Bronfman Nails Prokofiev, Tuner Sharpens Piano

Why should I tell you this? Obviously I shouldn't. Still, out of a sense of moral obligation.... When I was in my teens or early 20's I sometimes used to attend concerts at Washington Irving High School. I particularly recall seeing the Guarneri Quartet, one of the greatest, several times. Don't know when I stopped going; maybe when I moved to Brooklyn in the early 80's, which is not really a reason, just a coincidence I suppose. I pretty much forgot about these concerts after a while, and certainly did not know that the series had a name, and has been ongoing for over a century (not always at Washington Irving). In any case, I sort of got priced out of the classical music market at some point, and stopped looking. I go to a couple of paid classical concerts a year, now, and as many free or very cheap performances as I have time for (i.e., not many).

But the WIHS series does go on to this very day; it's called the People's Symphony Concerts. Now, with all the classical concert series in NYC, why am I making noise about this? Well, first take a look at their artists. This season alone they've had or will have several of the top string quartets in the world (the Takacs may be my favorite, but I haven't seen them live), pianists like Richard Goode, Peter Serkin, Leon Fleisher, and (last night) the great Russian-Israeli virtuoso Yefim Bronfman, the outstanding new music ensemble Eighth Blackbird, and a host of other great musicians. What's the angle? Catch any of these artists at Lincoln Center or Carnegie Hall and expect to pay $60 for an orchestra seat on a good day. You can pick up a prime orchestra seat for Bronfman at Carnegie on April 12 for a neat $93. And guess what it cost me for a prime orchestra seat at WIHS last night? Stop guessing when you get down to ten bucks. Yes, you got it, $10.00 tax and shipping included. Actually, there was no tax or shipping, because I picked the tickets up at WIHS a couple of hours before the concert. Uh-huh. It was not sold out. I did not have to sit on a cold, stone floor for 3 hours as I do at the Met when I want one of their Varis rush tickets; instead, I stood on line for about 5 minutes. Better: order a series ticket by mail and get the 6-concert series for... $32! As I overheard a college student telling his girlfriend, "That's like... free!" So, in short, concerts by top classical artists, for about the same price I paid in 1973. Now you know. Here comes the catch.

Actually, no catch. It's totally true. You just have to, um, put up with some stuff. WIHS is a magnificant old building with original wood details, impressive murals, bas reliefs and a great auditorium with skylights and excellent acoustics. But the building and the auditorium definitely show their age. This is not Lincoln Center (which also shows its age, in a different sense). The seats in the auditorium, which holds over 1,500 people, are hard wood, no padding, which was a particular problem tonight. The men's room has two toilets, no urinal, and one sink. There is no concession stand, of course, nor a box office. Practically everything looks in need of renovation. And that's the easy part. Through the entire concert tonight, no one dimmed the lights; it was bright overheads all over the auditorium for the whole evening. A huge array of fresnels and stage lights above was never used. Don't ask me why. Next, most of the seats are general admission. Reserved seating is only in the balcony, and it does sell out. Costs you an extra two bucks, too (OMG). This is not really a problem; we got there well after 7:15 when the doors opened, and we still got center orchestra seats a little more than halfway up the aisle. But don't plan to show up 5 minutes before the concert unless you bought the reserved seats. And the next-to-last thing I must tell you is that I'm not young, but if I ever want to feel young, my ticket to a People's Symphony Concert is good for that too. The average age of this audience must be a good 20 years above that of the LC or CH crowds. Again, I have no idea why this is. But it is. And it means, among other things, that this resounding hall echoes with the sound of throats being cleared for a good part of the concert.

To really give you the sense of why this is not the LC/CH experience, let's talk about the piano tuner. When I picked up my ticket at 6:15 I heard Bronfman rehearsing in the auditorium. That's an hour and 45 minutes before showtime. You would think that any problems with the piano would have been discovered and fixed in good time. So why is it that at 8:00 p.m., instead of our illustrious performer, a young man who looked nothing like an old school Russsian piano virtuoso walked on stage carrying a black bag? At first I thought he must be a page turner and was bringing out the sheet music. But the first piece on the program was Beethoven's 32 Variations on an Original Theme. Highly dubious that a world class pianist is going to perform Beethoven from the sheet music. Well, instead of removing a score, this fellow who looked to be not much older than a recent graduate of WIHS walked up to the Steinway, sat down, pulled out a screwdriver, and promptly began removing the keyboard! Nice, huh? We all thought he would be a few minutes sharpening a C or something like that. But by the first time he walked off (to a round of applause) he had already taken 15 minutes trying to adjust the action on one key. Yes, I said the first time. Bronfman came out, began to play Beethoven's Variations, stopped after about a minute and looked around for a stage manager. While somebody was running to get the young tuning genius before he went on his merry way, the maestro demonstrated that even he could not make a nice sound on the offending key; it was basically stuck, muted - thunk. The tuner returned for his encore performance, and was before us on stage long enough to learn one of the pieces on Bronfman's program. By that point people were rising out of their seats, some had left, and it seemed like a serious possibility that the concert would be canceled. Bronfman had already come out again, and explained in good English that since Beethoven had written the piece for an 88-key piano, it just would not do to play it on 87 keys. (I could barely hear him from midway down the aisle, and I know he said a bit more than this, but let's say that great as he is, he certainly is not ready to sing at the Met.) It was nearly 45 minutes past start time when the fire-haired prodigy packed up again.

Bronfman came out and once again launched into the 32 Variations, this time not stopping until the 32nd had ended. It was a marvelous performance, especially given the circumstances, which would have thrown a curve at the most seasoned performer. He made a great case for understanding the variations as a continuous piece. With little pause he then launched into Schumann's Faschingsschwank aus Vien, new to me, and I suppose to the rest of the audience, for we all broke into applause after the first movement - with good cause, as it contained plenty of room for the expression of virtuosity - not realizing there were two more movements to come. Since the audience did not make this mistake anywhere else in the program I assume that people were just not familiar with the piece. The sockdolager was Prokofiev's Sonata #2 in D Minor, a powerhouse that showcases the Russian school of tone production to maximum effect, containing many beautiful passages even amidst the electrifying speed and complexity of much of the piece. It must be said that in light of the lengthy delay, Bronfman raced from one piece to another with little pause, and possibly raced some of the tempi as well. This tended to put a probably undesired focus on the fact that this great Russian pianist, like others before him, tends to assimilate the sound of the earlier Romantic works to the manner of the later Russian school, with its thunderous, pedaled bass and emphasis on thick sonority. This is not to say that Bronfman was heavy-handed in the lighter passages; one could point to numerous beautiful episodes, performed with the delicacy of angels dancing on ivory. That said, rushing from piece to piece tended to bring out the heavier side of the palette.

There were worries that due to the delay, the one piece remaining after the intermission would be cut, and we could all pack up and go home. But no such thing occurred. The intermission was shortened, and we all returned for Tchaikovsky's rarely performed Grand Sonata in G Major, Op.37. This, I must say, was a treat, as it always is to discover a major work by a major composer. Still, I think it was fairly clear why the work is not the warhorse it might have been. Basically , the thematic material of the first movement, though melodically appealing in the manner of a folk-music theme (I don't know if it is, but it is at least influenced by the Russian folk idiom), is rather pinched rhythimically and harmonically. The effect of this is to lead to a development that is rather too obvious and predictable, and seems to support virtuosity for its own sake rather than in support of truly inventive writing. This is true of much of Tchaikovsky's music. An orchestration teacher of mine once said that studying one of Tchaikovsky's symphonic scores was as good as another, because he always solves the same problems in the same way. It is true of his composition in general, as well as his orchestration. So he needs to begin with themes of some melodic and harmonic interest or his development ends up sounding monotonous, if not gratuitous. The genius of his greatest works is that the great beauty of the thematic material is given its full measure of development. Such is not really possible in the Grand Sonata - no one can say it is not attractive or fails to deliver some lovely keyboard writing, but it does not really stand out as a work of great depth. In any case, it is necessary that even works such as this have some champion, for it is hardly deserving of being shelved completely. Bronfman delivered the goods, and it was hard to imagine a more sympathetic or authentic performance, much less a more technically accurate one.

Delay notwithstanding, Bronfman actually played two encores. I believe the first was a Chopin Nocturne; the second was his "Revolutionary" Etude, delivered with the panache he had shown himself capable of throughout the program. Without whining about it, I would have to say that this was certainly the Brailowsky style of Chopin performance, not taking much liberty with the rhythms and dynamics, and in this Etude if anywhere I must admit I prefer the "grand style" of Artur Rubinstein. But one could not have asked for a more appropriate encore to cap this concert.

Bronfman is, in a way, in a class by himself. Though his biographies say nothing about his training in the USSR, he was born in Tashkent in 1958, and made his debut two years after he moved to Israel at the age of 15. Whether by training or by personality, I hear Russian School all over his playing. Phillip Roth has referred to him as "Mr. Fortissimo" (in The Human Stain), and that is just how it is. Shura Cherkassky, another Russian emigre with a big Russina sound, died in 1995. Lazar Berman passed away 10 years later. Bronfman and Vladimir Feltsman, who emigrated at a much later age, are about the last exponents of the true Russian style. Evgeny Kissin is equally Russian by birth and perhaps moreso by training, but he is a different kind of pianist. (I don't want to start trouble, but I would say, for example, that Gil Shaham is more of a Russian violinist that Maxim Vengerov, though the former never lived in Russia and the latter was born and studied there. The influence of the old Russian school of violin playing spreads far and wide, so that by mid-20th century or so one did not have to be Russian to be trained in or influenced by the Russian school.) In the 20th century, pianists of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian schools (a loose term - "style" would be more accurate) more or less dominated classical music until the 1980's. The Russian milieu produced Vladimir Horowitz, Alexander Brailowsky, Emil Gilels, Vladimir Ashkenazy and Sviatoslav Richter, for example; from the Austro-Hungarian side came Artur Rubinstein and Rudolph Serkin, and several other notables. Perhaps the influence of Franz Liszt and his students on Anton Runinstein, who founded the St. Petersburg Conservatory, is what draws them together. There were differnces, of course (who could fail to notice the difference between Brailowsky's Chopin and Rubinstein's?) but broadly speaking, this was a kind of approach to the piano, emphasizing tremendous sound and technique in the more vigorous passages, offset by a singing style with some interpretive freedom in the more melodic parts. With the great outpouring of musical talent from the U.S., Japan, China and Korea, and the continuing if not increasing presence of French, German and British classical musicians, this tradition is pretty much history. If you want to have something like an authentic experience of this style, you can see Bronfman or Feltsman, and that's about it.

Anyway, after a false start and a few bruises on the posterior from sitting in unpadded chairs for an extra 45 minutes, in the end it was a brilliant evening of music for little more than the price of a deli sandwich. And if you decide to partake and some of the septagenarians who have been keeping this series going for decades can't get seats, don't say I sent you.