Just for you to understand what I am talking about if you don’t, I let you watch the 2 videos I chose to illustrate today’s topic. I had to choose these 2 pianists of course : THE showman versus THE ascetic. Keep in mind that the point is not to compare interpretations but to analyze two very different styles and their aesthetical implications in a non-judgmental manner.

Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli, Debussy: les collines d'Anacapri

Lang Lang, Debussy: les collines d'Anacapri

Something really weird happened while I was watching all these Lang Lang’s videos: I was so fascinated by his gestures and faces that I forgot there was something to listen to. In fact I focused on visual aspects of his playing, so I had to hide the video to really listen to his interpretation. So, back to the video: he is moving a lot and my old man would definitely appreciate this, seeing him as a “really passionate pianist”. But what I see is that Lang Lang is drawing attention of the audience on himself and not on the music he plays. He seems to show off his bright technique as much as he can even in this prelude.

With Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli we’re in an other world. Nothing superfluous with him, but what a sound, what a subtle interpretation : nothing more than the music needs. In this video, nothing to see, and I was so focused on the sound that I got kind of hypnotized : I had my eyes wide opened but I was not watching anything, just listening to him. If you know a little about Michelangeli, you certainly know this economy of gesture and visual sobriety was something he had worked on and thought about. In fact, he wanted to disappear behind the music he was playing. That’s why he used to politely bow from behind the piano.

As it should be obvious by now, visual aspects of piano playing have a huge impact on the listener, but can also define how the performer defines himself aesthetically speaking. In both cases, the pianist’s body expresses his approach of piano playing and music: one in the role of the spectacular star, one in the role of the craftsman. I won’t go further in this explanation, you got the picture which could be summed up by this new idiom: show me how you play, I’ll tell you what kind of musician you are.

I hear you now loudly complaining “But what’s his point?”. My point is that the old man’s question was much deeper than he thought. In fact he asked me to modify visual aspects of my playing, and thus to re-define who I am as a performer.

I feel much closer to Michelangeli than Lang. I am a craftsman: music comes first. No need to show off, no need to draw attention on me while on stage. Move to produce the sound, nothing more. You don’t need more to serve the composer and his music. And what is more important for a musician than this? So, no, I won’t move a little more, Sir. Music is the art of sound and silence, and I deeply believe music is self-sufficient to express emotions. If sound and silence are not enough to tell others our musical emotion, something may be wrong in our playing or in our understanding of what music truly is.

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Oh, I forgot to tell you the most important : what I was wearing that day. I was wearing a navy blue suit and a blue shirt without a tie. No extravaganza, classic outfit I wear almost every day. So what should a pianist look like? I really don’t know. Obviously I didn’t wear what this guy expected me to wear, I should have looked a bit more “artist”. Well, we’re going back to the endless discussion: what is a musician supposed to look like?

Some musicians are really over-thinking what they are wearing on stage : once I saw a pianist changing her dress three times during a recital. I can totally remind this fact about her and can clearly remember the sparkling dresses even after a few years, but I completely forgot the most important : her name, the works she played and how she played. Funny isn’t it? Not funny at all. Sad, very sad. She just drew my attention on something else than what I was supposed to focus on. She just made me feel clothing more important than music, she just turned a piano recital into a fashion show. Let’s take a big shortcut here : she thought she was more important to the recital than the music itself. You now may understand why it is best to wear a sober outfit on stage.

I don’t think the musician should wear clothes just to show he is a musician. I am a musician, do I need to draw attention of everyone on me? I’m not playing the piano to get famous or be the center of attention of the room I’m standing in, I’m playing the piano because I love music and think music can help people in their daily life. This is not about me, this is about music and audience. I’m not the kind of interpreter who wants to be a star, I’m the kind of interpreter who withdraws behind the works and composers trying to serve them as much as I can. In fact, my first aim is to be honest : honest with me, honest with the audience, honest with music. And to be honest with me, I need to wear the clothes I want to and not act like a certain image of the musician. I know it sounds a bit idealistic in today’s world but that’s just who I am.

No, I won’t dress up like an artist because I don’t need to look like an artist : I am an artist. No matter what marketers or people say, I don’t need a uniform to (make) feel I am a pianist, and after all, the most important is the music played, not the guy who plays it. And it should stay like this.

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Some of us noticed our traditional audience was getting older over the years, and got scared of a possible end of our art, because of a lack of audience. We all know there’s a lot of grey hair in our audience, and that’s not a new trend. The lack of audience is, from my point of view, an irrational fear : Yes our audience is in average old, but the older part of our audience renews itself. I know a lot of people who never liked classical music before their fifties and are now going at least once a week to a concert, reading magazines about classical music, or buying recordings.

Content should always be more important than form. This may sound idealistic in our society, but I strongly believe in the supremacy of content and strangely when talking about reaching a new audience, people are obsessed with the form as if it was the only thing we could change.

When attending a classical contemporary music concert (what an oxymoron!), the first thing you notice is the big difference in the audience composition : contemporary music attracts much more younger people. Is there two different audiences for classical music? A classical contemporary one and a classical “traditional” one? In fact there are more than two : with the development of specialized baroque ensembles was born a classical baroque audience too, and I’m sure we could find other examples. What if the classical music audience was not declining but just splitting into different trends? Have a look at concert programs from the first half of the XXth century and you might be surprised how they were different from now : much more contemporary music and baroque music for the traditional orchestras for example.

Nowadays, segmentation is going too far : You can’t play baroque pieces in a baroque festival because you don’t play on a harpsichord, you can’t play in a contemporary music festival because of the 10 minutes of Scriabin in your program, you can’t play in a traditional festival because of your Gubaidulina piece. As a musician, I don’t really understand this : music is a slow evolution and each composer has his roots in older music and there is not such thing as a frontier between baroque, classical, romantic, impressionistic, contemporary…. music. Why would we divide the music world ? Why would we compartmentalize this fabulous evolution? Moreover, this is leading to elitist content, frightening our potential new audience.

Sure, reaching new markets is important, but I don’t think classical music is going mainstream any time soon. Educational programs are absolutely great for this if well done. But before reaching new markets, couldn’t we take care of existing ones? Over the years I learned something important : segmenting a market as tiny as the classical music is a bad idea. We, actors of the classical music business, split our audience in different specialized (and elitist?) audiences without thinking of the future and we now have to reunify the segments. This is not a matter of form, but a matter of content.

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To sum up, Sandow talks about two concerts he heard in Washington: Janine Jansen playing the Sibelius concerto with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam and one of the ECCO (East Coast Chamber Orchestra). Both took place at the Kennedy Center.

According to him, both concerts were “dismaying”. Too much technical focus (???) and not enough or an overflow of emotion respectively for ECCO and the violinist. He therefore decreed that classical performances need to be reinvigorated [...] because there’s something somewhat impersonal about them.

Besides the fact that Sandow based his article on two isolated concerts to define basic assumptions extended to all interpreters, he did not mention an essential parameter: The search for emotional truth and accurate emotion is a lifetime work for an interpreter. Criticized interpreters are relatively young and need time to develop their skills towards perfection. But their potential is enormous, and with time they will reach a certain perfection.

Deviating slightly from the discussion, I would like to draw your attention on an underlying problem. Today the world is going faster and faster, are we still able to wait for an artistic maturity that requires time to fully develop? Are we still able to judge an artist as “still evolving” and not as a finished product once he is on stage? I pose the question without being able to answer it…

Sandow raises an important point in his article: Interpreter’s focus on technical perfection of performances. But isn’t it finally healthy? I mean, by the hope of a technically perfect performance, we express our need to free ourselves from technical requirements to better express our artistic soul. Technical freedom is then a first step towards freedom of expression. I think this focus, sometimes excessive, is just a necessary transition to mastery for the young performer. This focus on the technical side of things surely evolves towards artistic perfection in its time.

It is not fair to ignore external factors that may have influenced the interpretation during these concerts. Were they tired? Did the acoustics of the hall suggest them to adjust their interpretation? Did Jansen find that the hall was sounding flat and decided, to compensate, to overplay things that evening?

To conclude, I do not think that classical music is in need of a rebirth. We should stop thinking of performers like machines able to play perfectly every evening. Each concert is an adventure having good and bad sides. The quality of an interpretation depends on so many parameters not related to the musician that sometimes the conditions are not met and don’t lead to an optimal performance. But more importantly, being an interpreter is a lifetime training: we must let time takes its course and never forget that we are in a context of constant evolution towards a delicate balance.

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At the start of this year, I tried to think about the directions my writings could take for 2010. It is thus self-evident that this blog will still be about piano and music, but I would like to give a new impetus and provide more didactic content. Let’s see what will 2010 be like.

First, I would like to introduce you to the world of music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and to convey my passion for contemporary works. Through a series of articles dealing with musical trends, composers themselves and their works, I would like to draw your attention to their logic and aesthetic. To some it may seem pretentious but I will humbly try to convert the recalcitrant and improve the knowledge of others.

At the same time, I will focus on the “problem” of interpretation and we will try to respond together to some of its inherent problematics. Which tools for the interpretation? How to make a coherent interpretation? A few questions among many others that I will try to answer from my, admittedly personal perspective.

I hope this menu will be suitable for everyone, and please also feel free to make your own proposals!

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When I have started listening to a lot of records, I did not know at all or knew very little about the repertoire for piano. So I primarily listened to pianists. Thanks to them, I rapidly gained knowledge of the repertoire of my instrument and started to become interested in the rest. I have also acquired a critical ear on these interpretations, trying to understand why I disliked such-and-such recording. They sometimes brought me new ideas and opened my musical world.

The downside is that all these interpretations have influenced my ear. While some were good catalysts, many others prevented me from developing my own sound imagination, putting in my head already-thought sounds. Instead of searching, I have long used the “all ready” solutions offered by the CD. Here is the problem though: I have long believed that knowing by heart a recording means knowing the work perfectly. Rather than trying to learn from the work and draw an interpretation, I used to try to reproduce with more or less success what I already heard without really understanding the ins and outs. Without realizing it, I was standardizing my play and loosing my imagination.

Of course, it is necessary to listen to interpretations, if only for the benefits I have mentioned, but in my approach I lacked hindsight: I was like a painter contemplating a Velasquez and wanting to reproduce the same thing. Today, I have evolved enough to search for my own style and understand that even if Velasquez fascinates me, I must not copy Velasquez, but rather try to find what makes his strength.

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• Biography  

© Romain Guy

After a long debate with a student about musical analysis, I needed to write a few lines on the topic. Why is musical analysis so helpful for musicians? Why do we often deny its necessity? Musical analysis: a musical strategy, I said, because it allows me to draw up a plan for each piece, each concert.

Going on stage without a strategy is really dangerous. As well as a good technician, a pianist has to be a good strategist. Giving the final blow, taking the audience from the rear, we have to think about it, and analysis helps us to carry out this important work. Where is the climax, how this piece can be divided, we do not leave this to chance, our sound strategy depends on it. We have to do this using various scale levels: a movement, a work, a program and even sometimes a whole season or career. In piano playing, there is in fact a very little space for inspiration, I know this can be a deception for some of you, but understand that this little space plays a really important role at another level.

One very often hears of lack in cohesion. Musical analysis allows us to find out how a composer builds his work, and to understand the logic integrating the different movements in a whole called his work, to finally convey this logical system to the listener.

A composer thinks in terms of structures and musical forms (among others) to give a spine to his work. The interpreter has to understand it in order to build a coherent musical composition, and has to convey to the audience the cleverness of the structure.

And you, how does analysis help you?

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I would like to begin with a quote from Maurizio Pollini: “People who go to concerts are occupied during the day with completely different things than music. It is therefore not for them to decide what one plays or not”.

Is it necessary to play what the audience wants to hear? No, it is not. Building a program is an art and a science. A program, by letting the “law of the market” operate, looks more like a medley of classical music endless hits than a program which has been coherently drawn up.

To attract a new audience, nowadays, there are crossover concerts, combining different styles within the same concert. Let’s take, for example, a great singer and make her/him sing Haendel, Fauré with some arrangements of Norah Jones or The Beatles in between. This is quite simply stupid: you might as well be asking your plumber to fix the roof. As classical musicians, we are not trained for this and are only able to give ridiculous or pompous versions of these music genres.

Instead of making us perform what we are not able to do, or lobotomize our programs, it would be interesting to notice that the programming of contemporary works is always a success with audiences which are not much or not at all used to classical concerts.

Could “broadening the audience” and “updating the programming” rhyme? Should we not, at last, for the greatest pleasure of all, commonly and durably combine Chopin with Boulez, Beethoven with Murail? The music of our times has often proved that it could attract young audiences!

There is a French idiom saying “One is only old in one’s mind”. Programming does not need a facelift, but it is necessary to stop making it voluntarily old. Classical music is alive and its forces are intact, but as a result of living too much in the past, it now seems old and moribund. It’s up to us, interpreters, to follow our artistic path and to refuse to be confined, without trying to make programming a tool to reach an ephemeral glory.

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I will devote some posts to review the attempts at a makeover administered to our old friend. My objective: to show you that all this is useless and does more harm than good. Today, in this first part, I will focus on the dress code issue.

The concert ritual is often considered as being too strict, notably concerning the dress code. The public must feel comfortable, I agree with it, but one should not forget what clothing as a social code represents.

Imagine one moment you are in the artist’s shoes. You enter the stage and find the concert hall with most of the spectators wearing torn jeans, jogging suits and mini-skirts. Horreur! It would certainly make you wonder what’s happening here and why are you wearing a tuxedo. We could reverse the roles: you are in the audience and the artist enters the stage in a sloppy dress, almost in pajamas, what would be your reaction? And yes, you cannot deny it, you would be shocked (there has been precedents).

Indeed, as a pianist, I like people dressed “like penguins”. It is not bourgeois folklore, but simply a mark of respect to the artist. One cannot either deny the aesthetic side: a well-dressed public is much nicer from the stage.

The dress, be it the artist or the public, is a way to communicate. Both communicate their mutual respect to each other through the sartorial code. When one knows how easy it is to slip into a dress or a suit, it would be a shame not to do so.

In the next episode of Is it necessary to give Classical Music a facelift? We will talk about programming. See you soon!

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For some years now, I am “sailing” according to programs and works I am asked to play. But what about me? I dream of complete works, to take my time to get to fully know a composer, and to do a real aesthetic work on his oeuvre.

It is not easy at all, but worth it! For a long time now, I feel especially close to French music and even closer to Maurice Ravel‘s one. Ravel has been recorded many times, played many times, and magnificently performed; all of this makes my task much more strenuous, but I really feel I can bring a fresh look at it, or at least, I feel I can express myself the best through Maurice Ravel.

I have thus decided to listen to myself, to my colleagues too, who pushed me to do it. So, in accordance with my agent, I took the decision to carry out this exciting project, which will include not only the recording of the work for piano solo, but also the two concertos and the chamber music with piano.

Through this blog, I will keep you updated on the progress of this adventure and on my work on Ravel.

A little question however: is there a book about Maurice Ravel you liked and would recommend reading?

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