Alberto Reyes

Sidney Foster: Rediscovering an American Master


This CD set is a rare musical treasure. It contains several live performances by a master pianist who, by those inexplicable twists and turns of life, never reached the heights of popular acclaim and celebrity to which his artistry entitled him.

Live performances, by definition, are ephemeral events that fade from our consciousness with the last echoes of the music, only to live precariously in our imperfect memory. The fact that these particular live performances were spared that fate was something of a fluke. Some took place about half a century ago on the stages of Indiana University, where a single, permanent hanging microphone was switched on during faculty recitals. That was all. There was no thought of producing a recording as a musical event; it was a mere document of a recital that had taken place.

One recording comes from a broadcast of a 1941 Carnegie Hall performance with the New York Philharmonic, which some anonymous soul, sitting by a radio somewhere, captured off the air and rescued from oblivion. Others took place in different venues far from the major concert circuits.

But great art and the labors of a great artist, even if casually recorded decades ago, have a way of surviving. These tapes were cherished by the lucky few that had access to them, while awaiting discovery by a larger audience. Now, thanks to Marston, they finally reach the public.

Sidney Foster was born in Florence, S.C. on 23 May 1917. Early on, he showed all the signs of talent and precocity that great musicians share, playing by ear anything he heard on a gramophone or on the radio, and improvising. In 1925, the family moved to Miami, Florida, and Foster took piano lessons from Earl Chester Smith. Josef Hofmann, the legendary pianist, then Director of the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, heard young Sidney play and recommended he be admitted to Curtis. At the age of ten, Foster was one of the youngest pianists ever accepted at the famous school and he started lessons with Russian pianist Isabelle Vengerova. After two years, he went back to his family, which had moved to New Orleans, and studied with Walter Goldstein. Then, in 1934, he returned to Curtis to study with American pianist David Saperton, Leopold Godowsky's son-in-law.

In 1938 he won the Mac Dowell Competition and in 1940 the first Edgar M. Leventritt Prize, both in New York. His Leventritt award led to his debut with the New York Philharmonic in 1941, playing Beethoven's C minor Concerto under John Barbirolli, and composing his own first movement cadenza for the performance. The debut was a big success, and Noel Straus of The New York Times wrote "with all the enthusiasm and fire of youth, Mr. Foster, whose approach to the keyboard was of a noble, heroic type, gave the concerto a reading in the grand manner...he proved himself a richly gifted performer, and his brilliant playing occasioned a prolonged ovation."

He embarked on a career that included regular recitals at Carnegie Hall, performances with the New York Philharmonic at Lewisohn Stadium, the Chicago Symphony at Ravinia, the Boston Symphony, the Houston Symphony, the Cincinnati Symphony, the Minneapolis Symphony, the Dallas Symphony, the Indianapolis Symphony, the Utah Symphony, the Portland Symphony and dozens of other orchestras.

In the early 1960s, he played in England, Holland, Germany, Israel, Japan, and toured the Soviet Union in a whirlwind visit that included twenty-two concerts in thirty days, performing four concertos and three different recital programs in Moscow, Leningrad, Minsk, Tbilisi, Yerevan, Rostov-on- Don and Kishinev.

Despite eliciting universal acclaim from critics and audiences alike, Foster was practically ignored by the recording industry. His only commercial recordings were a couple of Mozart concertos with the Vienna Chamber Orchestra and a set of Clementi sonatinas, both for the Musical Heritage Society. In 1993, the International Piano Archives at Maryland published posthumously Ovation to Sidney Foster, a two-CD set that included some live performances at Indiana University.

He devoted a great part of his time to teaching. In 1949 he taught at Florida State University, and from 1952 until his death on 7 February 1977, he was a tenured professor at Indiana University, where he received the Frederich Bachman Lieber Award and was named Distinguished Professor.

He was married to Bronja Singer, also a student of David Saperton at Curtis, and had two sons, Lincoln and Justin.

Sidney Foster. A Remembrance

When I first heard Sidney Foster in 1966, in my home country of Uruguay, at a recital that included performances of the Appassionata and Rachmaninov’s Second Sonata, I was beguiled by his beautiful sound, mesmerized by the articulate virtuosity of his fingers and stunned by the volcanic intensity he was capable of unleashing in those monumental works. But as an aspiring, eighteen-year-old pianist, I was not ready yet to understand the depths of his artistry. It was only later that same year, when I arrived in Bloomington and began regular lessons with him at Indiana University, that I started to glimpse how much profound thought and artistic insight there was behind every one of Foster's performances.

Sidney Foster lived in a lush, leafy neighborhood of Bloomington, not far from some of the other great musicians who graced that musical Parnassum, luminaries such as Joseph Gingold, Janos Starker, Abbey Simon, Gyorgy Sebok, Menahem Pressler, Margaret Harshaw, and, later on, Jorge Bolet. As my parents did not have the means to support my studies in the US, Sidney had invited me to live with his family. The house was a reflection of the Fosters’ intellectual curiosity and eclecticism. Every room was brimming with books. The bookshelves displayed the broad range of their interests. Although books about music were abundant, they were overshadowed by numerous works on psychoanalysis, science, history, language and literature. There was a well-thumbed Encyclopedia Britannica in the dining area, and if factual doubts arose on any subject, the corresponding volume would be brought to the table to dispel them. In fact, the dinner table was the daily center of family life, as we assembled punctually at 6:00 p.m., to eat and to watch the CBS News broadcast with Walter Cronkite. With the Viet Nam war raging at that time, politics was always a topic of discussion. The Fosters were ardent supporters of the Democratic Party, and Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt were their heroes. But although they professed sincere admiration for Lyndon Johnson and his political prowess in legislating the socially progressive Great Society programs, Johnson's hard-headed pursuit of the war in Indochina was starting to appall them. Sidney and his wife Bronja took turns with the cooking. Perhaps in deference to my Latin sensibilities they prepared a very tasty chili con carne for my first dinner at the house, and I didn't have the heart to tell them that I had never come near that Mexican-American staple in my life. But soon Sidney taught me to make coffee in an old Melitta filter cone, and I felt I was doing my very modest bit for the eminently satisfying (both, culinary and intellectual) daily ritual of dinner with the Fosters.

Foster's childhood friends, pianists Abbey Simon and Jorge Bolet had come to teach in Indiana, arriving from Geneva and Spain, respectively, at Sidney’s initiative, and were weekly, sometimes nightly, dinner guests. The conversation centered on political or artistic subjects, and often, to my delight, on pianistic matters. It was a privilege to listen to three towering pianists relating their memories of great pianists I never got to hear, such as Hofmann, Rachmaninoff , Moiseiwitsch, Mischa Levitzki, Ossip Gabrilowitsch, the young Horowitz and their contemporary William Kapell. They expounded on diverse topics such as musical interpretation - both their own and their colleagues’ - the vagaries of modern recital programming, the tastes of Soviet audiences (“La Campanella country," as Simon called them), and the challenges of teaching . Sometimes they would reminisce about their salad days at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. In that great school, the three of them, as well as Bronja, had studied with David Saperton. There were tales about the imperiousness of Isabelle Vengerova, the meanness of composition teacher Rosario Scalero, and the strict theory lessons of Mme. Longy-Miquelle. Humor was never absent in those conversations, as they recalled, with glee but without malice, some anecdote about their fellow Curtis student Shura Cherkassky, or a prank they once played on their good friend, Russian pianist Alexander Uninsky, that involved a fictitious donation of violin strings to France - where Uninsky was going on tour after the war - by the non-existent organization “Guts for France.”

Other times, violinists Joseph Gingold and Isaac Stern, violist David Dawson, or cellists Bernie Greenhouse and Leonard Rose were guests, and the conversation turned to their memories of the legendary Stokowski sound in Philadelphia, Toscanini’s wit at the NBC Orchestra, the impenetrability of Reiner’s baton technique in Chicago, and their admiration for George Szell in Cleveland and Pablo Casals in Puerto Rico. A very heady environment for a young South American student just beginning to learn how to think about music and musicians, indeed!

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In my very first lessons Foster revealed not only his original way of thinking about music-making but also his unusual capacity to articulate, verbally, his ideas. He always said that his first ambition had been to compose. Perhaps this is what gave him the ability to approach any piece of music from the standpoint of the compositional process that allowed the author to go from the germ of an initial idea to the finished work.

He was a kind of “structuralist.” Not in the intellectual “French” meaning of the word (he abhorred all the pedantic, “philosophical” verbiage that, in the minds of young, impressionable students, passes for teaching,) but in the concrete sense that the dictionary attributes to the word structure: “the manner in which a … whole is constructed.” He would teach us to recognize the basic, constitutive elements which through development and combination would result in a coherent, self-contained organism. This approach meant that Foster’s performances of a work had a natural, narrative quality. He was capable of “speaking” the music with clarity and eloquence. Even a piece one had not heard before, e.g. Prokofieff's Ninth Sonata, Hoffman’s Berceuse, or Saperton’s Zephyr, became instantly clear in his hands.

To Foster, musical meaning was to be found in the set of relationships among all the musical elements: harmonic, dynamic, tempo, and temporal relationships (the idea that when an event occurs, whether as a first utterance or as a repetition, is crucial to determine its expressive value.) He organized his playing around the structure of the musical bar and it's implicit differences of intensity between the beats. That basic sense of pulse, his infallible rhythm and the permanent play of tension and release in the harmonic structure of a musical phrase were three pillars that made his piano playing intensely, compellingly alive.

None of this should remotely suggest that expression, affect and drama were not his concern as pianist and teacher. To the contrary: he was a master at conveying, in his playing and in his teaching, the subtle differences in dynamics and timing that make for natural expression in music. As a performer, he was keenly aware that character and mood are in constant change , following the harmonic and rhythmic unfolding of a passage. There was never a sense of a premeditated imposition of a rigid, overall mood dominating a whole section; what emerged was a subtly varied sequence of statements, reflecting music’s miraculous capacity to mirror the unfolding of our own conscious and unconscious emotions and thought processes.

Tone was also a hallmark of his aesthetics of piano playing. In the matter of tone production, his advocacy of arm weight resulted in an unforced, fully resonant sound that, in the manner of the great masters of the past, projected through the entire acoustic space. He understood the problems that the modern piano poses for the performer, with its homogeneity of color across the full extent of the keyboard. This homogeneity can result in a thick, muddy, impenetrable tone if the pianist is not able to control the dynamics of simultaneous sounds. The solution for Foster was to strive for maximum differentiation between melody, basses, and inner textures, and the result was a tridimensional sound, in which melodies soared above a carefully delineated bass line, while the inner textures emerged clearly in all their harmonic richness and variety. He pedaled with mastery and imagination, taking full advantage of the middle, "sostenuto" pedal. Sometimes he would depress soundlessly a key in the bass or middle range, so as to catch it with the "sostenuto"pedal and make it sound later, while cleaning any dissonances with the right pedal. Other times, he would land on a bass note that he wanted to prolong for the sake of a rich sonority or contrapuntal effect, and instantly release the notes above, so that only that note, caught on the "sostenuto" pedal, would underpin the resulting texture. Another arrow in Foster’s quiver of tonal resources was the subtle de-synchronizing of voices. When contrapuntal voices were too close in range, he never hesitated to separate them in time, without altering the natural flow of the lines, thus allowing each of them to be heard clearly. His magisterial account of Chopin’s F-minor Ballade is an object lesson in the use of de-synchronization for the purposes of tonal beauty and contrapuntal clarity.

Sidney Foster appeared in New York’s rich music scene around the middle of the 20th Century. Logically, he was very aware of the contemporary developments in musicology and the burgeoning interest in "authenticity" in performance. Urtext editions proliferated and were instrumental in ridding interpretation of certain “accretions” that tradition had imposed on performance. But Foster’s intelligence and musical acumen allowed him to avoid the trap of thinking that piano playing could simply be reduced to an accurate rendering of the text. For Foster, the art of piano playing was the art of conveying musical meaning, and meaning was intrinsic to the work, not just a function of the composer's intentions. He was not indifferent to scholarly research. Tellingly, the first book he gave me as a present was Emery's volume on Bach's ornamentation. And he thoroughly distinguished between originality or creativity, and ignorant or uninformed playing. But he understood the limits and imprecision of musical notation and did not elevate the printed score to the position of a definitive and unique blueprint of the meaning of the work. Perhaps, he saw the score as only a vague shadow of the composer's concept. Maybe he was an avatar of the intellectual zeitgeist of the mid-century, which found its maximum expression in Roland Barthes's essay "The Death of the Author", and elevated readers to a position of co-equal creators of meaning. But it was clear in Foster's playing and teaching that there was no quasi-religious reverence for the "wishes" or the "true intentions" of the composer. As an extensive reader of Freud, Foster knew too much about the pervasive influence of the unconscious in every creative act to slavishly follow the instructions of a score without a thorough critical analysis based on musical and aesthetic considerations.

Foster's way of filling the gaps left by notation was to highlight musical prosody, that is, those variations of stress and emphasis that contribute to meaning. He used the differences and contrasts of dynamics and timing to convey such meaning. Foster's score markings for his students offer a fascinating view of his mastery of musical prosody. He lavishly used dynamic "hairpins" to suggest the constant rise and ebb of intensity and gradations of volume in a phrase or group of phrases. Foster's own phrase marks and slurs reveal his own opinion about the parsing and shaping of melodies. He had absolutely no qualms in disobeying the printed dynamic marking if the musical meaning of a passage demanded it. The sense of inevitability in his approach to dynamics always managed to convince the listener.

The manipulation of time and his use of rubato for rhetorical and expressive purposes gave Foster's performances an intense declamatory character that commanded the listener's attention. As critic Ross Parmenter of the New York Times noted in a 1948 review, "one of Mr. Foster's gifts is to make his interpretations relate a story, so the listener feels that something definite and complete has been told by the end of a piece." He employed the rhetorical devices of an earlier era, such as arpeggiation of chords and the advancing of certain notes in the bass line, with great taste and to persuasive expressive effect, although he never explicitly advocated doing so in his teaching. He favored brisk tempi in fast movements and a forward-moving pace in slow ones. His velocity and articulation were legendary. There are live recordings of a few Chopin Études that have become something of a cult object unmatched as they are in speed, momentum, drama and control (Noel Straus described in the New York Times his performance of Op.10, Nº4 at Carnegie Hall in 1941 as "a bravura reading at immense speed that was fairly breathtaking"). Indeed, he never played it safe. He was unconcerned by wrong notes and went straight to the core of the musical message. His performances never sought to reproduce a fixed interpretation arrived at beforehand. He aimed to recreate the work on the spot and encouraged his students to do the same. By the same token, he never put too much store on recordings, believing that music making was a process that unfolded in time, in a particular place, in specific acoustical circumstances, to be listened to strictly as it was created. He did not pursue recording opportunities, and he never, ever, listened to tapes of his past performances. We are extremely lucky that he was so generous about performing at Indiana University, as the tapes of those recitals, plus a few live recordings from New York, Boston, Tokyo and a handful of American cities are all we have to appreciate his commanding artistry.

Foster's repertory ranged from Bach to Prokofieff , although he also broke a lance on behalf of his contemporaries when he premiered Norman Dello Joio's First and Second Sonatas in consecutive Carnegie Hall recitals in the Forties. The Classical composers he performed in public included a sprinkle of Mozart and a hefty chunk of Beethoven sonatas, from the early Pathetique to Op. 110. His performances of the two major middle sonatas, the Waldstein and Appassionata, were archetypal versions of relentless drive, drama and muscularity. Chopin, Schumann, Liszt and Brahms made up the bulk of his Romantic repertory. Perhaps Chopin's infinite imagination inspired Foster to display the widest range of expressive and contrapuntal details, with a fully orchestral sound, lyrical melodic lines and insistent inner voices within an overall framework that never bowed to the then common view of Chopin as a composer of small-scale, "poetic" works. The French Impressionists were not entirely absent from his programs. Some Debussy preludes --La terrasse des audiences du clair de lune, Le vent dans la plaine, Feux d'artifice, and a couple of other works show up on a few of his youthful programs. So does the Ravel Toccata. In fact, he liked to group shorter works that may be categorized as vaguely impressionistic, or nationalistic character pieces, in the second half of his recitals, and thus performed Albéniz, Turina, Délibes-Dohnányi, Bartók, Scriabin, Shostakovich, Prokofieff (he loved the Visions Fugitives and the Toccata) and the encore-type virtuoso repertory by Moskowsky, Godowsky, Paderewski, and Hofmann.

Foster performed quite a bit of chamber music from his early professional days, when he toured with the LeRoy Foster Scholz Trio (flute, piano and cello), until the end of his life. For the trio, Foster composed, under the pseudonym E. Silvera, a suite named Allende el Río which was praised in the press by composer and critic Virgil Thompson, no less. In Indiana University he played the complete Beethoven Sonatas for Violin and Piano with violinist and legendary teacher Joseph Gingold, and appeared as guest with the Berkshire String Quartet and other faculty members. I used to offer to turn pages for his chamber music performances (I particularly remember a gorgeous Trout quintet, a Dvórak piano quartet and Fauré's A Major Sonata for violin and piano) and he graciously allowed me to do so. I was fascinated by the economy and efficiency of his hand motions, and more than once forgot to turn the page. None of this posed any problems for Foster as it usually took just one rehearsal for him to memorize the piano part, and there were never any "accidents" provoked by my distractions.

His piano and orchestra repertory ranged from Mozart to Bartók. For his debut with the New York Philharmonic in 1941, as the first winner of the coveted Leventritt Prize, he played Beethoven´s C minor Concerto and composed his own cadenza. An off the air recording of the broadcast has preserved for us this tour the force of bravura writing and playing, as the cadenza shows impeccable stylistic awareness and daring imagination, in a framework of strictly Beethovenian passage-work. Unfortunately there are no known recordings of a memorable Chopin E minor Concerto I heard him play in Indianapolis, a concerto he also played at Ravinia with the Chicago Symphony and in Cincinnati, a Brahms B-flat Concerto he played with the Minneapolis Symphony and Dimitri Mitropolous, a Rachmaninoff Rhapsody on a Theme by Paganini he did with Antal Dorati, a Liszt E-flat Concerto he played with his brother-in-law, Jacques Singer, in Portland, and several other concerti. But there are recordings of a towering Tchaikovsky B-flat minor Concerto from Utah with Maurice Abravanel, an idiomatic Bartók Third Concerto with Aaron Copland conducting the Boston Symphony, and a wonderful Schumann A minor Concerto from Japan.

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Foster's generosity with his resources and with his time had no bounds. His teaching schedule at Indiana University far exceeded the requirements of the school. Although his regular lessons, lasting one hour, were very well organized, if a student's impending performance or participation in a competition so required, he went back to school after dinner and spent two or three extra hours listening and advising. As I prepared the repertory for the Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow in 1970, he would gladly sit at the second piano and sight-read, flawlessly, the orchestra part of Prokofieff's Second Concerto, while listening to the solo part and offering not only interpretive solutions but also suggestions for fingering or rearranging the distribution of notes between the hands. He was a firm believer in the redistribution of notes for the purpose of clarifying textures and facilitating performance. He was, indeed, imaginatively creative in that respect, and to this day his students eagerly seek the marked scores of their colleagues when they have to learn a new piece or when they have to teach those works to their own pupils. Another facet of his generosity as teacher was the holding of a collective piano class, from 2 to 4, every Sunday afternoon during the school year. His class assembled in IU's Recital Hall and listened to the students' performances of works ready to be presented in recital. Foster encouraged and moderated the critical discussion of those performances, teaching us to think clearly and to articulate our ideas, and enriching our artistic judgement and our capacity to convey knowledge to others.

He always put the learning interests of his students above his own ego considerations. When I learned the Prokofieff Second for the Moscow competition, Foster asked his childhood friend and esteemed colleague Jorge Bolet to listen to me. Bolet had been the first pianist to record the then rather obscure piece and was an unquestionable authority on it. Foster did not play the work, so he naturally felt that I could have a richer learning experience with the pianist that had already made it his own. But his own lack of egoism vis-a-vis his students getting advice from other accomplished artists also extended to my working on other pieces. As Foster (and the whole world) understood Bolet to be an exceptionally insightful Liszt interpreter, he also suggested I play for Bolet the Liszt Sonata, the Funerailles, and a few of the Transcendental Études. This from a pianist that was capable of tossing off towering performances of the Liszt Sonata, and Venezia e Napoli, as Foster's live recordings attest!

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Sidney Foster's strength and stamina were put to the test by a series of severe health problems. He had a heart attack at the age of thirty-eight which interrupted his performing career for almost four years. At fifty, he broke a leg in a car accident. In between, he was diagnosed with a complex disease of the bone marrow, myeloid metaplasia, which left him at times anemic and gravely affected his energy levels, although as all of his students could attest, there was never any slacking of his teaching activities. When the metaplasia was detected he was given a prognosis of about seven more years to live. The fact that he survived for more than a decade is a testimony of the extraordinary care he received from his wife and family, in terms of nutrition and love, and of his will to live and positive outlook on life. I marvel at my own extreme good fortune, as when I met him in Montevideo in 1966, he was already under a kind of medical death sentence. I never knew it until two or three years before his passing in February 1977, when the enlargement of his spleen became too evident to hide. Even so, he continued performing and learning repertory. In 1976 he learned American composer Ernest Schelling's Suite Fantastique for piano and orchestra, which had not been performed since the thirties. I had already moved to New York City and was thrilled to receive a call from him, asking me to accompany him on second piano on a private performance of the Schelling for conductor André Kostelanetz and New York Times music critic Harold Schonberg, on the premises of the Baldwin Piano Company on 58th Street. That was the last time I heard Sidney play. A few months later, on the weekend of 5-6 February 1977, I was by his bedside in Boston's New England Medical Center, and although his health was severely compromised by then, we didn't expect that, having come through another operation, he would die in the early hours of 7 February.

Sidney Foster, the pianist and teacher, was a glorious paradox. He, the pianist who could play faultlessly by ear anything he heard, who could read at first sight the most complex piece of music, who was capable of sitting down in his studio to demonstrate any passage of his vast repertory at the drop of a hat, was also (unlike other musical geniuses) the most intellectually insightful and verbally articulate teacher any aspiring young pianist could ever encounter in his studies. On the night before I moved from Bloomington to New York, in August 1974, after saying our good-byes to Sidney and Bronja, and as we were walking to our car in the balmy and fragrant Bloomington night, my wife and I heard Sidney through the window, tinkling at the piano. We stopped and at first could not recognize the piece which he seemed to have picked up in mid-movement. It took us a while to realize that he was faithfully reproducing a passage from a Prokofieff symphony he probably had heard recently on the radio. It was the most awesome musical parting gift we could hope for.

Alberto Reyes, 2018

In the shadow of Bach


The genius of Bach hovers, directly or indirectly, above the four Romantic works that make up this recital. Specifically, it is Bach’s supreme technical and artistic mastery of counterpoint that inspires the compositional and keyboard writing craft of Busoni, Franck, Chopin and Schumann. 

Ferruccio Busoni’s Chaconne (1893) is a monumental arrangement for piano of the last movement of Bach’s Partita Nº2 in D Minor (BWV 1004) for solo violin, consisting of a set of variations on a chordal theme that through the alternation of minor and major modes becomes a three-part form. Busoni credits his father for making Bach the center of his musical studies throughout his childhood. Later on, as a celebrated virtuoso pianist, when holding his first teaching position in Helsinki, Busoni adopted Bach’s Inventions as the starting point of piano instruction. As an editor in music publishing, his first work was a volume of Bach’s Two- and Three-Part Inventions,  Throughout his career he transcribed keyboard works of Bach and wrote original compositions based on Bach’s music, culminating in the Fantasia Contrappuntistica of 1910, a homage to Bach’s Art of the Fugue.

César Franck rose to fame as a pianist under the influence of his father, who intended to make young César a touring composer-virtuoso in the manner of Liszt or Thalberg. However, as an adult, Franck rejected his father’s wishes and sought employment as an organist at the church of Saint Jean-Saint François–au Marais. There he came to admire the Bach playing of organist Jacques-Nicolas Lemmens, whose accomplished pedal technique made possible the performance of Bach’s difficult organ works. These works exerted considerable influence on Franck’s own compositional style, steering him towards contrapuntal complexity and leading to his supreme work for piano, the Prelude, Chorale and Fugue of 1884. The Prelude opens with a variant of the name of Bach (the notes B-A-C-H in German nomenclature), and it’s second theme is an insistent two-note appoggiatura, reminiscent of Bach’s Weinen, Klagen, Sorgen, Zagen. After a calm, solemn Chorale, the work culminates in a complex Fugue whose coda brings together the Fugue’s theme, the Chorale’s descending-fourths motif, and the arpeggiated textures of the Prelude in a tour-de-force of contrapuntal writing. The Prelude, Chorale and Fugue‘s grand dimensions and soaring structure, a beautiful evocation of the aesthetics of a previous era, constitute a veritable sonic representation of the roughly contemporary glories of Victorian architecture’s Gothic and Romanesque revival styles.

For both Chopin and Schumann, J. S. Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier was the fons et origo of piano and composition instruction. Chopin’s first Polish teacher, Zywny, gave his student a copy of the 48 Preludes and Fugues at the very beginning of his studies, and Chopin never ceased to practise those seminal works through his entire life. As for Schumann, his biographer von Wasielewski says that a copy of the WTC always laid upon his piano in Leipzig. Schumann’s devotion to this work is endearingly shown by the fact that he and his new bride, Clara Wieck, made the study of the “48” a part of their honeymoon, as Clara attests in her diaries. What Chopin and Schumann learned from Bach’s keyboard writing was the art of counterpoint, the ability to create simultaneous, independent voices that blend in harmony while maintaining their individuality. As Delacroix writes in his diary, “(Chopin says that)…each of the parts has its own movement, which, while still according with the others, keeps on with its own melody and follows it perfectly.”

The Polonaise-Fantaisie, Op .61, is one of Chopin’s supreme examples of his late compositional style. The complex writing blends, in perfect balance, sublime melodies with bass-lines and inner voices that from time to time “break out into the open”, acquiring a brief protagonic character, only to fade again into a harmonious background role. It is a perfect demonstration of Chopin’s mastery of counterpoint.

Schumann’s Sonata Nº2 in G Minor, Op. 22, does not share Chopin’s delight in part-writing throughout its length. But the first movement, a textbook example of Sonata-Allegro form, is full of imitative counterpoint, starting with the statement of the first theme, a four-note descending motif in the right hand that is almost immediately echoed by the left. Sometimes the motif is inverted in the left hand and pitted against the original in the right. The second theme is a masterful instance of four-part polyphonic writing, and in the development section there is a brief “stretto” of a third theme, but Schumann’s obsessive, insistent handling of the movement’s thematic ideas is always governed by a learned, Bachian, contrapuntal discipline.

None of this would be of artistic consequence if the contrapuntal, polyphonic writing of Busoni, Franck, Chopin and Schumann did not have a profound effect on the expressive content of their music. Far from being a strictly formal charateristic, their contrapuntal piano writing goes to the very essence of drama. For these composers, (as Charles Rosen has perceptively pointed out in the case of Chopin) counterpoint is a public act, something for the listener to hear, not an intimate mode of expression nor a trick intended for the private delight of the score reader. The constant interplay of many voices, sometimes almost silent, other times insistently present in dramatic argument against the leading melody, lends these works an almost operatic dimension, where the ear imagines the interaction of different characters, their conflicts, their harmonious resolutions. Such is the pianist’s task: to master and reveal, with eloquence and lucidity, these voices’ dramatic argument, and thanks to the invention of the modern piano, with its infinite gradations of dynamic variety, the argument can be made audible in a way that Bach could only have dreamed about.

Alberto Reyes
New York, October 2016

Recording Schumann

Modern piano recording technology gives the listener an opportunity to hear details of tone and texture that are not heard in a live performance at a concert hall, no matter how exquisite its acoustics or privileged the seat location. The use of multiple microphones and their precise placing before the different piano registers, allow us to pick up inner voices, pedaling subtleties and polyphonic riches in such a clear way that listening to a CD becomes a unique aesthetic event, sometimes to the detriment of our enjoyment of live playing. In the hands of a master engineer (and with playback equipment capable of delivering high, undistorted volume) the listener enjoys the illusion of being seated right on the pianist’s bench, hearing every nuance of phrasing, the ghostly “bump” of the dampers pedal, the rich overtones of a long-held bass note, the sheer “physicality” of piano playing. Schnabel’s words about the abstract notion of the musical “work” (as opposed to any performance of it), “an irrational reality beyond and above any natural occurrence” come true in the act of recording.

This modern approach is not without risks, though. It served Glenn Gould’s purpose very well when recording Bach, but in other extreme cases, the closeness of the microphone placing produces a surfeit of clarity that comes close to Baudrillard’s “hallucination of detail…excess of the real…voyeurism of exactitude”, or what Arved Ashby has called “an ‘obscene’ image, exhibitionistic, direct, excessive, naked, overinformative”.

In the case of Schumann’s music, the recording artist will do very well to pause and ponder how the peculiarities of digital recording impact on the listening experience. The transparency and polyphonic clarity that will illuminate any rendering of Chopin will not necessarily enhance our understanding and enjoyment of Schumann’s works. In the first place, Schumann’s concept of sound and his use of the sustaining pedal are highly personal and daring. Often he will blur harmonies in “a single mist” as Charles Rosen puts it, not only for the sake of a beautiful effect but also to convey the very character of the music. An otherwise perceptive commentator once unjustly chastised Geza Anda for his “texture-muddling over-pedaling in the first movement of Kreisleriana (which) may strike some listeners as narcissistically self-indulgent, however beautiful”. (Only a Josef Hofmann – in his unsurpassed but truncated Kreisleriana at his Casimir Hall recital of 1938 - could convincingly get away with the willful absence of pedaling over long sections of that movement.) Similarly, the coda of Kreisleriana’s second movement acquires its otherwordly character in performance through the blurred harmonies of a long-held pedal. Perhaps the only moment in the entire piece where exact articulation may be enhanced by microphone placing is the central fugato of the seventh movement.

Another aspect of Kreisleriana’s essence that runs the risk of getting lost in a closely-miked, overly clear, under-pedaled recording, is the fear-inducing, grotesque quality of many of its pages. The literary origins of this supremely imaginative piano piece go back to the universe of E.T.A. Hoffmann “in which we encounter a multitude of masks whose Beneath is uncertain, oscillating between mechanical dolls and the horrifying substance of undead Life (ghosts)” as Slavoj Zizek describes it in “The plague of fantasies”. Clara Wieck remarked in a letter to Schumann, after receiving a score of the work, that his music sometimes frightened her, with its violent and abrupt contrasts. It is worth remembering that Hoffmann’s tale speaks about the biography of Kapellmeister Kreisler, into the pages of which the memoirs of his philosopher-cat Murr have been haphazardly interspersed. The grotesque reigns, for instance, over the wild coda of the third movement, one of the most frightening portrayals of uncontrolled rage in the whole piano repertoire. Clarity of articulation, distinct triplets and audible sixths at the end of each group? Not in the middle of this tantrum!

In fact, fear seems to hover above many of Kreisleriana’s sections. The very opening, apparently starting in the middle of a struggle, full of offbeat accents, fast and loud, seems to suggest the desperate efforts of a man trying to put his head above the waters of a raging torrent into which he has been mercilessly plunged. The suggestion of fear, as well, hangs over much of the haunting last movement, a deceptively care-free saunter through a darkening forest, where the offbeat left hand, always coming in when one least expects it, hints at a menacing figure hiding behind a different tree each time. It is interesting to note that for Schumann, music could be indeed a vehicle for inducing fear. The very title of Kinderszenen’s eleventh piece, “Fürtenmachen”, declares it , while its “scurrying critters of the night” music of bars 9-12 perfectly illustrates that intention.

On the sublime side (and a lot of Schumann’s music is never far from the sublime) whole pages of the C-major Fantasy’s third movement call for a gauzy sonority in which the sustaining pedal plays an indispensable part. The very opening of the movement, with its improvisatory arpeggios, needs a disembodied sonority until the right hand voices the baritonal melody in the fifth measure. Nothing calls for a singing, clear texture of melody over accompaniment until the appearance, at ‘Etwas bewegter’, of the melody that “…for hours I have been playing over and over again … are you not the secret tone that runs through the work?” (as Schumann wrote to Clara Wieck). And the imperious demand of the first movement opening phrase , so seemingly secure in its passion, which meltingly morphs into supplication with a drop in dynamics and a simple bass change from G to A very much worth lingering on, would be unthinkable without a “wash of sound” achieved by generous pedaling, and minimal articulation of the left hand. Although modern miking techniques would make it possible, who would want to hear with total clarity all those semiquavers? In Kinderszenen, the E-major interlude of the twelfth piece, “Kind im Einschlummern”, similarly requires a lot of pedal to convey its mood of happy dreaming; dreams, or at least our memory of dreams, are always hazy and somewhat distant.

For the musical work in general (not only Schumann’s, of course) recording poses a basic problem, characterized by Adorno as “the protective fixation … that leads to its destruction, for its unity is realized precisely in that spontaneity which is sacrified to the fixation”. Furthermore, we face the specific challenge of achieving, through the microphone(s), the ideal textures and sonorities that convey our musical intentions. But when we have an opportunity to record Schumann, we are inevitably tempted to “toss into the sea of future history” our own “message in a bottle” as Richard Leppert has so elegantly put it. Our motivation may be found in Edward Said’s eloquent words about the recital as essay, which with the reader’s indulgence I’d like to apply to recordings: “the recital (the recording), like the essay, is occasional, re-creative and personal. And essayists, like recitalists (recording artists), concern themselves with the givens: those works of art always worth another critical and reflective reading”. May the listener feel free to engage in debate with this particular reading of such timeless masterpieces

Alberto Reyes
New York, June 2010

In praise of older programs

25 years ago or thereabouts, a highly contagious pandemic spread unchecked through the music world: thematic programming. Its symptoms varied widely: a concert devoted to the works of a single composer; a recital exploring the influence of the English Romantic poets on German composers or vice versa; an evening of works having the word “Fantasy” in their title (even the undersigned, battling a mild strain of the virus, once played Chopin’s Polonaise Fantaisie and Fantasy in F minor, plus Schumann’s C major Fantasy in one program, before recovering and finishing the evening with Kinderszenen and the F minor Ballade); or, in extremely hopeless cases, concerts announced by apocryphal titles such as “Beethoven and the Distant Beloved” in order to justify playing the Pathetique, the Appassionata and the Moonlight in the same evening. The effects were always the same: moderate to severe listener boredom, a disproportionate amount of movements in a minor mode, unrelenting sameness of form, structure or mood, universal praise for the performer’s intellect, and the use of the word “revelatory” in every single New York Times review.

Most observers located the pandemic’s “ground zero” in the recording industry. With the invention of the long-playing record and - even more so - the longer CD, record labels found it easy to market complete cycles such as Chopin’s Four Ballades or Four Scherzi, or Debussy’s 24 Preludes, or Ligeti’s Complete Etudes, disregarding the fact that those works were never meant by their composers to be digested as one single meal. But at least the record listener had complete control over his equipment and was not forcibly sentenced to hear everything in one sitting. Concert goers, on the other hand, have had to endure instances such as the Carnegie Hall recital by one of today’s unquestionably greatest artists, playing the complete Schumann’s Noveletten with only one intermission to stretch their legs!

The main carriers of the virus, though, turned out to be program annotators and music critics. Thematic programming was a godsend to writers not willing to submit readers to another Schenkerian analysis of the Fourth Ballade, and to critics not wishing to risk an opinion on the interpretive skills of artists whose reputation did not precede them. It gave them something safe to write about. In some cases they even claimed that those programs made “musical sense” when in reality they made literary or historical sense. (Musical sense is rarely apprehended through the analytical, verbal right-side of the brain). And performers, always willing to shed the circus-like trappings of stage life, were quite happy to put on the hat of “deep thinkers” instead of “vapid virtuosos”.

So, how were the programs in the not so distant, healthy past? Widely different, of course, but one common thread run through them: they seemed to follow a dramatic arch that put the most intensely charged work right before intermission and, at the end, either rewarded listeners with exciting virtuoso displays ( a Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody) or sent them home with dangerously high blood pressure after a pounding, chord-pummeling finale ( Prokofiev’s Seventh Sonata). A chronological order was common: a Bach transcription seemed de rigueur at the beginning, drama hit the apex with a long Romantic piece, and the 20th Century put in an appearance only after intermission, usually under the banner of Impressionism or Nationalism (such was the delightful role of a lot of Debussy and Albeniz). Chronology had the undisputed advantage of making each composer seem a “radical”, emphasizing, as the evening progressed, the adventurousness of more daring harmonies and less academic forms. But the result was always an immensely satisfying evening, not dissimilar to a great dinner at “Le Cirque”: variety of textures, dramatic contrast, a chiaroscuro of moods, a generous palette of colors and flavors. Perhaps the last master programmer, one who never needed to don pseudo-intellectual garb, was the late Shura Cherkassky.

Tonight’s program is an homage to the great programmers of the past. It touches the requisite bases of an anachronistic Bach transcription, a great Romantic work in the middle, a sunny start of the second half, a late appearance by the 20th Century and a pulse raising, “brutalist” finale. But to those critics who might wish to say something clever about this performer in the future, I solemnly promise a thematic program of my own: an evening of works by Mozart, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Godowsky and Luigi Nono. Guess the theme yet? They are all Aquarians, and so am I!

Alberto Reyes
September 3rd, 2009

Why another Chopin recording

A pianist who dares to offer the public yet another Chopin recording will do so with considerable trepidation. Chopin’s works have been favored by pianists and audiences alike since the dawn of the recording era, and every great pianist in history — with the exception of the odd Beethoven or Schubert specialist — has recorded them.

So, lest the analysis of my motivation to release the present CD bump against the bedrock of narcissism (to paraphrase Freud), I’d better come up with some compelling reason to enter the crowded field of Chopin’s discography.

Sometimes a happy confluence of conditions and circumstances will offer an irresistible temptation to make a recording public. In this case, the unsurpassed acoustic of New York’s American Academy of Arts and Letters, the ravishing sound of CD 124 from Steinway’s 57th Street selection room, and the state-of-the-art ears of my producer and engineer Richard Price, have combined to produce a recording of such seductive tonal appeal that it would almost be selfish not to share it with others. But then we must remember that Chopin himself used to inveigh against the empty charms of sonority in his arguments with Delacroix. The latter used to proclaim the primacy of color over line, which translated into musical terms is equivalent to asserting the primacy of sound over structure, something that was anathema to Chopin. So the great Polish genius himself would not have deemed a great recorded sound reason enough to justify a release.

No, the valid argument in support of another commercial Chopin recording is the fact that making it affords a pianist the unique opportunity to engage in a double dialogue with the works themselves and with every other artist and commentator who have played or written about them; who can resist that?

The dialogue with the works cannot be approached lightly. One can only hope to be a worthy interlocutor if one has spent years, nay, decades studying them. It’s not right away that one comes to the conclusion, for instance, that the Funeral March of the B Flat Minor Sonata and the march that forms the introduction of the F Minor Fantasy (published in consecutive years but written four years apart) share the same aura of tragedy and despair, even though both modulate briefly into the major mode (one exultantly, the other amiably) and both alternate with music that offers heavenly consolation: the D Flat central section of the Funeral March and the B Major chorale of the Fantasy. Neither is it immediately obvious that the variation techniques that characterize the F Minor Ballade, with the recurrence of a heartbreakingly simple theme, enable Chopin to make his most profound statement of loss and regret.

How to capture these autumnal qualities of the Ballade in a performance that demands the utmost virtuosity from a pianist? How to convey the impish playfulness of the Scherzo of the B Minor Sonata? How to avoid the temptation of making the otherwordly fourth movement of the Funeral March Sonata an “effective finale” for the entire work, by turning it into a colorful virtuoso etude?

It is precisely a recording, with its opportunities to keep doing something until one gets it right (its wonderful “take two-ness” in Glenn Gould’s memorable bon mot), that affords the artist the chance to come close to his/her conception of the work, without being hostage to the hazards of a live performance. The chance to repeat a movement over and over again is not a case of submitting to the “barbarism of perfection” as Adorno’s friend and occasional piano teacher Eduard Steurmann called some musicians’ obsession with note-perfect renditions. That only results in a Frankenstein monster made up of dead body parts. By repeating whole movements and long sections with a musical vision firmly in mind, we indulge in the luxury of engaging at length in dialogue with a masterpiece, in the hope of reaching an enlightening and enriching conclusion in a performance that is at once, coherent and (with the least possible amount of editing) clean.

Similarly, by adding one’s performance to the recorded heritage, one enters into a respectful and friendly discussion with one’s predecessors and musical ancestors. True, the Apollonian elegance, command and imagination of Josef Hofmann’s first movement of the B Minor Sonata, captured in all their glory in his recording of 1935 (sadly he only left us that single movement) will be forever out of reach to us, mere mortals, as will be Moiseiwitsch’s definitive Barcarolle of 1941 and Cortot’s unbearably tragic Funeral March of 1928. But in our own modest way, perhaps, a few measures of our own performances of those pieces will sound like a hearty “hear! hear!” to their miraculous proposals. Or, having taken to heart Charles Rosen’s perceptive proclamation of the F Minor Ballade as Chopin’s masterpiece of elegiac style, we will endeavor to convey through tempo, phrasing and nuance, the essence of that elegy.

On the same respectful vein, we can take issue with Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli’s phenomenal display of velocity, color and bold shapes in his live recording of the aforementioned fourth movement of the Funeral March Sonata, as inimical to the bleakness of its character, even if we would gladly kill our own grandmother to have Michelangeli’s fingers.

And finally, through a well considered recorded performance, we can face up to the “pedants of textuality’, those who uphold the sacred nature of the written text above all else, ignoring the fact that the most important vector of musical meaning and expression in Chopin is prosody, those inflections of dynamics and timing that his musical notation is totally incapable of capturing. Those sticklers to the score will hear in the present CD organic modifications of pulse and even of rhythm that do not appear on the page, dynamic nuances that an expressive reading of the music demands, doubling of octaves in the bass to underscore the climax of a harmonic progression, de-synchronization of hands, and even of voices within the same hand, for the sake of contrapuntal clarity (counterpoint being a sacred value to Chopin)

This record, therefore, aspires to be a personal contribution to a public debate on Chopin’s masterpieces, one more voice in a collective conversation that will go on as long as performers approach these greatest gems of the piano repertory with open mind and an honest heart.

Alberto Reyes
August, 2009