if you consider that my basic gift in music was more as a composer than as a performer, although I never actively pursued composition. (That's one decision I've never regretted.) Gee-whiz virtuosity is simply not my thing; I have neither the build nor the mindset for it. And yet there I was, whacking away until all hours, honing and strengthening and sharpening, defiantly swimming upstream against the flow of my own inner nature.
I was a fundamentally non-athletic type trying to become a football quarterback. All that could happen was that I would hurt myself in the process, and hurt myself I did. I got sick. The damage wasn't physical, however; I'm immune to repetitive-stress impairments or the like. My wound was deeper and harder to cure, because what I hurt was my heart. That cassette tape from January 1989 documents the diseased playing of a damaged musician.
Fortunately I wasn't bound to the piano for my living, and so when in 1990 I quit the instrument I could do so without hardship. I made a gentle return in 1995, then quit again for a few years more. I have never resumed regular playing. The separation empowered me to discover my true musical nature; not specifically one thing or another, I'm a generalist who is comfortable with a wide range of activity. I never would have been more than a middling pianist, nor have I ever been much as a piano teacher, but I'm jim-dandy in a classroom and a hellzapoppin' public lecturer. What I'm not is a pianist.
Nowadays I play about once a year, provided I feel like it. If I don't, I don't. There was a brief period during which I was encouraging composition majors by playing their works, but I have called a halt to that as well; some kids, understandably jazzed by the prospect of being played by a senior faculty member, overreached and dropped me into the purgatory of slugging it out with a ferociously difficult piece, all the more bothersome since I no longer had those quicksilver chops I had wasted so many years developing. So no more of that. It's just too risky.
Next year I'll be playing another faculty recital, my first in several years. On the bill will be works that require honed musicianship and tonal imagination but only modest technical accoutrements. The stuff I should have been playing all along, in other words. There's a good chance that I'll be able to tolerate listening to the recording of the recital, as has been the case with bits 'n' pieces of recitals from the past ten some-odd years. The January 2013 recital may be the last time I ever play the piano in public. That doesn't bother me in the slightest. After all, I'm not a pianist.