“All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
― Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
Yesterday I attended a concert of violin and piano. In conversation with a violinist friend who also attended I mentioned that they simply don't program violin/piano recitals at the Salzburg Festival. She seemed surprised. They do have a lot of piano recitals though.
The concert last night, while seemingly enjoyed by many, was bad, but following the Tolstoy quote, it was bad in its own way. The soloist, according to the biography, had won prizes in fifty (50!) international competitions. And is only twenty-two years old. When I was a young performer I only entered one competition and had to drop out due to a nervous breakdown. The winner of that contest also had a nervous breakdown, but afterwards. His was more serious as, upon returning to Japan, he cut off one of his fingers so he could never play guitar again.
There are hosts of competitions now, it seems, and the path to career is apparently entering all of them. Also, judging by the concert, the key to winning is a ferocious ability to play many, many notes in quick succession, thereby bamboozling the judges. This was a bad, virtuosic concert, but for the audience, they did not seem to be able to perceive how virtuosity could be bad. It was bad because it was musically meaningless. It was virtuoso trash. This was keenly demonstrated when the artists departed from the main elements of the program, 19th century bon-bons, and played a Mozart sonata. This instantly revealed that the pianist was a banger, constantly drowning out the violin, and the violinist had no lyric sense nor grace and elegance. These performers should be enjoined from playing Mozart in public. Thank god they didn't program any Bach.
Good performances, like good families, are alike: they combine passion with grace, clarity with expression and are a delight to listen to. Bad performances can be bad in a thousand ways. This was one of them. Here is that Mozart sonata the way it should be played.
14 comments:
I love this Samuel Johnson anecdote:
'Dr. Johnson was observed by a musical friend of his to be extremely inattentive at a concert, whilst a celebrated solo player was running up the divisions and subdivisions of notes upon his violin. His friend, to induce him to take greater notice of what was going on, told him how extremely difficult it was. "Difficult do you call it, Sir?" replied the Doctor; "I wish it were impossible."'
Was that the Segovia International Competition you entered? I recall also reading that Eliot Fisk, having come third, was so annoyed that he threw his trophy into the moat.
That is a great anecdote! Thanks, Steven. Yes, it was the Segovia International Competition--sometime in the early 80s as I recall? Prior to that one, the only competitions for guitar were fairly small local ones in Spain: Alicante, Benidorm, a couple of others. What killed me was that apart from one free choice, ONE!, all the pieces were required. It was a good selection: Prelude, Fugue and Allegro, Bach; Fantasia para un Gentilhombre, Rodrigo; Sonata, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Concierto del Sud, Ponce. There were others, but I can't recall them. Trying to learn all these pieces (the Rodrigo was the only one I had previously played) in a fairly brief time, just wiped me out. I actually quit my teaching jobs and stopped playing guitar for a year.
Eliot Fisk would seem to be the ideal competition winner.
Another required piece was the Nocturnal by Britten.
There is footage of the competition on youtube, not sure if you've seen it? https://youtu.be/A2VD6td4ZiY?si=1Twtfr8qhdCQPe9q I think it was actually broadcast on tv at the time. Definitely a devil of a programme! Can't imagine...
I've gone to a few guitar competitions as an audience member and found them really hard to endure. Not just because of the kind of playing, but the stress of the performers came across so clearly. It's interesting to note the rise of Sean Shibe, who I don't think ever went down the competition route. I'm not sure ambitious players necessarily need to enter them.
I have only been present for two competitions that I can recall: the one at the end of the José Tomás master-class in Alicante in 1974 and one of the Toronto competitions--can't remember the year, but it was also in the early 80s. The winner in Alicante was Masahiro Umemoto, a wonderful guitarist and human being. In Toronto the winner was a terrific Brazilian guitarist whose name slips my mind. He left music and became a banker! But I actually enjoyed listening to both competitions--it's easier if you are not in the game. Yes, incredibly stressful! I don't think that a real artist like Sean Shibe needs to enter any competitions. Often the most musical player doesn't win.
My favorite pianist Grigory Sokolov, entered the Tchaikovsky competition when he was sixteen and won and I doubt he bothered with any others. That someone would enter and supposedly win fifty competitions is mind-boggling. I think that would turn you into a beast if you were not already.
Regarding competitions there is a difference depending on whether one is looking for a soloist career or orchestra/chamber music. Guitar in classical music is mostly soloist although as I have noted I wish it were used more in chamber music. Where you studied and references are more important for the second group initially to get auditions.
As for the concert do these two musicians play together often or is this just a one off pairing? Regarding the material, my US experience is that young conservatory musicians only know Beethoven forwards in terms of style. They play Mozart or Haydn like some Romantic composer of their choice. Bach is not frequently attempted as I think there is rather a hard division now between Baroque music performers and those playing later styles.
I suspect that the reason more guitarists don't pursue a career in chamber music is that you make very little money in it. I loved playing chamber music, but I sure didn't make much money doing it.
I don't know how much the two players worked together, but from their onstage demeanor, I suspect, not a lot.
Matanya Ophee used to say that there's a ton of chamber music that includes the guitar but that too few guitarists know of the music or want to play it. At one point he had the memorably brutal zinger that there was this guitarist who could have played chamber music with others but he preferred to play with himself, er, BY himself.
The irony about chamber music for me is I have had trouble persuading guitarists to take up my solo works but I've had my chamber sonatas pairing the guitar up with tuba, banjo and ukulele get performed. I was also able to persuade a pianist to perform my ragtime sonata for piano and guitar a few years back.
Hahn is good enough a violinist she gets me to put up with Mozart who I normally, honestly, usually don't like nearly as much as Haydn.
Bryan,
I rather suspect there is not a lot of money in being a classical guitar soloist these days either. My comment was in the larger context of making classical music more mobile. Lugging around a piano is difficult and outside established halls and schools if there is a piano it's likely to be subpar. I get it that classical music is not a growth business but if one chooses it anyway the first goal has to be visibility. People like what is familiar to a large extent.
And The Hatchet's point is also correct that there is already a decent backlog of such works.
A few decades ago there was a time when a few, a very few, classical guitar concert artists could make an excellent living in the $500,000 to one million range. Artists like Pepe Romero and Manuel Barrueco did very well. But I am pretty sure that the current leading performers on guitar are struggling to make a fraction of that.
As I see the divide between superstar musicians contrasted to the very many more excellent trained musicians scrounging to get paid, I more and more appreciate the pre-concert (and the pre-electricity time before recordings and mass media) system of household musicians and their patrons. The best could get such positions and luxuriate in their lutes and viols, while the less fortunate moved to the louder and vulgar violins and other tavern instruments that migrated well into concert halls where ticket-buyers were the new patrons, obviously more fickle and of less reliable taste. Luckily there were some good composers (originally the violinists themselves) who raided the quality of violin music, but once electricity made music a common commodity we ended up in the world of pop and a listening public who, like my workmates on the roof, profess to like "all kinds of music" but don't know what they listened to this morning because the streaming algorithm picked it. Here will no doubt be found a "market" for music generated by artificial "intelligence," which I put in quotes because there is no sentience or true "knowledge" in it, because there is no body or life impulse, from which comes all desire and passion and the tastes refined out of these.
RAISED not raided
Lots of truth there, Will.
Yes, the damned auto-correct means you have to watch like a hawk. "Theorboes" will come out as "theories" every time.
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