62. Expositions and Development: Pianists Past and Present, by Pippa Hammet
To get some chilled fresh air, I took a walk to my local Barnes and Noble bookstore one afternoon last week to purchase a copy of the new Ishiguro. Imagine my surprise when it took twenty minutes to locate a copy of the volume on the main floor of the emporium. (It was sitting innocently on a small table just past the entrance – one of about eight such tables scattered across the floor, each sporting a hopeful best seller -- but unfindable on the nearby New Fiction wall amid many other current novels.) Why? New Fiction is now arrayed not alphabetically according to title or author but, as a clerk put it, “according to subject”. Chaos. I suppose that the new Lauren Oyler work, Fake Accounts, would now be found under “Personal Media” or “Internet”? If Old Fiction followed this particular arrangement, Moby Dick would be classified with “Whales”? Or Joyce’s Ulysses would be found under “Advertising”? How interesting that we have reached a point where a literary work of art is to be identified by a Pop Topic or a Current Event. Talk about commodification! I asked the B&N clerk who was responsible for the disordered display of New Fiction and was told that the directive had originated with the chain’s “District Manager”. She or he was doubtless trying to be indicative. But twenty minutes of my life disappeared as a result.
Have you noticed the current bookstore labels on certain shelves that claim to be “Staff Recommendations”? Undoubtedly some of the workers imagine that they are literary critics-in-the-making, and a handy hint as to the nature and quality of a volume would be appreciated by the casual shopper? Here is another example of turning the style or shape of a written work into consumer-speak. (How can the potential buyer object when you get pretty much the same ambition in the essays in the typical New York Times Book Review?) So much of what passes for critical writing in the arts today is blurb writing. It is assumed that what is wanted is a tip sheet featuring the up-and-comer who deserves a ready bet. Certain newspaper readers may be grateful for columns of such advice, as well as labels on a bookstore shelf. They may merely want to be told what to think, effortlessly. Pre-packaging aims to say it all.
And especially if the work is discussed not in terms of the art itself but in terms of lifestyle pretensions, social causes, somatic issues, and identity politics. Thus, on page and tiny screen we get a Pauline Kael-style film reviewer in search of a journalistic hook that connects a movie with its cultural context, rather than dealing with the individual work’s unique style or design from within the imaginative world of an artist. This may be why I prefer a Manny Farber or a Parker Tyler as my guide to movies. They foresee categories invented by individual works in search of a renewed tradition or out of the personal processes of a filmmaker. At its best, the subject of a motion picture or a novel can be more than mere product.
My bookstore experience is another example of the tendency of today’s entertainment emporia to over-explain (as in “to package’) what might once have been assumed to be obvious. And artists themselves can sometimes be blamed. How many of today’s movies and stage dramas spend more than one act laying out the “exposition” of a narrative, so that a bit of development and climax can be squeezed into the last thirty minutes of the second act? This ploy may be the result of “Reality TV” practices over recent decades. How wonderful that the Trump White House was able to provide an attempted insurrection just as his presidential term was coming to an end. If only the Big Scene had happened earlier! Several such spectacles could have been spaced out over the months and years, rather than saving the best for last.
Perhaps the American public is assumed to have a new indulgence for a sense of temporal dilation. Ultra-patience is the required virtue when in search of a consumer’s dream of luxe. Perhaps one of the culprits in the maintenance of such heroic tolerance would have to be the television “series” that takes up three or four (or more) hour-long (or longer) segments to introduce all the characters, so that most of the dramatic tension is expended in mild suspense or simmering dread – with the solving of the procedural mystery (it’s usually a police investigation these days) accomplished toward the serial’s end. This must indeed be the accepted new version of dramatic “reality”. Television time now means really expensive exposition – and how better to advertise it than to have endless narrative dawdling – lots of “atmosphere” – rather than fleet dramatic architecture? This is the way the entertainment world ends: not with a bang but with filler. There must be a great many consumers out there with lockdown time on their hands. Or with a need for the most luxurious form of distraction. I’m happily not one of them.
Speaking of info-video, I watched New York City Ballet’s recent series on Balanchine’s Prodigal Son and was fascinated to encounter what I was supposed to be interested in: our Siren’s manipulation of her wieldy cape. Instead of commentary on the artistic background of the ballet (German expressionism, Russian icons, Velásquez-exquisite manual mime), we watch a coaching session on how to compete with a swath of fabric. We should have seen this coming after so many seasons of fashion galas at New York City Ballet. Costly threads and designer clothes are the perfect way to deflect attention away from the dance and the dancers. Can you imagine how many young people tuned into these programs hoping for insight into the art of ballet and came away longing for a cape just like the one the Siren models?
By the third evening of the series we were shown an archival recording of a performance of the ballet itself, shot from a very great distance so that the dancers were dwarfed by the many images of the Koch Theater’s stage floor, its side-lights in the wings, and blurred background details of the famous Georges Roualt scenery. I was impressed as usual by the way Balanchine mined the score’s details for the central debauch of the Son at the hands of his mistress. Prokofiev’s music for the opening and closing scenes outside the Patriarch’s tent has the corny religioso flavor to be found in Strauss’s music for Jochanaan in Salome. I was impressed as well by the performance of the Prodigal’s two Companions by Devin Alberda and Austin Laurent.
The fully “worked” scene of the courtesan’s seduction and betrayal is the development section of the ballet, and it places emphasis just where it should be: the young man’s illusions are stripped from him, and he is left wounded, naked, and abandoned. (Even his companions have punched and deserted him.) The heavily literalistic music for the final scene with the Father means that it is more mime than dance. Prokofiev wanted it that way. The compositional weaknesses of Prodigal Son were on display in this streamed version of the ballet.
The videography was primitive. This recording was meant for study by dancers for future performances, not for public consumption. Why NYCB would wish to stream the work in such raw form is a serious question. Certainly, the dancers were not seen at optimum legibility. As readers of my work know by now, my colleagues and I are dedicated to an ongoing study of how dance can be represented on film and video: via The Mass Media. These NYCB representations of company repertory are thoroughly negative examples. A lot can be learned from watching them about what to avoid. It would be best, for example, for the camera operators and the video directors to be familiar with the ballet to be recorded. That does not appear to be the case at Lincoln Center from the evidence of this Prodigal Son.
Poor Prokofiev. He longed for a realistic stage orgy to his music, and here in 2021 we have a video production that misses important narrative moments, such as the calculated entrances of the Siren. Balanchine would have been less than happy with what was done to his vision. Florian says that the choreographer was convinced that the art of ballet could be transferred adequately to the screen, but that the process required thought, time, and money. All three appear to be missing during the current pandemic at Lincoln Center.
Prokofiev’s career as a composer had lots of initial exposition, but its development was cut short by ill health, a return to residence in Soviet Russia, and his personal dedication to Christian Science. He was always aware that Stravinsky had world-wide fame and that his own ambition for grand opera would mean difficulties with achieving production, especially in the case of his mammoth War and Peace. How ironic therefore that his Romeo and Juliet became the most popular full-length modern ballet following the composer’s premature death. Stravinsky spoke an accurate epitaph when he referred to Prokofiev as the most unique musical “voice” to come out of Russia in the twentieth century.
Across the last month, the pianist Daniil Trifonov’s performance of Prokofiev’s Piano Concerto No. 1 has been streaming (ndr.de) from Hamburg with the NDR Elbphilarmonie Orchestra under the baton of Alan Gilbert. As usual with this performer, the virtuoso challenges of Prokofiev’s writing were turned to vivid expressive effect. This was not a standard performance of the concerto. Trifonov’s speed of fingering allowed nuances of rhythmic detail I have never encountered before. He does not work for dramatic profile over the length of the sixteen-minute work. Instead, Trifonov underlines sudden harmonic shifts and constant rubato in the transitional moments, which are numerous. His second movement (the Andante) is particularly striking as a result of the pianist’s dispersion of rhythmic and tonal effects, where usually the soloist is driving forward as though still under the impetus of the first movement’s dynamism. There is a conscious lingering here that makes us reevaluate the plastic shape of the entire concerto. It is as though the Andante is indeed the active development section of the work, not a contrasting interlude.
If you would like to compare Trifonov’s interpretation with a classic one, you can currently hear and see Martha Argerich’s brilliant 2005 performance of the concerto with the orchestra of Alexandre Rabinovitch on YouTube. Argerich establishes a forward drive in the opening moments and pushes the music at that intensity through to the end, including her fleet Andante. What is gained in Argerich’s view of the work is expressive coherence and granitic profile. It is one awesome musical gesture. She makes the concerto part of a tradition that includes Beethoven and Brahms. To hear her carve this music into the standard concert hall repertory is to hear it in the round, if not in depth.
Trifonov’s version refuses to evoke a standardized template – everything is under question, open to revision, hovering in space as it reaches toward an empyrean at the end of the Andante. And the final Allegro movement is like an extended apotheosis. In a sense, Trifonov may recreate the destabilizing effect that the concerto had at its premiere in 1912, when its tonal mass and rhythmic detail were described by some listeners as “mud”. I find it interesting that Trifonov – who has a composer’s analytical abilities in his performance arsenal – is able to shift its climax to the end of the Andante assai. Perhaps this is an aspect of the work’s “neoclassical” reshaping that so unsettled its first auditors. Prokofiev regarded the Piano Concerto No. 1 as his first “mature” work.
And then there are pianists who can plunge you into a composition from the word go: the listener is already hearing a prefiguration of “development” in the initial moments of the musical exposition. Such a pianist was the great Romanian classical musician, Constantin “Dinu” Lipatti (1917 - 1950). For my year-end gift, Florian presented me with a copy of a new pressing, “Dinu Lipatti: The complete Columbia recordings 1947-48” on Appian (APR 6032, 2 discs). I have long been an admirer of Lipatti’s classic Chopin recordings, but this set illustrates his mastery across the piano repertory. The recordings are also the beneficiary of new advances in reconstituting the sound of 78 r.p.m. records, especially in the bass range. I do not believe I have ever heard Lipatti’s art with such an illusion of presence. I recommend using headphones for full effect.
I also recommend you begin with the set’s extraordinary version of Ravel’s Alborada del gracioso. Balanchine choreographed the orchestral version for his Ravel Festival in 1975; you can view the filmed record of that work at the Performing Arts Library Dance Collection. (Balanchine’s massed choral effects are especially impressive.) Lipatti turns his piano into a solo guitar as readily as his instrument approximates orchestral forces. His rhythmic line is taut throughout. And there are multiple chromatic effects, some of which are achieved simultaneously.
Lipatti’s prime recording producer was the legendary Walter Legge, and it is to him that we owe gratitude for certain of the discs the pianist left behind following his abbreviated career. (Lipatti died of Hodgkin’s disease at the age of thirty-three.) Like Trifonov, Lipatti was a composer as well as virtuoso pianist. I would very much like to hear recordings of Lipatti’s compositions.
The new APR set includes five pieces that Lipatti recorded with the cellist Antonio Janigro. The two musicians toured with repertory that included Beethoven, Ravel, Fauré, and J.S. Bach. I was impressed by their recording of the Bach “Andante in D major”, which has a calm that is transporting in its Old World temper and unpressured flow. The set also includes the Grieg Piano Concerto in A minor (with Alceo Galliera conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra) and the Schumann Piano Concerto in A minor (Herbert von Karajan conducting the same orchestra). Lipatti is masterful in both. I am now certain that the Lipatti is my favorite version of the Schumann work. Von Karajan said it well: when we listen to a Lipatti performance we hear “no longer the sound of the piano, but music in its purest form.” A musical spirit of uncommon imagination was present on this earth for thirty-three years. Here is the evidence of that visitation.
A New Yorker encounters so many people eager to air their vociferous opinions about new and old works of art (see, indeed, those avid fan-boys who propagate film “reviews” via home videos on the Internet). I am convinced that they have formed their blurbing habit as the descendants of pop writers like Pauline Kael and Frank Rich, whose journalistic references to the arts seldom dealt with aesthetics. It is certainly easier to write on film and theater when you avoid matters that involve style, form, and redefined subject matter. Of course, in so doing you could be seen as condescending to your audience. Take my pet tomcat, Murr, in contrast, resting himself at this moment on my window sill. Murr is discreet in his display, eloquent in his aesthetic positions, and communicative in his very silence. Like Lipatti’s artistry, Murr never condescends.
P.H.
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