Hope After All

In April of this year I posted a despairing screed about the bleak future that lay in store for piano literature and the folks who play the instrument. While I remain skeptical about the instrument’s literature, I have encountered at least one pianist who makes me think that perhaps there might be some hope for the moldy old box yet.

That isn’t to say that I’m waxing all Mitt-ish and flipflopping on my earlier and harsh words about today’s pianists. Here’s an extract:

Pianists are the least inquisitive, the least adventuresome, and the least musically broad-minded of the instrumentalists. Their musical horizons are restricted, their musical culture rudimentary, their curiosity stunted. Often straight-A students who perform admirably well in solfège and book theory, they cause no trouble and leave few traces as they pass gracefully through the program. But that’s about it. The heady exuberance one finds amongst the classical guitarists, with their manifold passions for new music, Baroque music, composition, and popular music of all stripes, is altogether absent amongst pianists. Pianists are all about playing those basic concertos, those basic showpieces, those basic Chopin nocturnes, those basic Beethoven sonatas, all in the same basic way. To hear so much as a single nuanced phrase from them is becoming an occasion for remark; mostly, it’s just hard-driving fingers, appalling levels of bodily tension, and a rigid adherence to every directive spoonfed into them by their teachers. Those few blessed with musical imagination soon drift away and focus instead on chamber music and accompanying, rightfully seeking association with like-minded artists rather than suffocating in the airlessness that is modern-day piano.

I don’t retract one word of that. I don’t have to: recently I cringed through a confirmation as a ridiculously self-absorbed youngster mugged, pouted, and slouched his way through a drab and joyless rendition of a late Mozart piano concerto. His mock-profound onstage schtick masked, but did not conceal, the poverty of his musical spirit. It was depressing, not to mention annoying, irritating, and frustrating.

However, I have just recently heard the first Chopin waltz—a chestnut if ever there were—given vibrant new life by a superstar young pianist who has the brazen gall, the nerve, the exuberance, and the cheek to skip right by generations of finger-waving Mrs. Grundys and their bitchy admonitions. If Chopin had wanted this passage played più prestissimo, they proclaim, he would have MARKED it più prestissimo. But he didn’t, so don’t you dare speed up, young man! The printed page, sacrosanct, inviolable, authoritative and absolute. Don’t you dare mess around with it, they scold, don’t you DARE!! This wonderful young pianist dared. In fact, I’ll bet he blithely ignored all those soul-shrivelling old bags, as they clucked their tongues, shook their heads, and groused that oh, all that talent but just no discipline whatsoever and he’ll never have any kind of career at all and oh what a shame he needs discipline and hard work and discipline discipline DISCIPLINE.

Well, he’s most indubitably having kind some kind of a career, and then some. That overplayed waltz, so dinky-dinked to death by uniform phalanxes of boot-camp pianists, suddenly fresh and unpredictable and whimsical and entertaining as all hell. It was rather like being carried back to the 1830s, when Chopin’s piano works weren’t encased in cultural lucite and bolted to massive marble plinths. Back in the day, a Chopin waltz would have been a hot cookie, not a verdigris-encrusted monument. Performances were likely to have been experimental, risky, exploratory, unpredictable. The prevailing ethos was all about individuality and the divine rights of the musical soul. Think of jazz singers in the 1930s; they were soaked in jazz style, jazz rhythm, jazz culture, not as curators, but as the living creators of all that style, rhythm, and culture. They enjoyed the freedom that comes with discovery and exploration; anything was possible, and if it didn’t work, then drop it and move on. No fingers stabbing at ink on paper. For that matter, no ink. No paper.

Nowadays Mrs. Grundy pokes her fat old index finger at a mezzo-piano or a staccato. She scrawls DON’T RUSH!!! in blue pencil across the top of one page, TEMPO STEADY!!! along the margins of another. Her goal: a rendition that offends the fewest listeners, whether those be teachers, jurors, critics, or dear old Aunt Tilly. The result: the differences between pianists shrink until nothing is left but piddly minutiae—who played this mf instead of mp or whose metronome setting was .04% lower than the median. These days, most of the variance seems to originate with the recording engineers rather than the pianists. Such a bleak landscape has discouraged the brightest of our young talents from pursuing the piano. Why go to all that trouble to become an assembly-line product? For those few who acquire a semblance of a performing career, how to stand out in a crowd of sound-alikes? Thus the current plague of onstage schtick, a game attempt to clothe undistinguished playing in distinctive garb. I’m flashing on the Far Side cartoon that shows a vast crowd of penguins on an artic ice shelf, with one penguin in the far-off distance jumping up and singing I Gotta Be ME-E-E-E-E!!

At least there’s one bonafide exception from the prevailing mediocrity. As that stellar young pianist tripped his way through the waltz, happily ignoring the stern letter of the score while honoring the spirit with intoxicating exuberance, my heart skipped a few beats. Well, I’ll be damned, I thought. He is restoring something to piano playing that has been absent for at least a generation, if not longer, something that used to be in abundant supply, but has withered and dried away. But he’s got it—boy, howdy has he got it.

That something: guts. The guts to be yourself, to play your little heart out, to revel in a blistering set of chops and a once-in-a-generation talent for playing the piano. Nuts to the old-bag prissies with their urtexts and sharp blue pencils.

As he capped off the waltz to a scintillating fare-thee-well I blurted out ATTABOY!! at full voice. I couldn’t help myself. Besides, I meant it.

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