For those who don't know, Grigory Sokolov only performs on the European continent. And his own piano travels with him to every concert in a big, black Steinway Concert Services van. He also travels with a piano technician and tuner. Here is some footage of them getting ready for a concert which involves virtually dismantling the piano and adjusting every key. A perfect pianist needs a perfect piano.
Later scenes show the Herbert von Karajanplatz and the exterior of the Großes Festspielhaus. Later, during the concert, we see that this is the famous evening where there was a heavy rainstorm and the roof of the Festspielhaus began leaking. After the leak was stopped, the concert resumed and Sokolov commemorated it by playing Chopin's "Raindrop" prelude as one of his encores.
These days all Sokolov does is play solo recitals--pretty much in any hall in Europe. He does not do studio recordings so Deutsche Grammophon has begun releasing live concert recordings.
There are so many reasons why Bach is such an enormous presence in music. This morning I watched a little Rick Beato clip and despite the title it turned out to be just a "listen to this piece by Bach" clip. Well, sure!
But I want to play something else by Bach. The Well-Tempered Clavier, a set of preludes and fugues in every key, is one of the most monumental keyboard pieces ever written. And to show it wasn't a fluke, twenty or so years later, Bach did it all over again. There have been a few attempts in the last 300 years to match this achievement, but the only successful one was by Shostakovich.
Here is the transcendental pianist Grigory Sokolov playing book one in a concert in Munich in 1990.
UPDATE: Something I didn't realize until I had finished listening to the whole clip: this only goes up to the D# minor fugue, so only half of Book I.
This is a reminder of just how long Grigory Sokolov has been at the pinnacle of pianistic capability. Recorded in a concert in Leningrad (now St. Petersburg) in 1981.
I've been a fan of Sokolov for quite a few years now and I have seen him play in concert twice before--once in Bologna and once here three years ago. So I was very much looking forward to hearing him again. And the hall was over-sold again with about thirty or so extra seats placed on the aprons on either side of the stage. I noticed a couple of empty seats, which I assume meant that those folks had either suffered a critical injury or were knocked unconscious and unable to attend. Also, the audience was of all ages. I noticed a lot more Chinese families attending, often with their children. And again, the concert concluded with the customary six encores. Before I am chastised for not knowing which pieces were played, let me again remind everyone that I am a classical guitarist and I am simply not that familiar with the immense piano repertoire. I would venture that the fourth encore was probably François Couperin and the fifth possibly Chopin, but that's as much as I would guess.
The program was divided into a first half of Bach and the second half devoted to Chopin and Robert Schumann. I've often thought that the problem with including works by J. S. Bach in a program is that they tend to overshadow everything else. And so it was last night. The concert began with the quite obscure Four Duets BWV 802-805 from Clavier Übung III. They seem to show Bach at his most adventurous and for me they were the highlight of the evening. Following was the Partita No. 2 n C minor, BWV 826, also played with inventive clarity.
The second half had two groups of mazurkas by Chopin, op. 30 and op. 50 played with Sokolov's usual meticulous brilliance. The program ended with the nine pieces of Waldszenen op. 82 by Schumann which I suspect I have not heard before. But that was not the end of the concert--no, there were half an hour of encores to follow. Again, sorry I can't name them for you, but the third was a nimble-fingered scurry reminiscent of the Flight of the Bumblebee by Rimsky-Korsakov (but not that piece). Lots of composers have written bumblebee or hummingbird pieces including a couple for guitar.
A wonderful evening, confirming once again that Grigory Sokolov is at the pinnacle of pianistic elegance.
Let me add just a note about the Großes Festspielhaus: it is a beautifully designed hall. The seats are reasonably comfortable and there are plenty of exits--fourteen at least. So the entire two thousand-plus concert-goers can exit to the Karajan-platz where their champagne awaits in just a very few minutes. There are also nearly-adequate bathrooms and a huge cloakroom area (is there a more modern term for this?) where you can check your umbrella or overcoat. Here is a photo:
Cloakroom of the Großes Festspielhaus
The problem with so many spaces used for concerts (such as churches) that were not designed as concert spaces is poor access, inadequate bathrooms and no cloakroom. This is how it looks when it is done properly. And yes, you can't see them in the photo, but each area had its own attendants.
UPDATE: I see that the Festival elves have updated the Sokolov program to include which pieces he played as encores.
ENCORE
ALEXANDER SKRYABIN
Prelude e-Moll op. 11/4
FRYDERYK CHOPIN
Mazurka op. 63 Nr. 3
Etude op. 25/2
HENRY PURCELL
Chaconne in G minor ZT 680
FRYDERYK CHOPIN
Mazurka in F, Op. 68 No. 3
JOHANN SEBASTIAN BACH
Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ - Choral prelude
No, I could not be successfully employed as an encore-guesser except in classical guitar concerts.
Alex Ross went to Tanglewood this year instead of Salzburg, but Jay Nordlinger was there and wrote a nice piece on the Grigory Sokolov recital that I didn't manage to attend: ‘Hello to Music’
Grigory Sokolov is an odd duck — I say that with considerable admiration. He is his own man, going his own way. He is unconventional, idiosyncratic — you might even say eccentric. He won the gold medal at the Tchaikovsky Competition when he was 16. (The year was 1966.) He is the youngest person ever to win that medal.
Early on, he toured Great Britain, the United States, and the rest of the world. Now he stays in Europe. He doesn’t play concertos, either — no engagements with orchestra. Just recitals. He plays about 70 of those a year, and they are all devoted to a single program: a single slate of pieces. (The slate changes each year, I should say.)
Typically, he walks onto a stage rather grim-faced and bows solemnly. Then he begins. He maintains his demeanor all through an evening. A Sokolov recital is like a religious rite. The pianist plays as though he were doing the most important thing in all the world — and his audience listens in hushed wonder.
Please be advised that musicians’ bios in programs are practically useless. They seldom give you biographical information: where the person was born, what his nationality is, who his teachers were, etc. It’s a lot of PR puff.
This is how Sokolov’s bio begins:
Grigory Sokolov is widely recognized as one of today’s greatest pianists, an artist universally admired for his visionary insight, spellbinding spontaneity and uncompromising devotion to music. His masterful interpretations of compelling intensity and expressive beauty arise from profound knowledge of the works in his vast repertoire.
In case you were wondering what Grigory Sokolov has been up to with so many concerts cancelled. I know I was worried that he had moved to the Bahamas and grown a beard, but no. He actually played a special concert in December in Geneva to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the United Nations. It looks like the audience was just a few UN functionaries. But never mind! We can listen to it.
Amazing program: all Schumann in the first half and pieces I don't know. Four fugues? A lot of short pieces. Second half: four polonaises by Chopin. Unique program. His practice in the last few years is to devote one half of each program to a single composer. I haven't gotten to the end of the concert yet, but it looks as if he didn't play any encores.
UPDATE: As I listen to the program and notice there are something like eight people in the audience I wonder about the economics of it. Lemmesee, I once calculated that Sokolov's fee for a recital is perhaps €50,000 (in Euros because he only performs on the European continent). Divided by eight auditors that comes to €6,250 per person. That's a pricey ticket! Usually he plays 2,000 seat halls and fills them.
There is a live Frankfurt Radio Orchestra broadcast today, but I am going to go with a new clip that was just posted a couple of days ago. There are lots of clips of Sokolov playing, but this is a high quality one from Deutsche Grammophon.
As my regular readers know only too well, I am a big Haydn fan. On this blog I did a long series of posts on a wide selection of Haydn symphonies. Hereare a couple. I am also a big fan of his string quartets, but have done relatively few posts on them. Here is one that forms the first part of a four-part series. Haydn also wrote a great deal of other chamber music, such as his piano trios, and, in his role as director of the Esterházy opera house, also wrote quite a few operas, which are not very well known. His piano sonatas, however, are quite often played and some of them are very fine. But I have never explored them to any extent. If I were a pianist I would know them, I'm sure, but as a guitarist, they never quite caught my attention. The other day, though, I heard a performance that made me want to have a look.
That was Grigory Sokolov in a concert performance of the Sonata Hob.XVI:23 in F major. 2002 was a good year to be attending Sokolov concerts if you were a Haydn fan. He seems to have had three different Haydn sonatas in his touring program that year. Here is the Sonata Hob.XVI:34 in E minor:
And the Sonata Hob.XVI:37 in D major:
Here is another recording of the same three sonatas in a different concert from March 2002:
As you can hear, these performances are different in interesting ways. The tempi are subtly different, as are the articulations and the dynamic scheme. A lot of touring virtuosos deliver exactly the same performance in every concert. This is the safer course, but it is aesthetically less satisfactory because there is a significant element of mechanical reproduction--that's the problem with audio recordings, too. But Sokolov, dedicated to the live performance, and one that is, on this evidence, truly live in that each performance is a bringing to life of a musical entity, not just finger-spinning, does not take the safe course of just delivering a technically sound performance, but instead gives us a transcendent and luminescent one.
As Donald Francis Tovey claimed, Haydn is really one of the most important composers in music history, but rarely honored as such.
I feel I should, as a public service, warn you about the dangers of extended listening to Grigory Sokolov. On Friday I got the new Deutsche Grammophon release of two archival concerto recordings, one from 1995 (Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3 at the Proms) and the other 2005 (Mozart Piano Concerto No. 23, K 488 at the Salzburg Festival). I believe that he has, for more than a decade, stopped doing concerto performances. Like Bob Dylan bootlegs, these performances have been floating around on the internet for a while. There are both quite stunning. Mind you, I much prefer his solo performances, but never mind. Also in the package is an hour-long documentary on Sokolov. He refuses to either sit for photo sessions or interviews so the documentary spends most of its time interviewing friends and colleagues. There is some footage from his spectacular win of the Tchaikovsky competition in 1966 when he was sixteen years old. Part of the footage is him tossing off an extremely virtuoso piece by Liszt as if it were nothing. All in all, we do get a sense of Sokolov, known as "Grisha" to everyone that knows him personally, who seems to have been a consummate artist pretty much since he was six years old. What is it with these Russians!
Now we come to the dangers: if you listen to much Sokolov I am afraid that you will find other pianists to be unfulfilling. Last night I attended the first concert in our Pro Musica series with a fine pianist who played Scriabin, Schumann and Liszt. It seemed noisy, unsubtle, muddy and the pieces seemed to have a confused and muddled structure--all of them! Now this might be true, to some extent. My feeling about Schumann is that while his songs are superb, his longer instrumental works tend to not work very well, structurally. Scriabin I have never taken to. And Liszt, while interesting, is often structurally muddled as well. But I have the feeling that I would have enjoyed the concert a lot more were Sokolov playing! Mind you, I think he would have chosen a different program. Another problem was that all three composers seemed to sound rather the same, stylistically.
But the most likely explanation is that I am badly spoiled by listening to Sokolov! Once you get used to the astounding control he has over dynamics and the amazing clarity with which he delivers every texture, other pianists tend to sound ragged and noisy in comparison.
This is a clip of one of the pieces from last night, The Piano Sonata No. 2 by Scriabin played by a different pianist, let me stress.
There doesn't seem to be a clip of Sokolov playing the 2nd Scriabin sonata, but here he is with the 3rd:
I'm not sure if these clips make my point at all, but I don't have time this morning to seek out better ones!
As readers know, I am a big fan of the Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov, about whom I have written quite a few posts. I also had the opportunity to hear him in Bologna in May in concert, which was quite an experience. He plays the same program for a whole season, so it was the same pieces that Alex Ross heard him play in Salzburg on August 1st. I linked to his piece on the Salzburg Festival in yesterday's miscellanea, but just now got a chance to savor his comments:
A cultish, worshipful atmosphere can prevail in Salzburg, to sometimes irritating effect. A case in point was an evening of Mozart and Beethoven sonatas with the enigmatic Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov, who avoids travel to the United States but has an avid European following. He has an extraordinarily sensitive touch, and specializes in the surgical separation and articulation of voices: when he plays a crisp, marcato line with his left hand and a flowing legato with his right, the parts are so distinct that it sounds as though two different people were at the instrument. He is also deeply eccentric. His accounts of Mozart’s Sonata in C, K. 545, and the Fantasia and Sonata in C Minor, rendered without pause, veered from porcelain prettiness to turbulent Romantic gesturing and back again, neither manner suitable to the music at hand. In Beethoven’s Opus 111, Sokolov’s interpretive meanderings matched the saturnine magnificence of the score: endless even-toned trills and ethereal figuration cast a spell. Still, a humorless self-indulgence prevailed. The crowd roared and stamped; I went away perplexed.
This is delightful, isn't it? Alex Ross really is a creature of his environment, Manhattan's Upper West Side, the world view of which was captured in this New Yorker cover, years ago:
Imagine if the artist had been looking East instead and how foreshortened Europe would have been. That's the sense I get from this phrase in the review:
Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov, who avoids travel to the United States but has an avid European following.
Norman Lebrecht expressed similar misgivings about a pianist who simply does not give concerts in the UK: after all, how good could he be? Well, good enough to pack halls in Europe. As a bit of a corrective, here is a quote from a review by Geoffrey Norris in The Telegraph:
An enigma in his lifetime, the Russian-born pianist Grigory Sokolov restricts his recitals to about 60 a year, refuses to make studio recordings and, for the past seven years or so, has declined to play in the UK. He used to but then withdrew from appearances here in 2008 when new requirements were introduced for Russian citizens seeking entry visas. It sparked a furore, but the stand-off continues.
To experience him in concert, therefore, you have to be on mainland Europe – no loss to Sokolov when he can draw capacity crowds to the Leipzig Gewandhaus, the Berlin Philharmonie or the Vienna Konzerthaus.
As Ross seems to have only the vaguest idea of with whom he is dealing, let me fill in the picture a bit. Grigory Sokolov is a very great artist and pianist in the Russian tradition. He won first prize in the Tchaikovsky competition in 1966 at age sixteen--the head of the jury was Emil Gilels. Here they are in a photo taken at the time with Mischa Dichter on the left:
Since then he has pursued a career in which his devotion to the art has completely overshadowed any desire for fame or commercial endorsement, which is why so many music lovers do not know him. In Europe, however, he gives a tour every year to packed halls. He refuses to do studio recordings as he sees his art as that of the live performance. After many years of being perplexed by this, one record company, Deutsche Grammophon, has given in and begun releasing CDs of his recitals. He is an astonishing performer. I have one recording, of the Bach Art of Fugue recorded live in St. Petersburg around 1980, that is absolutely transcendent.
So when I read that Ross thinks that Sokolov's performance:
veered from porcelain prettiness to turbulent Romantic gesturing and back again, neither manner suitable to the music at hand
I suspect he just doesn't get out enough and is unfamiliar with the idea of expressive interpretation. Indeed, he seems much more in tune with the young Chinese pianist, Yuja Wang, whom he reviewed like this:
The program, under the direction of the striking young Estonian conductor Anu Tali, consisted of Niels Gade's Hamlet Overture, Grieg's Piano Concerto, and Sibelius' Fifth. I'll save the Sibelius for an upcoming New Yorker column and comment briefly on the Grieg. Yuja Wang was the soloist; I knew her from Leon Fleisher's Carnegie Hall workshops, which I wrote about last year. Then, I was gripped by her playing, though I felt she hadn't fully grasped Schubert's language. She has certainly mastered Grieg's. She gets a huge sound out of the piano, which isn't surprising from a well-traveled young prodigy. What's more impressive is that she plays in big paragraphs, shows a powerful grasp of structure, brings delicate fantasy to lyric passages.
To my mind, Yuja Wang rather resembles a music box with legs:
Grigory Sokolov, on the other hand has a different relationship with the notes:
Unfair, apples to oranges? Well, sure. Just making a point here. On Sokolov's Beethoven, Ross has this to say:
Sokolov’s interpretive meanderings matched the saturnine magnificence of the score: endless even-toned trills and ethereal figuration cast a spell. Still, a humorless self-indulgence prevailed. The crowd roared and stamped; I went away perplexed.
A humorless self-indulgence? You know, I would be just a tiny bit sympathetic with Ross' view if he had a shred of evidence to back it up. Which he doesn't. So, a pox on your house, Alex. You really should get out more. I think that endless string of Julliard note-spinners has dulled your ear.
Here is another quote from Norris' review in The Telegraph:
As is so often the case with the greatest musicians, it is hard, and perhaps not always desirable or essential, to analyse what makes them great. It is simply a fact that, listening to Sokolov, you know unequivocally that you are in the presence of someone extraordinary, someone possessing special insights and a thoroughly individual way of articulating, clarifying and communing with music so that his interpretations seem to find its very heart.
I just got back last night from my whirlwind visit to Bologna to see the Russian pianist Grigory Sokolov in concert. I wasn't quite believing it was actually going to happen until he walked on stage. I have been an admirer of his consummate musicianship for about a decade now, ever since a Polish conductor simply insisted I listen to him. I keep telling that story, but it's true! Sokolov, despite his towering over other pianists both musically and technically, is not well known, especially outside Europe. He quit touring in places like the UK and the US since the imposition of what he considers onerous visa requirements. A number of years ago he quit playing concertos with orchestra, from what I gather because of the frequent unpredictability of the results. So now he just plays solo concerts on the European continent, as well as they could possibly be played. As I mentioned a few days ago, Deutsche Grammophon is now beginning to release a number of recordings of his concerts, which will help a lot more of us to get to know Sokolov's work.
As I was going to be in Spain for a month, I checked his concert schedule and saw he was playing in Bologna on the 15th. After some frustrations, no online sales, concert sold out, that sort of thing, I reached one of the people in the concert office and she set aside a ticket for me. I flew in on Monday and lo and behold, there actually was a ticket set aside for me. I had no idea where the seat would be. Christina from the office said it was "first stall" but I didn't know what that meant. It turned out to be in the 7th row, on the floor! A wonderfully good ticket. Mind you, it was on the right, so I couldn't see his hands, but no problem, I've seen hands before. Here are some photos. First of all, the restless crowd at the doors, guarded by fashionable Italian security, waiting to get in:
Here is a shot of the interior. Good sized hall with three balconies, probably seating about a thousand people:
More of the balconies:
Most of the shots I got inside were poor because of the low light and I didn't take any while he was playing as they asked us not to. Before the concert a fellow from Steinway concert service (I didn't know they even existed, but they had a van outside) was tuning the piano and he came back at intermission to fine tune it again:
They may have even brought a special piano with someone to look after it in the big van. That would not surprise me. Oh, and the photo above was taken from my row, so you can see how close I was.
The concert was sold out:
The presenters were Musica Insieme and this was their 30th season. The first half was all Mozart with the Sonata No. 16 in C major, Kv. 545 followed by the Fantasia in C minor, Kv. 475 and the Sonata in C minor, Kv. 457. The arrangement of the program suggested that there would be a pause between the first sonata and the fantasia as there were timings on the right side and there was a duration for the sonata and then a separate duration for the fantasia and sonata together. But, as in the film of his Paris concert, where the first half was three Beethoven sonatas, he played the whole first half without a pause. There wasn't a hint of anyone starting to clap at any point until he stood up. He also played the whole second half without a pause.
This is an interesting phenomenon, by the way. Why do people start clapping and why do they not? I knew a guitarist in Montreal who had the opportunity to play a concert in one of the larger venues there. He played the Lute Suite No. 4 by Bach among other things and was cursed with applause after every single movement! I believe the problem was his body language. At the end of every movement he would throw up his right hand, a kind of habitual gesture. This signalled the audience to applaud. What Sokolov does is to make no gesture of any kind at the end of a piece or movement. His focus remains tight and whole. He also does not make a fuss of the ending. Often the last note or chord is played piano and he simply waits out the duration, slightly moves his hands off the keyboard for perhaps ten seconds and then begins the next piece or movement.
Something I have never seen in a concert before, the applause was such after the first half that Sokolov had to come back and bow FOUR TIMES. The concert did not begin until about ten to 9 (scheduled for 8:30, but I will tell you why it started late in another place) and the second half did not begin until ten pm. The second half was simply two Beethoven sonatas, the Sonata No. 27 in E minor, op. 90 (in two movements) and the Sonata No. 32 in C minor, op. 111. This last sonata is one of the most astonishing ever written and the last Beethoven composed. Several years ago I devoted a whole post just to the last movement which is a tour-de-force on several levels. I suggest you give that post a read. The last movement is a set of variations, that start with a theme of sublime simplicity. But things soon become complex indeed. Because of the jaunty dotted rhythms, one of the variations sounds very much like jazz when most pianists play it. But not in the hands of Sokolov. It may have been a combination of his control of the dynamics together with him playing the rhythms and not allowing the rhythms to play him, but it didn't sound at all like jazz on this occasion.
By the time the second half ended, it was almost 11pm, but the concert was far from over. This audience knows, as all European ones must, that Sokolov can be persuaded to play encores and after coming back out and bowing three or four times he did so. Including the encores, the concert wasn't ended until 11:30 or so. Here is a list (I was only sure of a few of these, but someone recorded his recent recital in Rome, where he played the same encores, so I was able to fill out the list with help from that recording):
Franz Schubert, Moment Musical Op.94 (D.780), No.1 in C major (Moderato)
Frédéric Chopin, Nocturne in B major, Op. 32, No. 1
Nocturne in A-flat major, Op. 32, No. 2
Jean-Philippe Rameau. Pièces de clavecin en concert (Quatrième concert): "L'indiscrète"
Robert Schumann. Arabesque in C major, Op.18
Frédéric Chopin, Prelude Op. 28, No. 20, in C minor
Yes, that's right, six encores. I have only twice seen more encores in a concert. Here is a photo of him bowing after one of the encores. Sorry about the quality!
It is hard to know what to say about this concert. It was, just as expected, an astonishing level of musicianship delivered with a peerless technical assurance. And a rebuke to all those pianists who walk out and pound away on the instrument. Sokolov can play loud passages, but they are rationed out for when they are really needed. Much of the time he plays with a transparent and finely graded dynamic and sometimes he shades a phrase into a very soft dynamic. This is what a great musician does, of course. The sense, overall, is that he is inside every note, every harmony, every rhythm and he knows where every phrase is going. This sounds like something everyone does, but you might be surprised. A lot of musicians play more or less mechanically, that is, they let the music play them rather than them play the music. You can let yourself be carried along in the flow and, sure, it will work out ok. But it will not be great musicianship. I'm not sure if I have ever heard anyone play music with such total engagement. I was talking about a concert a few days ago and saying how I would have liked to hear more articulation in the phrases. Well, in a Sokolov concert you can basically marvel at what he does with every phrase. Oh, and Sokolov has the best trills I have ever heard. There is a very short list of concerts I have attended that go into the "Great Masters" category:
Arthur Rubinstein, piano, Alicante, Spain, 1974, program included Bach-Busoni Chaconne and a lot of Chopin
Andrés Segovia, guitar, Place des Arts, Montréal, 1976, program included Sor, Sonata op 22 and a lot of Albéniz (eight encores!)
Nigel Rogers, singer, the one who rediscovered how to do those complex vocal ornaments in early 17th century monody, McGill University, Montréal, 1977 (seven encores!)
John Williams, guitar, Toronto, 1978, program included a lot of Albéniz and the premiere of a Brouwer guitar concerto, conducted by the composer (they had to repeat the middle movement of the concerto!)
Alban Berg Quartet, Salzburg, Austria, 1988, program of Beethoven string quartets
McGill Symphony, Montréal, 1996, program included Shostakovich, Symphony No. 7
Grigory Sokolov, Bologna, 2017, program included Mozart and Beethoven sonatas (six encores!)
And that's pretty much it. Sure, I have heard a lot of pretty darn good concerts, and perhaps have given a couple myself, but the only ones I have heard that were truly masterful, were these ones. (The odd man out is the McGill Symphony concert and they did a fine job, but they really made the list because of the composition. You have to hear this live in concert because I don't think there is any recording technology that can really capture the range of sound between, at one extremity, one snare drum played very quietly and, at the other, the whole orchestra playing as loudly as they can with six sets of tympani, six trumpets, six trombones and everyone else augmented accordingly. The first movement has an eleven minute crescendo that has to be heard to be believed.)
With apologies to, well, pretty much everyone, but especially Grigory Sokolov, I append this poor recording of the first Mozart sonata from the concert, made by someone who attended the Rome concert on this tour. The quality of the recording is such that you will just get a vague idea and perhaps you should not listen, but it might give you some idea of the concert, much like the shadows on the walls of Plato's cave, hint at reality:
I love it when the Great Ones finally come around to my thinking: after many years of ignoring him because, I don't know, not photogenic? Doesn't do interviews? Doesn't do recordings!? Deutsche Grammophon is finally making up for lost time by issuing a bunch of CDs of Grigory Sokolov. How is this possible, one wonders, as Sokolov is famous for, among other things, NOT doing studio recordings. The answer is that, over the years, there have been many recordings made of his concerts, some of which were released several years ago on the now-defunct French label, Naïve. I have a box of them that I bought after a Polish conductor simply insisted that I had to listen to Sokolov. Very glad I did, by the way. In any case, there is yet another new release from DG of two long-renowned recordings, both of them concertos. Sokolov no longer does concerto performances, only solo recitals which he can be more in control of, so this is a special treat.
This has nothing but five star reviews on Amazon, the first of which comments:
If you like Rachmaninov this disc is not to be missed. It contains the single most passionate and musically insightful account of the composer's Piano Concerto 3 I've ever heard, a recording for the ages. The recording circulated in pirated form for years; now DG has published it in very good (not great) sound. Coupled with the Rachmaninov is a recording of Mozart's Piano Concerto 23, one of the earlier composer's most characteristic yet forward-looking works, played here by Sokolov in a way that might bring tears to an angel.
There is also a DVD with the box that offers a look at Sokolov the person that I look forward to seeing. He is very likely the greatest living pianist.
But I look forward even more to tomorrow night when I will be attending his concert in the Auditorium Manzoni in Bologna, the closest venue to Madrid during his multi-city European tour. I don't think he tours outside Europe any more as he finds the heightened visa requirements just too onerous. This will be, as always with the maestro, a serious concert consisting of two and only two composers: Mozart in the first half and Beethoven in the second half.
There is a fine film of a concert he gave at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées in Paris over a decade ago, made by the French filmmaker Bruno Monsaingeon who has made many excellent films of musicians.
In this performance, he walks on stage, plays three Beethoven sonatas without pause and that's the first half. No-one even clapped between sonatas! So I am looking forward with great anticipation to the concert. I also look forward to writing about it, as that always clarifies my thoughts.
I have been trying to get a ticket to see a concert by Grigory Sokolov while I am in Spain this summer. At first, I was unsuccessful, but with the aid of a friend who speaks Italian, I finally succeeded. I got the email for the promotors of a concert in Bologna on May 15 and they just got back to me, saying that all the tickets were sold, but that I could put my name on the reserve list if a ticket became available on the day of the concert. I wrote back asking what the chances were as I would be making a special trip from Madrid just for the concert. They answered saying as I was coming from another city, that they would set aside a ticket for me in "first Stall", which I think is a good seat! Wow, this is just amazingly kind!
I can't help but contrast it with my experience last summer with our local chamber music festival. First of all, the most interesting concert (almost the only interesting concert!) was going to be pianist Jeremy Denk with a violinist doing all the Charles Ives violin sonatas. I even studied up on them. Then, just a couple of days before, it was canceled. Ok, not their fault. So I went to the office wanting to exchange my ticket for a different concert and they said they couldn't do that. I had to buy a new ticket and later on, after the end of the festival, they would refund the first one. Ok. But it didn't happen. They never refunded the ticket for the concert that was canceled.
I am very, very tempted to write an essay for the local newspaper explaining "Why I Don't Attend the Chamber Music Festival Concerts Any More!" In the meantime they have downgraded themselves by renaming it the "International Music Festival." Thanks but no thanks!
We just have to listen to some Grigory Sokolov, don't we? This is a performance of forty-eight minutes of François Couperin, the XIII and XVIII Ordres from a 2001 concert:
To my knowledge, none of Sokolov's performances of Rameau or Couperin have been released on CD. He doesn't do studio recordings, so the only CDs available have been of live recordings. The company that released these was Naive, but they are out of business. Luckily Deutsche Grammophon has started releasing CDs of his concerts. But so far they have just been of the more conventional repertoire such as Mozart, Schubert and Beethoven.
Way back in the 70s the Early Music Movement became a powerful force with performances of Bach and pre-Bach repertoire on original instruments following supposedly historical performance practice. These performances have gotten better and better so for a lot of this repertoire I automatically default to the Early Music guys. In fact a lot of orchestras and pianists have simply stopped playing the early stuff, ceding the turf to the original instrument players. So Rameau and Couperin and all the other harpsichord composers are hardly ever heard on piano these days.
Sokolov, however has been playing a lot of Rameau and Couperin. In a concert he might play a whole suite or two and recently he has been playing six pieces by Rameau as his first six encores! The thing is, that he plays this music so extraordinarily well that I have come to prefer him to the harpsichordists! So get with it Deutsche Grammophon!
Here is a little Couperin encore called "Tic-Toc-Choc":
I labeled this "reception history" even though it isn't quite that. Think of it as the first draft of a reception history. That term, by the way, refers to a way of doing musicology where you examine the history of how a piece or a style or a composer was received by audiences over time. It can be quite interesting. But it does raise the problem of understanding how people listen.
I've listened to a piece by Rameau, Les Tendres Plaintes, a few times recently for different reasons: it is on a recent CD of Grigory Sokolov, there are a couple of clips of it on YouTube and I was sharing them with a couple of friends and I just transcribed it for violin and guitar to see what that would sound like. So I noticed a couple of things about how I listen to it. By that I basically mean my moment to moment reactions which vary from occasion to occasion, of course.
Here is the clip I have watched the most:
Now I will try to do a kind of stream-of-consciousness account of my reactions:
...those trills! and then how silvery the ring of the melody...
...the trills in the melody and the accompaniment are offset, intentionally kept unaligned.
(there are actually several different kinds of ornaments I am calling "trills" here: Rameau has a table in the front of his book naming and describing them: the cadence is a trill from the note above and the pincé is to the note below. We tend to call them a trill and a mordent respectively. There is also a cadence apuyée, where the first note is held longer and the double cadence which is a cadence that ends with a turn.)
...he does just a hint of notes inégales in the bass line that connects the first two phrases...
...when he gets to the descending sequence that begins the 1re Reprise, it is so lovely that I just start swaying my head from side to side...
..that A major chord that ends the 1re Reprise is always a surprise... the piece is in D minor, but the 1re Reprise is in A minor...
...he handles the refrain so differently the second time: a crisper inégale in the bass with an added cadence...
...the 2de Reprise (in F major) is almost whimsical, but at the same time wistful...
...the last refrain is even more beautiful... the high A in the second phrase is I think the most delicate note I have ever heard from a piano--it is like a guitar harmonic or an orchestral bell hit with a feather...
Let me show you the score I have been looking at. These two pages are from Rameau's Pièces de clavecin avec une méthode by which he means that he has an explanatory preface about how to play them. The table of ornaments is from there:
And here is the score to Les Tendres Plaintes:
Click to enlarge
This is a very simple piece, of course. Just that theme in D minor which has two eight-measure phrases, the first ending on the dominant and the second on the tonic. Then another two phrases in A minor, then the theme again followed by the second reprise (or episode) in F major but this time both phrases end on the tonic, and finally the theme again. You just should bear in mind that Jean-Philippe Rameau literally wrote the book on harmony--it was his Traité de L'Harmonie of 1722 that formalized the theory of tonal harmony and the basic principles are still followed today.
It seems as if one of the few places that wisdom might be passed along these days is in popular culture rather than the traditional institutions of schools, churches and government. Wait, perhaps the churches are still in the game--I would be the last to know! Now why do I say such an outrageous thing? It seems as if instead of young people being given the riches of Western Civilization, they are instead being taught to revile them. Every significant figure in Western history, if he is white and male as most of them are (and why is that?) is condemned because of being a significant figure in Western history and white and male. As we are told over and over, the history of the West is a history of oppression, racism and colonialism. Oddly enough, while there are those things in Western history, the history of every other region and culture on earth has much more oppression, racism and colonialism! But magically, through some strange operation of multiculturalism, none of that counts, only Western culture has failings.
In order for this spectacularly massive lie to be sold to the younger generations, they first had to be made nearly completely ignorant of history. That was surprisingly easy and just took a few protests on campus while chanting "Hey, Hey, Ho, Ho, Western Civ Has Got to Go!" Of course this was preceded by decades of Gramscian softening up.
The result is a vacuous progressive monoculture that dominates government, media and academia. It is pretty significant in popular culture too, but there are little cracks where the truth peeks through. Let me give you an example with a famous clip from the movie Conan the Barbarian (1982) where Arnold Schwarzenegger explains what is best in life:
Just in case the accent was deceiving, Conan says that what is best in life is "To crush your enemies -- See them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of their women!" Sounds like fun! But there is actually an interesting point there. The question is "what is best in life" not what is most enjoyable or most pleasant in life and our tendency is to forget the difference. "Best" is a superlative deriving from "good", a normative term meaning what can or should be commended. It is not equivalent to the most pleasant or enjoyable. The truth of this is also in the film. Conan's most pleasant and enjoyable time is when he is reclining on fine furs, surrounded by bowls of precious stones, drinking wine and in the company of the very beautiful Valeria played by Sandahl Bergman. That doesn't end well, of course!! What is best in life is not to indulge in mere physical pleasure (I think Plato said something about that), but to be engaged, to be doing things, specifically, to be doing good things.
So if you ask me what I think is best in life, my answer is "To explore aesthetically strong and active music, to compose and play music, to write about music and to study through scores, recordings and books music of interest." Ok, it's a bit focussed, so sue me! One should add in a lot of other things like taking the opportunity to be kind, to spend time with friends and family and all sorts of other things that we commonly understand.
That idea, that I just put there, about "aesthetically active" is something that just occurred to me as I was listening to Grigory Sokolov the other day. What makes his performances so aesthetically energized? It is not that he plays faster or louder, it is that he activates the music in very profound ways. We hear all the different voices with great clarity, we hear the exact significant intensity of every harmony, we hear the acuity of the rhythm and we hear the notes and chords placed just where they should be aesthetically. And so on. Put into words, it is vague and fuzzy. But when you hear it done, it is perfectly clear and evident.
Reminds me of an old joke: the English Baroque Concert Society played Vivaldi last night, Vivaldi lost! Yes, there is always the feeling that music and out-and-out competition do not quite go together. But after reading the New Yorker article on Yuja Wang and how splendiferous her Hammerklavier Sonata is, I thought maybe it was time to do some side by side listening. After all, they end the article by asserting Ms Wang's "incomparable musicality." Well, maybe it is not so incomparable after all. Let's see.
The piece in question, one of the great thorny challenges of the piano repertoire, is the Sonata in B flat, op 106 by Beethoven. Here is the original title page:
Now "Hammer-Klavier" in German just means "keyboard with hammers" as opposed to the older harpsichord which is a keyboard with plectra. Beethoven went through a nationalist phase where he began to use German tempo words instead of Italian ones. "Pianoforte" is, of course, an Italian word that points to the ability of the keyboard with hammers instead of plectra to play both soft and loud. In any case, the word "Hammer-Klavier" does not signify that this piece is particularly loud or fierce. It is just a handy nickname like "Moonlight" Sonata or "The Tempest".
In order that the comparisons be fair, you should listen to these clips with the score and NOT watching the videos.
This is quite a long sonata, between forty and fifty minutes depending, so I will just talk about the first movement. I have listened to two performances of the the first movement by each performer. Let's listen first to Yuja Wang at the Verbier Festival this year:
The first movement is about nine minutes long in this performance. Next is the performance at Carnegie Hall this year and the first movement is a little over eleven minutes long:
Then we have Grigory Sokolov in a performance at Munich in 1975. He also takes around eleven minutes for the first movement:
The final one I listened to is on this CD: Sokolov: Schubert/Beethoven and it is the longest of all; the first movement takes almost fourteen minutes. For some inexplicable reason, Blogger won't embed the clip, so just follow the link:
Trust me, it is worth it. This last clip, recorded in a concert in Salzburg in 2013, was just put up on Aug. 23 and so far has had only five views! It has been released on this CD, which I recommend (for the Schubert even more than the Beethoven):
What I would like to do at this point is nothing. I have taken away Yuja Wang's huge publicity advantage and just posted two of her performances followed by two of Grigory Sokolov's and all you have to do is listen to them. Preferably watching the score, not the video! Then you can simply come to your own conclusions! But I am happy to offer a couple of thoughts. It is actually very hard to put one's reactions into words. Often one musician will run into another coming out of a concert and one will simply shake their head while the other returns that with a smile. Yes, we both know what we think and no need to put it into words.
It is hard to put into words because, while I think it is quite clear who is the better performer of this sonata, exactly why is not so accessible in language. For example, while what Yuja Wang does is certainly very accomplished and quite correct: notes in the right places, dynamics tidily done, phrases phrased and so on, it never seems to amount to much. Whereas, Sokolov, even in the early performance which is full of fire and rhythm, always seems to be revealing something: inner voices, that bass line you never noticed, the whole of that odd harmony. And he is always with where the harmony is going. The last performance, the slowest of all, is also the finest. Things that don't make a lot of sense when they are rushed become clear and inevitable at the slower tempo. And yes, there is some controversy about Beethoven's tempo markings.
But really, were you expecting anything else? Really? As a very seasoned Czech violinist said to me as we ran into one another leaving a concert by a young Canadian cellist, "what, you were expecting Rostropovich, maybe?"
I find that these days, with politics and popular music beyond any possibility of satire, that you have to look in some unexpected places to find something really suitable for the satiric treatment. I have an item going in tomorrow's Friday Miscellanea, but it really deserves a stand-alone post. The inspiration is one of those big, beefy New Yorker articles, this one on pianist Yuja Wang. She is a fine pianist, of course, but the 21st century being what it is, the article takes some bizarre twists and turns. For one thing, it is headed by this spectacular photo:
Wow, now that's some photo! Here is how they describe how it was shot:
We were on a below-street-level floor, filled with pianos. The photographer, Pari Dukovic, and his three assistants were placing lights and screens around one of them. They had been there since eight-thirty in the morning (catering and hair and makeup had followed at eleven-thirty). Several of Yuja’s concert dresses were strewn around an alcove serving as a dressing room, among them the blue-green dominatrix gown she had worn to play the “Hammerklavier.” This was the dress finally chosen for the portrait. The hair-and-makeup man, with whom Yuja had established laughing rapport, revised something in her hairdo at her request. “My cheeks are too fat,” she said as she looked in the mirror. She ate a few forkfuls from a plate of salad that her friend Carlos Avila, a pianist who teaches at Juilliard, brought her from the catering table. Then she slipped into the blue-green dress and stepped into stiletto heels, and the photo shoot began. Yuja went to the designated piano, and Dukovic—a handsome young man, with a warm and charming manner—began circling around it, snapping pictures with a handheld camera, as she played bits and pieces of repertoire. At first, she played tentatively and quietly, starting a piece and trailing off—and then she worked her way into a horrible and wonderful pastiche of Rachmaninoff, Chopin, Beethoven, Mozart, Gershwin, Horowitz, Tchaikovsky, all mushed together, playing louder and louder and faster and faster, banging with mischievous demonic force, as Dukovic continued his circling and snapping, like the photographer in the famous orgasmic scene in “Blowup.” Yuja ended with a parodic crescendo as Dukovic shouted, “I love you!” and she burst into laughter.
The arresting photograph that was chosen out of the hundreds, possibly thousands, of pictures Dukovic took of Yuja at the piano and, later, in the first-floor showroom, posed full figure in front of a piano with its lid up, represents her as no concertgoer has ever seen her. The wild disorder of the hair has never been seen in a concert hall. (Yuja’s hair tends to stay in place throughout the most rousing of her performances.) And the foreshortened, oversized hand is an obvious deviation from the consensus we call reality. Will Yuja cringe when she looks at the photograph? Or will she see it as expressive of her impudent, defiant nature and find in it, almost hear in it, an echo of her incomparable musicality?
Heh, heh, heh!
The New Yorker has this gift, when encountering someone they consider to be Really Important, of both sycophantically abasing themselves but at the same time sneaking in little things that tell their readers that This Person is Just Like You, obsessed with little material things like clothes and boyfriends and eating. About one third of the very lengthy article is, I kid you not, about Yuja's dresses. The caption to the photo reads: Yuja is keenly aware—as many soloists affect not to be—that she is being looked at as well as listened to. Oh yes, "as many soloists affect not to be!"
One piece that they do manage to talk briefly about is Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" Sonata that was featured in some of Ms Wang's recent concerts. That reminded me that there is a recent release of that same sonata on a CD by Grigory Sokolov. I immediately started imagining how a photo session with him might have gone.
"Grigory, Grigory! What are you going to wear for the photo session?"
"What do you mean, what am I going to wear? What I always wear in my professional life, white tie and tails."
"Oh no, not again! Grigory, don't you realize, it is the 21st century. We have to be aware of how the audience sees you, relates to you physically."
"Look, I'm a pianist, not a movie star or a body-builder!"
"That is so not the point. We need to up your sales figures and it is just a fact of life nowadays that your sexual persona is extremely important in how you project your image."
"My image?!? Who cares about my image? I'm a somewhat elderly, overweight Russian with weird hair! Once I sit down at the piano, who even notices what I am wearing?"
"The general public, my dear Grigory, the general public!"
"The general public doesn't come to my concerts or buy my CDs--it is the passionate music-lovers who do and I really don't think they want to see me in a slinky dress!"
"You might be right about that, but what about something casual and fashionable? How about something like this from Dolce and Gabbana? Very spiffy!"
"I think not. I think I will stick with exactly what I have been wearing ever since I became a concert pianist. And no, I will not "pose" for the cameras! Just take the damn picture!"
