jwilzewske: lifschitz

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Sunday, February 19, 2012

Konstantin Lifschitz: Collaborative Poesy of the Goldberg Variations

A passage of music could have a ‘semantic range’ that is essentially the same as that of any word in a language, only much broader in scope—sharing the same kind of elasticity but of a much greater degree than is typical in language... Choosing whether the French overture [Var. XVI] in Bach’s Goldberg Variations connotes ‘sublime confidence’ or ‘deep despair’ is easy because the semantic fields of those expressions are so completely separate. One seems coincident with the music—and the other, far from it!”
— Joseph Swain, p. 55.

T he hypothesis that syntax mediates tension—and its corollary, that if there is no sense of tension and resolution then there is no sense of syntax—do not entail that all tension is ‘syntactic’ in origin... The tension and resolution of this passage depend more on harmonic progression and meter than on the variety of rhythmic durations and texture.”
— Joseph Swain, p. 32.

K onstantin Lifschitz’s performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations BWV 988 last night was staggeringly beautiful, unified in conception and spiritually cohesive all the way through the Variations to the reprise of the Aria at the end.

T he left-hand/right-hand equality of voices that Lifschitz maintains is astounding—that it is biomechanically/anatomically very difficult goes without saying, but it is conceptually/expressively exceedingly difficult as well. (The intentions of the composer—and of the performer, and, now, of ourselves—are complex and tremendously varied through the course of this work. And they must emerge in the performance as fresh and totally genuine—a factor that learning and technically mastering and memorizing the musical text threaten to a degree, as anyone who has ever memorized and performed music in recital knows well...)

I ntentionalism [in music]... not so much a coherent philosophical position but rather a kind of ‘antidote’ to hermeneutic analytic approaches that treat musical works as ‘organic matter’—in short, like vegetables—rather than as products of thinking [,feeling] people. Ideally, this means encouraging analytic results that might please composers if they were told about them... Intentionalism is meant as a heuristic device that asks that we pose the question: What might the composer have thought about this composition and its sense? It has become common practice for musicologists to invoke the warning of the Intentional Fallacy as if it were law accepted by everyone. In fact, the entire hermeneutic tradition stands opposed to this doctrinaire apologia for New Criticism, so that merely calling the quest for intentions structuring a work of art a ‘victim’ to a fallacy does not make it so.”
— Laurence Dreyfus, p. 171.

T he interplay between the rhythmic, metric, melodic, harmonic, and textural tensions in Goldberg variation—notably in the French overture (Var. XVI)—was fascinating. When harmonic tension predominates, it “frees-up” the melodic syntax and vice versa. The realism of the multi-line, multi-voice dialogue or story-telling is enabled and augmented by the parity/equality of the hands, each tension-generating modality taking its “turn” and providing scope and opportunity for other modalities to express things freely.

L ast night our imaginations were permitted to run, taking all the “rope” they could, until close to the end near the 70-minute mark, when we realized in retrospect that the “story” explored by Bach (and Lifschitz) through all of these Variations is our very own. We had not only understood the story; we had in a palpable, true sense ‘said’ [to ourselves] the things that Bach—and Lifschitz—had just said. The story and these thoughts had come a huge distance to find us, as if meant (intended) to be found by us.

W e were inscribed by them, but we found that we, too, were, in a real sense, inscribing/authoring the thoughts. The attentiveness, the transcendent wide-awakeness that Bach has impelled us to with these Variations: like a newly-discovered, implausibly effective form of prayer. An unforgettable performance and a really wonderful evening.

A poem as a persisting manifestation of language—and, therefore, essentially ‘dialogue’ [that can be indefinitely-extended, with unnamed or yet-to-be-named respondents]—can be a message in a ‘bottle’: sent out in the not-always-greatly-hopeful belief that somewhere and sometime it might wash up on land—on some heartland. Poems [and music] in this sense, too are ‘under way’: they are making toward something... Wirklichkeit ist nicht! Wirklichkeit will gesucht und gewonnen sein! [Reality is nothing apart from our individual construction of it. It must be sought and won!]”
— Paul Celan.

I ’ve come to feel over the years that a musical work, however long it may be, ought to have basically—I was going to say ‘one tempo’ but that’s the wrong word—one ‘pulse rate’; one constant 'rhythmic reference point'. Now, obviously, there couldn’t be anything more deadly dull than to exploit one beat that goes on and on and on indefinitely. That’s what drives me up the wall about rock and about minimalism. Anyway, I would never argue in favor of an inflexible pulse. That just destroys any music. But you can take a basic pulse and divide or multiply it—not necessarily on a scale of two, four, eight, sixteen, thirty-two, but often with far-less-obvious divisions—and make the result of those divisions or multiplications act as a subsidiary pulse for a particular movement or section of a movement... So in the case of the Goldbergs, there is in fact one pulse, which, with a few very minor modifications—mostly modifications that I think take their cue from ritards at the end of the preceding variation, something like that—one pulse that runs all the way throughout.” — Glenn Gould, 1982 radio interview with Tim Page.

Saturday, February 11, 2012

Konstantin Lifschitz: Ich bin’s; ich sollte zu träumen (I’m the one; it is I who should dream on this)

Konstantin Lifschitz, image ©Felix Broede

M usical ideas are such combinations of tones, rhythms, and harmonies as to demand/inspire a thoughtful treatment like the main theses of a philosophical tract. [Any non-trivial musical idea inevitably] raises a question—sets up a problem that, in the course of the piece, has to be answered, resolved, ‘carried through’. It has to be carried through however many contradictory situations are plausible; it must be developed by deducing however many inferences there may be from what it postulates; it has to be checked—has to be proved to be true, like a mathematical theorem. And all this, if you are successful, will lead to a conclusion—a ‘pronunciamento’, a fresh new certainty—a beautiful new discovery [that speaks].”
— Arnold Schoenberg, ‘Beauty and Logic in Music,’ unpublished manuscript.

T he quote above was one we saw in the Arnold Schönberg Center archives, when we visited Vienna a couple of months ago. I was reminded of this insight of Schoenberg’s during Bach’s complete two- and three-part Inventions (Sinfonias), performed by Konstantin Lifschitz last night. Interleaved Invention-Sinfonia-Invention-Sinfonia as they were, in ascending chromatic sequence (as opposed to chronologically; as opposed to rank-order by pedagogic difficulty in Wilhelm Friedemann’s Klavierbuchlein), the pieces led us in the audience to some new insights.

S ome inventions, performed by many at faster tempi, became intense meditations on color and timbre. Other ones, often performed with wider rubato variation, became motoric illustrations of individual conviction and duty. Consider the editorial suggestions of the Alfred or others’ modern editions; consider the ur-texts of Bach himself; but make up your own mind—find your own true story. Which is what Konstantin Lifschitz did for us so wonderfully and spontaneously last night.

T hese inventions began as [mere] ideas, that Bach conceived [in an improvisational, impromptu manner] and wrote as teaching tools. The complexities of the three-voice Sinfonias make the two-part Inventions seem [simple] when you play them side-by-side.”
— Cynthia Siebert, founder, Friends of Chamber Music.

I t’s a joy to hear the unfiltered account of a friend’s or lover’s dream. We feel touched and, not just ‘connected’, but also more ‘human’ for the shared experience... ‘included’, ‘alive’. We are included in the ‘action’, and we feel the curiosity and the moral duty to engage with the friend who is relating this dream to us. We sense the truth that arises from the honest synapses firing without the interpolation of an ego in the process. The purity of (absence of—) motives and the transparency count for a lot.

I st das möglich? Denkt ihr, man kann sich wirklich mit einer musikalischen Idee durch einen Traum verlieben, bzw. kann man tatsächlich träumen, verliebt sich in die musikalische Idee zu sein? Habt ihr sowas schon mal geträumt?

[Is this possible? Do you think you can really fall in love with a musical idea in a dream, or dream you can actually love to be in the musical idea? Have you dreamed something like this before?]”
— Milton Babbitt.

Monday, November 17, 2008

Konstantin Lifschitz: Situating Performance & The Politics of Location

I was born in December 1976 in Kharkov, which back then was a city where everyone spoke Russian, but today my birthplace does not appear on the map of Russia. The coincidence of my birth in this ‘myth’ town has left me with a debt of explanation to non-Russians that I am not Ukrainian. It is mythological to me because anyone connecting me to this place has left it, including my parents, family and all of their acquaintances, dispersing to different corners of both this world and the next one. Now Kharkov appears in my consciousness somewhere between Chagall’s Vitebsk and the Tamara Gardens in the Nabokov novel... Music as a performing creative art on the piano did not begin for me with Mozart, Beethoven or Chopin, but with Rameau, whose ‘Tambourin’ I played for my very first concert as a four year-old. And it also began with J. S. Bach. [Eventually], I realized that my diction was a poetic one, but its intonation was not so much lyrical as it was ‘Virgil-like’, ‘remote’. In spite of (or because of—) the fact that fate has granted me encounters with a lot of eminent Musicians, I have always been on a search for my own plasticity as well as my own tools of expression.”
— Konstantin Lifschitz.

T hese works need special consideration from a player who has been trained in a different norm of notation and performance. But there is as much latitude for interpretive variation in earlier music as in music of the 19^th and 20^th Centuries—in fact, there is often more.”
— Richard Troeger, Playing Bach at the Keyboard, p. 259.

Konstantin Lifschitz will perform on Friday evening in the Master Pianists Series at Friends of Chamber Music in Kansas City. In a program that also includes Beethoven Sonatas there will also be a generous helping of baroque:

Frescobaldi: Three Toccatas
Bach: Two Ricercars from The Musical Offering, BWV 1079 (Ricercar a 6; Ricercar a 3).

Lifschitz gives his playing intensely personal interpretations, “like a sort of self-revelation and eavesdropping” as Boston Globe reviewer Richard Dyer said of Lifshitz in a 14-JUL-2000 review. In that regard, Dyer and others have noted that ‘stile recitativo’ has prominent lyrical elements—“It was originally a lyrical form, not just declamatory like it is today.”

Originally, ricercars were ‘open-ended’. Baroque composers emulated Renaissance style for ‘stile antico’ effects. The ricercar began as an early proto-fugue with a slow opening. But it didn’t stay that way. Further permuting and stretching the ricercar idiom, in ‘A Musical Offering’ Bach gave the name ‘ricercar’ to pieces that have ‘galant’ or even later features.

In Lifschitz’s Bach and Frescobaldi we get a sense of the difference between ‘strict and learnèd fugues’ vs. ‘progressive and casual fugues’. He achieves a unique sort of ‘productive objectivity’—that strikes us like ‘facial contextualist’ readings of the constitution of some country that we are surprised to discover we have never visited. Maybe the place is ‘mythical’, its existence vehemently denied by the authorized political maps. I have no way of knowing, but I suspect it has to do with Lifschitz’s native, now-mythical Kharkov.

Once upon a time (more than 50 years ago), the relationship between being, thought, and language (such as the musical manuscript written by a composer) was completely ‘grounded’. So grounded that people took it for granted—like it was ‘built-in’, a ‘given’. The total and obligate ‘contingency’ of all human discourse—including discourse in music—wasn’t appreciated. Even piano technique was less diverse then than it is now.

Then came post-modernism and deconstruction and other influences, and discourses were suddenly thought of as existential acting-out by the subjects, who disclose their personal engagements with the world and reveal how they are ‘inscribed’ by the world right back. Questions about what is ‘real’ center today more around inner conditions of human consciousness, and less around external reality. Transcendental subjectivity...

Liftschitz swoops in like a great Russian owl, an irruption of natural Kharkovian alterity... beautiful polysemy... Kharkovian heterodoxy right here in this American concert hall...

In piano, like in any language, there is an ethics of communication—one must try always to say what one really means to the other, to understand what the other really means (meant) to say, and to communicate in good faith—with some genuine preparedness to be persuaded by the other. This patience and good will... this receptiveness to endless undecidability... this eschewing of any rule-governed, static response is partly what is so admirable in Lifschitz.

M ore than any other composer, except some contemporary ones, Bach leads me on these highly exhausting but simultaneously rejoicing quests. Even though I don’t feel particularly content with my Bach playing, for some reason my Bach recordings of the 1990s received some lofty international critical reviews... I am trying to transmit to the listeners a ‘pantheistic’ perception of Earth’s nature with all its hills, brooks, vineyards, fields and seas... I would like to mirror such phenomena as medieval architectonics; frenzy; the immobility of Japanese theatre; and also lyrical urbanity.”
— Konstantin Lifschitz.

It amounts to a transcendental ‘undeconstructible condition of deconstruction’, an ‘ultra-ethics’ or ‘meta-ethical ethics of ethics’. The fact that works that we love and think we understood can stand up to being taken apart by this poetic philosopher of the keyboard is... reassuring... breath-taking... unique!

Lifschitz is a responsible imaginer... approachable, not at all elusive. Each work arises within a time and place—it always has a context—Italy in 1640; Germany in 1740; Kharkov in Konstantin’s youth; the world-at-large right now.

One could argue that it is a mistake to read Bach or Frescobaldi in anything other than formal, aesthetic terms. But to do that is to discard the hermeneutics of the work. To reduce them to notes and ritualized performance practice is to refuse to understand them; to hear but refuse to listen. Just as reducing paintings to paint is to ‘see’ but refuse to ‘see as’.

The post-modern Louis le Brocquy studies of the head of Samuel Beckett call into question who is gazing and who is gazed-upon. So, too, the baroque performance style of Konstantin Lifschitz calls seriously into question ‘who’ is playing/saying and ‘who’ is listening. It is truly beautiful in any case—and it is ‘mind-blowing’ as well, if you decide to allow it to be that.