Notes From a Curious Listener

I hope you had a Happy Holiday. Mine was terrific. But now I'm looking forward to the new year and the upcoming concerts in our Winter Season. I looked up Joyce Yang and the Miró String Quartet (more on Miró next week), performing on Saturday, Jan. 22. Check out this video by Ms. Yang. It provided me with insight into how she developed into a pianist worthy of playing on our stage. (We are quite picky, you know!) First, her Aunt taught her to love the piano and view it as something to enjoy. Next, an instructor taught her to remain true to the composer but also put herself into the music. How does one put oneself into the music when one strokes the piano key? I don't know, but apparently she does. Finally, she had a teacher that made her play a few measures of music over and over for two hours straight. It could be horrible, but she loved it. They explored all of the possible ways to play that brief passage. This exercise taught Ms. Yang many possible styles of playing, which she now draws upon. In fact, she uses this technique - playing each passage over and over to discover all of its possibilities - on each of the pieces that she plays. That must be why the Chicago Tribune called her, "brilliant".

Think that's all it takes to be a world-famous classical pianist? I'll find out later these week when I interview Joyce Yang.

Curious Listener: Rob Bookstein wrote a pithy email describing Melvyn Tan's concert to his friend and La Jolla Music Society Board member, Katherine Kennedy. It morphed into this post. Thank you, Rob!

Rob Bookstein: I decided to go to the Dec. 10th concert mostly because of Sonata No. 3. I think this is one of the most incredible piano pieces ever written. It is viciously difficult, and you don't hear it often. Afterwards I checked iTunes and realized I didn't have a recording there; nor did I have one on a CD. But I did remember owning two different vinyl recordings dating from some 30 years ago. I hadn't played a record in many years; an old 1990s era black plastic component audio system, with a turntable, a CD player, a dubbing cassette tape deck (!) and a "graphic equalizer", has been an ignored, dust-catching relic for almost a decade. The speakers were gone, so I patched the output into a small tabletop CD player. I played both versions, and preferred the one dating from 1962 by a Polish pianist named Malcuzynski. The flip side (I almost forgot that records had two sides) was Sonata No. 2. I used to be able to play the first movement myself, but it is so distant that it might as well have been done by a different person. The third movement is the Funeral March, which is quite easy.

Melvyn Tan was technically spectacular and engaging, and of course I loved hearing the piece, but I realized why he sounded different than others: he deliberately exposed all the technical nuts and bolts of the music rather than keeping them cloaked inside a musical surface or skin... sort of like the Pompidou Center in Paris with all the A/C ductwork on the outside. I guess I like the surfaced method better. But the concert was still great and the 3rd Sonata was the perfect piece to end Chopin's bicentennial year.

Rob's short bio:
Rob Bookstein spent his early childhood and formative years learning classical piano and building motorized toy vehicles. Eventually reason prevailed and he trained in biological sciences and medicine. He has worked in cancer genetics research for most of the last 24 years and is currently advising on biotechnology venture investment with Biogen Idec in San Diego.

Did you know that only a handful, 15 - 50, pianists in the world play Bach well? Who says? Well, since we don't want to get anyone into trouble, let's just say it is an anonymous source that I tend to agree with. For me, the same is true for violinists. Their Bach playing bores me. I greatly prefer Beethoven. I always assumed it was the composition; but, I have a new theory after hearing Midori play Bach last Friday. Perhaps I simply have not heard Bach played very well in the past. Or, perhaps I simply prefer Midori's interpretation which SanDiego.com's Kenneth Herman called, "sumptuous and immaculate". For me, it was delicate and beautiful. My head stopped thinking and my heart soared, just as it does during Beethoven. Usually, instead of soaring during a Bach performance, my mind settles in and thinks through a problem or two; and the music moves into the background. I can't help it. My mind works when my heart isn't soaring.

Why is Bach so difficult to play well?

Johann Sebastian Bach is technically challenging, yes; but, also, his compositions require uncommon sensitivity to be able to play so many notes together without making them sound like scales. Forcing whole audiences to listen to tiresome exercises for the fingers is the pitfall of Bach. Check out this video to hear Bach's Piano Concerto 1 in D Minor played by Glenn Gould, Canadian pianist, considered one of the best interpreters of Bach to ever live. I do enjoy this interpretation of Bach!

I planned ahead and got tickets to the Staatskapelle Berlin - the Berlin opera orchestra normally directed by Daniel Barenboim - on Wednesday, November 25th, during a trip to Germany to visit relatives. What an amazing experience!

It was 26.6F (-3C) which doesn't seem so cold to my Chicago mindset, but felt awful at the time. We were able to ignore the cold by beginning the evening outside the concert hall at the best Christmas market in Berlin. It had lovely white tents decorated with small green evergreen trees and twinkling white lights. The lentil soup I purchased at one of the stalls also helped with the cold. Thirty minutes quickly passed, and it was time to enter the Konzerthaus Berlin. We soon realized that our enthusiastic exhortations to our friends to, "Go see the new Disney Hall in Los Angeles," needed to be dampened. The Konzerthaus is an absolutely stunning hall with gold gilded ornamentation, plush red velvet seats, and lovely statues throughout. It exudes taste, not excess.

The concert began with two pieces from Charles Ives, who some consider to be one of the most influential American composers of all time. For the first piece, the flutes were standing in a balcony overlooking the stage to highlight their presence. The solo trumpeter stood on a smaller platform even higher up providing a dramatic effect. The piece, "The Unanswered Question", was as the title implies - haunting and beautiful. It had sections where the first violinist stood and continued conducting the violins so that the "real" conductor, Michael Gielen, could focus on cueing other instruments playing in completely different time. Amazingly, the piece works! The same dual conducting occurred in the next Ives piece as well.