Great Contemporary Pianists Speak For Themselves
Elyse Mach
« « « « «This book would ordinarily follow a reading of
Great Pianists on Piano Playing by James Francis Cooke, also available from Dover, which I reviewed here last year. For one thing this is a far more contemporary book than Cooke's and the pianists interviewed are a mix of some of the older greats with some of the newer talents. Conspicuously missing but far from forgotten is Arthur Rubinstein. He is remembered largely through his protege, Janina Fialkowska.The portraits of some of the pianists one will actually meet inside are from top left to bottom right, Vladimir Horowitz, Claudio Arrau, Andre Watts, Alicia de Larrocha, Glenn Gould, Emil Gilells, Rosalyn Tureck and Jorge Bolet. Each has quite different stories to tell of how they came to be concert pianists. In this book, one will hear one of the few instances where a pianist goes into some depth concerning pianos themselves;
It is true that you transport your own piano for the concerts you play?
"Usually, yes. It's a twenty-year-old Steinway which is shipped to each city while I'm on tour. I like to use my own piano for concerts. All pianos are more or less good, but they need constant care and don't often receive it. At least every month or two they should be tuned and voiced. If this isn't done, within a year's time the piano will run down like a human being who neglects his health. Pianos change their timbre and tone with the weather, the atmospheric conditions, or movement. When they come from the factory, they are like a new car. You can't drive them at top speed. There's even a difference in pianos from different areas. For instance the German Steinway differs from the American Steinway. And you should never mix them. The German wood cannot tolerate much change in the climate, so it starts to lose its voicing. European felt is different, too. A piano has some eleven thousand parts and, if one of those goes awry, then the piano doesn't function right. A piano is very vulnerable. Generally winters are too dry and summers too wet. I have my piano tuned once a month when I am at home, whether I play it or not. I've even had a truck with two pianos on it following me. One of the pianos was my own for a recital, the other the new Steinway for the performance of the Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto which I played for my fiftieth-anniversary celebrations in 1978. I chose this particular work for sentimental reasons. Rachmaninoff was a great friend of mine."
Vladimir Horowitz, p 121
One will also read Lili Kraus's story of her internment in Indonesia as a prisoner of war by the Japanese, read Glenn Gould's eccentric views concerning his own pianistic career, read Rosalyn Tureck's views on making a specialty of playing Bach, read the contrasting personal views of people such as Alfred Bredel, Byron Janis and Paul Badura-Skoda who has actually made a hobby out of restoring old pianos.
But above all, this is a book that anyone contemplating a serious career as a concert pianist should read. It should be a must read for all serious teachers and students as well. It is always best to go into any field of endeavor with one's eyes as well as one's ears open. This is especially true of one making a career of the profession of any of the performing fine arts.
As anyone who has bothered to look around them well knows, the contemporary situation for the concert pianist is one that offers more peril and simultaneously more opportunity. The opportunity exists in the form of new venues in hitherto formerly unthinkable places; mid-sized and larger towns and cities in Asia, South America and Africa where a concert pianist playing a recital of classical music is in most cases rare and atypical. The peril in some sense has always existed but has not been helped by developments following World War II. There is much more competition for an ever shrinking audience for classical music. In real numbers the number of people actually interested in this music has probably grown in numbers, but they are scattered over more area making travel a consistent problem for the concert artist.
There are also many ways in which the actual lifestyles of a working concert pianist are delineated. These are incredibly busy people who must dedicate themselves so thoroughly to their art that they mostly have no time left for anything else. A few of them have families, but surprisingly few.
This book also brought to my attention a few pianists I had never heard of before, whose work I shall try and find; Stephen Hough and Zoltan Kocsis, Janina Fialkowska and Cecile Ousset.
This is one of the books that belongs on the shelves of every serious pianist, piano teacher or student, for encouragement, for role models, for professional and personal reflection. You will probably want to turn to it many times in the future when or if you encounter something similar in your own life. This book is a must read.
