In the second of a series of guest blog posts, pianist Jonathan Biss
explains how all the pieces of the program for his January
21 solo recital debut fit together.
Having written
about the preparation I've been doing on this program, I thought
I'd go back further and address how the program was put together in the
first place. As I said in the earlier
video, haltingly and with more hand-gesturing than was absolutely
necessary, one of the pleasures of playing recitals is that I am
entirely responsible for planning the program, and thus spend a lot of
time thinking about what the experience of hearing it from start to
finish will be like. I always find this process fascinating. One of the
magical things about music is the way in which it can create an
atmosphere so powerful the listener's body chemistry is altered. And so,
the way one hears a piece of music is very much influenced by what one
has just heard. In short, context is everything!
Given how special this concert is to me, I spent even more time and
energy than usual tossing this question around, imagining different
combinations of pieces, thinking about atmosphere in the air at
Carnegie, and how various pieces would feel emerging out of the silence
there. (Every hall has its own unique silence—an ineffable feeling which
has something to do with a mass of people collectively NOT making
noise, but also something very specific to do with the space itself. I
wouldn't even try to describe what it is in Carnegie, but the ghosts of a
century's worth of great musicians who all played there certainly have
something to do with it.)
My decision to begin the program with Janáček's wonderful Sonata had a
lot to do with my feeling that it could be a very powerful way to
"break" that opening silence. We have a special relationship, the
Janáček Sonata and I. (At least, I have a special relationship with it; I
can't vouch for how it feels about me.) I learned it when I was 18. I
had played the Violin Sonata, and knew and loved much of the chamber
music and the operas, but at the point at which I got a volume
containing his piano music out of the library, I had never heard a note
of it. (Thus, the Sonata became the first work I ever played without
having first heard someone else play it—that'll make you feel
proprietary towards a piece!) And as I first played through the piece, I
was frankly stunned at its power—the raw, yet in no way navel-gazing,
emotion. This surely has something to do with the event which inspired
it—the murder of Czech worker by the occupying army—but in the end, what
is so striking to me about the Sonata is the same thing which strikes
me about all of Janáček's's music: in the profoundest sense of the word,
he has a voice—in ear for sound, for rhythm, for affect, which makes
his music absolutely distinctive. And for me, he has become one of the
voices of the 20th century which I cannot imagine living without.
And because Janáček's is a now classic voice of the past century, I
think his music makes a perfect "preparation" for the music of Bernard
Rands who, a century later, is writing music no less distinctive. Around
the time I found out that I'd be giving this recital, I had been
offered the opportunity to commission a composer of my choice (my thanks
to Music Accord for that!), and I almost immediately arrived at Mr
Rands. I had known his symphonic and chamber works for years, and his
music has two qualities in particular which I am in awe of. First, he
manages to combine a unique musical personality with a deep sense of
rootedness in the past—in very different ways, influences as various as
Schumann (witness the title of the third piece, "Arabesque"), Debussy
(the colors!!), and Scriabin (a kind of whirling intensity) make
themselves noticed, and yet, much as is the case with Janáček's, I'd
never mistake a note of Bernard's music as being by anyone else. Second,
he has something which goes beyond craft—he has an extraordinary ear.
There are chords in the second movement of this piece, in particular,
which I still can't quite believe, even though I've already played it a
handful of times. What it must be to have the ability to imagine such
things...
That said, programming a commissioned work does present a special
problem: as the piece does not yet exist, you can't know what it will be
like! (Well, maybe that's not entirely true—after all, it was my deep
appreciation for Bernard's music which led me to commission him, so I
was familiar with the language. But the more creative the composer, the
wider the range of possible outcomes, so there was a substantial unknown
element in play here.) And given that the piece was only finished
months ago, waiting for the final product and planning the program
around it was obviously not an option. I did not, however, want Bernard
to feel that his piece was supposed to fit into a puzzle that was
completed.
So in this case, I took what seemed like the middle path. I told
Bernard what else would be on the program, and then asked him to put it
out of his mind. My hope was that he would write the piece that he felt
compelled to write, but that in some entirely subconscious way, the
voices of Beethoven, Schumann and Janáček's might nudge the piece in one
direction or another. (Did they? Probably impossible to definitively
say. What I can say is that in the performances I've given thus far, the
program has had a wonderful quality of confrontation, with the Rands
snapping the listener out of the state the Janáček's inspired, and
eventually preparing the atmosphere of super-intensity that the
Beethoven lives in.)
So if you are putting together a program which includes a piece you
don't yet know, how do you decide what should follow it? While this is
always a bit of a risk, my gut is that Beethoven will always be the best
answer. Why? Because all of us, we musicians who have come after him,
are Beethoven's children. For composers and performers alike, trying to
understand him and coming to terms with his sometimes overwhelming
personality is a major part of one's development as a musician. And
thus, all composers, simply through the act of writing, are in a
dialogue with Beethoven.
My motivation for programming the "Appassionata" was also personal,
though. Because this concert feels like a milestone, I wanted to include
pieces which similarly represented milestones in my life; this sonata
is the first piano work that I loved so much, I was desperate to play
it. I learned it when I was 13, and I can only imagine what I must have
done to it—all I can remember was that it seemed awfully hard!—but
playing it didn't feel like a choice; I needed to play it. I've
performed the piece many, many times in the past (gulp) 17
years—possibly more than any other piece of music—and I certainly hope
my playing of it has matured. But that quality of desperate intensity
which attracted me to it so powerfully all those years ago has grown no
less seductive. Great music can evoke just about any imaginable feeling;
in the "Appasionata", it is the feeling that the world is coming to an
end.
Several people who have heard this program in the last couple of
weeks have asked me if there is some programmatic link between the
Beethoven and the Schumann Fantasy, which closes the program. The answer
is that there isn't—the only link is that I love both of them deeply.
But aside from that love, the reason I put them on this program
together, on either side of the intermission, is that they both have
this quality of heightened emotion, yet this is achieved in two totally
different ways. (In the end, that's always the key to making a good
program: interesting similarities and interesting differences.) While
the "Appassionata" is, above all, relentless—not one note strays from
the work's central argument, and its plunge toward its inevitable
conclusion—the Schumann Fantasy expands, contracts, winds, digresses (so
beautifully!!!!), and finds its way to its conclusion only through
sheer exhaustion. Schumann conceived the piece as a tribute to
Beethoven, but what it ends up displaying, is how dazzlingly individual
he was.
Schumann quotes Schlegel on the first page of the Fantasy, saying
that the piece is for "those who secretly listen", and what is so
magnificent and so improbable about this work is the way it combines the
intimacy that statement implies with a grandeur which runs through the
whole work. And this, too, has often struck me as the glory of Carnegie
Hall. While it is enormous, imposing, and wondrous-looking, it somehow
allows one to feel purely—intimately—connected to the music; it is a
place which rewards those who secretly listen. To have the chance to
play this piece, which I truly love more than I can express, in this
hall—the thought takes my breath away.
—Jonathan Biss