We’re in the midst of a retail bonanza. The record labels, ever mindful of the money yet to be made from their vast back catalogs, have been gleefully releasing box sets of their great artists of the past. We, the public, have been snapping up those box sets with equal abandon. Well, at least I have. I love box sets to pieces and rarely pass them by. They don’t stay in print for very long, for one thing, and besides, I really dig them. To date I’ve skipped only a few of the big-ticket boxes: Horowitz (never liked him) and Julian Bream (not that into guitar). Otherwise, I’ve had myself a ball with Rubinstein, Heifetz, Gould, the Vienna Philharmonic, Vivarte, Archiv, Decca, Mercury Living Presence, Masterworks, Eminence, Philips, RCA Living Stereo, Karajan, Furtwängler, Toscanini, and many more.
Recently the wheel has come around to the mid-century American pianists, that group of technical wizards including Leon Fleisher, Gary Graffman, Byron Janis, Van Cliburn, William Kapell, and Julius Katchen. Both Kapell and Katchen died young and so the retrospective field belongs mostly to those first four pianists. They form an intriguingly well-matched quartet, or perhaps we might call them a trio-plus. That’s because Fleisher, Graffman, and Janis all had to contend with Cliburn’s meteoric rise, as he appeared to be heading for Olympian stature but then burned out early, unprepared emotionally for his intense fame and musically a far more delicate flower than was generally recognized.
So it really comes down to Fleisher, Graffman, and Janis. I’m going to call them FGJ, pronounced “fuhGAHZH”. They weren’t exactly clones of each other, but certainly they shared a surprising number of characteristics. For one thing, all three suffered from physical disabilities that sharply curtailed their performing careers. Both Fleisher and Graffman settled into teaching, becoming two of the target teachers for the next several generations. Janis managed to rise past his problems with arthritis and kept his performing career going, turning himself into a revered elder statesman and spokesman for worthwhile causes.
Both Fleisher and Graffman were afflicted with focal dystonia, a disability that left Fleisher without the use of his right hand and derailed Graffman as well. Whether focal dystonia is directly traceable to overstressed muscular development, it appears primarily in people who have undergone extensive training in motor skills, particularly musicians.
Which makes sense. FGJ were über-technicians who sacrificed poetry and subtlety for brilliance and accuracy. Not for them the tonal beauties of a Cortot, the subtlety (and occasional flubs) of a Schnabel, or the scintillating sophistication of a Rachmaninoff or Hofmann. FGJ weren’t insensitive players by a long shot; they were fine, highly intelligent musicians—and still are. But their playing was often more impressive than loveable.
FGJ remind me of American muscle cars of the same era: those street-hogging Chryslers and Cadillacs with their gargantuan engines, massive horsepower, and casual disregard for propriety or restraint. As FGJ’s careers blossomed in a growing America that had just emerged victorious from a world war, they embodied the arrogance, muscularity, and just plain machismo of the era. It’s piano playing with tail fins, V-8 engines, and power steering. No old-world European hothouse decadence here, that’s for sure.
FGJ’s repertory is surprisingly similar: the same batch of concertos (Fleisher emphasized Beethoven a bit more) and a lot of the same solo stuff. Pictures at an Exhibition. Prokofiev sonatas. Liszt. Balakirev’s Islamey. Gaspard de la nuit. Miroirs. They played them all very well. But lovely piano tone tended to be in short supply. FGJ ran more steely than subtle.
Interpretively they were more similar than not; in fact, telling one from the other can be a bit challenging. Scrupulous fidelity to the score is a given, of course. Phrasing is direct and unsentimental, tempi bang-on center. Despite their drop-dead astounding technique, they seem unwilling to take any emotional chances. It’s hard to imagine any of them indulging in the liberties common to Schnabel, Cortot, Rubinstein, Horowitz, or Rachmaninoff. To show the cheery eccentricity of a Glenn Gould would be unthinkable. They were supremely well-trained, well-prepared, and well-educated. But they were also a bit corporate, a bit flavorless, a bit anonymous.
Which probably accounts for the attention lavished on Cliburn when he appeared in the late 1950s, even more so than the politics of his Russian adventure during the peak of the cold war. Cliburn had plenty of technique, too, but he also had something that was becoming scarce amongst American pianists: he made a lovely sound at the piano. Cliburn wasn’t steely. His sound was more reminiscent of Rubinstein, or even more of those marvelous past-generation pianists such as Moiseiwitsch and Friedman who never allowed their tone to stray into the edgy. Cliburn’s interpretations were just as bourgeois as FGJs, but at least he was an easy pianist to love.
Cliburn couldn’t sustain it and faded from active view, slipping into graceful retirement as the Sultan of Fort Worth. His choice, his business, and bully for him. He just might have paved the way for a new generation of pianists who returned to those old-school concepts of lovely tone and imaginative interpretation—pianists such as Murray Perahia and Emanuel Ax.
But FGJ’s legacies are rich, vast, and well worth exploring. There’s a lot of tremendously good piano playing in those retrospective boxes, coupled by some equally fine orchestral work—Szell/Cleveland with Fleisher, Munch/Boston with Graffman. And if there are a few Pictures at an Exhibition too many, sometimes there is surprisingly insightful and sensitive chamber playing.
I don’t miss American muscle cars, and I don’t miss the mid-century school of American macho piano playing. Nevertheless, both have a certain attractiveness, and it’s not just nostalgia, either. Definitely worth exploring.