In October 2005 the Russian pianist Boris Berezovsky played a selection of Godowsky-Chopin Etudes at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. Chopin’s Studies are extremely difficult. Godowsky’s transcriptions of the Studies take difficulty to the level of ecstacy. The pianist is required to do three times as much; to play with the equivalent of two right hands, controlling an exponential increase in figuration, polyphony, dynamic contrast and tonal differentiation like a whole squad of performers conjuring symphonic multitudes from the instrument. Very few people in the world can play these pieces, let alone perform them. Berezovsky’s stratospheric virtuosity left the audience reeling. It was a once in a lifetime experience that had articulate listeners gobsmacked, and in the melee afterwards I was sure that shockwaves were already pulsing through the capital, that as I stood with a stiff drink and a dazed look, messengers were galloping off, pennants flapping, steeds steaming, to some august central forum where tidings of this miracle would be disseminated to all corners of the land.
Well, of course, what should have been on the 10 o’clock news remained in its niche. Such concerts obviously amaze the cultural sub-group interested in Godowsky, but even this group is a small club within the minority of classical music lovers, many of whom will find Godowsky de trop, and transcendental pianism inessential. And so a transfigured witness like myself is bound to conclude that one of the most riveting experiences of his life will have no impact in the wider scene. I am sure this is a common experience in our mass media age where so much is going on all the time, but it is perplexing. How can the remarkable be so marginal? How can something of such extreme importance to me remain obscure to most of my contemporaries? That is, I suppose, one aspect of the modern condition – the marginalisation of deep personal experience.
It was not always so. In the first century of the recital era figures like Liszt and Chopin, Horowitz and Arthur Rubinstein were world famous. Homes had pianos and the aspiring middle classes knew their Bach and Beethoven. First hand familiarity with the repertoire fed an appreciation of piano playing, and the great pianists of the first half of the twentieth century had a status and relevance that has no comparison today.
With the advent of records it was no longer necessary to make music in your own home or go to concerts, and so people have naturally become less interested in the artistry of the concert pianist (not playing the piano themselves) and less aware of the marvels of a recital. And so, when something really exceptional occurs like the Berezovsky concert, something which has real ‘cross-over’ power, people aren’t interested even in the news of it. What does a great piano recital amount to these days? Most people would not have a clue.
Let me try to give you an idea.
Around five years ago there was a wonderfully exciting Wimbledon Final: a match so gripping and titanic it turned one’s breath and left one bamboozled on the armchair. On the evening of the same day I saw Nicolai Demidenko play Beethoven’s Hammerklavier Sonata at the Wigmore Hall – in genteel contrast to the gladiatorial tennis, you might have thought. Demidenko’s performance was incomparably more exciting.
I have always found the precarious tightrope walk of live performance akin to the tense flow of a tennis rally. There is a beautiful equilibrium and energy on the constant edge of derailment. Virtuosos, like tennis stars, need to get in the groove, harnessing nerves, channelling concentration so the audience can invest in their mastery, enjoying the risk, the perils of the rope, whilst urging them to victory. Hence the cult of the artist hero, who triumphs against the emotional hazards of music expressed through technical difficulty. If he fails, it is a let down for all of us. If he triumphs, we triumph, too. We respond to his courage but in the end we are enslaved by his artistry. In tennis, the victor vicariously fulfils our urge to be champion.
Demidenko is a pianist with a different approach. Technically brilliant, he seeks a new way in, as if breaking through the familiar to some kind of buried essence. The first three movements of the Hammerklavier Sonata were violently alive and intense but it was in the almost incomprehensible fugue that his conception took fire. The terrain in this movement is, put simply,diabolical. Demidenko hit it like a bat out of hell. Speed can often be dull. Here it was electrifying. There was razor clarity in semi-quaver passages and a kind of demented brio, which was itself an insight into how the music should sound. One reaches for similes and grasps only bathos, but hearing that great work so madly energised was like a vision of primordial chaos, the fabric of creation in cosmic flux, as if Beethoven were conducting an ontological experiment with the state of nature before it has been ordered by man’s perception and risking madness in the process. In other words, something almost unaccountable and completely unrepeatable happened. As physically challenging as world-class tennis, as charged as a battle of equals, as breathtaking as a dozen long rallies, here was an experience that took one to frontier of perception.
The best recitals are like experiments with the potential of music. Beyond expensively acquired technique the pianist brings to his task a heritage of insights about a work, ingrained control of the most subtle impulses of feeling, a grasp of character and narrative logic; he brings all this, and he brings something much deeper and infinitely more mysterious. He brings the daemonic: that part of his nature which responds to the primitive energies in music and which, perhaps only music can elicit in him. When this astonishing fusion of elements combines with the nervous fuel of performance the listener’s whole body and mind is in thrall, his awareness accelerated, his perceptions sparked. I am afraid to say that as a spectator sport it leaves everything else behind.
