Pianistic Individuality In The 21st Century

Pianistic individuality and creativity in the 21st century As a pianist, but more importantly, as a consumer of classical music, I have recently been concerned with the ever-increasingly apparent uniformity of today`s style of piano playing. I feel that in recent years the scope for individual expression in performance has narrowed in response to an emphasis on technical perfection at conservatoire and competition level. With unprecedented access to recordings and digitalised concerts, the young pianists today have become conditioned to flawless performances and conventional interpretations. When I listen again to "classic" recordings, these are all extremely individual. This led me to wonder what shapes and defines individuality within one`s playing. The question of how a musician expresses his own musical feeling is very important to me. Without wishing to indulge in nostalgic sentiment, I would like to explore the differences in the piano performance practice of today, drawing comparisons from the past century. I will also compare several recordings of past and present performances of Schubert`s last piano sonata D. 960. The recording industry has evolved dramatically in recent years. Because of these developments, sound engineers and musicians alike are much more concerned with erasing what they perceive as faults both in sound and in technical prowess. This leads to false expectations among musicians. Nowadays, an application requirement for many auditions and competitions will be an audio recording or a DVD performance. The performer goes to great lengths to ensure he finds the perfect technical equipment that will give him the cleanest and most varied sound. For string players, several takes are required to stamp down any lingering intonation problems in difficult passages. One hears stories about technical fixes such as "Auto-tune", and the mixing and slicing of a CD has become the most important factor. In comparison, famous soloists with strong personalities such as Sergey Rachmaninov and Dinu Lipatti only needed a very limited amount of takes to produce their recordings. There is no doubt that the experience of a live concert is very different from that of a sterile recording in front of microphones, which is nothing more than a reproduction of the live performance. This great demand for authenticity lead Rudolf Serkin to choose to only record a piece from beginning to end, allowing no slicing, not even for one wrong note at the very end of a long piece. But certainly performing a piece several times in a row takes a lot of its initial panache and adrenaline induced energy away. On the other hand, small technical imperfections and irregularities in the rhythm or phrasing are easily neglected and forgotten in the concert hall, where as on a hard copy that is subjected to repeated listening all these little slips can become rather distracting and disturbing. In turn, conservatories encourage students to focus more on the technical aspect of their development. One cannot deny that technical mastery is essential to performing an instrument, however it is very common to hear students focus only on that aspect and disregard anything else.

Another important factor that is allowing conformism to become the norm are international competitions, which represent a sometimes illusionary launching pad for most instrumentalists aspiring to a solo career. Although many world famous pianists (such as Martha Argerich, Murray Perrahia, Krystian Zimmerman or even Emil Gilels 1.) have achieved worldwide recognition after winning an important competition, it is less common today for a prize winner to have guaranteed long term success because of the inflation of competitions. According to the Alink-Argerich Foundation calendar, there are 289 Piano Competitions scheduled for the year 2014. This means that hundreds of laureates have to find venues to perform, whilst numbers of audiences tend to decrease. Taking part in competitions is almost a career for many graduate musicians, as they offer a performance platform that is hard to come by through other means. Young artists who focus on this become conditioned by the rather narrow repertoire requirements that most competitions have in common. With very few exceptions, such as the Chopin Competition in Warsaw or the Bach Competition in Leipzig, which are dedicated to one composer only, most others require a rather standard program. Participants usually need to include a Bach Prelude and Fugue, several studies including one by Chopin, a Classical sonata, a big Romantic piece, a 20th century piece and a contemporary work. With one comprehensive recital program one can participate in numerous competitions for years in a row. Full-proofing such a repertoire to the technical perfection expected at competition level requires a lot of dedication and leaves little time for learning new repertoire. At the same time, this kind or repertory can prove to be rather unsuccessful in the concert hall, as audiences and juries can have very different expectations from performing artists. The public that is interested in the great Romantic canonical repertoire will not necessarily be keen on contemporary pieces. Likewise, contemporary music attracts a substantial following of listeners who might not be attracted by a standard, chronologically presented variety, unless it is unified by a specific concept (a quality competitions are less known for). Italian pianist Roberto Prosseda talks about his alternative solution in the quest for recognition: `My great luck was to not win first prize in a major competition. I was forced to find alternative ways to become known, such as searching for my own personal musical approach.`2. He has become well known for discovering and premiering unpublished works by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. Because of the way contestants are marked in most competition, the most original and unconventional interpretation will rarely be rewarded. The highest and lowest marks of every participant are eliminated to account for the extremes in the panel. But it is usually the most interesting and eccentric personalities who polarise opinions and cause opposite reactions, so they will also be the first ones to be eliminated. It would be hard for us today to imagine artists such as Glenn Gould or Ivo Pogorelich succeeding in competitions. Pogorelich was in fact famously eliminated in the third round of the International Chopin Piano Competition in 1980, leading Martha Argerich to resign from the jury as a sign of protest. Pianist and writer Charles Rosen commented on the mentality of juries, who are most often formed of teachers. `Teachers don`t like to hear an interpretation that is different from the way they teach a piece. Composers and conductors on a jury will almost always be more open.` 3. It is also revealing to point out that, at a glance at the Alink-Argerich Foundation catalogue, one notices that many of the jurors are active in a great number of competition, some of them having judged more than 60 events in the past 10 years. This limits the diversity and variety of criteria that selects the winners and stagnates the development of the competition world. `Professional jurors` know each other from panels they sat on together before, and they socialise at the end of a round. Rosen thinks that `any attempt to forbid discussion is in vane; you can sense the disapproval or enthusiasm of the colleagues sitting next to you by the way they squirm or breathe ecstatically or by how emphatically they write a large NO! in capital letters next to a candidate`s name` 4. He adds that, in his opinion, performing artists should be judged by their greatest moments of artistic inspiration, even if consistency is not their biggest quality: `the pianist is generally masterly only from time to time.` 5. It is commonly said nowadays that pianists like Arthur Schnabel, Vladimir Horowitz or Alfred Cortot would never go through the rounds of a competition today with some of their less masterful performances. This reminds us of Bela Bartok`s famous dictum, `competitions are for horses, not for artist`, as they will reward the most consistent and technically `apt` of musicians, not necessarily the most inspired ones, who stand out for what they are trying to communicate.

Since most members of a panel of jurors are active teachers, they also influence the way music is taught in conservatories, where students are prepared for and encouraged to take part in competitions. The repertoire requirements in a music school are also very similar, and is taught and played in a `traditionally accepted` and institutionalised manner. Pianist Stephen Hough recalls on his experience as a student at the Royal Northern College of Music: "Gordon Green was the opposite of a `competition` teacher," he recalls. "He wanted you to make mistakes, experiment, go off in weird directions. When you enter competitions you are immediately restricted. You have to play in a correct way; you worry if the jury will like you. Pianists who enter competitions have stopped having fun by the time they are 20-they become old and stunted."6. I think young musicians should be encouraged to delve deeper into the repertoire of composers that genuinly interests them and that will also often reflect their own best qualities as performers. There is a lot to be learned from experimenting with different approaches of the same style, different tempi, ideas and interpretations. Even if one might not appreciate and approve of Glenn Gould`s rendition of Beethoven`s `Appassionata`, to choose an example, there are many interesting details and new sides of the music to be discovered in his tempo that many might consider outrageously out of style and character. I myself am personally inclined to think that it is sometimes preferable for a musically trained listener to hear a revealing and individual interpretation, very different from one`s own. As Rosen puts it, "if I want to hear a piece played my way, I play it myself."7. This is especially true in an environment where most students perform very familiar canonical works, which have also been recorded and played by great artists. Why have these conventions become so universally excepted? There are many marvellously illuminating interpretations that have survived the past century and are so convincingly played in a way that would most certainly be dismissed in a musical teaching institution today. One thinks of so many of Glenn Gould`s renditions of Mozart and Beethoven sonatas, Brahms Intermezzi, Schnabel`s wonderful recordings of Schubert Sonatas, who`s liberties taken with tempo fluctuations as an expressive device would be considered unacceptable in a conservatoire exam. This makes me think of a situation a fellow pianist of mine was confronted with in an exam, and it is a story I find sadly illustrative of music schools today. A student pianist had performed a piano quartet in chamber music assessment in one of the music colleges in London. She was disappointed with her mark so she pursued a member of the panel to receive some feedback. Without offering any specific critique, the examiner told my colleague that her group`s performance would have been wonderfully suited for a concert situation, but it had not been appropriate for an exam. This proves to show that the conservatoire`s aim is not necessarily to prepare young artists for the real world, and that their interest lies elsewhere. It is much more important for its body of students to produce immediate results in standard conventional examinations and contests than working towards building a long-term career. At the same time, it is understandable that an education establishment will favour routine over eccentric individuality. It has to be able to justify the diplomas it issues, and the only way the proficiency of a student can be guaranteed is by assessing them according to their current performing skills, with which they show that they are able to give a recital of an acceptable standard. It is interesting to note that nowadays, in the same way that performing artists travel and move all around the world much more than 50 years ago, so do teachers. This leads to very diverse faculties at most leading music schools from Europe, the United States and even Asia. It is less so the case for the Guildhall School of Drama & Music, but if we look at the Keyboard Department of the Royal Academy of Music in London, out of eighteen principal study piano teachers, eight (almost half) are of non-British origins, coming from France, Russia, Latvia or Ukraine. The same is the same is the case for a lot of the faculties at national music colleges across Germany, France, Spain or the US. One might think that this can only encourage diversity and personal approach, as the teachers and students come from such different backgrounds and have been educated in a certain school of piano playing. But surely in a few years, this will lead to a merger of all these different styles of music making into one international style of piano playing. If a Russian student and teacher find themselves in a German institution, they will have to adapt in order to respond to the requirements of their new establishment. I find that expectations have already become more and more similar all around the world. Soon Debussy or Prokofiev will sound the same everywhere, regardless of the geographical or social characteristics of a place. Orchestras find themselves in a similar situation, as instrumentalists respond to the globalisation of the classical music scene. Increased touring activities, international conductors (Valery Gergiev conducting the LSO, Simon Rattle directing the Berlin Philharmonic etc.) and the limited amount of rehearsals contribute to this effect. Nowadays, orchestras have lost a lot of their distinctive qualities, and are playing in a more mainstream fashion. An avid classical listener of the mid 20th Century will have had no problem telling apart the Concertgebouw Orchestra from the Cleveland Orchestra, but would now find it remarkably challenging. Granted, this phenomenon has a lot to do with the instruments they are using today. This brings us back to the piano industry, where Steinway & Sons now have an almost complete monopoly over concert halls and music schools. There are over 1600 pianists that carry the title of Steinway Artist, which means that they all own a Steinway, but most importantly that they choose to play exclusively on Steinway instruments. Daniel Barenboim, Evgeny Kissin, Mitsuko Uchida, Rafal Blechacz, Imogen Cooper, Krystian Zimmerman are just a few examples of Steinway Artists. Arthur Schnabel was famously refused any of their instruments on his tour to North America because of the Bechstein piano he was playing on in Europe. "They insisted that I play on Steinway exclusively, everywhere in the world, otherwise they would not give me their pianos in the United States. That is the reason why from 1923 until 1930 I did not return to America... In 1933,... Steinway changed their attitude and agreed to let me use their pianos in the United States, even if I continued elsewhere to play the Bechstein. Thus from 1933 on, I went every year to America." 8. Steinway also carries a program called `All-Steinway Schools`. Conservatories that are part of this program include the Yale School of Music, Curtis Institute of Music,, the Leeds College of Music, Royal Welsh College of Music & Drama, and many other conservatories and colleges across Europe, Asia and Central and North America. Playing on the same instruments conditions your hearing and shapes your taste in sound. As the instrument itself is so important in the making of your own personal sound, using the same make of pianos leads to uniformity of sound in the piano music world. One might think that it is very difficult to be original and innovative with core repertory that has been studied, recorded and performed by numerous generations of artists, and a solution would be to discover new, unexplored repertoire and focus on contemporary music. On the other hand, most modern music is more limiting in terms of indications in the score. The markings are usually very particular and leave little room for interpretation and inquisitive thoughts, like the works of Beethoven or Schubert might require. As individuality tends to develop whilst one is in college, one must hope that young musicians use those years to reflect on their artistic personality. Using insight taught by teachers from various backgrounds could actually be a very beneficial aspect if used correctly. Perhaps, for the same reason Ravel insisted that his music should be played "without expression" in reaction to the Romantic tradition, one needs to break away from conformity in the 21st Century.

1. Martha Argerich made her breakthrough after winning the International Chopin Piano Competition in Warsaw in 1965. Murray Perrahia attracted worldwide recognition after receiving First Prize in the Leeds International Piano Competition in 1972. Krystian Zimmerman also became famous after being the youngest pianist yet to ever win the International Chopin Piano Competition in 1975. Emil Gilels rose to fame after winning the Ysaÿe Festival in Brussels in 1938. 2. Johnson, Michael - Behind the scenes at piano competitions http://www.factsandarts.com/current-affairs/behind-the-scenes-at-piano-competitions/ 3. Johnson, Michael - Behind the scenes at piano competitions http://www.factsandarts.com/current-affairs/behind-the-scenes-at-piano-competitions/ 4. Rosen, Charles, Piano Notes - The hidden world of the pianist, Penguin Books, England,2002, p.110 5. Rosen, Charles, Piano Notes - The hidden world of the pianist, Penguin Books, England,2002, p.103 6. Isacoff, Stuart - The Keys to His Heart: A Cultural Conversation with Stephen Hough http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304640104579487363828081466 7. Rosen, Charles, Piano Notes - The hidden world of the pianist, Penguin Books, England,2002, p.1098. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steinway_%26_Sons

Bibliography

Alink-Argerich Foundation, Piano Competitions Worldwide 2014-2015-2016

Rosen, Charles, Piano Notes - The hidden world of the pianist, Penguin Books, England,2002

Online resources

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steinway_%26_Sons http://www.steinway.com Isacoff, Stuart - The Keys to His Heart: A Cultural Conversation with Stephen Hough http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304640104579487363828081466 Johnson, Michael - Behind the scenes at piano competitions http://www.factsandarts.com/current-affairs/behind-the-scenes-at-piano-competitions