The Beethoven Odyssey Continues

Four Down, Four To Go

2010-12-05T17:48:00.000-08:00

I have already written that, prior to embarking upon this project, I was apprehensive on several levels: At the back of my mind lay a fundamental premise that there is no point in committing to disc a second recording of anything, let alone a full Beethoven sonata cycle, unless it reflects further thought and greater insight on the part of the artist. Moreover, to pretend that an undertaking of this scope is anything other than gruelling is pointless: Let’s face it, technique and stamina do not generally improve when one is a pensioner. Neither does memory.

Initially, I experimented with self-conscious changes in interpretation: stretching tempos here, pushing them elsewhere, deliberately bringing out voices that Beethoven himself may not have realized were present, playing lyrical themes more "romantically" than I might have done previously, and so forth. In other words, I found myself doing things that my teachers never would have allowed me to do, things I had never previously done as an adult myself, and things that I never permitted my students to do.

Only a couple of hours' effort were necessary to recognize this approach's futility. Perhaps some performers can successfully impose their will on a composer’s score, but I cannot. I soon realized that whatever changes that would occur this time around would have to reflect harder work, deeper thought, and modifications in my own way of looking at music--and the world--during the intervening decade. I set myself a goal of ensuring that at each practice session, every melodic strand in Beethoven’s canvas, and every sound I created would be re-evaluated, and if possible strengthened.

In retrospect, this shift in my musical outlook is due primarily to an enhanced ability to step back from the score and view its larger dimensions, seeing where sections really begin and end, and ensuring that at least one voice is carrying the music along throughout each section, even if others seem to be taking a breath. Great composers think vast thoughts. Even when the score seems to indicate that a new section has begun, the music is often still in midstream.

It was not always thus. One characteristic of my earlier playing was that commas tended to became semi-colons; semi-colons, a period. I often slowed down and started afresh at the ends of phrases, or in preparation for a new voice that was about to state the theme. (Strange that none of my teachers ever caught it, but none did. It was a former student who casually asked if I really meant to do it as frequently as I did that got me thinking.) By mid-career, those mannerisms were largely gone, but I still was not prepared for the extent to which, as I get older, the pieces I study seem increasingly larger in scope, while at the same time, feeling shorter. An event that may then have seemed structurally important often now appears as local. These days I try to ensure that colourful details do not obscure the broader musical line. Yet paradoxically, I also find myself infusing greater inner life to every phrase in every sonata. In other words, I try to zero in on a work's macroscopic and microscopic aspects simultaneously. Both go hand-in-hand.

Thus far, the works that have changed the most are the first movements of Opp 109 and 110, which I have probably performed more than all the others combined over the past four decades, and recorded twice previously. I have simplified both movements somewhat, largely avoiding such formulaic, self-conscious late-Beethovenisms as sudden pauses and deliberate tempo changes, except where he specifically indicates he wants them. However, even his own markings require reflection. In his later works, Beethoven began introducing interpretive directions that were no longer purely reflections of the work's structure, but rather, indications of how he wanted them performed; he may well have been writing out his own rubati, as it were. In such cases, there can be a danger of over-interpreting those markings.

Another obvious reason for simplifying the first movement of the 31st sonata is to shift the work’s emotional weight as much as possible toward the conclusion of the sonata. If ever a composition calls for such an emphasis, Op. 110 is it.

On Beethoven editions

2010-10-18T09:40:00.000-07:00

Like many other pianists, I use the Henle edition for studying the Beethoven sonatas, as well as a lot of other piano music. It is expensive, but you get what you pay for: notes are invariably well laid out on the page, and you can be fairly confident that all the important sources (especially the autograph – where available – and first editions) have been consulted and analyzed by editors who know their business. Conrad Hansen’s fingerings are inspired; like no other edition of piano music known to me, they force the player to phrase correctly, without demanding that you also be a contortionist. Henle is also unusual because minor revisions are added silently in new printings of the same edition. This admittedly can result in some confusion unless you check the publishing history carefully, but if you buy a recent copy instead of xeroxing your library's older one you will be assured of getting the latest version.

On occasions where differences between sources exist, the choice of which to use is sometimes obvious, but on other occasions, it is anything but. Henle’s editor, Bertha Wallner, generally makes good calls, but it is always best to decide for oneself. At the very end of the Appassionata, in m.352, for instance, the first and third eight-notes in the bass clef are F’s in the first edition, whose printing Beethoven presumably oversaw. However, clearly marked in the autograph are A-flats. Wallner thinks that was an error, and she may well be correct. But perhaps not. Playing the A-flats allows the extra punch of a renewed F in the next measure where the cascading arpeggiated chords are written double forte.

I always play through Schnabel's edition once (but only once), and only after I have thoroughly learned the sonata. He offers fascinating and provocative interpretive advice, but he certainly was dogmatic, and often just states his opinion without supporting it with any argument. Especially annoying is his refusal to condone even the slightest adjustments Beethoven would have had to make in order to counter the limited range of whatever piano he had at hand. I have no problem extending the bass a note or two when it seems obvious that Beethoven needed, say, a contra E that was not available to him, as in m.2 of the second movement of the Waldstein, but I invariably observe any variation he composed in order to get around the limitations imposed by his lack of treble notes. Another Schnabel curiosity is the system of Roman numerals he employed to indicate measure numbers within a phrase. Thinking deeply about such issues is of utmost importance, of course, but his system of counting measures often seems arbitrary.

I also keep a copy of the Tovey-Craxton edition close by, for one reason only: Donald Tovey's pithy comments that precede each sonata. Unlike his book on the sonatas that now seems pedantic and old-fashioned, his remarks to the performer are chock-full of advice that is witty and wise in equal measure. He would have been a lot more fun to argue with than Schnabel. He may even have listened to what I had to say.

Von Bulow's comments in the Schirmer edition give insight into the thinking of a great musical mind of the 19th century, but his edition, like the Schnabel, who at least made a strong effort to deliver an accurate text, should serve solely as a reference, not something to learn a work from. Copious editorial suggestions that we constantly see in front of us, no matter how perceptive, have a way of affecting our interpretation in spite of our best intentions to avoid their influence. Why do you think politicians keep on repeating the same lies time and time again?

Not being a theorist I do not prostrate myself on the floor whenever the name Schenker is uttered, even though I freely recognize his invaluable contribution to our comprehension of tonal music. His credentials aside, however, I have never felt drawn to his edition of the Sonatas. I own a copy but seldom find it helpful in comparison to any of the others I have mentioned.

All the above editions are what today's students would call old to ancient. Others exist, and new ones appear now and then. However I have not examined them and so I leave it to others to comment upon them, or compare them to those editions that have served my generation extremely well.

Concert No. 2

2010-09-20T13:44:00.000-07:00

It’s hard to believe but the San Jose cycle is already 25% complete. The Appassionata was probably the highlight to date, and with a few retakes, Op. 109 came out really well too. None were disastrous, I am pleased to report.

This time I used a couple of cheat-sheets. The first movement of the G minor sonatina, Op 49 required so little work to get it the way I wanted that I never quite managed to lock it into my memory bank, having missed learning that one as a kid.

There was an event during the opening movement of Op. 54. Beethoven’s music possesses a powerful inner logic. Most of the notes are precisely the notes they have to be at any given moment, and as a result, memorizing his music is generally easy (for me, at any rate). However there are certain movements, often slow ones, containing several variegated iterations of the same theme. Generally, those inner variations become more elaborate as the movement progresses, but still, memorizing those differences give me my share of trouble. As a result, during the performance, I also end up spending far too much of my creative energy worrying about what’s coming next. The first movement of Op. 54 is one such instance, so I placed a sheet containing the last page on the music stand. As I turned the first page, which was easy to do because there is a long rest for the right hand, the resulting breeze blew the extra page off the piano onto the keyboard, then onto my lap and finally onto the floor. All the while, I was performing and the microphones were recording the proceedings. Needless to say, that movement required more than one re-take the next day.

Given that these works are being recorded for future release, from now on, I might very well play some of the sonatas with the scores open, and even with a page turner. Feedback anyone?

Incidentally, there was an on-line review of the first concert: http://bit.ly/d2Xc90

Next up, some thoughts on editions and adherence to text. See you then

Thoughts on the opening concert in San Jose

2010-09-13T12:21:00.000-07:00

The program of last Thursday’s concert reveals such a wide array of moods--from the storminess of the first sonata’s outer movements, to the comparative gentleness of the Op. 14/1! Even more impressive is Beethoven's mastery in so many different compositional styles. Compare, for instance, the breadth, brilliance, yet relatively simple texture of the Waldstein, to the thorny, compact, pervasively contrapuntal Op. 101, which could (and should, IMHO) be a string quartet or quintet. How many of us, if we knew only one of those works, could intuit that the same composer wrote the other?

During the recital, I felt a bit like an athlete at the moment of a competition. The principal goal at the actual performance is not to duplicate the best of one’s practicing over the past several weeks, but to make use of the acquired insights and technical improvement so as to better access whatever inner creativity can be summoned up at the moment. I’ve now heard the “rushes” and hey, they ain’t all that bad (in Bob Silverman talk, that’s good). The touch-up sessions should take care of the most egregious clams, but it is already clear that, if this set sees the light of day as a recording, it will indeed be a live performance, warts and zits included, not a carefully edited studio product.

Earlier on these pages, I wrote that this traversal would be different than my earlier one. For a short while, I tried to deliberately introduce differences, but quickly learned that I could not. Differences, there will be, but they will have to be the result of new or enhanced ideas about the pieces that reveal themselves through further study of the score and a striving for more technical perfection. Or by the simple fact that I am 15 years older than I was when I first approached many of these works. One cannot “fake a difference.” Self-conscious phrasing creates caricatures, not portraits. Choosing a tempo that is incompatible with one’s inner clock never works. A tempo can never so slow as to impede the flow of ideas, or so fast that the ideas don’t have the opportunity to breathe, or that the listener cannot adequately digest them.

And now, back to Op. 54. I love the piece this time around…

Musings on the human mind and Beethoven’s head-games

2010-08-29T16:17:00.000-07:00

The 1st concert in San Jose is just a week and a half away. The work is exhilarating most of the time, and goes well. It never ceases to amaze me not only that the human mind stores absolutely everything in some deep recess of our memory, but as far as piano playing is concerned, we apparently keep practicing the music unconsciously non-stop all the time. Why else are passages that scared the bejeezus out of me 15 years ago, now more comfortable in a seventy-two year-old's hands than they were in his late fifties? Why else do solutions to problems of interpretation in a given work now appear far more easily and quickly solved than they did then? It's not exactly as though I studied them superficially or did not practice hard the first time around….

Lately, I find myself wondering whether, after Beethoven realized he was creating an ever-growing canon of lasting piano music, he may have started playing head-games with the numbering of his pieces, or his choice of keys? One of my correspondents jokingly referred to the Waldstein as a large dominant preparation for the F major of Opus 54. But she may have been onto something: Following the brief hiatus, post No. 27, in E, Beethoven returns to serious piano sonata composition with Op. 101, in A major. Not only does the the sonata begin on the dominant, but the hesitant opening phrase could easily translate into "Let's see now, where were we?" as though he were picking up on an unfinished conversation a while ago.

Beethoven's ever-growing lifetime fascination with the interval of the third may also mirror the key choices of Op.109-111 (E to G# or A flat, then A flat to C.

The Diabelli's Variations' thematic relationship to the final movement of Op. 111 has been oft-noted, not to mention that he composed 33 Variations, one more than the number of sonatas thus far, thereby hinting that this was really his 33rd sonata. Moreover, as Brendel notes, the number 33 fills a gap of sorts: He'd previously written a set of 32 variations in C minor, and and published variation sets Op. 34 and 35.

Of course all this could all be coincidental. I’ll have to ask him the next time we meet

Less than a month to go

2010-08-13T11:26:00.000-07:00

What a spectacular work Beethoven’s 28^th sonata (Op. 101) is! Counterpoint reigns from the first note to the last, more consistently than in any of the other sonatas. In fact, an enterprising transcriber like either of my friends Robert Stallman or Mark Starr could easily turn it into a great string quartet or quintet: So much of the music specifically emulates string writing, like the entire second movement, or that two-note motive that is handed pizzicato from one instrument to the other toward the end of the Finale.

That is what makes this piece so difficult for pianists. Of course it is never enough simply to pay attention to the most active voice. Here, the principal challenge is not merely to keep track of, and project three or more voices simultaneously, but to infuse each voice with a life of its own that often is independent of the others. Yet, in the end, all must coalesce into a unified vision.

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Further word from Audio High about the recording team Michael Silver is assembling for the San Jose Beethoven project: the legendary Mark Willsher of Pin3hot will be in charge of recording the recitals, and the equally renowned Steve Hoffman will master the edited files. Meridian is a major co-sponsor of the project, along with the Elf Foundation, whose mission is to make life more fun for sick kids in hospitals. With guys like that hanging around, I’d better cut this post short and get back to practicing soon.

Closer to home, Dave Pay of Music on Main has arranged for a great Steinway B to be brought into The Cellar specifically for the series there. I love that funky, intimate space.

Le Petit Trianon in San Jose

2010-07-28T08:06:00.000-07:00

Site of the upcoming series and recording sessions.

Introduction

2010-07-27T20:52:00.000-07:00

There are many good reasons--professional, artistic, and commercial--why a mere handful of pianists have recorded the thirty-two Beethoven sonatas more than once. So, when Michael Silver of Audio High invited me to perform and re-record the complete cycle at Le Petit Trianon in San Jose, and a week later, Dave Pay of Vancouver's Music on Main--the city's most edgy concert presenter--asked me to perform them for his organization, the decision to accept both invitations was made neither lightly nor easily.

I had studied many of the sonatas during my student years, and taught virtually all of them over three decades. Nevertheless, when I first undertook to perform the cycle in its entirety, many sonatas--including the Appassionata, Waldstein, Pathetique, Das Lebewohl, the Hammerklavier, and others that have managed to survive without the benefit of a nickname--were new to my fingers, if not my brain. Incorporating them all into my repertoire took a full two years. Then, after performing the complete cycle eight times in Washington, Vancouver, Seattle, Toronto and elsewhere, I recorded them over a period of many months, and a set of 10 CDs was issued in 2000.

This was undoubtedly the musical journey of my life. No project I had ever undertaken had been remotely so exhilarating: my brain was flooded daily with insights about how Beethoven's mind worked, how his music is put together, and how his magnificent, multi-faceted thoughts might be transmogrified from notes on a page into a rich, architecturally-coherent sonic image.

It has since become increasingly obvious that this adventure was not in any sense a culmination, but rather a rejuvenation. To this day, I still find myself studying scores and practicing in ways that I had not previously done. New ideas about interpretation, technique, musical structure, and sound production constantly occur to me whenever I am seated at the keyboard (and often when I am away from it).

After Michael contacted me, I listened to the cycle straight-through for the first time in close to a decade. Several sonatas definitely rank among my list of favourite recordings, and I would gladly sign my name to the set, if it were available. Still, I do hear most of them differently--not necessarily better, definitely not worse, but certainly differently. In retrospect, the first set constitutes a fairly objective record of how I thought they should be played at the time. If all goes as I intend, the forthcoming set will represent a more personal statement of my present feelings about the sonatas.

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There are technical reasons for having another go at them as well: The earlier set was made on a reproducing Boesendorfer 290SE, a technical marvel of its time, so fiendishly expensive that only 32 were made (one for each Beethoven sonata, apparently). It was situated in a large living room with sufficiently good acoustics to be used regularly as a venue for public concerts, but it is a relatively narrow living room nonetheless, and this layout presents notorious challenges for recording engineers. (See Stereophile editor John Atkinson's article at http://www.stereophile.com/musicrecordings/298/ for more information on the instrument, the room, and the recording process.)

The sound on those discs is undeniably intimate -- far closer to the sound of a fortepiano of Beethoven's era in a large drawing room than that of a resonant, modern concert Steinway in a large concert hall. Still, for better or worse, a resonant, modern concert Steinway in a large concert hall is what we have become accustomed to for the past century and a half. Le Petit Trianon has magnificent acoustics, as well as a beautiful Steinway onstage. Having been a Steinway artist by choice for decades, my desire to record the Beethoven sonatas under close to ideal conditions is, I hope, understandable. Fine an instrument as the Boesendorfer is, there are facets to my playing that were not adequately captured in those recordings.

Also, the instrument's internal reproducing mechanism is extraordinarily accurate, however, the sound of the player's fingers physically striking the keys when recordings are played back, is necessarily absent. That noise is an important component of any performer's tonal palate, and varies significantly from pianist to pianist. Many fine pianists know the sound each of their fingers makes when striking a key, and constantly adjust the height and position of their fingers accordingly. (If they don't, they should.)

Finally, hi-resolution recording was a relatively new, seldom used technology a decade ago, whereas by now, it has become commonplace. Moreover, not only are SACDs and Blu-Ray discs capable of playing back digital files with much greater accuracy than standard CDs, but the downloading of hi-res files onto a computer's hard disk allows any listener owning little more than a stereo system and a computer to potentially hear recorded music in exactly as much detail as the engineer at the original sessions.

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I will try my best to keep this blog up to date throughout the year, to create a running record of my work, my thoughts and insights about the music, and my impressions of each concert. The first two recitals will feature nine of the sonatas: four early ones, three from the middle period, including the Waldstein and the Appassionata, and two of the late ones.

September 9, 2010 (San Jose - Le Petite Trianon)

September 27 (Vancouver - the Cellar)

Sonata No. 1 in F Minor, Op. 2, No. 1

Sonata No. 21 in C Major, Op. 53 “Waldstein”

Sonata No. 9 in E Major, Op. 14 No. 1

Sonata No. 28 in A Major, Op. 101

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September 16, 2010 (San Jose - Le Petite Trianon)

September 28 (Vancouver - the Cellar)

Sonata No. 19 in G Minor, Op. 49, No. 1

Sonata No. 20 in G Major, Op. 49, No. 2

Sonata No. 30 in E Major, Op. 109

Sonata No. 22 in F Major, Op. 54

Sonata No. 23 in F Minor, Op. 57 “Appassionata”