Back
to Chapter 15
16
The
Pleasure of Taking Part
The
delight of playing with great artists.
Wonderful solo violinists, cellists,
pianists – Heifetz, Oistrakh, Menuhin,
Perlman … Fournier, Tortelier, du Pré,
Rostropovich … Rubinstein, Solomon,
Currzon, Barenboim …
However
enjoyable going to a concert may be,
or listening to music on the radio,
TV or a recording, there is nothing
to beat actually taking part in a performance.
I have tried to express how wonderful
it is if one is privileged to be part
of a performance of one of the masterpieces
of the orchestral or opera repertoire
in a very good orchestra with an inspiring
conductor. In a similar way, to be in
the orchestra accompanying a great artist
is immensely satisfying. In addition,
if one is lucky enough to play alongside
musicians one admires, whether it is
in a symphony orchestra, the pit in
an opera house or at a film session,
broadcasting or recording light or commercial
music, it can be equally enjoyable to
make music with congenial spirits. These
are the delights I was able to enjoy
a good deal of the time during my 38
years as an orchestral musician.
In writing
about the artists whose performances
gave me so much pleasure when taking
part in concerts with them and whom
I recall as one does old friends, in
many cases now departed, there is no
attempt to suggest these are the ‘best’
artists, only that in memory they are
those for who I feel great affection.
Someone once asked Sir Thomas Beecham
‘what is good music?’ and he had to
invent an answer on the spur of the
moment. ‘Good music’, he said, ‘is that
which penetrates the ear with facility
and quits the memory with difficulty’.
This is equally true for a ‘good performance’.
My
very first experience of accompanying
a soloist was while I was still at the
Royal College of Music. Sir George Dyson,
then the Director, conducted a rehearsal
of his very pleasant Violin Concerto,
with W. H. Reed as soloist. Willy Reed,
as we called him (though Vaughan Williams
calls him Billy, in his Introduction
to London Symphony, Portrait of an
Orchestra) was for many years the
Leader of the LSO and it was to him
that Elgar turned when seeking advice
at the time he was composing his violin
concerto. As well as being a most distinguished
violinist Reed was also a composer.
He composed a violin concerto and a
viola rhapsody among many other works
for orchestra that were all performed
between 1910 and 1930. The music by
Dyson and Reed like the compositions
of so many English composers of that
period is now largely forgotten.
Once
I had joined the Wessex Orchestra I
took part in a good many concerts with
a soloist. In fact, it was rare for
us to do a concert without a soloist.
I referred in Chapter 5 to a number
of the artists who played with us, but
omitted to mention Mark Hambourg. He
was the most internationally famous
artist we worked with apart from Benno
Moiseiwitsch. By 1942 when he played
with us he was in his 60s and past his
best, but still a formidable player
and very popular with the public. He
was always called upon to play an encore
and most times would play the Minute
Waltz by Chopin. He always turned
to the audience and with his still fairly
thick Russian accent said, ‘Now, I play
Minute Waltz – in half-minute!’
And he would then proceed to do so including
a fair sprinkling of wrong notes. His
book From Piano to Forte is interesting,
amusing and extraordinarily well written
in marked contrast to his spoken English.
This book, published in 1931, is worth
reading for the last chapter alone,
in which he writes so perceptively about
the effect of recording (then still
on 78s) and broadcasting on artists
of his time and reflects on the changes
in attitude this was already having
on performers and audiences.
Mark
Hambourg, like nearly all the soloists
I shall write about was a child prodigy
who first played in public when he was
seven years old. In 1895, when he was
16, he played Liszt’s Hungarian Fantasie
in the beautiful Musikvereinsaal in
Vienna with the Berlin Philharmonic
Orchestra, conducted by Felix Weingartner.
It is usually apparent from a fairly
early age, often by the time they are
four or five years old, whether a young
instrumentalist has a talent that may
lead to a great solo career.
Violin
and cello soloists
It was
in 1943, the year I joined the LPO,
that I first played in an orchestra
accompanying Ida Haendel. She was the
soloist on two occasions. During the
Prom season that year On 11th
July she played the Tchaikovsky Violin
Concerto and only four days later on
the 15th she played the Symphonie
Espagnole by Édouard Lalo.
She was then 15. This astonishing musician
was truly a child prodigy. When she
was only 7 years old in 1935 she was
the 7th prize winner in the
Wieniawski Competition. One gains some
idea of the standard from the fact that
Ginette Neveu , then aged 16, and David
Oistrakh, aged 27, came 1st
and 2nd that year. Haendel
made her debut in London at the Queens
Hall in 1937 playing the Beethoven Violin
Concerto with Sir Henry Wood conducting.
I remember the occasion very clearly
because my father insisted that we listen
to the broadcast of this concert. I
was then 12 and he had about a year
previously started giving me clarinet
lessons and he wanted me to hear this
incredible girl, then still only 9.
Having been an outstandingly gifted
boy himself, earning his living as a
clarinettist when he was 11, I felt
this was intended to inspire me and,
perhaps, induce me to practise more.
Needless to say, though I was amazed
by her playing I recognised a talent
so far beyond my own that it did not
have the desired effect. As the years
went by Ida Haendel continued to be
an artist that gave me pleasure whenever
she played with any orchestra I was
in.
From
the time when I was at school in 1940
and was bowled over listening to the
young Yehudi Menuhin playing the Elgar
Violin Concerto, until the end of his
life in1999 his wonderfully musical
insights were always rewarding and from
the mid 80s he was most helpful to me
personally. He gave his support to and
came and worked with the orchestra at
the National Centre for Orchestral Studies
and when we were establishing the Music
Performance Research Centre, now Music
Preserved, he was also very helpful
and supportive. Later, in 1990, he agreed
to be the President of the Orchestra
for Europe which, unfortunately, finally
had to be abandoned for lack of sufficient
finance.
He was
an absolutely natural player and musician
who perhaps to a greater extent than
anyone else in my life time demonstrated
how dangerous interfering with such
a talent can be. He said that he wanted
‘Kreisler’s elegance, Elman’s sonority
and Heifetz’s technique’ though nature
had to a considerable extent already
granted that wish. ‘I played more or
less as a bird sings, instinctively,
uncalculatingly, unthinkingly,’ Menuhin
was to write in his memoir Unfinished
Journey. But this was not enough
and in his forties he suddenly decided
that intuition was not sufficient and
could not be relied on; he needed to
think about how he should play, in fact
to re-teach himself.
Though
for the rest of his life his musical
instincts never deserted him he had
ever increasing technical problems that
at times seriously marred his performances.
He was a perfect example of the warning
exemplified in the story of the two
golfers, Charles and James, one very
much better than the other. Charles,
the much less good player, decided that
if he could not win by his golfing prowess
he must use guile. Just as the other
player raised his club to drive off,
he went ‘Um! yes.’ James, stopping in
mid-stroke, ‘What’s that? What do you
mean?’ ‘It was just that I was interested
to see what you did to get such a good
swing and strike the ball so well’ This
started James thinking about what he
was doing so that he became increasingly
introverted and inhibited until he found
it harder and harder to play with his
former skill.
Perhaps,
because Menuhin’s violin playing was
causing him problems he began conducting.
Again his instinctive musicality was
always present but, as has been the
case with so many other instrumentalists
and singers who have wanted to conduct,
the particular magic required had not
been granted to him. When he came to
conduct the Philharmonia he was quite
unable to cope with the problems involved
in accompanying one of the Bartók
Piano Concertos. He became rather disagreeable
and as a result his relationship with
the orchestra deteriorated. At the time
I was Chairman of the orchestra and
found it extremely saddening to hear
someone I so much admired spoken of
by my colleagues in such an unfavourable
way.
Once
the war ended in 1945 a great many of
the finest soloists began visiting Britain
again. One of the first to arrive was
the French violinist Jacques Thibaud.
In 1896 when he was 16 he was joint
winner of the Paris Conservatoire Violin
Prize with Pierre Monteux, who went
on to be a viola player (he led the
violas at the Opéra-Comique for
the first performance of Debussy’s Pelléas
and Mélisande) before becoming
a celebrated conductor. Thibaud is best
remembered now for the trio recordings
he made with the cellist Pablo Casals
and pianist Alfred Cortot. It is a pity
that there is no recording of his performance
of The Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso
by Camille Saint- Saëns. I
remember it still, though it is so many
years ago, because I have never heard
the Introduction played so sensitively
since then. The way in which the beautiful
Introduction is nearly always
played is far too schmaltzy and
‘romantic’ for this quintessential French
music. Thibaud played it delicately
and tenderly and with true feeling,
in the same way that a great actor can
underplay a love scene making it all
the more affecting, rather than sentimentalising
it.
Thibaud
was followed by two more superb violinists,
Zino Francescatti and the incomparable
Ginette Neveu who immediately made a
tremendous impression on the orchestra
– as well as the audience. There was
something so ferociously passionate
about her playing that overwhelmed one.
At times she seemed to attack the violin
like a gladiator and at others to draw
out the most sensuous and captivating
tone. Her performance of the Beethoven
and Brahms Concertos were outstanding,
but it was her performance of Ravel’s
Tzigane that for me was probably
the most memorable. Her personality
was just right for portraying the wild
gypsy element in the music. This wonderfully
vibrant musician was still only 26 when
she played with us in 1945, four years
before her tragically early death.
Around
the same time two more very fine string
soloists came to work with us, making
the very hard schedule we undertook
worthwhile. They were the two cellists,
Maurice Gendron and Pierre Fournier,
both French with that particular elegance
that French artists of that generation
still seemed to have. After Casals left
the famous Thibaud-Casals-Cortot trio
Fournier took his place. He had that
refinement, purity of tone and musicianship
similar to Thibaud that is extremely
rare. I remember a lovely recording
of the Dvorak Cello Concerto he did
with us that was quite different from
the much more ‘virtuoso’ readings of
that beautiful composition we generally
hear today.
From
1947 onwards, during the years I spent
in the Royal Philharmonic and the Philharmonia,
I have always enjoyed it more when the
soloist has been a string player and
was fortunate to have the opportunity
to play in the orchestra with many wonderful
violinists and cellists. It is a mystery
to me why pianists and the piano repertoire
appear to have been, and continue to
be preferred by the public.
There
have been far too many violinists to
write about them all but I have very
happy recollections of performances
with Nathan Milstein, Joseph Szigeti,
Alfredo Campoli (who, notwithstanding
his name was British and one of our
leading violin soloists for many years),
Henryk Szerying, Anne-Sophie Mutter
(when she was only 13 Herbert von Karajan
said she was ‘the greatest music prodigy
since the young Menuhin.’) and Joshua
Bell. Four very special artists that
made a tremendous impression on me were
Jascha Heifetz, David Oistrakh, Isaac
Stern and Itzhak Perlman.
Jascha
Heifetz has been called the greatest
violinist of the 20th century and certainly
in my experience his virtuosity was
supreme, to such an extent that a youngster
who was outstanding on any instrument
used to be called ‘a little Heifetz’.
Already at the age of six he had performed
the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto in public
and from when he was twelve he was touring
Europe. Ever since his debut at Carnegie
Hall in 1917, throughout his exceedingly
long career and as a result of having
recorded a vast amount of the violin
repertoire, he has set the benchmark
by which violinists have been judged,
and his recordings still continue to
delight music lovers everywhere.
In writing
about Beecham I referred to the less
than happy relationship he had with
Heifetz when he recorded the Mendelssohn
Violin Concerto with the RPO. In fact
the first time I played with Heifetz
was in 1945 or 1946 soon after the end
of the war when he came to play with
the LPO. He had not played in Britain
for some years so that when this concert
was announced it was the cause of considerable
excitement. On the night of the concert
the Royal Albert Hall was packed and
many celebrated violinists were in the
audience. When Heifetz came onto the
platform to play the Beethoven Violin
Concerto he was greeted with rapturous
applause. During the orchestral introduction
Heifetz stood absolutely still and looked
impassive as usual. The soloist’s entry,
a series of octaves was played with
his accustomed brilliance, but as he
started on the downward melodic legato
passage his finger slipped off the fingerboard
and as it landed on the resonant belly
of the violin the impact was like someone
striking a snare-drum. He continued,
apparently unperturbed, but for me the
shock of hearing and seeing the acme
of perfection falter, if only for a
moment, reminded me of the shock I experienced
when Beecham put the baton through his
hand at his first rehearsal with us.
My memory
of hearing Heifetz goes back even earlier,
to the time when I was evacuated with
my school to Crowthorne to escape the
bombing of London. There was a small
cinema in the village of a kind that
in those days might have been referred
to as a ‘flea-pit’, but the price for
admission was suitably low, three pence
in old money (pronounced thripence,
about half my pocket money, and
equivalent to just over 1p in today’s
coinage). It was there that I saw a
wonderfully sentimental film, They
Shall Have Music, about a charity
that ran a music school for very poor
children that was going to have to close
for lack of money. By some miracle Jascha
Heifetz agrees to come and play at a
fund-raising concert at which he plays
the slow movement of the Mendelssohn
Violin Concerto. There is general rejoicing
and the school is saved. I was then
14 and the effect of the story and Heifetz’s
beautiful playing is something I have
never forgotten. Perhaps because of
that experience I have rarely been affected
to the same extent by any other performance
of that concerto. The mood one is in
and an association with a previous experience
can have a profound effect on how one
responds to a performance.
Heifetz
was not a very sociable man and inclined
to be rather formal and unfriendly.
When I was in San Francisco in the 1980s
I had the opportunity of spending an
evening with his daughter, who had been
a pianist and composer. She told me
that her father would not allow her
to use the family name because he did
not think her work was of a high enough
standard. His need to preserve the image
of perfection was very strong. The leader
of one of the orchestras in the USA
who as a young man had attended the
master classes that Heifetz gave at
Berkeley told me how he had been assigned
the task of driving Heifetz from his
home to the University. Each time he
arrived with his car to collect him
Heifetz insisted on testing the tyre
pressure of each tyre and if he found
that the pressure in all of them was
not absolutely equal he would send him
to a garage to get them adjusted.
There
are a few performances that remain in
one’s memory as fresh as the day they
took place. It is over fifty years since
Isaac Stern joined the RPO under Sir
Thomas Beecham to perform the Sibelius
Violin Concerto at the Royal Festival
Hall and record it at the Abbey Road
Studios a few days later. He was then
in his early thirties and not yet the
world renowned figure he became later
as a result of his work in rescuing
the Carnegie Hall from destruction,
his crusading visits to Russia, Israel
and, perhaps the most remarkable, to
China. It was clear from the first rehearsal
that Stern responded to Beecham in a
way that would lead to a very satisfying
musical collaboration for all concerned.
Stern brought a youthful strength and
passion to his performance that together
with Beecham became, especially in the
slow movement something quite beautifully
expressive. The recording sessions were
particularly enjoyable; Beecham was
in his most jovial and expansive mood
and Stern seemed to be influenced by
him. The occasion was made even more
pleasant because at one of the sessions
Beecham presented a silver Loving Cup
to Jack Brymer to celebrate the birth
of his son.
Thirty
years later in 1986 I was to participate
in a Conference, rather grandly entitled
The Evolution of the Symphony Orchestra
- History, Problems and Agendas, at
which Stern was the Chairman. It was
sponsored by the Foundation, funded
by the composer Gordon Getty, son of
Jean Paul Getty, the oil billionaire,
who shared in the Trust, set up by his
father, with his brother, Sir J Paul
Getty Jr. The Conference, attended by
about thirty musicians and others concerned
for the future of the symphony orchestra,
including Pierre Boulez, Alfred Brendel,
Alexander Goehr and Sir Isaiah Berlin,
was held in Jerusalem in suitably comfortable
conditions. The papers and discussions
were later published by Weidenfeld and
Nicolson.
When
he came to play with the RPO another
great violinist, David Oistrakh (also
often spelled Oistrach) immediately
excited the whole orchestra, especially
all the violinists. It was at a BBC
transmission to play the Tchaikovsky
Violin Concerto with Sir Malcolm Sargent
conducting. As soon as he started playing
everyone was amazed by the beauty and
breadth of his tone. Warm and vibrant
with a lovely unobtrusive vibrato that
has reminded some, including myself,
of Fritz Kreisler. Kreisler was born
in 1875 and was another artist who showed
great promise when extremely young and
continued, from the age of eleven for
the next sixty one years until 1947
to delight audiences not only with his
playing but also with the many compositions
he wrote for the violin which so many
other violinists played, on bandstands,
in restaurants and on the concert platform.
I never had the opportunity of hearing
him at a public performance, but he
was, from when I was about sixteen,
the artist I most wished to emulate.
The first recording he made with the
Berlin State Opera Orchestra of the
Brahms Violin Concerto was ravishing;
there were some passages that even on
the 78 rpm records I played over and
over again – not nearly so easily as
one can now on a tape or CD. The small
charming melodic pieces he composed
for himself and recorded, some several
times, and each a fresh-minted one-off
performance – Schon Rosmarin, Liebesfreud
(Love’s Joy), 
Liebesleid
(Love’s Sorrow), Tambourin chinois
were my favourites. Some years later
I bought the violin parts so that I
could adapt them and play them on the
clarinet.
To return
to David Oistrakh. On that occasion
when he played the Tchaikovsky Concerto
with the RPO I remember that in the
interval of the rehearsal a lot of the
string players crowded round him and
one or two of the Jewish violinists
in the orchestra asked him in Yiddish
– he as yet spoke no English – to play
to them on his own so that they could
hear his wonderful tone. He started
to play one of the Bach Unaccompanied
Violin Sonatas, but after a few minutes
begged to be excused as it was making
him nervous. The sound he drew from
his violin was so big – it sounded to
me like a whole violin section. He played
with the Philharmonia a number of times,
several times with the conductor Gennadi
Rozhdestvensky, and I always enjoyed
his performances, whether of the standard
concerto repertoire – Beethoven, Brahms,
Tchaikovsky or the fiendishly difficult
Shostakovich No.1.
Itzhak
Perlman who was born in Israel in 1945
lost the use of his legs as a result
of contracting polio when he was only
four years old and as a result he has
always had to play sitting in a wheelchair.
He had already made number of broadcasts
in Israel before he was 13 when his
family emigrated in 1958 to America.
In 1959, when he was fourteen he was
featured in ‘Ed Sullivan’s Caravan of
Stars’, a showcase for gifted young
artists, when he played ‘The Flight
of the Bumble Bee’ as well as the last
movement of the Mendelssohn Violin Concerto.
After further study at the Juilliard
School, he made his professional debut
in1963, at Carnegie Hall, playing the
Wieniawski Violin Concerto. A year later
he won the prestigious Leventritt Competition
and began his international career.
To take
part in a performance, or even a rehearsal
with Perlman is always a mood raising
experience. The combination of his irrepressible
joy when making music, boundless energy
and infectious charm are irresistible.
Every time he played with the orchestra
it was sheer delight. Whether it is
Klezmer, Scott Joplin and the cowboy
music that he has recorded with Andre
Previn, the film music for Schindler’s
List, Tan Dun’s music for the film
Hero he recorded when he was
in China, or the Beethoven and Tchaikovsky
Concertos, he brings the same warmth
and understanding to everything he plays,
by turns lyrical, dramatic and effortlessly
virtuoso.
The
cellist Paul Tortelier was an artist
who affected me in a similar way to
Perlman, though he had a quite different
personality. Whenever I had the pleasure
of playing in an orchestra and he was
the soloist it always felt to me that
I had received an injection of sunshine.
Yet when he was playing with the Philharmonia
and we were talking about his future
schedule he spoke in a very dispirited
and sad way about how difficult he found
it going from one engagement to another,
always travelling carrying his luggage
and his cello, away from his family
and having to spend such a lot of time
alone in unfriendly hotel bedrooms.
When I suggested that perhaps he might
undertake fewer engagements he said
that his agent would not like that and
other artists would take his place.
Unlike
nearly all other soloists I have been
writing about, Tortelier was working
as an orchestral musician for some years
before his solo career took off. He
was playing in cafes and restaurants
before he was sixteen and later he was
sub-principal cello in the Paris Radio
Orchestra and then in the Monte Carlo
Philharmonic Orchestra, where he played
the solo part in Don Quixote
with the composer, Richard Strauss conducting,
before finally being appointed principal
cello in the Boston Symphony. In 1947
he made his British debut with the RPO
playing Don Quixote with Sir
Thomas Beecham conducting. This concert
was one of a series of Strauss concerts
and at the rehearsal Richard Strauss
was also present. At one point he came
up to the clarinet section and told
Jack Brymer that the little clarinet
solo near the end of the piece should
be played very quietly, like a memory.
As well
as Don Quixote, which Tortelier
played many times, I remember enjoying
his splendid performances of the Saint-Saëns,
Schumann and Dvorak Concertos and Schelomo
by Ernest Bloch. The last time I heard
him play was at a concert after I had
left the orchestra and was on holiday
in the Dordogne in France. I went to
a concert where he was playing in what
had been a fine Chateau but which was
then in a state of some decay. It was
a fine summer evening and as it gradually
got darker a number of small bats started
to fly in through the broken roof and
swoop around overhead. At the end of
the concert Tortelier spoke to the audience
very eloquently about peace and good
will amongst mankind and then played
the lovely haunting folk song Casals
had arranged for unaccompanied cello,
The Song of the Birds. While
he played a bat sat absolutely motionless
on the toe of his shoe.
Jacqueline
du Pré was a wonderful charismatic
artist, a superb cellist and a joy to
work with because of the intensity of
her approach to performing. It is a
tragedy that her life was cut short
when she was only 42 and had been unable
to play for some years before her death.
Though she had lessons with William
Pleeth, her main teacher, and then for
a short time with both Tortelier and
Rostropovich and no doubt she was influenced
by each of them to some extent, she
was a very individual artist. Her most
famous performance is the recording
of the Elgar Concerto she made with
Sir John Barbirolli, but when she played
it with the Philharmonia it was with
her husband Daniel Barenboim. This,
too, was a great performance, exciting
and gloriously youthful and wildly exuberant.
I am glad I was able to take part in
a couple of performances with
her.
Even
at the age of seventy-seven Mstislav
Rostropovich remained the most outstanding
and remarkable cellist of our time.
He was only four when he composed a
Polka and at the advanced age of eight
undertaken his first major concert appearance
as a solo cellist. When he arrived in
Britain after leaving the Soviet Union
in 1974 his first concert was with the
Philharmonia and it was my privilege
to introduce him to the orchestra. Of
course he had visited Britain a good
many times before as a cello soloist,
but this was the occasion when he and
his wife the soprano Galina Vishnevskaya
had at last been obliged to leave the
Soviet Union following their support
for the dissident writer, the banned
novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn. However,
this time he came to conduct the orchestra
for what was in fact the beginning of
an extremely distinguished international
conducting career. He conducted Tchaikovsky’s
Symphony No.6 in a very dramatic and
extrovert interpretation, which I enjoyed
though a good many in the orchestra
thought it rather ‘over the top’.
His
performances of the cello concerto repertoire
are legendary and his friendships with
Shostakovich (in whose composition class
he had been), Prokofiev and Britten,
who all wrote works especially for him,
gave particular authority to his performances
of their compositions. The combination
of his incredible virtuosity and charismatic
personality made taking part in performances
of these works an extremely exciting
experience. From a technical standpoint
his performance of the Dvorak was probably
more accurate than any other I have
heard, (it has possibly been equalled
by Yo-Yo Ma, but I never took part in
a performance with him), but for me
it was less satisfying than those with
the artists I have written about earlier.
I mention this because it shows how
very personal and subjective any judgement
or criticism is. Indeed, all the soloists
I have chosen to write about are those
that gave me personally the most pleasure
and satisfaction and were in one way
or another part of my continuing musical
education.
For
some a less than perfect playing of
a technical passage or moments of doubtful
intonation will render a performance
unsatisfactory. Others and I include
myself, are more concerned with the
content of the music and can allow relatively
small technical faults to pass. It is,
of course, the repetition of identically
the same performance that one hears
on a recording, that has passed in a
moment at a concert, that makes even
a small imperfection so difficult to
accept. Now that everyone has become
accustomed to technical perfection on
recordings artists have had to concentrate
to an ever-increasing degree on the
technical aspect of their performance.
There are artists whose temperament
does not let them perform in this way,
who vary from performance to performance
(as I remember some of the finest soloists
and orchestral players did before the
dominance of recordings) and who therefore
do not get engaged to record. Without
recordings it is now virtually impossible
to achieve a international recognition.
Piano
soloists
I have
chosen to write only about those pianists
whose performances gave me so much pleasure
at the time they took place and which
still do so now when I recall them.
To write something about every celebrated
pianists who was the soloist when I
had the good fortune to be playing in
the orchestra would require another
book. In addition to the pianists I
have already either mentioned or written
about, this list of superb artists gives
some idea of just how fortunate my colleagues
and I were: Martha Argerich, Claudio
Arrau, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Daniel Barenboim,
Alfred Brendel, Julius Katchen, Louis
Kentner, Stephen Kovacevich, John Ogdon,
Murray Perahia, Sviatoslav Richter,
Artur Schnabel, Mitsuko Uchida.
An artist
who gave me immense pleasure was Myra
Hess. Unlike the majority of solo artists
Myra Hess was quite a late starter.
She did not make her debut until she
was seventeen when in 1907 she was invited
by Sir Thomas Beecham to play Beethoven’s
Concerto No. 4 with his orchestra. Even
so, it was to be some years, during
which she taught and accompanied a number
of artists including Nellie Melba and
Lotte Lehmann, before her career took
off. From 1912 her reputation rapidly
increased until 1922 when she made her
debut in New York. She is probably best
remembered by the general public for
her inauguration of the series of Lunch
Time concerts at the National Gallery
in London during WW2. She, and the many
artists she encouraged to perform at
these concerts, continued to do so during
the heaviest bombing of London and was
an emblem of courage in the face of
adversity.
She
was a wonderfully sensitive artist of
a kind we so seldom hear now with a
beautiful pianissimo legato and
loving phrasing. There was nothing percussive
or flaunting in her playing. Her Mozart,
Beethoven and Schumann Concertos were
a delight but, above all else, it was
her magical performance of the César
Frank Symphonic Variations that
gave me the most pleasure. It has remained,
in the same way that Thibaud’s playing
of Saint-Saën’s Introduction
and Rondo Capriccioso has, a very
special memory, unmatched by any performance
I have heard since.
Solomon,
he was never known by his full name
Solomon Cutner, was 12 years Myra Hess’s
junior. He was another astonishing prodigy,
playing the Tchaikovsky and Brahms D
minor when he was only 12 years old.
He was a most self-effacing performer,
always subordinating himself and putting
his prodigious talent totally at the
service of the composer. His performance
of the Mozart, Beethoven and Schumann
Concertos, were quite different from
Myra Hess’s, but equally sensitive and
insightful. When he played the Emperor
Concerto by Beethoven it was
majestic and not, as so often in other
hands, reduced to yet another ‘war-horse’.
His performances were never showy whether
playing Mozart, Liszt, Tchaikovsky or
Brahms. Tragically, his career was cut
short as the result of a stroke when
he was only 54.
Another
artist, in many ways similar to Hess
and Solomon, was Clifford Curzon (later
Sir Clifford). He was a perfectionist,
never satisfied with his performance,
extremely serious and sensitive in his
approach and always gave the impression
(to me) of being rather nervous. He
was a sore trial to the gramophone companies
because he was always reluctant to let
any of the recordings he made be published
before he was absolutely satisfied with
them – and he seldom was. The performance
I remember most vividly was the one
I wrote about in the chapter about Beecham
when Curzon played Brahms’s Second Piano
Concerto. The contrast between their
two personalities was so great – Beecham
so extrovert and ebullient and Curzon
withdrawn and silent – yet, their collaboration
was so successful. But it was Curzon’s
playing of Mozart and Schubert that
was most magical. I was lucky enough
to take part in a number of his performances
of several of the Mozart piano concertos
and each time it was a real treat. It
was the same with the Beethoven Concertos,
especially the Third and Forth, to which
he brought a wonderful lyricism.
I think
Benno Moiseiwitsch was the first great
pianist I saw actually performing in
person, or as we now say ‘‘Live’’. It
was in Bedford, to where the BBC had
been evacuated during the war, at a
studio broadcast. The BBC often used
the main assembly hall in Bedford School
as a studio for broadcasting and on
this occasion, as I was on holiday and
had come home from Crowthorne where
I had been evacuated, my father had
taken me there to see and hear the orchestra.
Moiseiwitsch was the soloist in the
Rakhmaninov Second Piano Concerto. The
first thing I noticed about him when
he was playing was his undemonstrative
and reserved manner – in this respect,
as I remember, very similar to Heifetz.
Years later I saw this characteristic,
even more pronounced, when he was playing
the Third Concerto by Rakhmaninov. When
he played the soloist’s opening phrase,
a haunting melody in octaves, he did
so hardly moving and with an absolute
‘poker face’. He was in fact a keen
poker player and I was not surprised
when my Professor at the Royal College
of Music, Frederick Thurston, at that
time principal clarinet in the BBC Symphony
Orchestra, who had played poker with
Moiseiwitsch several times, told me
that he was an extremely good player.
Moiseiwitsch
was also the first major piano soloist
I worked with when I was still in the
Wessex Orchestra. I was to take part
in many concerts with him over the years
and it would nearly always be one or
other of the Rakhmaninov Piano Concertos
or the Rakhmaninov-Paganini Variations.
He was a magnificent player and it is
reported that Rakhmaninov thought he
played his music better than he did
himself.
There
were three artists that always raised
my spirits however depressed I might
be at the time – the cellist Paul Tortelier,
the violinist Itzhak Perlman and the
pianist Artur Rubinstein. Rubinstein
lived to the ripe old age of 95 and
to the end of his playing days brought
an infectious, youthful joie de vivre
to everything he performed. He was the
most spontaneous of artists and said
that he avoided practising whatever
he was going to be playing at a concert
immediately beforehand so as to retain
his freshness. And over seventy years
as a major concert artist he succeeded.
Saint-Saëns, Schumann, Mozart and
Beethoven were all in their different
ways equally delightful. I never had
the opportunity of taking part in any
performance of a Chopin concerto with
him, but have heard him on broadcasts
and recordings playing a good deal of
the Chopin repertoire and have always
been entranced.
There
are two more pianists that remain very
clearly in my memory, not for any particular
performance, though both were very fine
players and, as it happens as different
from each other as they could be. I
only played with Glenn Gould once, but
as I remember he had a very austere
personality. It was a warm day, but
he came to rehearsal wearing an over-coat
and scarf and wore mittens, that is
gloves with the ends of all the fingers
cut off (he wore these at the concert
as well but discarded the coat and scarf).
He had a unique posture at the piano,
sitting on an extremely low stool so
that his elbows were below the level
of the piano keyboard. It looked very
strange but seemed to suit him as it
was an excellent performance.
The
other pianist was Shura Cherkassky,
a brilliant virtuoso and very extrovert
in an unusual way. He seemed to have
a piano stool fetish because on every
occasion before we actually started
rehearsing he would spend some time
complaining about the piano stool so
that a number of different stools and
chairs would be tried out before he
was satisfied. His personality was a
mixture of cheeky, difficult and extremely
‘camp’, though I have read that he was
married and had a family. He made a
point of never playing the same work
twice in the same way so that he was
something of a trial to conductors trying
to follow him. I had the impression
that he enjoyed being difficult and
having read an interview he gave, it
was clear he was enjoying ‘sending up’
the interviewer by never answering his
questions and talking about the weather
instead. Nonetheless he was a remarkably
exciting player with an astonishing
technique.
For
nearly 40 years the opportunity to play
alongside all these superb artists has
been both immensely enjoyable and a
continuing enrichment of my music experience.
Chapter
17
Index
page
