Last season, I wrote about the process of putting together one of my recital programs. While many of the priorities of program-building remain the same — a love for each of the individual pieces, a hunch that they will somehow mix well and interestingly — the program I’m preparing at the moment represents enough personal departures — or, rather, enough new and renewed passions — for me to feel it merits writing about.

But I’m not to be trusted, for really, I will seize on any excuse to write about György Kurtág these days.  Listening to him give a masterclass recently,  I was provoked into rethinking some of my most basic assumptions about music (what are dynamics for? what are the limits of musical notation? how does the interpreter deal with those limits? what is a chord, really, and how should one hear it? feel it? play it? etc etc etc), and working on his music has a peeling-the-onion quality — the feeling that each question answered, each problem solved, simply reveals another, more absorbing layer of problems and questions — which I used to associate with only the very greatest music of past centuries. How wonderful to be proven wrong! One thing this immersion in Kurtág has clarified for me is what quality, or set of qualities I most value in new music: a love for, deep understanding of, and connection to the past masters, married to an absolutely unique, original voice.

Not easy to do, particularly after the twentieth century. But Kurtág fits the bill. While there is nothing — really, nothing — derivative about his music, it was made possible by, and constantly responds to Bach and Schubert, Beethoven and Bartók, Schumann and Ligeti. That is why, though the five fleeting selections from the Játékok (”Games”) that I have programmed take only minutes to play, they are, for me at least, at the heart of the evening, and form its organizing principle.

I’m weary of trying to explain why certain composers go well together, lest I sound like one of those earnest, humorless restaurant menus that tries to tell you what wine to drink with your pork chop. (”The oakiness of the Kurtág makes a perfect complement to the fennel-radicchio blend of the Schubert; best of all are the notes of cherry in each’s aftermath.”) But programming around Kurtág makes me feel like a kid in a candy store, because practically every phrase is somehow suggestive of a past master. This occasionally takes the form of a reference (one of the pieces I’m playing is a delicious, absurdist reinvention of a Debussy Prelude), but far more often it’s something more mysterious and witch-doctor-y. Far be it from me to try and explain how the “Birthday Elegy for Judit (for the 2nd finger of her left hand)” connects to Schubert’s almost psychedelically beautiful C Major Sonata. But connect it does, on a level so profound that I’m currently toying with the idea of going from one to the other without a pause.

(There’s another reason for that, on top of whatever mysterious relationship exists between the pieces. The C Major Sonata — like its more famous counterpart, the B flat — is one of those pieces that emerges from silence. On a literal level, this is obviously true of any piece of music. What I mean in this instance is that the silence that precedes the first notes actually feels like part of the piece itself, as if the Schubert C Major Sonata had been occurring, in silent form, for God knows how long, before the first notes of it were intoned. To create that feeling by starting some seconds after applause is very difficult; segueing from a piece with a mystical ending seems much more likely to set the appropriate tone. But I digress.)

And that Schubert! Oh, the Schubert. It is that rarest of species: the centuries-old neglected masterpiece. Much like the Unfinished Symphony, his leaving the 3rd and 4th movements incomplete may have been an accident, but if so, it was a divine accident; on some level, he must have known how completely satisfying the two finished movements are on their own, and how impossible it would have been to write music to successfully follow the second movement — one of the saddest, most unrelenting utterances from a composer who was usually sad and often unrelenting.

Is Schubert the most unfathomable of them all?  Given his wretchedly short life, he should really not have been able to write down the 998 works that have now been published, even if he had simply been taking dictation. When you add to that the struggles he had with large forms (unlike the equally insanely prolific Mozart, who gives the impression of having emerged from the womb writing an unimpeachable rondo), and the incredible development that took place in his sonata writing, it becomes more unthinkable still. (The C Major is a real benchmark in this regard — an exposition with three themes, all with a more-or-less identical melodic outline, a highly unusual scheme of keys…) When you think of how many of these works are heart-breakingly beautiful, it becomes not only overwhelming, but overwhelmingly sad. Surely no one has suffered more to create art of such power. In recent years, I’ve gone through periods of immersion with Mozart, Beethoven and Schumann. These days it is Schubert who is demanding that sort of attention. It feels alarming, sometimes, how overwhelming these composers can become in my life and in my mind…

Artur Schnabel once slyly commented that the difference between him and other pianists was that the second halves of his recitals were just as boring as the first halves. (The model he’s mocking here is the “recital program as dinner,” with a frothy dessert at the end.) I understand what he’s getting at, and often have tried to build my own programs in such a way that the intensity builds through the recital. That said, when I was putting this program together, I was attracted to the idea of it being somehow old-fashioned in construction. Hopefully it goes without saying that I don’t find any of the music I play boring, but when the core of the first half of the program (measured in minutes, at least) consists of two sonatas composed in Vienna,  and the second half is all short and short-ish pieces by Chopin — decidedly not composed in Vienna — the impression is of a dramatic shift having taken place during the intermission. When I’ve been in the audience for a recital and felt that shift, I’ve always found it strangely exciting — the energy in the room suddenly altered, the language being spoken thrillingly unfamiliar.

Chopin, in a sense, marries these two program prototypes (hors d’ouevre-entree-dessert/boring-boring) perfectly, for while his music is decidedly unlike Mozart or Schubert (in some undeniable but indescribable cultural sense) it is profound, and profoundly great. When I was a teenager, I probably played more Chopin than any other composer. For various reasons, my attention has been focused elsewhere lately, and coming back to him has been wonderful. In the late pieces that I am playing here, the impeccable bel canto style that characterizes the early pieces is still much in evidence, but the skies have darkened considerably. The E Major Nocturne might have its roots in Bellini, but what happens between the notes is rarely heard in Italian opera. The mazurkas (and much of the f minor Ballade) have roots in dance, but their twists and turns — their digressions — are what make them memorable. And the magnificent Barcarolle alternates between nostalgia and something like terror, all on top of a constantly — relentlessly — rocking gondalier’s rhythm. Unsurprising, perhaps, as Chopin is in a sense the most paradoxical of all composers: he is, for example, the only composer who can be simultaneously impassioned and cool.

For all of the thought that goes into program-planning, it really is impossible to know in advance how well it will work. For while a recital may be a musical conversation between composers, it is also a three-way conversation between composer(s), performer,  and audience. I have at least some measure of control over my conversation with the composers — that, it seems to me, is what preparation is for. But I have no control over the energy or the reactions of the audience, which is precisely why playing concerts is such a wonderful, terrifying activity. A teacher once said to me, at the end of a Not Easy lesson, “now forget everything I said, and play it like a performance.” And that is what playing recitals is about: working to constantly deepen your relationship with the music, preparing so thoroughly that you feel that the music inhabits you, and then opening yourself absolutely to the public, without any precondition or inhibition.

What a wonderful thing to get to do.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 8th, 2009 at 11:08 pm and is filed under Blog. 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.