ON A WET OCTOBER NIGHT in 2010, pianist Menahem Pressler (b. 1923) made his way along the concrete tributaries in New York’s Greenwich Village, racing past falafel stands and coffeehouses, cheap ethnic restaurants and ramshackle taverns as his taxi traced the twists and turns of the historic neighborhood—traditionally, the home ground of poets and artists, intellectuals and provocateurs. This is the place where Bob Dylan first met Allen Ginsberg; where the folk-music revival of the 1960s was born; and where the ghosts of Jack London, Henry Miller, James Baldwin, and Jack Kerouac still haunt the narrow alleyways.
But Pressler wasn’t sightseeing. The diminutive, robust eighty-six-year-old, one of classical music’s most revered performers, was on his way to a gig. That evening, he and clarinetist Richard Stoltzman were giving a joint recital at the former site of the Village Gate, the legendary club where jazz lovers once marveled at live performances by Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Duke Ellington, and Bill Evans. Now renovated into the smaller Le Poisson Rouge, a cabaret with the announced intentions of reviving “the symbiotic relationship between art and revelry,” it offers music of all genres, from classical to pop to avant-garde. The venue had become the hippest music stage in New York.
Pressler is a bullet train without brakes. Many younger colleagues who perform regularly with him have complained that they simply can’t keep up. He has just returned from Europe, performing at Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, one of the finest concert halls in the world; and from Beijing, where he gave a week’s worth of master classes. He is in a category all his own, especially when it comes to chamber music (he was a founding member of the legendary Beaux Arts Trio, and remained its leader for nearly fifty-five years). Few others could boast of a lifetime achievement award from Gramophone magazine, or a Gold Medal of Merit from the National Society of Arts and Letters. In 2005, he received two of the world’s highest cultural honors: the German Cross of Merit and France’s Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters.
But now he was on his way to an informal Village haunt to give a program of Bernstein, Brahms, Debussy, Gershwin, and Reich—a trek that brings to mind Mozart navigating the cobblestones of Vienna, past rows of refreshment stands, courtyards, and taverns, to premiere his D minor Piano Concerto before a small audience at the Poisson Rouge of its day, the Flour Pit.
Of course, Mozart didn’t have the luxury of color spotlights over the stage, or an electronic sound system projecting and delicately balancing instrumental voices clearly throughout the room. Certainly no one in his time could have pulled off the intricate Steve Reich work for eight clarinets on this evening’s program in the way Richard Stoltzman regularly does, performing it single-handedly by playing one part along with seven prerecorded tracks.
But there are also similarities. Le Poisson Rouge represents both the very old and the very new look of classical music, offering relaxed musical celebrations in a space bustling with waiters and buzzing with expectation, where listeners can order a drink, enjoy a snack, and put their elbows on the table without fear of a reprimand.
Richard Stoltzman and Menahem Pressler at Le Poisson Rouge
PETER SCHAAF (Illustration credit 16.1)
All formality has been stripped away. After a brief introduction, the musicians begin, and as Bernstein’s jaunty rhythms and Broadway charm envelop the room, their sounds merge with the clink of ice cubes and the rustle of tableware. Listeners are nodding or tapping their feet. The stage is aglow, and Stoltzman’s clarinet, with a wireless microphone that clings to the instrument like a two-headed snake, suddenly looks like it is being squeezed from his face, which has assumed an unearthly grin. His eyes are closed, and Pressler’s head is bouncing left and right to the music’s syncopated rhythms. Sitting just feet from the stage, a listener feels like part of the ensemble.
In a solo turn, Pressler plays two selections from Claude Debussy’s Estampes. Even from the small, well-worn piano, his playing is graceful and warm.
Pressler is a musical caretaker, pursuing the exquisite sound at the core of each work, and bringing it to life with the shaping of a phrase or the weighting of a harmony. “The pianist who has a beautiful sound is like a good-looking person,” he once explained. “You immediately feel attracted. For many works, it’s essential—a reason for being. Someone playing Chopin with an ugly sound will have a very hard time making the form stand out, because in the end what really counts is the beauty that the composer put into the music. Even Beethoven, whose message is so strong it can bear a hard edge, put indications in his music like ‘tender.’ ” Indeed, this evening, each piano phrase sounds like a musical caress. “You know,” Pressler told a student, “when you are in love as I am with these pieces, they are always fresh. They are always young. I remember the first time I was thrilled by them, and I am thrilled by them today.”
But why would two stellar musicians used to the finest halls in the world be playing in a little Greenwich Village cabaret? “Wherever people want to hear us, that’s where we’ll go,” said Pressler just before walking on stage, and Richard Stoltzman nodded in agreement.
THE SCENE at Le Poisson Rouge represents the future of classical music, as it resolutely dissolves the distance that has grown between player and listener. It is a replay of musical days gone by. Indeed, it reflects the state of the piano in the new era: Everything old is becoming new again.
Three hundred years after the invention of the piano, the traditionalists and the experimentalists continue on. There are still towering players of the standard repertoire like Hungarian-born András Schiff (b. 1953), who, like his fellow, too-soon-departed countryman Géza Anda (1921–1976), invests the music with remarkable intelligence and flawless technique. And there is France’s Pierre-Laurent Aimard (b. 1957), a phenomenal pianist and thinker, who renders Bach, Beethoven, and Debussy and the latest contemporary works with equally stunning artistry. Jazz artists have developed a wider cultural vision, with the emergence of players like Vijay Iyer (b. 1971), who combines American sounds with music of the Indo-Asian diaspora; and Monty Alexander (b. 1944), who bridges the roots of his native Jamaica to the legacy of Nat “King” Cole and Oscar Peterson. As in the past, we have pianists who look forward as well as backward, like Peter Serkin (b. 1947), Rudolf’s son, who enlivens the concert scene with newly commissioned repertoire while engaging in various experiments, such as placing a second “lid” beneath the piano’s soundboard to help project the music toward the audience, and using historical tunings in mainstream works (something most often done by early-music groups and members of the avant-garde).
The piano’s abundant charms have also continued to spread across the world, especially to the Far East, where over the last several decades it has become a rising star. Gary Graffman’s transition from concertizing pianist to educator gave him a front-row seat. With his performing career on hold, he assumed the directorship of the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and began to notice an increasing number of Asian applicants. “Usually we take only between two and four new entrants at a time,” he explained, because the school is so small. “In a year when 119 applied for just two slots, we opened our doors to a young man named Lang Lang.”
That Chinese-born pianist reignited the phenomenon of the classical piano superstar, attracting adulation and scorn in equal measure. The endless sweep of his balletic arms, the pain and exaltation that register on his face, a torso that rises and pivots at every dramatic moment, all made him seem not merely a pianist but a theatrical sensation. His musical interpretations were often equally over the top.
“He wanted to be the Tiger Woods of the piano world,” explained Graffman, comparing his former student to the celebrated golfer, “and he achieved it, with his picture in every magazine and product endorsements for Rolex watches, Nike sneakers, and Mont Blanc pens.” Indeed, Lang Lang was the first artist ever to have his name adorn a Steinway piano model.
But he was not alone. Other talents from his homeland were eagerly waiting in the wings. China has come a long way in its mastery of Western music since a Jesuit named Matteo Ricci first brought a clavichord there while visiting in the late sixteenth century. Although Mao’s Cultural Revolution put a temporary halt to Western musical practices, today’s young Chinese musicians, like Jin Ju, who won top prizes in competitions from China to Brussels before resettling in Florence, are creating a piano renaissance, filling conservatories and winning awards at a remarkable rate.
Other Asian nations—especially Japan and South Korea—have also discovered the instrument’s allure. In Japan, Yamaha began building pianos in 1900, and over the course of a century grew to become the world’s most prolific piano manufacturer, offering both acoustic and electronic models. In 2007, it acquired Bösendorfer, the venerable Austrian piano company founded in 1828, whose instrument was a favorite of Liszt, Oscar Peterson, and many other great artists.
THE PIANO IN CHINA by Yundi Li
I started playing the piano when I was seven. At that time, China had just opened the door to participating in international competitions. By the time I won the Chopin Competition in Warsaw in 2000—becoming, at eighteen, its youngest winner in history—the Chinese government was actively supportive. Today, there are 30 million children studying the piano in China, and about a dozen truly great concert halls.
I had a love of music from the age of four, but my first instrument was actually the accordion. In fact, I won a children’s accordion competition when I was five. Then I heard the piano, a tape of Chopin Etudes (we didn’t have CDs then), and everything changed. I listened to it every night, and slept between listenings. I lived those Etudes, and I’ve had a relationship with Chopin ever since. My teacher, Professor Dan Zhaoyi, helped me to deepen it.
Is there a national style of playing? Yes and no. Our piano tradition developed from the Russian “touch,” but also from the French approach to Debussy and Ravel. We want to learn as many good things as we can from a variety of sources. Our attitude is like tai chi [yin and yang]—a combination of mixed and free, not moving too far in any one direction. To understand the Chinese personality, you have to study our poets, like Du Fu [712–770], the “poet-sage,” and Li Bai [701–762, one of Du Fu’s “Eight Immortals of the Wine Cup”]. We draw our inspiration from five thousand years of history.
One reason that Chopin feels so natural to us is that his music contains the spirit of nationalism—it reaches out to his fellow countrymen. This is something we relate to. He is also, of course, a wonderful piano composer–his whole life was focused on the instrument. And he is Classic as well as Romantic, with a deep love of Mozart. That balance is why his music has continued to thrive from generation to generation.
But China’s size and population alone have put it in a special category. Along with its mushrooming piano schools filled with millions of students, the nation has become a center of piano manufacturing. Companies such as Pearl River—owner of the largest piano factory in the world—are producing extremely fine instruments at lower costs than their American and European competitors. Indeed, although few Americans realize it, many of the parts in their new and recently restored pianos originated in China, which is now dominating that market. The musical trickle that began at the Curtis Institute with the introduction of Lang Lang turned out to be an impending flood.
A SNAPSHOT of the current piano scene includes skilled keyboardists breathing new life into old practices, like classical improvisation. American pianist Robert Levin (b. 1947) has championed the return of improvised cadenzas (the places in a concerto where Mozart or Beethoven would simply make up something on the spur of the moment, drawing on themes in the musical score as a springboard for instantaneous composition). He even allows audiences to have a part in deciding his choices.
Venezuelan-American pianist Gabriela Montero has gone a step further. While the practice of playing original cadenzas, and of preluding—preceding a work with a short improvised introduction—never disappeared entirely, Montero is a modern-day Liszt, accepting melodies from the audience and improvising entire pieces on the spot. Few artists in any genre can muster her sweeping command and technical flair, her ability to sail through myriad stylistic palettes, or generate intricate counterpoint at a moment’s whim.
Composer-pianists are also revisiting the subversive world of the early-twentieth-century avant-garde. Frederic Rzewski (b. 1938) is one of them. Described by Nicolas Slonimsky in his Baker’s Biographical Dictionary of Musicians as an “overpowering piano technician, capable of depositing huge boulders of sonoristic material across the keyboard without actually wrecking the instrument,” Rzewski’s variety of sound and musical fertility is endlessly stunning, especially in works like Four North American Ballads (which includes a sonic depiction of a cotton mill) and The People United Will Never Be Defeated (thirty-six variations on the leftist political song by Sergio Ortega). Many of the subtle coloristic shadings that Rzewski achieves were derived from the innovative techniques of American pianist David Tudor (1926–1996), a long-time associate of John Cage.
JUST AS in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when oddities such as “giraffes” were rising in popularity, today’s piano world is replete with examples of the peculiar and the extraordinary. Many stem from John Cage’s interest in revising our conception of what a piano is, turning it into a percussion orchestra, for example, by inserting objects into its strings. Cage paved the way for a new generation, including Singapore-born American pianist Margaret Leng Tan, who commissions and performs works for a variety of toy pianos.
“While everyone has heard of the three B’s—Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms—how many are aware of the three C’s—Cage, Cowell, and Crumb?” she asks. “They constitute what I call the classical avant-garde for the piano. Cage’s ‘prepared piano’ was built on what Cowell had done with the strings inside the instrument. Contemporary composer George Crumb [b. 1929] doesn’t ‘prepare’ the piano, but his approach—strumming, plucking, or running objects along the strings—simply extends the same idea.
“Cage had written a Suite for Toy Piano in 1948, and George Crumb used one in his 1970 song cycle, Ancient Voices of Children, and again more recently, in his American Songbooks cycle,” she explains. “It gave me the idea there was potential for it to become a legitimate instrument. Now a great many composers are writing for it, and I’ve been actively recording and performing these works; I even recently played the toy piano at a Carnegie Hall concert.”
Margaret Leng Tan at her toy piano
© 1993 JACK VARTOOGIAN/FRONT ROW PHOTOS (Illustration credit 16.2)
Crumb labeled Margaret Leng Tan “the Sorceress of the Piano.” There are many modern “sorcerers” as well, like Michael Harrison, who creates his own piano tunings in a continuation of the work of Indian raga master Pandit Pran Nath and American maverick piano composer La Monte Young. Harrison sets aside the modern “equal temperament” piano tuning in favor of the mathematically “pure” musical intervals that produce calamitous collisions when used for a keyboard instrument. He embraces both the purity of these sounds and the collisions, and the results—in works like his ninety-minute hypnotic piano solo, Revelation (placed by both The New York Times and the Boston Globe among the best recordings of 2007)—can suggest angelic choirs in one moment and thunderous explosions in the next.
THE LOOK OF the piano, for many years as predictable as the seasons, has once again become a creative outlet in the twenty-first century. Just as in the nineteenth century, specially crafted models have placed the piano in the role of objet d’art. Forerunners like the 1883 Steinway painted by noted Victorian artist Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema (1836–1912) and the heavily decorated first White House Steinway, presented to President Theodore Roosevelt in 1903, serve as inspiration for new designs by such artists as Dale Chihuly, known for his extraordinary glass sculptures. Other designers are working with varieties of woods. (Steinway takes pains to explain that it is environmentally conscious in its use of woods, so as not to deplete natural resources. Similar concerns have for many years forced manufacturers to use plastic rather than ivory for the piano’s keys.)
But modernity has taken the idea of the piano as art even further, incorporating the instrument into conceptual and mixed-media works, from German Heiner Goebbels’s music-theater piece Stifters Dinge (Stifter’s Things), presented in 2007 at the Théâtre Vidy-Lausanne in Switzerland and in 2009 at New York’s Park Avenue Armory under the sponsorship of Lincoln Center—in which five pianos moving on tracks become active characters in a dramatic narrative—to Dutchman Guido van der Werve’s 2009 “chess piano,” which is played by moving chess pieces on a board.
The Alma-Tadema Steinway (Illustration credit 16.3)
Dale Chihuly’s Olympia Steinway (Illustration credit 16.4)
In 2010, a three-actor theater piece in New York called Three Pianos employed three movable uprights, which, in addition to being played, became ventriloquist dummies, coffins, triangulated penalty boxes, and piano bars, complete with drinks and cocktail peanuts.
That same year, an art installation entitled Stop, Repair, Prepare: Variations on “Ode to Joy” for a Prepared Piano by Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla was presented at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (it had debuted in 2008 at the Haus der Kunst in Munich). The work features a Bechstein baby grand piano on wheels with a large hole cut into its center, out of which a pianist rises up and hovers over the keyboard (bending forward from behind the keys) to play an arrangement of the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. As the music unfolds, the pianist gently maneuvers the instrument around the room and through the crowd of onlookers, parting assembled listeners like a ship moving through cresting waters. Pianist Evan Shinners confessed that the hardest part of performing it was the strain on his back.
Pianist Evan Shinners performing from inside a Bechstein piano in Stop, Repair, Prepare at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, 2010
ADRIENNE ISACOFF (Illustration credit 16.5)
Whether Stop, Repair, Prepare is, as The New York Times claimed, compelling, and “possibly a form of reparation for the regimes the music, in its greatness, has served,” or merely a silly parlor trick, history will judge. (As “theater of the absurd,” it certainly pales beside John Cage’s 1960 Theatre Piece, during which a piano is slapped with a dead fish.)
Such applications take the piano a long way from the cypress keyboard that once transformed the musical world simply by playing soft and loud. Yet they demonstrate that even in an age of previously unimagined technical advances, the old-fashioned acoustic piano can still astonish.
BACK AT LE Poisson Rouge, as Richard Stoltzman is playing Steve Reich’s long, intricate New York Counterpoint—an endurance test—the exhaustion, heat, and intensity begin taking their toll. Perspiration is pouring down his face. During a brief break in the solo clarinet part, he attempts to remove his jacket. The air has been thick with pulsations moving in endless loops—jaunty thematic permutations, fragmented phrases flying here and there, syncopations moving against other syncopations, and rhythms everywhere—until the sound builds into what seems like a stampeding herd of clarinets. And as Stoltzman, dripping, and using every ounce of breath to keep the momentum going, finally manages to rid himself of the jacket there is a smattering of giggles and a few handclaps. We have all been drawn into the drama.
After a Brahms sonata of riveting emotional gravity, the duo finishes the night by playing a bluesy Gershwin set, sending patrons back onto the street, where the rain clouds have finally dispersed. Reflecting on the experience afterward, Menahem Pressler is upbeat. What did he think of the experience? “It was more intimate, somehow,” he says. “It amazed me how they listened. They ate and they drank, and they listened. I was not discouraged by any noise.”
No doubt Mozart would have been comfortable too, though he might have been amazed that the simple keyboard instrument he helped popularize still plays so vital a part in music making. It is rather miraculous. Bartolomeo Cristofori couldn’t possibly have imagined our world, and we can barely picture his, yet we still find reasons to appreciate that humble Paduan for his remarkable gift. It’s a good bet that some form of his keyboard “with soft and loud” will continue to thrill listeners for generations to come.