The Other Day I Was Listening To Alfred Cortot Play The Franck Prelude Chorale & Fugue (from 1929, I

The other day I was listening to Alfred Cortot play the Franck Prelude Chorale & Fugue (from 1929, I think; my mother and father were 3) and I immediately posted to Twitter that I thought it was overwrought, the composition that is. I received some gentle feedback suggesting perhaps I was wrong in my estimation of the composition, and this led me to recall the first time I heard this composition, when I was perhaps 8 or 9 years old. It was Rubinstein who played it. I too tried to play it a few years later in some child's pedagogy where it was watered down appropriately for my technique. The melody of the chorale theme has stayed with me all these years, vaguely, but I can't recall whether I really liked it or not. (I liked everything Rubinstein did, so the answer is doubtless yes.) Listening to it now, however, I really felt it was much ado.

But it pays to give everything a chance and so I am revisiting it via Rubinstein, my original master. An excerpt is posted above. Rubinstein gives almost everything from the 19th century a coherency that is remarkable (and so much richer than a player such as Horowitz). If something is overwrought, he has the ability to wring it into something real. And I love him for that.

Here is the Cortot for comparison, which I continue to find inferior, but then I never much cared for Cortot anyway. (Maybe I should have considered that before judging Franck? Let's not get too carried away.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPRRZwnq-6E

If you have any favorite recordings of the Franck, I would love to know about them and why.

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 (?)

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.

Something interesting coming tomorrow, in honor of Chopin. I think this could be a lot of fun.

[Image source unknown, but found courtesy of foreverswedish.org]

readmorewikipedia:

Pirahã is believed to be the only surviving member of the Mura language family, all other members having become extinct in the last few centuries. It is therefore a language isolate, without any known connection to other living languages.

Pirahã can be whistled, hummed, or encoded in music. Consonants and vowels may be omitted altogether and the meaning conveyed solely through variations in pitch, stress, and rhythm.

Schumannology

I am going through an intensive Schumann phase and I don't know why. I have never, never been a Schumann fan, from my earliest days learning the piano. (I do not recall him at all in the days before that, in my single digits, when I was reading the lives of "the composers" and listening to their music.) With the exception of op. 21 (the Novelletten, perhaps his least played major work for piano), I just never felt the connection that piano players are supposed to feel for this music. Thanks to Pletnev, however, I discovered a heart for the op. 99 pieces. Thanks to Richter, for the op. 7 Toccata. And now my mind is filling with the sounds of op. 20 (the Humoreske for piano), the op. 38 1st Symphony, and the op. 41 string quartets. Mind: I don't expect ever to have anything like fellow feeling with the op. 26 (Faschingsschwank aus Wien) or the Papillons or Album für die Jugend, but I've opened up my head.