A few weeks ago I went to New York ostensibly to hear Maurizo Pollini play the first book of the Well Tempered Clavier at Carnegie Hall. Alas, he was taken ill and canceled. His replacement was Jeremy Denk a young (early 40s) American pianist with a rising reputation and a blogger.. His program: the Ives Concord Sonata and the Bach Goldberg Variations; about as strong a statement of serious intent as would be possible, especially for a Carnegie debut.
But still,not Pollini, who is about as august a presence as can be found in the piano world. But I had the ticket and had the reservations, so off I went.
The Concord made up the first half of the program. Forty-five minutes, four movements. Extremely and unrewardingly difficult. Unrewarding because some of the difficulties are gratituious, caused by Ives not being a pianist and thickly scored. So there are passages that are very difficult that don't actually sound that difficult and none of it is intended to show off the pianist's brilliance. I suppose one could call it rebarbative.
It also isn't in any key or meter. Most of it doesn't have bar lines. There are no recognizable structural sign-posts for the performer or the listener (at least not in the traditional sense). It is highly discontinuous, in a way that seems post-modern. It is absurdist, ironic, mocking, pious, pompous, bombastic, redundant, endless, repetitive and banal. It is also elegiac, tragic and possessing a kind of transcendent grandeur won from it's own self-doubt and struggle and refusal to avoid the very problems that it raises and refuses to solve.
Why anyone would program it is beyond me. I was going to say the Denk dispatched it with ease, but that's not quite right. He possesses seeming limitless technical and tonal resources, not something usually associated with "intellectual" pianists. To say that he played it with ease would deny the physicality of the performance, of a human body working hard and with grace. That and the feeling of risk being taken, of something if not moral that at least ethical being at stake, of someone trying hard to come to terms with whatever it was that Ives was trying to say about music and being an American composer.
I was familiar with the Concord from recordings and had not been won over. Hearing it live in a masterful performance, I now regard as one of the signal achievements of the last century.
Above is a screen capture of the score. You can find the whole thing here. It's worth looking at for the score; in addition to the music, you'll find all of Ives' discussion of the piece and it's inspiration in the New England transcendentalists.
Then the Goldberg Variations for the second half. It's often the only piece on a program. There are 32 variations and each is written to be repeated. If all the repeats are taken, it's maybe 70 minutes long - there are no or few tempo marking in Bach so you can play it as fast or as slow as you like. Denk took maybe half the repeats so his performance lasted maybe 50 minutes.
It can be hard to tell if a variation is repeated, by the way. First, a good performer will add additional ornaments the second time through. But Bach's counterpoint is so rich and his ability to suspend musical voces above one another is so great that one listening cannot grasp all that's going one, so the second seems as new, as it were, as the first.
Whereas Ives is inchoate Bach logical, as it were, but just as mysterious. infinite in craftsmanship and attention to detail, limitless in invention, lapidary, elegant, clear without being obvious or pedantic; considerable depths always transparent. At least in Denk's hands. And the piece is not easy, being , it seems to me, at the technical limits of Bach's keyboard writing. It rewards the performer with passage work of sparking virtuosity and animal good spirits, leaps and hand-crossing (especially difficult on the piano rather than the two keyboard harpsichord for which was written).
It is also, as far as I know, the only instance of the variation form in all of Bach's music.
About mid-way through, I realized that I was starting to fade. I was becoming tired. I wondered about the pianist. I wasn't worried about his physical technique, but the mental demands of such a program must be considerable. So I pulled myself upright and then leaned over the balcony railing and relaxed and started listening more closely.
Sometimes we talk about the "long line" in music, the quality of breath, real or metaphoric, that keeps all the parts of a piece in in order, that keeps it from becoming episodic. It is, I think, generally a matter of dynamics and tempo, but especially dynamics, and it's very hard to achieve. You can tell it's happening when the music continues during silences and at full stops. At many places, Denk finished one variation and pounced directly into the next. But at others, especially after the slow ones, he paused and held the pause. So in my opinion, he maintained the a continuous thread from the beginning to the end of the Variations. A very considerable achievement.
Then, for an encore, although one would not be expected after such a demanding program, he repeated the third movement of the Ives, the most subdued and reflective and the circle was closed.
So, a serious program asking a lot of the audience and more of the performer. By the time the Variations were
underway, you could have heard a pin drop.
Here's another piece by Ives, one of his most beautiful songs. The piano part is not that difficult. Try it.
