Countdown to Planyavsky at MIT (18 days)

Peter Planyavsky with the author (Brookline, March 9, 2004). Seems odd that the Austrian is drinking the chianti and the Italian is drinking the Weizenbier!

In March, 2004, at St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Brookline, MA (where I was then Music Director), I organized "HeillerFest," a week-long festival commemorating the 25th anniversary of the death of the great Anton Heiller. Naturally, a "HeillerFest" would not have been complete with Heiller's star pupil, close friend, and future biographer, Peter Planyavsky. The following is an excerpt from an article that I wrote for the July, 2004, issue of The Diapason. The excerpt describes the opening event, a Choral Evensong which I personally tailored with the sole purpose of showing off Planyavsky's improvisational gifts.

"There are two types of performers: those who emit electricity, intensity, and sometimes neurosis, for whom every piece seems a matter of life or death (Caruso, Horowitz, Heifetz); and those who exude mental and physical health, for whom each pieces feels like the first of many encores (Gigli, Rubinstein, Kreisler). Peter Planyavsky is of the second type. The 75-minute Evensong service seemed short. One felt that another twenty-five improvisations could have fallen from his sleeve without any detectable effort.

"There is something Beethovenian about Planyavsky, a certain Viennese ruggedness. It snowed as we walked down St. Paul Street together, yet he seemed unconcerned about his photocopied prelude and postlude which he held, uncovered, under his arm. "In Vienna I always walk around like this, "he explained. He spent not much more than an hour at the Bozeman organ, an eclectic instrument on which the stop names are on plaques next to the stop knobs. I myself occasionally pull the wrong stop! Not only did he never do that, but he had a total comprehension of the organ's tonal resources, as if he already knew how every combination would or wouldn't work.

"I knew firsthand of Planyavsky's brilliance as a liturgical improviser, and I designed the Evensong around it. No trite compline hymns for him; I chose Aus tiefer Not and O Welt, ich muß dich lassen. And while the prayerbook rubric permits a "moment of silence" before the Mag and the Nunc, respectively, I translated "moment of silence" as "three-to-five-minute organ improvisation." The individual improvisations complemented and contrasted each other: the simple effectiveness of his bicinium on Le Cantique de Siméon; the color and fluid virtuosity of his Magnificat; the rich, impenitently German-Romantic O Welt; and so on. Each improvisation seemed to enhance the others." (From The Diapason, July 2004, p. 14)

Peter Planyavsky plays an organ recital at Kresge Auditorium, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, on Friday, January 27 at 8 p.m. Admission for this grand event is FREE.

Lidia Comes to Boston!

Friends,

The one and only Lidia comes to Boston for a book signing this Monday!

For twenty years I have sought out all the Italian cooking shows, everyone from Biba to Pasquale to Carlo Middione. Lidia is, in my opinion, "La Regina dei Cuochi Televisivi." Every time I see her pick up a utensil and move the food in the pan, I feel like I am watching Horowitz touch the piano keyboard. The footage from Italy is thrilling; she doesn't just grate the pecorino, she shows footage of the sheep grazing, and the woman in the shop who has made pecorino the same way for 67 years. Jeanette can testify that when Lidia's show comes on, whatever I had been doing comes to a grinding halt. This has a deleterious effect on my music but a marvelous effect on my stomach!

So in case you're looking for me next Monday, I will be at the Williams-Sonoma in the Copley Mall. (The exact address is 100 Huntington Place C9, Boston, MA 02116. For more info: (617) 262-3080)

The much-more interesting world of opera

Today, I posted the following on a popular organist listserv. I'm guessing the organist-types won't care so much for it. I thought you would enjoy it more!

My good friend Andrew Farkas sent me this today:

http://operachic.typepad.com/opera_chic/2009/11/gloves-off-angela-gheorghiu-blasts-alagna-he-wants-me-back-his-family-in-corriere-della-sera-intervi.html

It is entirely more interesting than anything going on in our little organist world. True, the musical and vocal level of singing has never been lower. But at least there's something INTERESTING to read about. Bigger-than-life personalities, like the Greek gods throwing lightning bolts at each other.

These folks aren't circus attractions who get 15 minutes of fame from their little trick. ("I can play 'Granada' with my ear lobes!") They do more than inspire curiosity. These are personages who dominate a stage, and what's more, they have a relationship with their audience. Their audience sees through the performer who says, "I want your attention and will stoop to absolutely anything to get it." These operatic titans are simply living their operatic lives, and they get attention because they are INTERESTING -- interesting people who are really living life -- not always cleanly, but living it they are.

Biggs and Fox were interesting. Menuhin was interesting, and he happened to be a prodigy. But just being a prodigy doesn't automatically make you interesting. (And what happens when you grow up? An old prodigy becomes like a retired baseball player, increasingly grateful for the people who still remember him. And if they're really unlucky, they live long enough that no one remembers them except some bespectacled librarian. "Oh, yes, I remember you! You pitched for the Manhattan Island Red Stockings in 1742.") Liberace was interesting, and he happened to wear sequins. But putting on sequins doesn't automatically make you interesting. There has to be something more.

Biggs and Fox had something more. Horowitz and Rubinstein had something more. And these operatic numina? Well, they don't sing so good, some of them. But boy, do they have that something more! I was on the edge of my seat reading about the Sicilian tenor and the Romanian soprano. And I immediately became sad that in my inbox today, there was nothing about organs that put me on the edge of my seat. In fact, it's not just today.

In Search of Sound II

More often than not, Vladimir Horowitz was appreciated for the wrong reasons. Yes, in the 20s and 30s, no one had a technique like him. But later we had people like Pollini, a veritable computer taken human form. I juxtapose these two names for a reason: Horowitz's technique included SOUND, which he never for a moment allowed to be absent from his playing. Pollini is simply a Godowskian mechanism (and without the tone or lyricism of Godowsky's era).

This is what I felt has always been underappreciated. When at the triumphant Moscow return in 1986, someone commented, "Horowitz is the only pianist who plays with colors," there, finally, you had a listener who understood what Vladimir Horowitz was accomplishing.

A scale can be scale, or it can be a fire cracker. An arpeggio can be an arpeggio, or it can be ocean waves. Octaves can be octaves, or they can be a cannonade. Horowitz's sensitivity to sound has probably never been equalled, not by Liszt or Anton Rubinstein, not even by Chopin or Debussy themselves. In fact, I want to say that Horowitz never played notes -- he made sounds. (Very musical ones, naturally. For Horowitz really was one of the great musicians, even if his musicality was sometimes sui generis.)

There was talk that "The Horowitz Piano" was somehow "rigged." For starters, there were at least four "Horowitz pianos" over the years. Secondly, it has been well-documented, by those who have played his piano after his death, that it was harder to play, not easier. The weight that would produce a mezzopiano on a regular Steinway thundered a fortissimo on Horowitz's. So to play all the gradations of p, pp, and ppp, you needed a transcendental digital sensitivity. Only Horowitz possessed it.

Somehow I realized that the technique-through-sound approach worked for me on the piano before realizing that it could work for organ, as well.

Last June -- six months before Jon Gillock's life-changing advice described in the previous post -- I was to play Chopin's Piano Trio in G minor with the Lavazza Chamber Ensemble. The strings have little to do, while the piano part is like Chopin's Third Concerto. I wasn't sure how to approach it, especially since I just did not have a lot of time in my schedule. I tried budgeting my practice time, practicing only the parts I didn't know. I practiced "just the notes," in other words.

And let me state: you do really need to practice notes! Not that I like to admit it. But there is no substitute for technical woodshedding, when necessary. And there are healthy and unhealthy ways to do it. The unhealthy ones can ruin both hands and psyche.

So I did the woodshedding, but it just wasn't coming together. As late as the dress rehearsal, I simply could not play the piece coherently or cohesively.

Meanwhile, in an earlier rehearsal, I was enjoying the music and less worried about the concert deadline. Kristina Nilsson, the violinist of the trio, remarked, "It's amazing that an organist can play the piano as well as you do." I said simply, "I just try to make the sound that I want to make." You know, the whole "water instead of arpeggios" thing described earlier. But more than that: when a pianist plays cleanly, doesn't it SOUND a certain way? And I think every pianist in the world thinks that only by playing every note with computer accuracy produces that clarity. It's simply false -- the proof being that Horowitz sometimes made mistakes. So to be honest, I tried to make the sound of a clean pianist. I simply approached it from the opposite side. A sparkling arpeggio sounds a certain way -- I tried to make that sound.

But as it got closer to the concert, I got more and more nervous about the notes. Then there was the problematic dress rehearsal at which I (and undoubtedly the others!) wondered what was to become of me. Because on top of it all: I had tendonitis.

Now ... before you start interpreting that word I just uttered ... a doctor will tell you that the term "tendonitis" can mean anything or nothing. It is like the terms "illness," or "treatment." They are undefined and undefinable.

So before rumors circulate that "Ciampa has tendonitis," I assure you that tense tendons come and go and can be as curable as the reduction of caffeine intake. (The notion of tendonitis being "permanent" was yet another misconception injected into me from my piano teacher of yore. Perhaps what she really was saying is: "If you get tendonitis, that's the point at which I give up on you and concentrate on the next competition-winner.")

I had a couple of days left before this concert. I asked my dear friend Anne Conner, "What am I going to do? I have to practice, but my tendons hurt." She said, "You know the piece. And even if you don't, nothing you do now is going to help you at this point." She was right. She continued, "Just run through the piece once, or twice if you feel up to it."

I played very little in those couple of days, and I was sure to practice from the standpoint of sound and to forget technique entirely.

I sat there at the piano, the downbeat came, and ... I knew the piece! No one could believe it (least of all the long-suffering string players!). It wasn't a note-perfect performance. But I realized that I really had practiced. All of that woodshedding really did happen, and the notes were there, in hands and brain. All I needed to do was to make music and, well, to sound good. It was one of those personal triumphs that make a career feel fulfilling.

Why it took me so long to realize that I could approach the organ the same way, I cannot say. I guess I'm a little slow that way. But I must leave you with a Horowitz anecdote which was told to me personally by Franz Mohr, his piano technician. Franz arrived at the Horowitz's 94th street mansion. Franz entered. Horowitz was playing. Franz said, "I see you're practicing." In feigned indignation, Horowitz declared, "Franz! I never practice! I REHEARSE."

And if you rehearse the sound as carefully as you want to rehearse the notes ... well ...