In the third of a series of guest blog posts, pianist Jonathan Biss
reveals that, while his solo recital debut in the "big hall" takes place
on January
21, his debut on the great stage happened earlier. Much, much
earlier.
Over the last few weeks, I've been asked the question "Why is playing
a recital in Carnegie Hall special?" many times, by friends and by
journalists, and each time my first instinct, so far successfully
repressed, has been to respond (in the Jewish manner) with another
question: "Isn't it obvious?"
But if lightning doesn't strike twice, it certainly doesn't strike
more than twice, and so I am by now forced to acknowledge the
possibility that it might not be obvious after all. And so, without
falling back on the usual (accurate) platitudes about the hall's beauty,
grandeur, and acoustics, I'm going to attempt to answer the question in
as personal a manner as possible.
I've probably told this story one too many times, but if ever there
were a moment for it, this is it: my Carnegie Hall debut, as it were,
took place approximately five months before my birth, when my mother
played there early in 1980. It was as Lorin Maazel's soloist in the A
Major Mozart Violin Concerto, with the Cleveland Orchestra—distinguished
circumstances for a debut. (26 years later, when I played the A Major
Piano Concerto, K. 488, with Mr. Maazel, I asked him how it compared.)
My next appearance in the hall, approximately as noteworthy as my
first, was when I was seven years my old, and my mother was giving a
recital. My family lived in Indiana at the time, but we all flew in for
the concert, and I walked on stage during the rehearsal—apparently at my
own insistence. My memory of that day contains no specific
recollections, but rather a hazy but definite feeling of awe. Both from
the stage and, later in the day, from the audience, the place felt not
only enormous, but somehow magical. I was seven, and from Indiana, and
Manhattan seemed noisy and overwhelming, and that made the kind of
serenity which existed inside all the more eerie and impressive.
Then I went back to Indiana. As I grew up, and a life in music seemed
more and more to be an inevitability for me, Carnegie Hall came to
represent something—not a holy grail, that's too, well, holy—but a kind
of home for music, a place where its loftiness and its simplest beauties
could co-exist, a place where, in spite of the size and the
impressiveness of the structure and the people who played in it, music
was to be loved rather than admired.
As anyone who has ever dreamed knows, this sort of internal building
of distant monuments is a very easy way to be disappointed, and I
remember distinctly that on my next visit to Carnegie, ten years later, I
felt ready to have the bubble burst. But while the hall did seem a
little less shockingly huge, it was in no meaningful way diminished. I
remember that concert very well—it was Martha Argerich playing
Prokofieff's 1st and 3rd concerti—and while she was, of course, amazing,
when I stood outside the hall to buy scalped tickets for the next day's
sold-out concert, it was as much out of a desire to go back in there as
to hear her a second time.
The first time I played at Carnegie Hall was at the tail end of 1999,
with the New York String Orchestra and Jaime Laredo. As the date
approached, I was almost giddy with anticipation and, I'm sure it's no
surprise to hear, nerves. How would I handle the sensation of being on
that stage which I'd looked at from a distance so often but hadn't
actually been on in 13 years? (And I didn't exactly play much on that
occasion—one note, according to my parents' more reliable memories.)
But in the concert, something curious happened—a phenomenon I've
experienced the many times I've been blessed to play there since—I felt
almost serene, and as able to enjoy the beauty of the sound in the
moment as I've ever been able to anywhere. No one who plays at Carnegie
could fail to feel a sense of occasion, and yet being on that stage
feels not just inspiring, but somehow comforting.
More than architecture or acoustics, I think a person's relationship
with a hall is defined by the concerts he or she hears there, and it's
probably significant that at Carnegie, I've heard not only many
performers whom I know as legends, but numerous friends, colleagues, and
probably most significantly of all, mentors. I've been in the hall for a
handful of recitals each by Mitsuko Uchida and Richard Goode, both of
whom I've grown to know well through many summers at Marlboro; when I
think of Carnegie, a bit of Mitsuko's unflinching integrity and
Richard's endless musical generosity are part of the thought. And I was
in the hall when Leon Fleisher, my revered teacher, gave his first
two-handed recital there in many decades; I was one of, I believe, over a
hundred pianists sitting in the balconies in tears, not because his
story is so moving, but because we had never heard Schubert played with
so much wisdom or feeling between the notes - with so much rightness.
His Schubert, and his sound—which both pierces the heart and shines like
the sun (or moon, or stars, depending on the moment)—is part of my
Carnegie Hall as well.
So that, more or less, is why playing a recital in Carnegie Hall is
special. But writing this is an excellent reminder that, really, every
visit to the hall is special. Not that I really needed a reminder. Just
last week, I went to the hall to hear the New York String Orchestra with
Jaime Laredo—the same institution (if not the same players) with whom I
made my (credited) hall debut eleven years ago. I walked into the
building, and immediately noticed that I was gazing, wide-eyed, at
everything—much like a seven-year-old. I picked up my ticket, walked up
the stairs, and took my seat. I then looked out onto the stage, at all
of those musicians, most of them playing there for the first time, and
wondered if they felt the same way about being there as I did eleven
years ago, and still do. Jaime walked on stage, the concert began, and I
tried to remember to breathe.
—Jonathan Biss