On The Other Hand

On The Other Hand

To hell with originality. It's a fool's quest. The minute you think you're on to something new, you find someone who did it or said it 500 years ago. Don't worry about it.

So here we begin what I hope will be a fun little project: the creation of a "perfect" or "ideal" total 27. The Complete Chopin Etudes in their best (or bests) incarnation piece by piece, player by player. This post will just lay out the full set and then subsequent posts (not necessarily in order) will tackle a little more depth and reflection on each individual etude and the reasons for my choice. As with chess, a (?) after a choice will mean I'm not entirely satisfied with the wisdom or availability of what's listed here; whereas a (!) after a choice will mean I feel this is not necessarily orthodoxy but brilliance beyond the pale. Please feel free to let me know the error of my ways or how you'd do it differently.

Opus Posthumous

And herewith we round out the set:

Samson François

Artur Rubinstein

Christian Ihle Hadland

So there it is. Next we'll go into op. 10 no. 1, that arpeggiated, C-majorated delight, more fun in the playing than the listening really. But that's to come tomorrow. Also, I will lay out the full list of piano players listened to and considered for this list. (It's long so I don't want to tack it on here.) Please feel free to let me know the error of my ways or how you'd do it differently.

Opus 10

And so we begin.

Here is the ideal opus 10 set. Remember: (?) or (!) mean I'm either not 100% convinced or overly enthusiastic, respectively, of the choice.

Martha Argerich

Glenn Gould (!)

Frederic Chiu

Andrei Gavrilov

Mikhail Pletnev

Frederic Chiu

Murray Perahia

Andrei Gavrilov

Boris Berezovsky (?)

Louis Lortie

John Browning

Sviatoslav Richter (!) or Cameron Carpenter (?)

Sweaty backrooms, cigar-chomping promoters, Bangkok box-office bonanzas, all built around scenarios like this:

But Nancy Pellegrini, the classical and performance editor of Time Out in Beijing and Shanghai says the Lang Lang effect is not something to be celebrated. 'In developing countries, music is seen as a way out of poverty,’ she tells me. 'Since the success of Lang Lang, people think that if you’re really good at piano you can become an international superstar with more money than you know what to do with. So a lot of kids have been pushed into piano.

The Beginning

As a matter of honor, this first post really should in some way involve Glenn Gould. So I'm going to briefly take on a philosophical point of order, in the hopes that it not only satisfies honor but also sets forth some principle of approach so you can tell whether or not this is going to be something you're going to want to read going forward.

The philosophical point concerns the idea of "greatness" in created work, and since this is specifically about piano players and music, greatness qua such. I'll try to keep it simple for my own sake, so here: I don't think much of the idea.

Less simply, here's why. If we stack up 5 artists of any sort and set some categorical context, some criteria and so forth, that's all a bunch of muddle to me and misses what I consider most satisfying in many cases: not the historical moment but what a player means to ME. And in this regard, some unknown or some so-called minor work or some eccentric trajectory of a career may prove to be the most fascinating, the deepest creation of a moment. And as we all well know, having once upon a time been children, a moment can last your whole life. 

So you won't, I hope, find me arguing much for Greatness around these parts, but rather for things of substance and positive provocation. And as a substitute, if one is needed, I would say what is more meaningful is to put forward artists of tremendous insight, unique in the je ne sais quoi and sine qua non of their approach and execution. For if there is one thing the 20th and 21st centuries do not need, it is more of the vanilla perfection of what is churned out by the piano academies and too much of the concert world. How many of these will we miss? Do we need more and more and ever more of the more or less same Chopin waltzes, Brahms intermezzi, Tchaikovsky concerti, and [substitute your own overplayed repertoire]?

Well, yes, it might be argued, we need more and more and infinitely more because you never know (and the artist him/herself surely does not know) when something unusual or remembrance-worthy is going to occur. But this is precisely where judgment enters the picture. Precisely where maturity and an editorial decision along the lines of: "Yes I will study that work, yes I will play it, but no I will not record it, no I will not concertize with it, unless I am firmly convinced that my voice is one that must be heard". Do current piano players make this conscious statement? Of course they do, alas.

Which brings me back round to Gould. Glenn Gould is my favorite piano player of all I've heard because his is the loss I would feel most (and have most felt since his death), his is the hole that would leave piano playing with a gap that would change it inconceivably had he never been. That he is Great is not the point, for we will speak of many things in these posts that are Great. I would not like to rank anyone with anything other than subjectivity, so that's all you'll find here. People I cannot do without, the objects of their making I cannot do without, or the people and their objects I can do without and why.

Much about much to come.