Alan Walker

Of Pianists and Executioners

II

And so to the pianists themselves. There was the usual variety of players on display: those who made love to the piano, and those who declared war on it; those who gave it their all, and those who took it back again. Some played with the detachment of a diplomat. (The correct definition of a diplomat, incidentally, is someone who thinks twice before saying nothing, a state of affairs that applied to a number of the competitors). And the ranks of these players-the lover, the hater, the seducer, the diplomat-were occasionally infiltrated by that most undesirable arrival of all: the wood-chopper.
Among the common faults was the over-use of the agogic accent, employed not for expressive purpose but for technical convenience. I am referring to the habit of using that slight hesitation in time afforded by an agogic accent in order to make it easier for the player to get from point A to point B on the keyboard. Abused in this way, agogic accents became havens of refuge placed at strategic junctures along the keyboard, put there for the mundane purpose of giving the player a rest during a tiring journey. And all this under the umbrella of "expression". The practice is endemic among young pianists, and it amounts to a kind of deception.
Another fault was the approach to tremelandos, which abound in Liszt's music (they are totally absent in the music of Chopin and Schumann) and were generally played too slowly. Liszt always wanted them as fast as possible, irrespective of how they were notated. He recommended that they be played with the keys already halfway depressed (to shorten the journey towards the hammers) and he liked them played with a quiet arm. "Do not make omelettes", he would tell those of his pupils who put too much movement into the device. Enough omelettes were made on the platform of the Liszt Academy to open a restaurant, but occasionally someone walked onto the stage who knew exactly how to do it. One such pianist was Mamiko Tomari from Japan, whose enchanting account of St. Francis of Assisi Preaching to the Birds was a model of its kind. Alas, she did not get beyond the first stage. There was, of course, the usual obsession with speed for its own sake.

"Why do you play it so fast?" Horowitz was once asked.
"Because I can", he replied.

In this simple altercation lies the death of so much of Liszt's piano music. The concert study Gnomenreigen suffered greatly throughout the competition from performances that went at breakneck speed. Liszt himself often complained that Gnomenreigen was nearly always played too fast for him. "There you go, mixing salad again", he would complain of students getting the crossed hands of the opening page into a tangle. There is a profound sense in which the slower you play this piece the more brilliant it can sound, because when you hear all the notes with diamond clarity, to say nothing of the spaces between them, they communicate the impression of swiftness. Everything is lost when these same notes are glued together into what Liszt described as "tone smearing".
Nor was there any shortage of pianists who wanted to be different for the sake of difference. It prompted one of my fellow jurors to observe drily that we will soon be giving prizes to pianists for playing normally. Certainly there was nothing normal about Liszt's wonderful concert study Waldesrauschen whose "forest murmurs" too often fell victim to hurricane-force winds which stripped the trees of all their leaves. Likewise the depiction of St. Francis of Paula Walking on the Waters produced occasional waves large enough to swamp the auditorium. We should not have to worry about taking to the lifeboats while listening to this piece. Of all the works subjected to distortion, however, Wilde Jagd probably fared the worst. The only pianist to rise above its formidable difficulties and communicate its underlying sonata structure, was the gifted young Hungarian pianist Gábor Farkas. He is a musician of intelligence, a thinking man's pianist. Another piece that gave the candidates trouble was Mazeppa. Most of them could not rise above the turmoil of this music. After several such performances we felt sympathy only for the horse, and none at all for its riders, even the ones who remained seated on their steed, and one of whom gave the loudest execution of the piece that I have ever heard. A noble exception must be mentioned, however.
The brilliant Ksenia Blinktsovskaya from Russia stunned me with her bravura performance of Mazeppa, which was illuminated from within by her shining insight into its structure. It was a source of bewilderment to me that this mature artist did not get beyond the first round.
Another Russian pianist, Lev Vinocour, whose playing in my opinion was marked by "difference for the sake of difference", got through to the finals. No one can begrudge him his success, although it was not a result of any mark that I gave him. He usually produced high-powered "competition performances", filled with tension, and exhibiting some occasional histrionics. He is already a fully developed artist, but his playing is not my cup of tea. There is a certain class of pianist, of whom Vladimir Horowitz was a leading representative, who search endlessly for inner
voices, and then, having failed to find them, insist on bringing them out. Vinocour belongs to their ranks. His technique is astonishing, but he should abandon the search for non-existent hidden tunes, which all too often lead him into a musical cul-de-sac.
And what can one say of the 16-year-old Ingolf Wunder, the second youngest pianist in the competition? He played like a young lion, and lived up to both his name and his mane. His Feux-follets was probably the fastest in the competition. And his Erlkönig was phenomenal. Yet despite his prodigious talent he suffers from the vices of his virtues. His heart still rules his head and it sometimes leads him into a world of musical distortions. Meanwhile we forgive him (almost) everything, because of his youth. He did not reach the finals, but the jury awarded him the prestigious City of Budapest prize, to indicate both to him and to the audience (with whom he was a favourite) that his gifts had not gone unnoticed. We are bound to hear more of him in the coming years.
If there is one piece of general advice to be offered to all these talented young pianists it is this. Do not play fast and loose with Liszt or he will play fast and loose with you, exposing all your weaknesses. Remember the words of Artur Schnabel: "Interpretation is a free walk across firm ground." The walk may be free, but the ground beneath must be firm.

III

And so a word about sound. There was often too much of it. The decibel level was sometimes overwhelming. Why are young pianists trained to produce a volume of sound designed to fill a concert hall of 3000 people? They will never need to use it, and most of them will be fortunate to play in modest halls of 300 people or less, for which their overwhelming sound is totally inappropriate. If only they knew that by scaling back their sound they could achieve exactly the same results- whatever the size of the hall! The distance between mp and f is exactly the same as the distance between pp and mp. Only the dynamic level has changed; the degree of contrast remains the same. All things are relative, after all. And when was the last time we heard a true pianissimo in the concert hall? Pianists seem afraid to go there. Yet it can create an overwhelming effect when the audience has literally to lean forward in their seats in order to hear such murmurs of the heart.
This problem assumed general proportions halfway through the contest, when, after the First Stage, the Competition was transferred from the small recital hall to the Great Hall of the Academy, for by now the daily audience was beginning to swell in numbers. The recital hall holds about 300 people, the Great Hall about 1100. The Great Hall is wonderful for choirs, but not so good for pianos. Yet hardly any of the semi-finalists modified their approach, especially in their (over)use of the sustaining pedal. It was as if they were oblivious to their surroundings. The fact is that a pianist must not only play the piano but also "play the building". A hall, too, is a musical instrument, and its acoustic is there, waiting to be brought to life by the pianist's ten fingers. (Sir Adrian Boult once told me that he used to change the tempo of big works like Holst's "Planets" Suite, depending on whether he was conducting it in a dry concert hall, in Worcester Cathedral, or in the cavernous Royal Albert Hall.) The reverberation period can make or break a performance depending on whether or not you acknowledge its presence.
The answer to my earlier question: "When was the last time we heard a true pianissimo in the concert hall", was provided by the Canadian pianist Li Wang in his ravishing accounts of La Leggierezza and the Schubert/Liszt Der Müller und der Bach. He held the audience spellbound with these renderings which seemed at times to erase that invisible line separating sound from silence. Moreover, he was one of the few pianists to create that indefinable thing we call "atmosphere", in which the pianist encloses the audience within his magic circle, casts his spell, and draws them into his dreams.
Aside from pianissimos, there is another aspect of piano sound which we heard all-too-rarely. I am referring to bel canto. The "enthroned golden sound", as Busoni once put it, is almost entirely absent from the concert hall these days-and certainly from competitions. Its last great exponent may have been Shura Cherkassky, who passed away a few years ago. The simple truth is that inside every great pianist is a singer trying to get out. Embodied within this idea is the great paradox of the piano. Its sounds begin to decay the moment they are born; they are always on the point of death unless extraordinary measures are taken to keep them alive. The piano is a percussion instrument trying to sing, and for this reason it has been well described as an instrument of musical illusion. Players and composers alike throw out the baby with the bathwater if they simply treat it as a percussion instrument. Let them take up the drums. Of all the candidates we heard, it was the Croatian pianist Igor Spanjol who understood how to make the piano sing. His Schubert-Liszt Ständchen was ravishing, as was his Aufenthalt.
One other idea occurred to me as I listened to these young competitors, and it, too, has to do with sound. There is a long-held belief in the scientific community, shared by a number of musicians, that the quality of the piano's sound remains fixed to whatever dynamic level is produced. In brief, so the argument goes, the player has no independent control over quality, as opposed to quantity. According to this theory it makes no difference whatsoever whether the piano's keys are depressed by a human hand or by the point of an umbrella. This is not the place to give the pros and cons of the scientific principles involved, which are complex. Entire learned conferences have been devoted to the topic. Far better to attend a piano competition and watch one pianist after another play on exactly the same Steinway grand piano and marvel at the variety of colour that emerges. All the scientific data in the world cannot argue away the evidence of one's ears. For the rest, the quality of sound is how a true artist-a Rachmaninov, a Cortot, a Horowitz-identifies himself. It is his musical fingerprint, and it makes him different from everyone else.