in which I am back, with a vengeance. Partially by design, and partially by chance, my busiest-ever season was followed by one of my un-busiest summers: as of August 30th, I had gone a full five weeks without playing a concert - my longest hiatus, if I’m counting correctly, since I was 16 years old. It’s not that I stopped playing - the vast majority of my time was spent learning new pieces and getting reacquainted with old ones. But being off the stage - and in my apartment with some regularity! - allowed me to temporarily live a life quite different from my normal one. Since my return, the pace has been quick - 11 pieces in 4 countries over the last 10 days - allowing me to make a kind of direct comparison between these parallel existences. Some early conclusions:

* Time off is good. Anyone who’s delved this deep into my site probably already realizes that I am, ahem, enthusiastic about what I do; passion is a quality that I tend to value more highly than balance. That said, the benefits of being away from concert-giving life for a while turn out to have been enormous. Most importantly, I’m finding that coming back after a long break, my emotional receptivity is greater - to music, in general, and to the rather extraordinary dynamics of the concert hall. The first thing I performed after my time off was Schoenberg’s Six Little Pieces, and the meaning of each interval - the way in which each note conversed with its predecessor and its follower - seemed not just stronger but more specific than it ever had to me before. (This is, quite apart from the vicissitudes of my schedule, a quite extraordinary aspect of Schoenberg’s music - but that’s a topic for another post.) And my awareness of the electricity in the room - the silence which follows the initial applause, and the way the first notes of the concert rise out of that silence - was sharper than ever.

* Traveling on a regular basis involves internalizing a great deal of stress. However great the value of having a break may have been, I did miss performing. I also missed visiting familiar and unfamiliar cities, going to museums, seeing old friends and meeting new ones. Things I did not miss: packing my suitcase; unpacking my suitcase; discovering, upon unpacking of said suitcase, that I have forgotten to pack hangers/cufflinks/toiletries; being asked to remove my shoes and belt, in the manner of a patient in a mental institution, in the security line at the airport; phoning everyone I know in the United States when it’s 4:30 a.m. in Europe and I’m up, jet-lagged; asking airline employees why, 45 minutes after the scheduled departure of a flight, no announcement of a delay has been made; airport food; the price of airport food; the gnawing feeling that an airplane has not been cleaned during the last few presidential administrations. I’m ending the list here only because I can feel my blood pressure rising…

* This is not strictly related to my time off and its effects, but it’s been much on my mind the last week: one huge fringe benefit of making a recording is what it does to the experience of playing the piece subsequently. Recording forces you to be remorselessly clear about your musical intentions - any hint of uncertainty about the shape of a piece is magnified by the microphone. In the studio, this can feel a bit constricting, but in the concert hall, it has almost the opposite effect: knowing precisely how a phrase fits into your larger conception of a piece gives you the confidence that no matter what direction you choose to take with it on the spur of the moment, it will retain its inner logic, which in turn gives the feeling of immense freedom. Playing Beethoven sonatas last week, for the first time since recording them, I felt them moving in unexpected and exciting directions, which I’m sure is at least partially the result of the experience of playing them in the studio, and which makes the prospect of playing them - living with them - throughout the coming year all the more thrilling. Which brings me to my last point:

* One of the pieces I played for the first time last week was Beethoven’s strange and wonderful song cycle, An die ferne Geliebte (To the distant beloved). The opening of the cycle’s final song is quite faithfully and extremely movingly quoted in the first movement of Schumann’s Fantasy. (The words are: “Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder/Die ich dir, Geliebte, sang.” Roughly translated: “Take these songs, then, which I sang to you, beloved.”) The first movement of the Schumann begins with a nearly shapeless version of the Beethoven theme - more a searching for it than a rendering of it - and gradually, as the movement progresses, we move increasingly close to it, until the near-quotation comes at the end. Having lived with the Schumann for so long, it was, then, very touching to finally play the Beethoven itself - a sort of reunion with the distant beloved, which I had previously seen only through a dense fog. And given that the last year of my life was heavily tied up with Schumann, and that the one I’m just embarking on is equally centered around Beethoven, the song represented a very apt and very beautiful transition.

All of which is to say: music is wonderful, and it’s very good to be back.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 11:18 am and is filed under Blog, Performance, Travel, Recording. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.