jwilzewske: virtuosity

Showing posts with label virtuosity. Show all posts

Sunday, May 27, 2012

Chamber Music Repertoire for Didgeridoo?

T here are a few orchestral works that include didgeridoo (Sean O’Boyle and others), but for conservatory recital or chamber performances there are currently only about 3 dozen chamber music compositions that are readily available. Most of these are indexed at the Australian Music Centre (Duos, Quartets, Quintets, Sextets, Octets; Solo with vocal ensemble). You may also want to consider Peter Sculthorpe’s String Quartet No. 12 with didjeridu, and ‘Lorin’s Piece’ for didjeridu and voice; Neal Corwell’s ‘Aboriginal Voices’ trio for tuba, didgeridoo, and voices; Philip Glass’s ‘Voices’ for organ, didgeridoo, and narrator; and Dubravko Lapaine’s ‘Rescribi’ trio for piano, didgeridoo, and percussion.

[50-sec clip, Dubravko Lapaine, ‘Kosmopterix’, ‘Rescribi’, 1.6MB MP3]

and ‘Putnik’:

[50-sec clip, Dubravko Lapaine, ‘Kosmopterix’, ‘Putnik’, 1.6MB MP3]

T he aboriginal people have a great deal to teach the western world about wind playing in general and lip reeds in particular. The trombone may seem old when compared to western orchestral instruments, but it is only a five hundred year-old baby when compared to the possible forty thousand-year-old tradition of the didjeridu.”
— Stuart Dempster, 1979.

V irtuosic double- and triple-tonguing in the didgeridoo repertoire have parallels to ‘cursus’ in classical Latin oratory and medieval chant (see Eklund, link below), and you might consider that idea in preparing a program. Rhythm—the patterning of accents in speech or singing—establishes expectations; it entrains the listener and the speaker, phase-locking them to the pattern. Accents in Latin fall on at least one out of every three syllables. But in English and other languages the gaps are longer—you can often go for five or six syllables between accents. The didge literature tends to emphasize prosody and oratorical aspects—not only because of your vocalizations into the didge, but also because you have just the fundamental (and pedal), plus a few harmonics (‘toots’, ‘trumpets’) to work with. (Years ago, Juilliard professor Ivan Galamanian famously drew an analogy between instrumental (violin) playing and speech, in which he asserted that attacks are consonants and the sustained notes are vowels, and performers should treat them as such. The analogy is true enough for strings and other instruments, but it’s hardly even an ‘analogy’ in didgeridoo playing: given all of the tongue, jaw, and vocal tract technic involved in didge performance, the vowels-consonants assertion is a self-evident fact of how the didge sounds are produced.)

V ocal and instrumental rhythms are sometimes direct translations of a poetic meter. In other words they may be sung or played, interchangeably. Far more often than not, however, vocal and instrumental rhythms create what we might call ‘rhythmic counterpoint’ when heard with reference to the poetic meter—the interplay among two or more rhythmic threads or voices. By continually altering the durational relationships and varieties of accent in a succession of syllables, musicians can elicit the close attention of listeners.”
— Michael Tenzer, p. 43.

I n thinking about other instrumental repertoire that might be suitable as-is or transcribable for chamber didge recital, you might explore pieces whose articulation and accents entail sound-envelopes that are marcato ‘thrust-followed-by-decay’, an accent that resembles a plucked string instrument like a double-bass. With the didge, the decay is because the outflow of air from the cheeks that occurs while you are inhaling through the nose in circular breathing can’t be as forceful or sustained as the outflow of air when supported by the diaphragm. In general, highly rhythmic, marcato pieces in low register are likely to be feasible and stylistically coherent with didge performance practice, regardless whether they are for winds, strings, or percussion. There are pieces for tympani (for example, Daniel Jenkyn Jone’s ‘Sonata for Unaccompanied Kettledrums’) that could be performed as-is or transcribed for didgeridoo. And there are a number of chamber pieces for bass clarinet or low brass that are plausible. More links that you may find useful follow.

Monday, May 7, 2012

Evgeny Sorkin & Gerard Willems: Beethoven Sonatas for Piano & Violin (& Cocktails)

A re we as performers always bound to execute Beethoven’s ornamentation as he consciously intended when we believe that there is a more convincing possibility? This is a subject to which a whole conference could be devoted, as it involves aesthetic, philosophical and even moral dilemmas. My own short answer is ‘Yes!’ There are certain works where it is obvious that a convincing manner of execution took decades to discover. It is reasonable to think that we are still today discovering it.”
— Daniel Herscovitch, Professor of Piano, Univ Sydney Conservatorium of Music.

T he faculty recital given last night by Sydney Conservatorium faculty members Evgeny Sorkin and Gerard Willems was exciting. The program featured the ‘Spring’ Sonata (Op. 24) and the ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata (Op. 47). The conservatory’s ‘Cocktail’ programs—starting at 19:30, with 65- to 80-min of performance and a snap 5-min intermission—are very popular. It is clearly a very effective marketing/programming concept… the recital hall was nearly completely filled up on this cool Fall Monday evening. Attendees seemed mainly to be 30s to 60s business people who work in Sydney’s central business district, who attend these concerts before taking the train home to the suburbs.

Abundant sturm und drang… lots of passion and gravity-defying force… yet tremendous intimacy, with both performers probing emotionally far beyond the notes. Such joy in this ‘Spring’! Really beautiful to see two artists enjoy performing together this much. Thrilling performance, plus 60 seconds of amusing historical/explanatory remarks from Gerard and Evgeny prior to beginning each piece. No ‘museum’, this!

Saturday, March 10, 2012

Higher-Order Virtuosity: Richard Goode and Chopin’s Ballade No. 3

I n everything Chopin wrote, no matter how complex and virtuosic, that powerful simplicity is there at the core. Although he wrote some very difficult and impressive stuff, the ultimate effect of his music, I feel, should never really be to ‘impress’. But that’s exactly what the pianists we usually hear are striving to do: impress the contest judges, the critics, the public. The world we classical performers live in gives us very little room not to play big ‘show’ pieces, or make everything we play into one... Chopin’s third ballade suffers particularly from this problem. The ballades are all difficult, but No. 3 is the easiest of them—sort of like the shortest Himalaya. It seems as though all the star performers I’ve heard end up trying to make it as hard as the others, plowing through it with virtuosic flare, and thus trivializing it. [And how wonderful it is when, instead, someone like Richard Goode plays this piece with selfless transparency. –DSM]”
— Paul Cantrell blog, In the Hands, 02-MAR-2005..

M y favorite part of Richard Goode’s performance last night in Kansas City [a program that included Mozart, Beethoven, Schumann, and Chopin] was the Chopin Ballad No. 3, Op. 47. This 9-minute piece is maybe the strangest of Chopin’s four ballades, on account of its unrelenting optimism. Goode’s expressive dexterity handles the staggering complexity with seeming ease and imparts a vigor suffused with warmth... perfect for this sweet, cheerful work.

G entle A-flat 6/8-meter dolce, evoking donkeys Chopin observed in the hills of Majorca? Donkeys with jobs, but happy jobs that they enjoyed doing.

T he technique [of musical gesture] is perhaps a musical version of what is referred to as a ‘suture’ in film theory: placing the camera in such a way that it functions as the eye of the protagonist of the film, thereby drawing us, as unwitting spectators, to become the subject of the film ourselves, since we share the same visual field and same [Majorcan] point of view.”
— Patrick McCreless, in Almén & Pearsall, p. 13.

W hat a narrative trajectory! What storytelling! Social media of 1841! Our minds engage, imagination runs free, and we ‘friend’ or ‘follow’ this peripatetic, vacationing Chopin voice from the beginning to the end. The feeling is physical, not just emotional; it coheres—for Goode, and for us in the audience—throughout the piece, all the way to the satisfying, happy ending. For example, the motion from C (mm. 230, 232) down to the E-flat (mm. 231, 233) suggests the subsequent plunges to the low A-flat at the end. Energy flows! We “feel” the path that we are on, anticipate things along the way, anticipate them accurately. And this experience of uncanny accuracy is part of what is pleasant and thrilling for us: in material that is this complex and unpredictable, we don’t usually experience ourselves as being so graceful or right as this. We love being unexpectedly better than we are!

U ltimately, our minds and bodies gladly go everywhere Chopin’s and Goode’s narrative aims to take us. Theirs is a higher-order virtuosity that doesn’t strive to impress. It strives only to reveal what’s True, to tell this true story. But it’s not just ‘telling’, not just a musical ‘text’. The human body is involved—fingers, arms, flesh, nerves, mortal gifts, physical mass. The higher-order virtuosity inhabiting the body averts its gaze and embodies Laws of Physics in action—beauty incarnate; a kind of transcendence—something for which we surely hadn’t planned on our Friday night out, and something for which we feel thrilled and grateful. Bravo!

V iewed as a sign, ‘formative repetition’ refers to what is repeated: it is usually a marker of segmentation, a grammatical feature. When a figure is repeated more than once, the attention begins to be attracted by the repetition itself; instead of focusing on the repeated material only, we focus on the act of repetition as an activity signifier per se and seek a symbolic interpretation of it. It is then a sign, not of segmentation or grammar, but of connotative meaning. It evokes extra-musical associations of... emphatically [re-]emphasized speech, dancing, laughing, etc.”
— Raymond Monelle, p. 88, quoting Lidov.

Monday, January 2, 2012

How Fast Does Violin Bowstick Go?

S urprisingly, this 2009 CMT blogpost on violin kinematics keeps receiving a lot of pageviews every day, with page visitlengths averaging more than 3 minutes. (I monitor the tags/keywords that cause readers to land on each page, to better understand what topics for future posts might be useful and welcomed. And, for that 2009 post, ‘bowstick velocity’, ‘bow speed’, ‘bowing agility’, and similar phrases are what people seem to be looking for information about.) So I thought I’d gather together here some relevant links on that specific aspect.

A lso, because some people who are searching on these searchstrings and keywords have emailed me to say that they have a desire to increase the maximum velocities that they can propel the bowstick with, I collect some links below that have to do with various athletic activities involving fine motor coordination and speed of the upper extremity. (For pianists, Czerny and Hanon are of course good. For brass players, Arban. For violin family, the Bauer books look interesting, although I have not tried them myself.)

M ost interesting to me are some of the findings in the research papers by Diana Young and her colleagues (jpeg above), showing a tremendous amount of ‘fine-structure’ in the velocity and force timeseries. No matter how ‘smooth’ we think our bowing is, there are a tremendous number of little variations—some of them arising with the interaction of the bowhair with the strings; other of them arising from the ratchety contraction physiology of our muscles.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Composing-while-Dancing: EROI Festival, Organ Improvisation, and Embodiment

I mprovising is difficult-] because our current educational system makes it so.”
— William Porter, keynote talk, EROI 2011.

B ecause learning it happens so very late [in the course of pedagogy and acquiring musical skills].”
— Eastman student, quoted by William Porter, EROI 2011.

T he EROI festival this year is centered on the topic of improvisation and opened this afternoon with a stimulating, expansive meditation-cum-keynote-speech by William Porter, entitled ‘Why Is Improvisation So Difficult?’

I t was followed by a breathtaking, virtuosic “triple-header” 8:00 p.m. recital on the Craighead-Saunders organ for a packed-in audience at Christ Church across the street from Eastman School of Music:

Böhm – Praeludium in C; Herr Jesu Christ dich zu uns wend (Chorale Cycle with 6 verses); Hans Davidsson
Hindemith – Organ Sonata No. 1; William Porter
Schumann – Etuden in kanonischer Form für Orgel oder Pedalklavier, Op. 56; David Higgs
Liszt – Präludium und Fuge über den Nahmen B-A-C-H; David Higgs

U p to the mid-18th Century, improvisation was a fundamental skill in which most if not all practicing musicians were adept. Since that time, however, fewer and fewer musicians have felt fluent at improvising extemporaneously.

P orter catalogued the concepts and situations that he believes lead many musicians today to find improvising difficult. He averred that because genres and idioms are today so tremendously diverse, it is difficult to teach improvisation as ‘compositional performance’ insofar as it is not humanly possible for one person to be fully fluent in what constitutes improvisation in more than a few genres/idioms. It was far easier when the prevailing idioms/use-cases/purposes of the music were few in number and the contexts for the improvisation (e.g., liturgical/sacred music) were more structured.

F oremost among the reasons why improvisation has become ‘hard,’ Porter says, is that counterpoint, voice-leading, and harmony are in recent decades taught in ‘classroom’ settings, primarily as paper-based exercises in writing, instead of as practical performance on a keyboard instrument (or any other instrument, including voice). Student musicians only rarely these days develop any ‘muscle memory’ for improvisation per se, so that the body—the fingers, the hands, the diaphragm, the whole body—knows how to execute improvisation as a sort of ‘compositional performance’. Porter exhorted the teachers in the audience to amend the curriculum to impart such kinesthetic knowledge to students, and to do it from their earliest days when they are kids, just beginners, much in the manner that would be done with dancers or other kinds of athletes.

S ome book links are gathered below, for your interest, in the spirit of Porter’s remarks about embodiment, kinesthetics, and corporality in improvisation. Especially noteworthy is Pamela Ruiter-Feenstra’s new two-volume treatise ‘Bach and the Art of Improvisation’ (link below).

W hat a fantastic EROI Festival this will be, crafting the future of organ improvisation and improvisation pedagogy!

W e must kill the twin demons of ‘originality’/‘novelty’ and ‘imitation’: these ultimately lead to paralysis and inhibit improvisation. Instead, we must teach the student how to be compelling, how to be convincing. It is better to be ‘interesting’ than to be original. The integrity of saying something with conviction, and of being spontaneously responsive to other musicians and to the audience—is what we really mean by ‘improvisation’. We must teach them to prepare—to prepare to take advantage of the unexpected when it happens.”
— William Porter, keynote talk, EROI 2011.

Wednesday, June 15, 2011

Luca Guglielmi and Ovid’s Harpsichord at Midnight

T he late-night BEMF program last night was organized around themes from Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’:

Louis Couperin - Prelude & Passacaille in C major (Bauyn m.s.)
Francois Couperin - La Regente ou la Minerve; L'Atalante; Les Silvains
Girolamo Frescobaldi - Cento Partite sopra Passacagli
Baldassare Galuppi - Sonata in E minor, Op. 2, No. 3
Dieterich Buxtehude - Praeludium in G minor (BuxWV 163)
Johann K.F. Fischer - Passacaglia in D minor (Suite ‘Urania’)
J.S. Bach - Prelude, Fuga & Allegro in E-flat major (BWV 998)

I especially enjoyed Guglielmi’s varied treatment of the cadences in the Buxtehude, emphasizing a diversity of rhetorical aims and composerly intentions and showcasing widely-varied articulations in Baroque form.

I n keeping with the theme of Ovid’s rhetoric, Buxtehude’s Praeludia embody architectural structures that are parallel to the ‘Dispositio’ in the Classics, basically a forensic method or form for conducting oratory: (1) ‘Exordium’, the orator capturing his audience, (2) ‘Narratio’, the orator presenting salient facts of the case, (3) ‘Confirmatio’, the orator explaining evidence and logical proofs, and (4) ‘Peroratio’, the orator passionately expressing the logical conclusions that are justified by steps (1) through (3).

I n harpsichord rhetoric as in spoken oration, the orator/composer/harpsichordist has the latitude to insert a ‘Digressio’ here and there. An extra ‘Exordio’ or a ‘Peroratio may optionally be inserted to reinforce a point here and there as well.

I n Buxtehude’s Praeludium in G minor, a wild, improvisatory, mind-blowing ‘stylus phantasticus’ prevails—not only in the ‘Exordium’ but elsewhere—and this is what can really make audience members gasp, emotionally caught-up as they are in the thing.

O ur minds were thoroughly convinced by objective forensic and evidentiary harpsichord arguments, but hearing and seeing the emotional ‘finish’ is what captures our hearts’ imagination! Guglielmi’s account of the Buxtehude ‘Peroratio’ was given in an all-out, athletic toccata style, more like a winning jockey-and-racehorse than the closing statements of a dramatic, rhetoric-genius trial lawyer.

T he whole peformance was gorgeous and elicited a prompt standing ovation at the end from the large, appreciative midnight BEMF audience.

B onus vignette: It was beautiful to see Guglielmi pat his harpsichord on the right-hand "cheek" of its body, on the wood to the right of the keyboard following a couple of these very difficult pieces, as if to thank it for its performance. The gesture resembled nothing so much as that of a jockey, patting the horse after winning a big stakes race. Or a human master petting the much-loved dog or other companion animal.

T he 2-manual instrument by William Dowd, on loan from James Nicolson, is one based on a Ruckers Franco-Flemish design of 1628 and it bears this inscription on its lid: “Saltatur me canente ... ubi melos, nec ibi mali” which I believe means something like: “Dance as I sing ... ever sweet, never sour.” Or was it ‘canum’ instead of ‘canente'’? ... “Turn me tummy-up like a beloved pet dog ... always well-behaved, never bad.”

L uca Guglielmi was born in Turin in 1977, where he studied music and humanities. He studied Composition with Alessandro Ruo Rui, and Choral Music and Choral Conducting with Sergio Pasteris at the Conservatory "G. Verdi" of Turin. In 1999 he was chosen to participate in the Extraordinary Course in Conducting under the direction of Carlo Maria Giulini at the Fiesole Music School. He has served as harpsichordist and organist with the Orchestra Sinfonica Nazionale di Torino. His study of the harpsichord has been diverse, with Patrizia Marisaldi among others and most recently under Ton Koopman. He studied organ with Vittorio Bonotto, piano accompaniment (including lieder) with Eros Cassardo. When he was 20 he was invited by Jordi Savall to join his ensembles Hesperion XX (now XXI). Guglielmi teaches harpsichord, organ and orchestra at courses at Urbino, Pamparato, San Feliu de Guixols (Catalonia) e Barbaste (France).

L ast night’s 11:15 p.m. recital in the atmospheric sanctuary of Boston’s Emmanuel Episcopal Church was financially supported by Ruth M. McKay and Don Campbell. Bravo!

Wednesday, January 19, 2011

The Importance of [a modest number of—] ‘Wrong’ Notes

Authenticity is not the only quality for which a performance might be valued. Where a relatively inauthentic performance is highly valued, it is valued in spite of its ‘inauthenticity.’ For example, Schnabel’s recorded performances of the Beethoven sonatas are well regarded despite the wrong notes that they contain.”
— Stephen Davies, p. 47.

Beethoven marks ‘fugue in 3 voices with some license’, which is a serious understatement [Sonata No. 29 in B-flat Major, Op. 106, “Hammerklavier”] and which I read as something of a joke: the joy of the joke being the extent to which Beethoven will simply flaunt the very idea of a fugue. Though the fugue subject begins with a series of consonant, descending thirds (taking up an obsessive theme of the piece as a whole), pretty soon its running sixteenth notes have a willful tendency to encounter all sorts of dissonant neighbors, and these ‘wrong notes’ become a subject for the composer’s perverse and inventive discourse. Beethoven’s ‘play’: causing all kinds of collisions of one dissonant neighbor with another and then miraculously making sense of them: this is the playful creation and resolution of chaos.”
— Jeremy Denk.

I was recently checking to see how my friend, pianist Victor Goldberg, is doing with his Asian tour. As part of my online “checking up,” I looked at his Twitter feed, which I had not done in awhile. There was not much in the way of updates about his performances in Hong Kong or Taiwan or Thailand in there, but there was this little tweet from last June, which I’d not previously seen.

Are wrong notes that important?”
— Victor Goldberg, Twitter, 23-JUN-2010.

N umber one, Victor plays exceedingly well, with wonderful expression and technique. He does not produce wrong notes—at least not many of them, and especially not many of them in the context of the difficult, finger-challenging repertoire he performs. His tone remains consistently focused, clear, and centered throughout the range. The pulse remains secure, and his rhythms are accurate for the style. Dynamic levels are consistent, emotionally coherent, and an accurate interpretation of the style. Phrasing remains always consistent and sensitive to the style. Expressiveness manifests creative nuance and style, remaining responsive not only to the score but to other performers and the audience. Articulation has secure attacks, and all markings (staccato, legato, slur, accents, etc.) are executed accurately. In short, anyone who has heard Victor play would be astonished by his Tweet from last June.

N umber two, Victor’s recoveries from any notes he misses are invariably graceful and, if anything, the few misses lend in an admirable way to the overall humanity of his performances. We do not attend to hear damned automatons or computers perform. We come to hear a real human, and to vicariously experience our own humanity more fully through what that dear human does.

N umber three, we know both the quotidian and the sometimes noble, poignant origins of “mistakes” in elite performers; we understand how they happen, at least those of us who have ever studied music do. And we actually want to witness them. We love virtuosic spectacle, yes, but, more than that, we glimpse first-hand in the virtuosos’ limits and accomodations and recoveries from occurrences around those boundaries some important dimensions that we have and that all people, past, present, and future have.

N umber four: authenticity is not conditioned upon enslavement to the urtext. In any good performance, we witness improvisatory but at the same time fully consequential music. We see the person’s full absorption as it unfolds in front of us. And, given the finiteness of human attention and other capacities, the “full absorption” is not evenly spread across all of the myriad elements to be attended to. As a result, we witness the highly personal irregularities of the elements that receive extra attention, while other less-attended elements recede toward the boundaries where the so-called “mistakes” happen. A lot of what we call “depth” in performance arises via these core-vs-boundary processes. Again, it is part of the beauty.

N umber five: the composer created these risks in the score. In some cases the risks were put there deliberately, in full recognition of what awkwardnesses under the hand (or for the voice, etc.) would do to the performer—some of Rzewksi’s writing is diabolical in this way—and in other cases it was happenstantial/incidental. But the aesthetic whole—the unity of the score’s architecture, replete with its hazards and insurmountable challenges—is what we seek.

N umber six: We can measure the “mistakes” and statistically model the ‘reconstruction error’ or fidelity to the score. In principle, we could study the situations in which the reconstruction error density is high and yet our emotional and aesthetic reception of the performance is also [paradoxically] high.

F irst, we record the occurrences of deviations from the score and transform them from the time-domain to the event-frequency-domain. Then y_t is the power spectrum of those deviations. And we calculate the Kullback-Leibler (KL) divergence (see Lee and Seung 1999)… the 50-cent equation up at the top of this blogpost.

F or those who are especially interested in these issues, have a look at the paper by Maria Ruiz, Hans-Christian Jabusch, and Eckart Altenmueller at Hanover and Dresden (link below).

N umber seven: some of what we hear as “wrong” is not wrong after all, even if the performer herself/himself obsesses over it.

W e first have to diagnose the right notes as ‘right’ before we can say that any of them are wrongly played—‘diagnose,’ rather than merely find: no longer does the fact that a composer puts down a C on paper [or in Finale or Sibelius, etc.] necessarily mean that s/he cares two hoots if a C sharp is played instead, or a C-semi-sharp for that matter. And even if s/he thinks s/he cares, one takes leave to doubt the profundity of his/her worries when, in rehearsal, one notices that s/he does not perceive the difference between the alleged right note and the wrong note s/he gets instead.”
— Hans Keller.

E vents remaining in Victor Goldberg's Asian tour include:

Masterclass, City Hall, Hong Kong - 20-JAN
Masterclass, Hong Kong University - 21-JAN
Concert, Discovery College, Hong Kong - 23-JAN

B est wishes, Victor. See you back in the U.S. at the end of the month.

Saturday, November 6, 2010

Andrejs Osokins: Expressive Shaping of Time

A ndrejs Osokins delivered on Friday a sincere and heartfelt account of Bach's Prelude and Fugue in E-flat minor BWV 853 at the Royal Academy of Music in London. The Prelude was played at about mm=40, lentissimo, with a wide expressive palette… more loss-evoking and ‘bereft’ than any performance I’ve previously heard.

H is interpretation is as smooth as can be. The tempi he chooses are somewhat exaggerated, to great expressive effect. Cadences are executed with confidence and strength.

S uch speed! Such brilliant playing of Liszt’s Widmung S.566, Liebestraum No. 2 in E major, and Liebestraum No. 3 in A-flat major! Such imaginative exploring of all possibilities in Debussy’s Prelude No. 6 ‘Des pas sur la neige’ and ‘L'Isle joyeuse’! He has energy and resources to spare! Impressive!

T he expressive timing Osokins applies to his interpretations is superb—the encounter of a sensitive musician with the structure of these pieces. We hear his playing as the ‘effect’ of each composer and the score (the ‘cause’).

Bach – Prelude & Fugue No. 8 in E-flat minor BWV 853
Liszt – Widmung S.566
Liszt – Transcription of Schubert’s ‘Shakespeare Serenade’
Liszt – Liebestraum No. 2 in E major
Liszt – Liebestraum No. 3 in A-flat major
Liszt – Transcription of Wagner’s Liebestod S.447
Debussy – Prelude No. 6 ‘Des pas sur la neige’
Debussy – L’Isle joyeuse

T here is an ‘average’ tempo to each piece as he plays it, of course, but the ratio between the slowest and the fastest tempi within each is really large—I estimate it to be between 1.6 and 2.0. It is a sort of dramatic ‘modal’ effect—resembling French storytelling? Idiomatic Baltic narrative style, like how his parents or grandparents in Latvia used to speak when he was a kid? A style that aims more for clarity and sound color than for ‘expressivity of timing’ per se?

I n any case, the result is highly personal—not just technically excellent but really convincing, persuasive. Bravo!

O sokins graduated from the Latvian Academy of music in 2007 and since 2008 has been studying in the post-graduate program at the Royal Academy of music, London with Professor Hamish Milne. Osokins was born in 1984. He received the Lillian Davies Prize, won First Prize in the Brant International Piano Competition, Birmingham in 2005, and was joint Second Prize winner in Porto International Piano Competition, Portugal. In 2008, Osokins won First Prize and the Audience Prize in the 5th International J. Vitols Piano Competition, Riga. The same year he was also winner of the Beethoven Intercollegiate Piano Competition in London, as well as Semi-finalist in the Montreal International Music Competition and the Liszt-Bartók International Piano Competition, Budapest. In 2010 he won the Laureate of Koningin Elisabethwedstrijd International Piano Competition, Brussels. He has performed at Wigmore Hall, St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Birmingham Symphony Hall, Drapers Hall, Rachmaninov Hall in Moscow, and as a soloist with orchestras including the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra, Sinfonietta Riga, and the Latvian National Opera Orchestra.

Andrejs Osokins page at Queen Elisabeth Competition website
Andrejs Osokins page at Latvian National Symphony Orchestra website
Andrejs Osokins page at London International Piano Competition website
Bowen J. Tempo, duration, and flexibility. J Musicol Res 1996;16:1-47.
Cook N. Music, Imagination, and Culture. Oxford Univ, 1992.
Repp B. The aesthetic quality of a quantitatively average music performance. Music Perception 1997;14:419-44.
Todd N. A model of expressive timing in tonal music. Music Perception 1985;3:33-58.

Saturday, October 2, 2010

Feltsman: Temperaments of Discovery

V ladimir Feltsman’s performance in the concert that opened Friends’ of Chamber Music new season was powerful and moving. Besides this, he illuminated dimensions we hadn’t realized existed in these pieces.

Mozart - Fantasia in D Minor, K. 397
Schubert - 4 Impromptus, Op. 90, D. 899
Liszt - Sonata in B minor, S. 178

I found the Liszt sonata especially engaging.

I imagine what it might’ve been like to start with blank sheets of manuscript paper and compose this sonata... You have a thought, privately. You think about the idea; it seems interesting. It’s a new thought. At least, it’s an interesting one—interesting enough for you to write down. And it rapidly leads to other thoughts.

Y ou come back to the original thought a moment later, or several minutes later. It still is novel, interesting. You mull it over and see how it connects to other thoughts, in odd, ironical, happenstantial, stimulating ways. An oddly ‘self-referential’ thought—about you, and about your habit of thinking, privately, pianistically. A thought about a self having a thought and thinking about itself thinking, while connected to a piano.

B ut the thought calls into question who exactly is the self who is referring to itself. About how it is that we remember who we have been and are able to retrace the trajectories of how we felt about things an hour ago or yesterday or the month before. About how it is that we speak to ourselves and carry on these inner dialogues. And who is this piano I am connected to? Its personality is here, too!

A h, it was the great Liszt who listened, listened to his inner voice. They said he was ‘inspired’. But he was simply listening to himself.”
— Vladimir de Pachmann, on pianistic originality.

A nd you are furiously writing your ideas down. It just happens to be music. The original thought was not that difficult or monumental a thought—not ‘heroic’ anyhow. If anything, it was kind of an ‘organic’ thought, like something you just happened to find and decided to keep, or something that sprouted as a ‘volunteer’ in your garden and you watered it and it happened to grow exuberantly.

T hat’s the sense I have of this Liszt sonata, S. 178. And it is how I experienced Vladimir Feltsman’s performance of it tonight.

H e has played this piece—for many years—and there was still more to discover in it, last night, in Kansas City.

T here’s a tremendous amount of experimentation and exploration in this sonata, trying different ideas on “for size” and testing them.

I t’s something. Some expressions in it are almost anticipating... Late Modernism? Complexities of, maybe Ferneyhough; maybe Rzewski; others? Sort of like reinventing virtuosity without the heroism. Or a hero who is inadvertently a hero, who denies being brave and says he/she just ‘lived’.

C learly, Vladimir Feltsman likes this piece. It is a piece of music that asserts that solo piano music is mostly individualistic performance art. The score feels like an improvisational essay, less prescriptive than previously taught; the composer’s narrative is not the putative narrative but instead—How could we doubt it?—the performer’s own. Vladimir likes this about it.

W ith Liszt we have a bold navigator who throws himself into the sea with his boat and sail... who seeks his route in the stars of the sky, but if the sky gets cloudy... M. Thalberg, for his part, carries a compass.”
— Review of Liszt performance, Le Monde, 29-JAN-1837.

V ladimir Feltsman does carry a highly precise compass. And an old-school sextant; and his precise chronometer. But it is bad form to obsessively look at any damned compass, or watch, or sextant. It’s blue-water sailing; you came here to be away from the shore and to not see anything but water and sky for long stretches of time, and to see what happens. You will take your sights and do your celestial nav and re-plot your course at the appointed times. But you will not be ruled by your tools. You’re here to experiment, to take risks, to discover things.

I have been continuing writing in proportion as ideas come to me, and I fancy I have arrived at last at that point where the style is adequate to the thought.”
— Franz Liszt, Letters (coll. & ed. La Mara, tr. Constance Bach), 1894, Vol. 1, p. 130.

I s his route exhaustively planned in advance? Or is each journey, each performance, one of deep discovery? Last night, Feltsman displayed no worries about “clouds” or uncertainties. They are part of the challenge, part of the expressive/interpretive attraction that a piece can have. Part of his native Russian mien...

L iszt’s chromatic gestures aggressively explore what the colors can do—to himself, to the performer, to the audience... And then I wonder: What tuning (temperament) was used on the piano Liszt composed this on?

A n augmented second—look at measures 740-744 of this sonata—enharmonically equivalent to a minor third in modern equal temperament, but it is not the same interval in other tunings. In any tuning close to quarter-comma meantone it will be close to the 7:6 ratio of the septimal minor third. What colors was Liszt listening to? And Vladimir: has he experimented with playing this sonata in a well-temperament instead of equal temperament?

Liszt, Sonata in B minor, S. 178, measures 739-744, score at IMSLP

S o, if twelve-tone equal temperament was just emerging in Liszt’s time and various well-temperments were still in-use, then maybe some of his pianistic ideas in this sonata may indicate his ongoing fascination with them, his explorations of them—what they allowed, what they mutated beyond recognition, what they (including equal temperament) ‘forbid’.

O ne can confidently assert that, with the single exception of the harp, no modern instrument ... has been so radically altered in conception as the piano. The techniques presently applied to this instrument are poles removed from conventional keyboard methodology. It is not that the piano has become even more solidly entrenched as a percussive instrument, but rather that today’s experimental composers have a thorough awareness of its tone-color potential.”
— Hugh Davies, ‘Instrumentation & Orchestration’, New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Vol 12, p. 401 (2001).

W as this piece composed on a piano that had departed from the well-temperament of Liszt’s youth? (The late Owen Jorgensen [Jorgenson O. Tuning the Historical Temperaments by Ear. Northern Michigan Univ, 1977, p. xii] evidently thought so.)

O n some days—on some piano tunings; on some particular instruments—the harmonic “waters” of an augmented second could seem optimistic and azure-colored. And on other days the same interval was mysterious—glowing an ominous aquamarine, with flashes of nervous herring swimming fast just under the surface. And not for no reason. A toothy predator pursues them. S. 178: emphatic, violent passages interspersed with serene, azure ones...

E qual temperament is, as they say, like an architect’s drawing: prescriptive; precise; every detail laid-out explicitly. Well-temperament is... an impressionist artist’s painting. So much is implicit; liberties are being taken. Equal temperament is this singular “color” or “in-tuneness” for all like intervals; well-temperaments instead give you a shocking palette of diverse harmonic hues. The “character of the keys” and differences in modulation make for color changes that just don’t arise in equal temperament. Was S.178 part of Liszt’s experiments with voicing in well-temperaments on the eve of equal temperament?

W here is his lab notebook containing his results? Some pianists emphasize the ‘text’ they are performing and exercise their pianos’ notes, their tuning. By contrast, Feltsman explores the “voicing” of this piano, as though it is a witness to be interrogated. This one could be reliable and it could provide valuable evidence. Or it could be a perpetrator.

T he piano technician has made all the notes very even and the sound as clear as possible in each register. Feltsman finds out ‘whose’ voice it is that is in there. He knows whether or not they are lying or holding back. He makes the piano confess things. Beautiful, true things.

C harles Smith wrote a famous article on “extravagance” in composing. He said that chromaticism is a “convergence” of harmonic and contrapuntal motion. S. 178 is nothing if not extravagant. And wild, wild harmonies and counterpoint, converging and then diverging again.

T his sonata is so full of convergences—the measures 740-744 are among the tamest of them... enharmonic reincarnations of harmonic colors... The convergences make me wonder about the narrative ‘overload’ of the piece.

R ichard Bass at UConn (link below) examined how half-diminished sevenths unhinge us. Our minds expect them to be the product of sensible counterpoint, but then they do something out-of-character (in contexts other than vii^ϕ7 or ii^ϕ7). Their alibi is not really plausible; it’s too emphatic, too aggressively ‘testamental’ for its own good. It means something, but we can’t be sure what, exactly. We can’t entirely trust it.

I f you transported a pianist from 30 years ago and had him/her play on one of the mellower-sounding pianos we’re voicing today, he wouldn’t like it because he wouldn’t think it sounded aggressive enough.”
— Sibin Zlatkovic, expert piano voicer.

T he #2 is a regular element in dominant sonorities and is not without its usual dramatic purposes and emotional tension (Smith, p. 124). But here in this measure, #2 is a perpetrator infiltrating an otherwise law-abiding chord, doing something nefarious probably, impersonating a minor third or even a diminshed third, depending on the way the piano is tuned—starting some kind of trouble or other, probably; covering its own vulnerability, certainly—and demanding that we have now a major-triad resolution, okay?

F eltsman has just the sort of temperament to love this kind of suspense and color and ‘lurking microtonality’, and he is just the experimental sort to reanimate it and show us how curious and lovable it is.

U ltimately, Liszt’s Sonata in B minor, S. 178, will forever be too difficult for my amateur fingers, but that doesn’t mean that I would be able to banish the piece from my dreams.

I n fact, if a piece is totally beyond my ability to attempt it, like this one is, I tend to become fascinated with studying the score, with playing the bits of it that I can manage—with playing and re-playing those bits to hear their voice. I try to see what they do and how they work. (My apologies to my wife for what this racket sounds like.) It leads me to questions and discoveries—to things that are new for me, at any rate. It amuses me to think that maybe even Liszt pottered about like this, in a microbial manner, on his way to discoveries that he then wrote down and fashioned into this epic, experimental piece.