Chopin at Carnegie Hall

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2005 by Dhuga, U S

Chopin at Carnegie Hall

RARELY TODAY DOES ONE ATTEND, in New York, a piano recital at which Chopin is not on the program. More rarely still does one hear, outside of Europe, Chopin played on a piano other than a Steinway. The present music chronicle is less chronologically expansive than my previous essays, focussing instead on three excellent piano recitals held this autumn at Carnegie Hall. Dovetailing with my reviews of Carnegie Hall's piano recitals, I shall conclude by discussing a broader cultural problem which has received, as far as my eyes can see, no attention from American music critics-viz., what has become Steinway's deplorable monopolization of certain American concert venues (and record labels). For a country which prides itself on cultural and aesthetic diversification, it is appalling that a single artistic medium, as it were-that is, the Steinway-should be the arbiter of pianstic tone, timbre, and temper, to say nothing of the Platonic form of The Piano': for any musical instrument is a pnon a work of art in itself. Recall Odyssey Book 21, verses 409-411, before Odysseus slays each suitor with what seems to them an impossibly taut bow:

Odysseus strung the great bow without effort.

Taking it in his right hand, he tested the string:

And it sounded beautiful, like a swallow's voice.

It sounded beautiful. A violin, a voice, a piano-or, in the Odyssey, the murderous bow as metaphorically musical lyre-is per se instrumentally beautiful. So Andrew Manze, for instance, will have played on a violin made by the school of Amati, circa 1690, with a bow made by Gerhard Landwehr, Heemstede, 1986-such information about certain instruments (particularly string instruments) is readily gleaned from the notes of any program or disc which is worth, so to speak, its weight in gold. Not so for the piano. We shall return to this problem at the end of the chronicle.

Meantime, let us discuss the recitals themselves. As my Summer chronicle ended with Pollini and Schiff in London and Birmingham, respectively, so this one treats of these two virtuosi in New York, as well as the lesser known (if not less talented) Fou Ts'ong, whose seventieth birthday was celebrated by the Foundation for Chinese Performing Arts at Carnegie Hall on the evening of Saturday, October 9. This "Master," as he is known in Shanghai, walked on stage determinedly, like a Londoner hunched forward against a slanting rain; but Fou Ts'ong's head peaked out not from a mackintosh but from an especially high black turtleneck, and his fingers out from black knit mittens, with the result that he appeared incongruously Dickensian.

Fou Ts'ong's reading of Chopin's Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, Op. 35, was most peculiar, yet edifyingly so. Peculiarity is intrinsic to this sonata: Schumann, for one, questioned whether this work could rightly be called a "sonata" if the composer had set therein "four of his most bizarre creations." The opening bars, as Fou Ts'ong handled them, were almost too balanced in tone and time, whereas Chopin here (and usually) requires a lyrical and, as it were, Nocturnal predominance in the right hand, with the left now languishing behind, now plunging ahead, of the melodic line. Fou Ts'ong's left hand tended to grow too heavy: if it was bathos which he sought, it came at the expense of the treble clefs pathos, which ought properly to be illuminated. One heard that night also an over-reliance on the pedal-clarity paid for sonority. In the last movement, however, Fou Ts'ong demonstrated a power which was bewildering given the apparent fragility of his hands, particularly in the rubato-requisiteIy hefty here-in the left, which jolted the listener with its force yet retained its harmonic clarity. I heard not a few gasps of (one imagines) shock from the audience as the pianist moved from near silence in lento to a sudden ferocity in attacca. I do not think I have ever heard this rubato played so heavily before: Fou Ts'ong took an admirable risk, for in approaching the Marche funèbre with such Romantic antitriumphalism, one runs the risk of sounding outright grotesque.

An anecdote of Sviatoslav Richter (have I ever written a music review without mentioning him?) always comes to mind when I hear this movement. When Stalin died, Richter received a telegram informing as much, demanding that the pianist return forthwith (from his tour in Tbilisi) to Moscow. Upon arriving in Moscow, Richter was ushered into the Hall of Columns: assembled there (imagine the scene!) were Oistrakh, Nikolayeva, the Beethoven Quartet, the conductor MelikPashayev, etc., etc. When it was nearly midnight-the appointed hour at which Stalin's body was to be removed from the Hall-the Russian musicians continued playing: Melik-Pashayev recommenced Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony, but, as Richter tells the story, "just as he [sc. the conductor] reached the development section-musically, the most inconvenient moment imaginable-he had to stop, as he was interrupted by the military band playing Chopin's Funeral March. Disgusting! I was furious, but, at the same, I felt little sympathy for 'Sir' [sc. Stalin, of course] and so I thought: 'He's got what he deserves.'"1 To return to Fou Ts'ong, I must say, at the risk of pleonasm, that I was generally pleased to see an unconventional pianist play an unconventional sonata with such studied unconventionality. I am not certainindeed, am doubtful-whether we shall see Fou Ts'ong play again at a major American venue (his management is reticent about his health), and it was a shame indeed that attendance at this performance was so wanting. Those several audience members who carried bouquets of flowers to the stage gave me some consolation for the unfortunate fact that such a great interpreter of Chopin as Fou Ts'ong-he won, in his early twenties, the Chopin Competition in Warsaw-is not so appreciated as certain of his more packaged, promoted, and pandering contemporaries.