I really like this interview I did recently with Frances Wilson, aka the
Cross-Eyed Pianist. So I am sharing it here!
FW: Who or what inspired you to take up the piano, and make it your career?
LD: I started at the piano as a toddler and simply never stopped! I just
never found anything I loved as much. In my teens, I had passing
fantasies about being an archaeologist or an actor “when I grew up”, and
then I realized that I could incorporate aspects of both of those
careers into my musical path. My work involves a lot of archaeological
excavation of the repertoire in search of historical narrative and
context, and I think that I channel my inner actress into the task of
interpreting the emotions and messages of the composers whose works I
perform.
FW: Who or what were the most important influences on your playing?
LD: It’s been a collage of many things: my very first teacher, Maria
Cisyk, was my first love! She was a wonderful woman who integrated a
true understanding of and curiosity about music into the first steps at
the piano. As soon as I could cover a five-finger position, she had me
playing little and Bach and Bartok pieces, and learning the stories
behind them so that I had a sense, from the very beginning, of the scope
of a history and a tradition in music.
A little later I went on to work with Adolph Baller, a wonderful
Austrian pianist with whom I studied at Stanford when I was still very
young. He gave me, again, another layer of understanding about the
importance of tradition. Having come out of the Viennese tradition
himself – he studied with a former student of Franz Liszt! – he was a
direct link to the European Romantic school that I, an adolescent in
California, could only vaguely imagine. Tragically, Baller had suffered
tremendously during the Nazi regime (he was interred in a concentration
camp and his fingers were broken), before escaping to the U.S., where he
was able to rehabilitate his hands and resume his career as Yehudi
Menuhin’s accompanist and a member of the Alma Trio. His story gave me
some insights into the power that music can have in a life, the strength
that can be found in one’s calling throughout personal tragedy and
upheaval. That was an important turning point.
Later on, as a teenager, I studied myself at the Hochschule in Vienna
and the Mozarteum in Salzburg with the great Hans Graf, and was able to
touch that grand tradition for myself, which brought everything full
circle. I remember a winter morning in Vienna, the first heavy snow of
the year, when an Argentine classmate came running into Graf’s class
saying “I went to the Mozart house and I walked in Mozart’s snow!”
That’s how it felt for me during those years, working in the birthplace
of the tradition, treading the same ground as the composer whose works I
was studying. Very magical.
FW: What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?
LD: I think that I’ve come of age in a challenging time to be a musician,
but also a very liberating one. So I see the challenges also as
advantages. The limited opportunities in the concert world (especially
in the U.S. where funding for the arts is such a tremendous issue)
present a constant difficulty, but ultimately that difficulty has been
an inspiration to me to develop a real creativity and innovative spirit
in my approach to presentation and programming, to build a unique
profile as an artist, to identify what it is that I have to offer and
share with audiences that is uniquely mine, my genuine voice in the
world. I think we are living in a time when an artist with something
significant to say can take a significant amount of control in
determining how, when and where he or she is heard. There is a really
interesting and diverse mix of artistic personas on the concert stage
these days, reflecting a commitment to different ways and means of
musical expression. I think it’s very exciting.
And then of course there have been the challenges of combining my
professional and personal lives – the same challenges we all face as
musicians, finding ways to integrate my roles in my family and in the
professional world. Being a mother of two young children has meant
making some choices. But that too, I think, has been a very positive
thing for me. I’m certainly a more centered, more thoughtful musician
than I was when I was younger, and obsessed solely with the day-to-day
mechanics of being a pianist, practicing 6 hours a day. Having a wider
landscape to tend has been very good for me. I’ve built a career that
encompasses performing and recording, writing, and also concert curating
and presenting, which I love to do. Being active as a concert and
festival curator/presenter allows me more space to bring my many (too
many??) ideas to life! It’s important to me to have some impact in
shaping the future of an art form that is changing so quickly, and has
so much potential to reach new audiences in new ways.
FW: Which performances/compositions/recordings are you most proud of?
LD: I’m proudest of the multi-faceted projects I’ve created and produced
from start to finish, which have encompassed everything from
commissioning and premiering new works, to writing and delivering
narrative commentary from the stage, co-producing multimedia/visual
enhancements, and self-producing and releasing recordings on my own
label (Tritone).
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FW: Do you have a favourite concert venue to perform in?
LD: I love playing the Kennedy Center in Washington DC. They treat
artists so well (my son wants me to go back so we can “ride in the
limo”!), but more than that, the place evokes for me something very
powerful about respect for and pride in the arts. It’s just a beautiful
place to be and to perform.
FW: Favourite pieces to perform? Listen to?
LD: Whatever I’m working on at the moment! And some “comfort food” pieces
that go way back for me, that I turn to when I need to sort of
musically meditate and center myself: the Chopin Nocturnes, Schumann’s Davidsbundlertanze, Bach’s Goldbergs, some favourite pieces by Barber, Ives, and Prokofiev…
FW: Who are your favourite musicians?
LD: Arthur Rubinstein, Billie Holiday, Richard Goode, Nat “King” Cole,
Chet Baker, Etta James, Charles Aznavour, the Beatles, Pablo Casals, my
son playing the trumpet, Lucio Dalla… you see it’s pretty all over the
place!
FW: What is your most memorable concert experience?
LD: Hearing Rudolf Serkin under the big tent at Tanglewood in the late
‘80s, just a few years before his death. I was a kid watching a legend
and knowing deep in my bones just how precious the moment was. Again, to
me he represented the magic of the tradition.
FW: What do you consider to be the most important ideas and concepts to impart to aspiring musicians?
LD: Know what your music means to you. Find your voice. Learn what you
alone have to give. Don’t try to be like anyone else. Be flexible in
your thinking and let your path take you in unexpected directions. The
future can surprise you.
FW: What are you working on at the moment?
My next recording, Exiles’ Café, will be released on the Steinway & Sons label on 26 February 2013. It’s a collection of 19th and 20th
century music by composers in exile, or written in response to the
experience of exile and diaspora. I’ve positioned music by composers
displaced by World War II (Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Bohuslav Martinu,
Darius Milhaud, and Kurt Weill) alongside works by earlier composers
such as Chopin, Rachmaninoff, and Prokofiev, who were likewise political
exiles in their own time. I’ve also included the Africa Suite
by African American composer William Grant Still, representing the
permanent wandering of the African Diaspora, and some preludes by the
American composer and novelist Paul Bowles, who lived in self-imposed
exile in Tangiers for the latter part of his life. The central, big
piece on the album is Korngold’s 2nd Sonata, which he wrote
in 1910 when he was a thirteen year old prodigy! It’s a massive,
late-Romantic, very Straussian work, just absolutely gorgeous and lush.
The project illustrates the global currents of diaspora and exile,
which create artistic confluence among people from many different
backgrounds of time and place. I think the theme of displacement is one
with which everyone is familiar at some level, and also I think that
this goes back to my answer to your earlier question, which touched on
my deep emotions about the tradition that has built our concert
repertoire. Often it has been breaks in that tradition that have
actually carried it forward – the historical and political situations
that have carried composers from one place to another (Chopin from
Poland to France, Rachmaninoff out of Russia, Korngold to Hollywood
where he made a legendary career as a film composer and defined the
future of that genre) have influenced the development of concert music
in a profound way. So once again challenges sometimes prove essential!
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FW: What is your present state of mind?
LD: It’s a hugely exciting time for me. I’m watching several musical
projects come to full maturity and thrive, and I’m embarking on new
ones. I feel that I’ve arrived at a time in my life when my
musical/professional priorities are clear to me. I know what I want to
do, and I’m ready for new challenges. I feel lucky every single day to
be making a life in music, really. It’s an amazing thing.
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