A Month of Great Piano

The piano is not my instrument, normally. I don’t just mean I never learned to play it (though that too is true: my childhood music lessons were on the violin). What I really mean is that I don’t seek out piano concerts the way I do, say, string quartet concerts or other kinds of string-based performances. I am used to thinking of the piano as a relatively impersonal instrument, compared to the human voices of violins, violas, and cellos.

So it was just by luck—the geographical luck of being in New York, and the professional luck involved in getting press seats or cheap tickets—that I managed to hear, over the course of three weeks, a dozen of the most interesting pianists performing today.

The series started on October 19 at Carnegie’s Zankel Hall, where I heard Igor Levit for the first time. Friends had recommended his playing highly, and I had even met him at a dinner party once (he is, among other things, a masterful raconteur of Jewish jokes), but I was still not prepared for how irresistibly moving his performance would be. The program—a Brahms transcription of a Bach partita, a Bach-inspired piece by Busoni, plus one work by Schumann and two by Liszt—all derived from his recent album, Life, and it all felt immensely personal in his hands. (This was even more true of the thrilling encore, Frederic Rzewski’s “A Mensch,” which I had never heard before and will now permanently associate with Levit’s inspired performance.) Without any distracting mannerisms or excessive emphasis, and with great thoughtfulness throughout, Levit managed to make the piano into a deeply expressive and delicately tender instrument.

A mere six days later, on October 25, I was present in the same hall when Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich (who are partners onstage as well as off) gave their remarkable performance of Olivier Messiaen’s Visions de l’amen. The first half of the two-piano program (Bartok, Ravel, Birtwhistle) was fine—probably better than fine—but it was the half after the intermission which galvanized the audience, including me. I have heard this great Messiaen work played before, and I knew it was probably going to be good, but I have never before felt the hairs rise on the back of my neck during certain passages. I am not kidding: that eerie sensation, which I always considered a metaphor, in this case became so literal that I briefly glanced around the hall to see if someone had opened a door and let in a draft. In animals, I know, this physiological reaction signals alertness to danger, a sense of guardedness and fear. What is it about a piece of music that can reach to those depths? Whatever it is, the Messiaen as played by Aimard and Stefanovich had it—not to mention a hundred other shades of emotion as well. You could be a staunch atheist, as I am, and still feel that the music gave you a brief glimpse of the world to come.

A more earthly but still delightful event took place two days later at Merkin Hall. On the afternoon of Sunday, October 28, about thirty musicians gathered together to give a 70th birthday concert for the cellist Fred Sherry, who is a much-loved figure in the New York chamber music world. Tickets were available to the public for a mere $20 and were free to students (that was very Fred, too), so naturally the hall was filled, but so many people seemed to know each other that it felt more like an intimate house concert than a public event. Among the noted pianists who took the stage, both solo and in concert with others, were Peter Serkin, Ursula Oppens, Alan Feinberg, Jeremy Denk, and Anne-Marie McDermott. (Among the non-pianists were the cellist Leila Josefowicz, the clarinetist Richard Stolzman, the JACK Quartet, and other musicians of that calibre.) The whole event was so thrilling, so touching, and so only-in-New-York that my main emotion was gratitude at being present for this terrific gift (a gift that Fred Sherry, who sat right across the aisle from me, was clearly thrilled at receiving). But I also had time to take note of the fact that my monthly great-pianist count had suddenly jumped through the roof.

And I still had four concerts to go!  On November 1, I was lucky enough to hear the Brazilian pianist Nelson Freire perform Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto with Gergiev and the Mariinsky Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. I had gone for the Mariinsky, but I came away feeling that Freire—a pianist’s pianist, one whose self-effacing manner and phenomenal skill have endeared him to generations of musicians and audience members—was the real discovery. I love the Brahms anyway, but this pianist brought things out that I had never heard before, and he did so by collaborating beautifully with the orchestra, not by strutting his own stuff.

The very next night, I heard a resolutely modern piece that was entirely new to me—Morton Feldman’s “Triadic Memories for piano solo”—performed by New York’s own Pedja Muzijevic as part of the annual White Light Festival. Held at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, which co-sponsored the event, the November 2 concert also included a simultaneous dance performance by the Catalan dancer Cesc Gelabert. Gelabert is an interesting dancer and choreographer, but in this case it seemed to me that the star of the show was Muzijevic, who gave extra meaning to the word “piano” by rendering Feldman’s one-hour work in a phenomenally soft, quiet way. Partly because of the dramatic setting, it felt as the pianist was pulling each single note out of the silence and showing it to us before letting it lapse back into its native inaudible state.

This was immediately followed by a Paul Lewis concert—always likely to be a high point of any piano month. On November 3 he was appearing courtesy of the People’s Symphony Concerts series at Washington Irving High School: an excellent series in that the tickets all cost $15, though the environment can be somewhat less-than-excellent in terms of acoustics. Still, no one was complaining about the sound quality in this case. Lewis’s solo concert, which ranged from Brahms to Haydn to Beethoven and back to Haydn (with an extra fillip of Beethoven Bagatelle as the encore), was satisfyingly terrific from start to finish.  He has a way of engaging with the audience through subtle glances and occasional smiles that welcome you into his view of the music: you can tell when he thinks a passage is witty or tender by the expression on his face, and you can hear the same emotion coming through in his sensitive playing. Once again I was forced to acknowledge that the piano, in the right hands, can be as moving as my beloved strings.

I was able to get both piano and strings in the final concert of my three-week series, the November 8 encounter at Zankel Hall between the St. Lawrence String Quartet and the pianist Inon Barnatan. I’ve become a great fan of the California-based St. Lawrences ever since first hearing them at an intimate Baryshnikov Arts Center event some years ago, and I try to attend their concerts whenever I can; Barnatan, too, always struck me as incredibly talented when I heard him play with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. So I was looking forward to their collaboration on Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet, a piece I hold very dear. What I couldn’t have predicted was how skillfully the first half of the program—Haydn’s strangely modern String Quartet in G Minor, Beethoven’s darkly antic Opus 135—would lead up to the Shostakovich. The whole performance, with and without Barnatan, felt of a piece, as if all five performers and all three composers (plus Schumann, whose great piano quintet supplied the encore) had banded together to offer us a single jolt of powerful emotion. That emotion partook of joy and pessimism, wit and sadness, wild adventurousness and deep respect for tradition, individuality and communion—everything, in short, that makes music such a central and important part of life.