After three consecutive weeks of playing with orchestras, I’m now beginning a week of recitals. While the give-and-take of playing concerti can be a tremendous pleasure, in some way, I find recitals even more satisfying. I think this has something to with the fact that when I play with an orchestra, I am a guest - one piece of a programming puzzle that has been put together primarily by others. When I play recitals, however, it’s not just that the amount of playing makes it possible for me to show more facets of myself - it’s that I have put the program together, which means that I am responsible for the emotional arc of the experience.

Inspired by an extremely thoughtful and inquisitive comment on a previous post, I thought I would try to explain the thought process that went into the planning of this particular program. It’s difficult, because “thought process” is an inexact term in this case - sometimes planning programs is more about an instinct for the alchemy through which certain pieces mesh well together than it is about any sort of formula which dictates how successful the program will be.

Perhaps this goes without saying, but my first selection criterion for any piece of music I play is that I must love it. I feel absolutely sure that if a performer lacks conviction in what he is doing, the audience will know it. And frankly, since I already see that life won’t be long enough to play all the pieces I do love, why on earth would I spend time playing those that I don’t?

This is the second time this fall that I play a program devoted to two composers: in September it was Brahms and Bartok, and now it’s Beethoven and Janacek. I love these kinds of programs: single-composer evenings can be wonderful - I’ve done all-Mozart, all-Beethoven, and will do all-Schubert later this year - but there is always the danger of a stylistic sameness, or rather a lack of confrontation between the pieces. Concerts of works of two composers are great because they still offer enough music of each to create a sense of immersion in the composers’ sonic worlds, and yet the concert becomes a dialogue between the two, which often moves in surprising directions.

The question of which composers work well together (and which don’t) is particularly alchemical, and I think it is one of both similarity and difference. The success of Beethoven and Janacek as a pairing relies in part on the terrific intensity that characterizes both, which is why Ravel, for example, is a much less natural partner for Beethoven. But what I think makes the combination really interesting is that the intensity may be similar, but the language is utterly different. One facet of this, as an example: Beethoven’s sonatas are incredibly tightly - one might say relentlessly - argued, giving the listener the feeling that from the first note, he is being inexorably led towards the last. Janacek, by contrast, is perhaps the greatest master of the musical non-sequitur. (These seeming non-sequiturs are, of course, actually connected to the material they surround on a deep level; on the surface however, they seem to come out of the blue.) This is just one example of many - really, the building blocks in Beethoven and Janacek could not be more different, which makes the similarities in temperament between the two all the more fascinating.

The great composer Leon Kirchner once wrote, “Poetry responds to poetry, no matter its time or chronology,” and much the same could be said of music: what is wonderful in juxtaposing Beethoven and Janacek is that Beethoven becomes not just the foundation - as he nearly always is, when juxtaposed with a composer who came after him - but the respondent. The deep nostalgia in Janacek’s In the Mists is, I feel sure, a longing for a lost musical world — the very world that Beethoven inhabited. (And, interestingly, played a large role in dismantling - but that is a subject for another essay…) But equally, when I play Beethoven’s Opus 109 after the Janacek Sonata - a gut-wrenching lament for a murdered Czech worker - it carries the feeling of consolation to a far greater extent than it might otherwise. This is one of the most wonderful things about great music: while its affects are in a sense unchanging, it is never impervious to its surroundings. Beethoven could not have predicted the events which inspired Janacek to compose his Sonata - and given his own political predilections, he may not have been interested anyway - but his music addresses every aspect of the human experience, and therefore is moving - differently moving - in any context.

So in a sense, I feel that in playing this program, I become the conduit through which a conversation between two great masters takes place: a very exciting notion.

“What a humiliation when one stood beside me and heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard the shepherd singing and again I heard nothing, such incidents brought me to the verge of despair, but little more and I would have put an end to my life - only art it was that withheld me, ah it seemed impossible to leave the world until I had produced all that I felt called upon me to produce…”     - Ludwig van Beethoven, from the Heiligenstadt Testament, 1802

I think this explains, far better than I ever could, why playing Beethoven - doing him justice, or at least coming as close as one can - feels like a matter of life-or-death.

Or perhaps even his words are unecessary: the force of his personality, the intensity of his need to say what must be said — these are made plain in his music.

My Beethoven CD was released earlier this month. Just my most recent attempt, in a series which I hope will last a lifetime, to come to terms with the most life-affirming, yet unfathomable music I know to exist.

(A further attempt to explain what this music means to me can be found here.)