A Little Sondheim: Anthony de Mare and Liaisons

I never did meet Tony de Mare last summer, when we were both performing at the Portland Piano International festival. I arrived at the festival venue 5 minutes after he had left the building on his way to the airport, having just finished up a masterclass following his concert the night before. The next evening, I played my festival concert, and at the reception one of the audience members complimented the definition in my arms, as displayed in a strapless gown. "And", he said "we couldn't help noticing that Mr. de Mare also has a very impressive physique. Tell me, are all classical pianists in such amazing shape?" 
Hmmm....
My arms are, admittedly, fairly well cut, due both to my hours at the piano and to a slightly obsessive gym habit. But when I did meet Tony, a couple of months later at a New York concert, I had a chance to check out the competition, and I am pretty sure that if it came to it, he could arm wrestle me under the table without so much as flexing a bicep. (See biceps>>>>>>)

Trained as a dancer and actor as well as a pianist (and, I'm guessing, harboring a little gym habit of his own), Tony is known for the impressive physicality of his piano playing. He's also notorious for the tremendous breadth and flexibility of his musical interests. An intrepid and eclectic champion of new music, he has been collaborating with composers for over 20 years to create a huge and unique repertoire that showcases his singular range of talents. His projects consistently reflect his interest in achieving what Justin Davidson of Newsday has called the "slippery fusion" of music and theater. In De Profundis, a multimedia work written for him by Frederic Rzewski, Tony recites from Oscar Wilde's prison journal and sings in a falsetto croon, while performing the fiendishly virtuosic piano score in near-darkness. In Playing With Myself, a piece of "concert theater" he created with director Sal Trapani, he fuses piano performance, song, dance sequences and autobiographical dramatic sketches to tell the story of a young man whose exploration of his anguished longing culminates in a transforming romantic encounter at a gay nightclub. His latest CD, SPEAK - The Speaking-Singing Pianist, (Innova 2010) is uniquely recording devoted to the pianist/vocalist genre that he created over 20 years ago. 

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"The pieces have enough in the way of music, story and pacing that time goes by quite quickly. And it is time spent to good use. In a way, this is the thinking person's Broadway, the hipster's alternative to opera, the musical equivalent of a very dynamic poetry reading, theater for those jaded with the usual claptrap. It's a trip that you will very much enjoy if you have an open mind."

- Grego Edwards, Gapplegate

Tony's latest project, Liaisons: Re-Imagining Sondheim from the Piano, may be the most ambitious in a long line of ambitious efforts: a landmark commissioning and concert project that focuses on the prolific output of one of his musical heroes, Stephen Sondheim. Tony has brought together 36 composers, both emerging and established, including Steve Reich, Fred Hersch, Eve Beglarian, Fred Rzewski, Tania Leon, Daniel Bernard Roumain, Mason Bates, and Gabriel Kahane, to create solo piano pieces based on Sondheim songs of their own choosing. The resulting "re-imaginings" bring Sondheim's work into the concert hall while spanning the classical contemporary, jazz, film, theater and pop worlds. For Tony, this an intensely personal project, a labor of love, and what he calls a "career realization", the perfect melding of his musical passions and personal history.

Previews in Portland, San Francisco, New York and DC have generated excitement and terrific reviews. The highly anticipated official New York premiere of Liaisons takes place at Symphony Space this Saturday, April 21. 

Tony and I caught up over Skype to talk about the exhilarating experience of reimagining giants, looking back, and looking forward all at once.

LOOKING AT THE GOLDBERGS Part IV: Christopher Taylor

Christopher Taylor gets called things like "a genius" (San Francisco Classical Voice) "a pianist of equally nimble intelligence and imagination" (The New Yorker), and "so talented it's almost frightening" (The Boston Globe). He's a pianist's pianist - no time for flash or hype - a musician dedicated, in his almost frightening way, to the serious art of making serious music.

Taylor's projects lean towards the monumental and thorny: Messiaen's Vingt Regards sur l'Enfant Jesus, all 130 minutes of it, performed by memory; all 28 Ligeti etudes; the complete Liszt Transcendental Etudes... His musical propensity to tackle such complexities reflects the rather intimidating scope of his intellectual abilities -  this is someone who  graduated summa cum laude from Harvard with a mathematics degree in 1992, just two years after winning first prize in the William Kapell International Piano Competition.

Most lately, Taylor has been immersed in the world of the Goldberg Variations, touring a fascinating performance of the Goldbergs executed on the  Steinway–Moór Concert Grand, a unique dual-manual model D Steinway equipped with the double keyboard mechanism developed in the '20s by the Hungarian composer and inventor Emanuel Moór. This Berlin-made piano was purchased by the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1961 for the use of Gunnar Johansen, who was artist in residence at the university at the time. After Johansen's death, the piano remained unused for many years until Taylor, who joined the UW faculty as Associate Professor of Piano Performance in 2000, initiated a complete restoration of the instrument to performance quality. Since the piano's restoration in 2007, Taylor has brought the piano around the country for stunning performances of the Goldbergs at venues including the Caramoor Festival, Ravinia, the Gilmore Festival, the Krannert Center, the Gardner Museum and the Kennedy Center. He brings the project to the Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts at UC Davis next season. We talked about Taylor's way of looking twice at the Goldbergs.

LOOKING AT THE GOLDBERGS, Part III: Tim Page on Glenn Gould

In 2007, author Evan Eisenberg wrote in Slate Magazine 

"The year was 1955. Three things happened: Albert Einstein died, and Glenn Gould recorded the Goldberg Variations. It is difficult to describe the impact of the second event, in part because I was a fetus at the time. (The third event, of course, was my birth.) But I will try. For those of us—beatniks, philistines, fetuses—who thought of classical music as something powdered and periwigged, that slab of vinyl struck with the force of a meteor. The stegosaurs who played Bach as if he were Lawrence Welk sniffed the heady, pomade-purged air and keeled, metaphorically, over. The Cretaceous Age of Music had ended. The Age of Gould had begun."

For any pianist who has grown up in this Age of Gould, his recordings of the Goldberg Variations assert a dual force: both inspiration and obstacle in their greatness and completeness. None of us who tangle with the Goldbergs can imagine an understanding of this musical monument that does not hold Gould’s influence at its very center. His Goldbergs represent a standard, a benchmark, a sort of magnificent elephant in the room. I’ve spoken in this space with colleagues Simone Dinnerstein and Dan Tepfer about our respective challenges in approaching, assessing, and finding our ways around the elephant. It's due to my own life-long fascination with the beast  - a near addiction to the 1955 recording that started when I was a baby on my father's lap - that I've taken the wonderfully rewarding journey to my latest recording project 13 WAYS of Looking at the Goldbergs.

Even for Gould himself, the 1955 recording of the Goldbergs, released as his major-label debut at the age of 22 and an immediate career-launching, reputation-defining success, assumed a presence of somewhat elephantine proportions, which he eventually confronted with the absolute musical revisions of his 1981 recording, released just months before he died. The scope of the internal conflict, evolution and transformation of Gould’s relationship to the Goldbergs is captured in a 1981 interview with Tim Page, Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic and writer, and editor of The Glenn Gould Reader. The conversation is a scripted dialogue written by Gould, more of a radio drama really, recorded in a marathon midnight session in a Toronto studio. The conversation offers a fascinating glimpse into Gould’s restless, flexible mind, and a unique opportunity to hear him speak about the personal and musical variations behind his two recordings of the Goldbergs. The complete interview can be heard on the three-CD set A State of Wonder: The Complete Goldberg Variations 1955 & 1981 (Sony, 2002).

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I was fortunate to speak with Tim Page (himself the owner of a restless, flexible and fascinating mind) about Glenn Gould the man and the musician, about his artistic interests and his challenges feared and faced, about the critical re-evaluation of his body of work since his death, about his two iconic recordings of the Goldbergs, and about the lasting footprint of that magical, marvelous elephant.

Back to Bach

Now that we've entered the Bach birthday month, I'm heading back into my series on the Goldberg Variations; conversations about the Goldbergs with Christopher Taylor and Tim Page on Glenn Gould coming soon, plus posts from NPR Music's upcoming feature on the Goldbergs.

It's a gray, rainy day here in California, and this feels like a wonderfully introspective piece to share today: Glenn Gould playing Variation 13, captured in four different recordings from 1954, '55, '59 and '81.

Enjoy!

A YEAR WITH LISZT: Garrick Ohlsson

In 2010-'11, if you were a world-renowned and much-in-demand Chopin pianist, you were very busy touring the world playing all-Chopin recitals in celebration of the Chopin Bicentennial year. In 2011-'12, if you are a world-renowned and much-in-demand Liszt pianist, you are very busy touring the world playing all-Liszt recitals, in celebration of the Liszt Bicentennial.

photo: Paul Body

If you are Garrick Ohlsson, both of the above are true.

Mr. Ohlsson has survived a Chopin Year that took him from San Francisco to Warsaw, with many stops in between, playing the eloquent yet muscular Chopin for which he's been known and loved ever since he won the International Chopin Competition in 1970. 

Along the way, he committed to a full-on exploration of another great passion, the music of Liszt, in time to celebrate the bicentenary of Liszt’s birth just one year later. And in a year that has many pianists beating a path to Liszt, his particular journey into Lisztian territory is being hailed for the "passion and force of his interpretation, enhanced by his clear voicing of inner lines and the dramatic juxtaposition of contrasting elements" (The New York Times).

Ohlsson's Liszt recital, which he brings to the UW Presidents Piano Series, Seattle on Wednesday and the  Mondavi Center for the Performing Arts at UC Davis on Friday, is sort of a Best Of collection of the composer's most profound and remarkable piano works, with the magnificent B Minor Sonata at its center, a thoughtfully curated portrait of the many sides of Liszt, from the dramatic to the mystical to the athletically virtuosic. We talked about channeling Liszt, memorizing Hamlet, and  about how, sometimes, size matters:

LOOKING AT THE GOLDBERGS PART II: Simone Dinnerstein

It's safe to say that the Goldberg Variations changed Simone Dinnerstein's life. 

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Here's the story: She took on the task of learning the Variations as a project chosen to accompany the nine months of her pregnancy. She emerged from the experience with a son, Adrian, and a deep connection to the piece of music that she had long admired in Glenn Gould's hands and had now made her own. She self-produced a recording of the work which was remarkable enough to make managers return her calls and to fill her calendar with concert dates. She performed the Goldbergs in her self-presented Weill Hall debut recital, to a full house and the blessing of the  New York Times. In 2007, Telarc released her recording of the Goldbergs, and the world took notice. 

It's a story, with its mix of DIY determination and fairytale good fortune, that has captured imaginations in musical circles and beyond. But it's Simone's musicianship - deeply personal, sometimes unorthodox, always committed - that resonates with listeners, in concert and on disc.

Simone's concert and recording projects have taken her in many new directions. during these last few years. Her latest  CD Something Almost Being Said: Music of Bach and Schubert, was released on Sony Classical in January. But I asked her to go back with me to the Goldberg Variations and all the beginnings they represent in her life, musical and otherwise:

Introducing the ON THE BENCH Questionnaire

A new feature at ON THE BENCH, my guests will be subjected to the following Dorky Piano Version of the Proust Questionnaire. Stop by later this week when Simone Dinnerstein gives her responses in LOOKING AT THE GOLDBERGS, PART II. 

But in the interests of full disclosure, I'll go first.

The ON THE BENCH Questionnaire (with apologies to Proust and Vanity Fair)

Lara Downes interviews Lara Downes (with apologies to Glenn Gould)
 

What’s the first thing you do when you sit down to practice?  

      Turn off my phone

What's the last thing you do before you go onstage?  

       Call my kids to say goodnight, then turn off my phone 

If your piano could speak, what secrets would it tell about you? 

        Sometimes she practices in her nightgown.

If you could travel in time to attend one concert, which would it be? 

        Horowitz's return to Moscow after 60 years, in 1986. I remember watching that concert on TV, the overwhelming emotion in the hall, the audience in tears, Traumerei... To experience that moment in person would be well worth the trip.

 If you didn’t play the piano, what would you do?  

        I'd run a concert series or festival - something that would let me develop projects, build audiences, work to shape a musical present and future. Or I'd just bake cookies.