So, it’s taken me somewhat longer than planned to post this follow-up, but I needed some time to process the extraordinary experience I had two weeks ago.

I was excited at the prospect of making this recording, but it’s fair to say there was some trepidation as well. In addition to being my first ever live recording, it was my first orchestra recording. And since Orpheus plays without a conductor, that was another element of unfamiliarity inserted into the process. (I had played conductorless before, but not with anything approaching the frequency with which I’ve played concerti with conductors.)

There were also logistical differences between this and my previous recordings: until now, I’d always recorded in London, which meant sticking - obsessively, some might say - to a routine. I stayed in the same hotel, ate the same things for breakfast, ran in the same park, left at the same time every morning. This time I was in New York, which meant that I was at home: nice, but psychologically different. (In my life, being at home usually means not working - or at least not performing.)

All of which is to say that the element of the unknown was very, very present. The details of the recording had been more-or-less in place since the summer, so I had a long time to think about the implications of all this. I’ve written in the past that a recording, to me, simply represents a snapshot of my thoughts about the piece on the day, but the truth is somewhat more complicated: however impossible it might be, the permanence of recording has always caused to me to fantasize about an idealized performance of a piece. And because I always record a piece after I’ve played a series of performances of it, there’s an urge to see the recording as a kind of summation of the process - a chance to meld all of the prior performances, and hope for a “the-whole-is-more-than-the-sum-of-its-parts” kind of result.

There’s a big downside to this attitude: not only does it discourage spontaneity, it is anti-spontaneity, as it carries the implication that everything that will happen in the recording studio has been experienced already. It also, I believe, leads to the making of a recording whose value is more theoretical than real - a recording that can be admired, but not loved. The snapshot analogy still holds, but the question becomes: is a photograph a document of a moment, or a highly posed creation?

Needless to say, I’ve given this issue a lot of thought, and in previous sessions I’ve felt that these two concepts of recording were doing battle with one another. I would have liked to have let go entirely of any expectation of perfection, or idealization, but the foreverness of the CD was often in the back of my mind. (Schnabel used to talk about the process of “verplattung” - which in German means both “disc-making” and “flattening out.”)

One of the advantages - or challenges, depending on your point of view - of recording live was that the decision as to which attitude I would take towards the recording was made for me. While the dress rehearsal was also recorded, and we had a brief patch session after the concert, the number of hours devoted to recording this album was a tiny fraction of what I spent making the Schumann and Beethoven CDs. The opportunity to play things over and over until I had found - or at least approached - what I had in my ear at the beginning of the day was simply not there. In its place was a very different opportunity: the chance to make a recording in which spontaneity was not only not shied away from, but actually the primary element involved. It’s not that my preparation for this recording was any less thorough: if anything, the mental and physical preparation for this disc was more intense than ever. It’s that the goal of the preparation was not to eliminate the element of uncertainty, of chance, but to free me to take chances. As cliched as it may be, my goal for this recording was to meet the moment.

As luck would have it, several elements combined to ensure that the odds were stacked in my favor. First of all, the music itself asked for this approach. Whereas in a Beethoven movement, creating a sense of the architecture of the whole is perhaps the biggest key to making the performance work, with Mozart, a sense of the mercurial - the sensation that the character of a phrase is being determined as it is played, as a reaction to the provocation that was the previous phrase - is of utmost importance. And that cannot be faked - you can only give the impression of being in the moment by actually being in the moment.

Second, I had the huge fortune of playing with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. In addition to their fantastic playing, their energy and enthusiasm were incredibly contagious, and the level of involvement each of them had in the music-making is something I will not soon forget. And any fear I may have had about playing without a conductor in a recording session proved unjustified: the lack of conductor - and the security one brings - forced everyone to listen that much more intently, which changed everything. It made the ensemble tighter, facilitated greater flexibility, and most importantly, it meant that whenever I tried something on the spur of the moment - a different dynamic shape, a slight leaning on a note - the orchestra not only accommodated it, but responded in kind. Never, playing this repertoire, have I had such a strong sense of a conversation being written on the spot.

Suffice it to say, the experience on the whole was memorable, and the concert itself had a joyousness - a pleasure in music-making - which I wouldn’t have imagined possible beforehand, given the pressure created by the circumstances. I’ve yet to listen to the tapes, but the making of the recording was so gratifying, the end result somehow doesn’t seem so important. (Another sharp contrast with my previous recordings, when the arrival of the first edit was a momentious - and nerve-wracking - moment.) What is important is the way the week confirmed my deepest-held feelings about music-making, so often compromised, and occasionally even obscured, by the pressure of recording and performing to the standard that great music demands: that it is all about communication. That if you strive to play in the most open, egoless way possible, you can reach people in a way that only music can. That it is, at its best, a more wonderful means of communication than speech.

I am very, very lucky to do what I do. Making this recording, I felt that as strongly as I ever have in my life.

As I’ve mentioned, exhaustively (exhaustingly?), I’m in the midst of a year during which Beethoven is never far away. I’m often playing him, constantly practicing and thinking about him, and in general finding that he is taking up so much space in my head and in my life, there’s little room for much else.

Last week, amid this sea of Beethoven, was an island of Mozart: the Concerto K. 467, which I played in France. I’ve always felt that despite their status as Classical Era Icons, the distance between these two composers, in argument, in effect, and in affect, is immense. This time, playing the Mozart concerto while Beethoven was oozing from my every pore, the feeling was stronger than ever - it struck me as amazing that works which are unquestionably masterpieces could be so profoundly unalike.

I remember a remark Richard Goode made in an interview, to the effect that playing the 32 Beethoven sonatas in one year - presumably to the exclusion of much else - was a kind of sensory deprivation. (I am taking this statement grossly out of context - the larger message was that the immersion in Beethoven was one of the most extraordinary experiences of his life.) It’s a feeling that I’ve come to understand; it’s not that Beethoven’s music is lacking in sigh-making beauty or innovation, that it fails to give tactile pleasure to the performer, or that it is in any way grim, dour, or lacking in color. Rather, it is that in spite of his music’s beauty, its warmth, and its endless storehouse of ideas, it is above all the indomitable will of the composer - the will to say what must be said - that makes Beethoven’s music moving, that makes it Beethoven.

One of the works that I recorded and have been playing a lot of is the Sonata Opus 28 - the “Pastoral” sonata (not a name I’m fond of). Midway through the development of the first movement, we find ourselves in F# Major - a highly unlikely, not to say inappropriate, place to find oneself in the middle of a movement which is in D Major.

(*Brief musicological aside, which can be ignored by anyone not interested, without any serious deleterious effect on his/her understanding/appreciation of the rest of this essay: in fairness, this chord is actually approached as V of b minor [vi], making it somewhat less surprising, but through repetition, its function becomes increasingly unclear.*)

Now, composers before and after Beethoven wrote music with surprising harmonic twists and turns, so this chord, while immediately exotic, is not all that shocking. What Beethoven does next, however, decidedly is: he repeats the chord, over and over again, for twenty eight measures. For the first few measures, while the harmony remains unchanged, we at least still have a motive from earlier in the movement. Gradually, though, all other elements dissipate, and by the end, there is nothing else: no melody, not even a rhythm, just this chord, this harmonic visitor from a foreign country, desperate in its quiet insistence. By bar twenty eight of this, when Beethoven asks the performer to hold the chord - very quiet by now - indefinitely, we no longer have any sense of home whatsoever. The sheer repetition has forced our ears to rethink - even if only subconsciously - everything they had assumed about what they had been listening to. And all this done with one chord, stubbornly repeated, over and over, until Beethoven decides he’s finished with it, and in three short phrases, modulates us back home, as if it were nothing, the F# Major merely a mirage: this is Beethoven’s force of will.

The effect that this force of will has on the listener is so profound, it becomes difficult to imagine that music could ever be powerful or moving for any other reason. And that is why there have been times in the past where I’ve found it very strange to move from Beethoven to Mozart - the latter’s lack of a will of steel, heard in that context, can seem like a defect. This time, however, playing K. 467 was a joy and a delight, in equal measure, and it occurred to me that Mozart’s lack of will - his emotional malleability - may be not only not a defect, but in fact a defining feature, the quality that makes his music remarkable, much as the opposite is true with Beethoven.

Busoni referred to music as “sonorous air,” in which case one could call Beethoven’s music sonorous idealism. We sense in his music not only what he feels, but what he wishes he felt - not just his world (and ours), but the world he wished he lived in. Mozart, to put it mildly, is not like this. The greatest ever composer of opera, Mozart’s music is dramatic simply because life is dramatic. His music changes character and mood with such astonishing speed and frequency because that is how people behave. Nothing in Mozart’s brief biography suggests a particularly happy life, but the subject of his music is very definitely things as they are - not as they might be.

For the first seven bars of this concerto’s slow movement - an aria for the piano which could have just as easily been for the Countess instead - the emotional soundscape of the music is clear: wistful and poignant, but simultaneously noble, and very, very proud. In bar eight, however, comes a question which is asked with some urgency. When it is reiterated, two bars later, the question is asked in a voice far more stricken. By now, the defining characteristics of the opening of themovement - which occurred just seconds earlier - have vanished. The music has gone from major to minor, and more important, the nostalgia has been replaced with a sadness which is unmistakably raw.

And then, five bars later, after a harmonic sequence astonishing enough to give the lie to those who say that Mozart was not inventive, we are back in F Major, and the pain - which briefly seemed to be all-encompassing - morphs again, this time into something far closer to resignation. Not acceptance, perhaps, but the understanding that life must go on. And so it does: everything just described takes approximately one minute to play, and occurs prior to the first entrance of the piano! This is, thus, stage-setting, in a sense, and yet a whole emotional universe has already been revealed. In the same amount of time, Beethoven might have restricted us to one chord…

It was a very happy hiatus from Beethoven for me. While it might have been a rude shock, it instead was very wonderful to be reminded just how diverse is the music that I love. Now it’s back to Beethoven; despite his immense and immensely powerful personality, this time I’m reserving a corner of the room for myself. And for Mozart.