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Michael Parekowhai’s ‘Maori’ Steinway

Recently I had the opportunity to play a rather special Steinway grand piano as part of the fascinating ‘Oceania’ exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts.

He Korero Purakau mo Te Awanui o Te Motu: story of a New Zealand river was created by New Zealand sculptor Michael Parekowhai (b.1968) as part of a larger artwork for the 2011 Venice Biennale exhibition. The title of the sculpture refers to a 1920s New Zealand novel which in turn was the inspiration for Jane Campion’s film ‘The Piano’ (1993). The artist is insistent that the piano should be played and wherever the instrument is on display – whether in London, its home at the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, or on tour in other exhibitions – the piano is kept in tune so that members of the public may play it. For the artist, the art work comes to life when played and performance is crucial to it:

There is no object I could make … that could fill a room like sound can…….. the actual piano just kind of melted away.

Michael Parekowhai

I knew it was an old instrument when I sat down to play it; its keys are ivory with a creamy patina of age, and it has a light action, suggesting a lot of use in its former life. After I’d played it, I decided to do some digging to find out more about the instrument and discovered its rather unusual provenance.

The original instrument was a 1920s Steinway Model D, sold in London and shipped to New Zealand half a century later. Inside the body of the piano was a pencilled dedication: “Dear friends, may this beautiful instrument bring you happiness and inspiration. All my love, Lili Kraus, London, Christmas 1959.” Lili Kraus was a Hungarian concert pianist, noted in particular for her interpretations of Mozart and Beethoven, Chopin and Bartok. After time spent in a Japanese prisoner of war camp during the Second World War, she moved to New Zealand, where she became a British citizen and spent many contented years performing and teaching. She finally settled in the US, where she died in 1986. For me the encounter with the piano felt curiously serendipitous, for only last week I had been reading about Lili Kraus’s premiere of Schubert’s ‘Grazer’ Fantasy (about which more in a later article), and listening to her recordings of this little-known work….

The sculptor Michael Parekowhai regards pianos as a statement of high Western art and has used them in other artworks (for example, ‘The Horn of Africa. A seal balancing a piano on its nose’). He acquired this Steinway in 2002 and asked Auckland-based piano restorer David Jenkin to see if he could do anything with it. There is a tradition of “art case” pianos, with painted or other decoration, inlays and marquetry, or the use of particularly striking wood such as walnut or bird’s eye maple. Michael Parekowhai’s carved piano certainly references this tradition, but takes it to an extreme, such is the richness of the carving and its symbolic narrative. Unlike other art case pianos, the lid is pierced by the carving and thus the sound emerging from the instrument is diffused. The piano was restored, including a new soundboard, to ensure it was playable and a new oak and mahogany rim was created to take the carving. It is Parekowhai’s sixth piano sculpture and took more than 10 years to make. At the 2011 Venice Biennale it was exhibited as part of a larger display exploring New Zealand’s cultural history entitled On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer. The installation included two other grand pianos but these were not in playable condition, merely used as sculptures. The title of the work is taken from a poem by John Keats and by utilising ‘Toi whakairo’, traditional Māori carving on an item deeply emblematic of European culture and craftsmanship, it references ideas of discovery and exploration, the supposedly “civilising” mission of Europeans to New Zealand and its surrounds, cultural exchanges between the old and new worlds, and New Zealand’s post-colonial situation.

he-korero_17-te-papa-install
‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’

In his sumptuously carved grand piano – an instrument originally built in Germany – Parekowhai shifts the cultural focus: the carvings fully take ownership of the piano, literally and metaphorically, transforming a European instrument, which held pride of place in the nineteenth century drawing rooms of New Zealand and Europe alike, into a work of ornate Maori symbolism and colourful story-telling, while also making a thought-provoking and witty commentary on notions of European colonialism and cultural appropriation.

When I played the Maori piano, I had just come from a weekend of house concerts given very much in the tradition of the nineteenth-century European salon, with an attentive audience formally seated in the music room of an English country house. I had never played a piano in a busy gallery space before, where people were wandering around looking at the exhibition. My performance felt secondary to the exploration of the artworks on display, and I wanted my mini programme of pieces by Pärt, Sibelius, Schumann, Bach and Corea to feel like a background to the exhibition, rather than expecting people to stand still and listen. In fact, the experience was very mixed: despite a lot of noise of people walking through the exhibition, there were moments when a sense of attentive listening was palpable. At other times people walked around the piano to examine the carving in more detail and take photos. Some stood behind me, looking at the music, or peered into the belly of the instrument to see the hammers in action or to marvel at the wonderful light effects and shadows created by the pierced carving. The sound of the piano being played drew people into the space in which it was exhibited, and the gallery setting allowed people who may not necessarily go to classical concerts to experience music in an informal yet meaningful way. I felt very secondary to the instrument, yet also part of a bigger, collective artistic and musical experience. The piano was on show, not the music, and certainly not me, and I like to think this is the effect the artist wants to achieve with his work.

 

Oceania continues at the Royal Academy of Arts until 10 December.

Read a review of the exhibition

Image: He Korero Purakau mo Te Awanui o Te Motu: story of a New Zealand river, 2011 by Michael Parekowhai. Piano, wood, ivory, brass, lacquer, steel, ebony, paua shell, mother-of-pearl, upholstery. Te Papa Tongarewa, Wellington, NZ.

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Conceptual Concert in Three Acts with Annie Yim, piano

Annie Yim, piano; Raymond Yiu, composer; Kayo Chingonyi, poet

Thursday 13th December 2018, 6.30pm at Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Ely House, 37 Dover Street, London W1S 4NJ

Pianist Annie Yim is the creator of MusicArt London, a conceptual concert series which combines music with poetry and visual arts, creating interesting and unexpected dialogues and connections between the works in the programmes and across creative disciplines. Programmes include works by 21st century composers, often juxtaposed with historical masterpieces, spoken word, sound and video installations, dance and art. Her innovative artist-led concerts, often presented in collaboration with others, multiply artistic roles and dissolve boundaries across media.

Yim’s forthcoming MusicArt event, ‘Conceptual Concert In Three Acts’ on 13 December in London, features a world premiere concert-installation with composer Raymond Yiu and poet Kayo Chingonyi as well as piano music and spoken words by maverick composer John Cage. The performance takes place in the Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac London, which is showing a new exhibition of American artist Robert Rauschenberg’s ‘Spreads’ and ‘Ryoanji’, an installation by John Cage, Rauschenberg’s close friend and long-time creative mentor and collaborator. The Conceptual Concert takes its inspiration from the art and life of Rauschenberg and Cage, and pays homage to their work and joint creative impulses through music and words.

The specially composed concert-installation inspired by the work of Rauschenberg and Cage focuses on dialogues – musical and spoken, historical and contemporary, space and time, visual and aural interactions. Intended to be cumulative and cyclical, this new composition comprises unexpected combinations of influences and traditions, uncovering themes in Rauschenberg’s Spreads that have been incorporated into our process.

– Annie Yim

In Rauschenberg’s work content is often ambiguous. His ‘Spreads’ series comprise wooden panels to which he variously applied acrylic paint, paper and fabric collage, solvent-transferred images, coloured or mirrored plastics and everyday objects such as fans, pillows, buckets and lights, and thus blurred the distinctions between different media such as photography, painting, printing and sculpture by combining them all in one work. Taking inspiration from Rauschenberg’s artistic process and collaborative spirit, together with his exploration of layering, fragments, memory, resonances and integration, Yim and her co-collaborators interweave music and words, blurring the boundaries between traditional roles of musician, composer and poet. Like Rauschenberg’s work, these “sound events” suggest several narrative outcomes or associations to the listener or viewer.

Cage too blurred and pushed boundaries. An iconoclast like Rauschenberg, he challenged preconceived notions of how music should be presented in performance and questioned what actually constitutes “music” and “sound”. His Winter Music, dedicated to Robert Rauschenberg and included in Annie’s concert, utilises musical collage, chance and indeterminacy, leaving decisions about the presentation of the music to the performer. His infamous 4’33”, which concludes Annie’s programme, was directly inspired by Rauschenberg’s White Paintings, whose seemingly “blank” canvasses change depending on the light conditions of the rooms in which they are hung. 4’33 is, in effect, an “aural blank canvas”, reflecting the ever-changing ambient sounds surrounding each performance, and onto which performers and audience may place their own interpretation and responses, complementing Rauschenberg’s contention that an artwork is incomplete without the presence of the viewer (or audience). The audience will be invited to participate during Annie’s performance of 4’33”, further confirming Rauschenberg’s assertion.

Conceptual Concert in Three Acts

Presented in collaboration with MusicArt, Thursday 13th December 2018, 6.30pm at Galerie Thaddeus Ropac, Ely House, 37 Dover Street, London W1S 4NJ. Admission free.

MusicArt London http://musicart.london/

Annie Yim http://annieyim.com/

Video

Dream by John Cage from an earlier MusicArt performance

https://youtu.be/PEknsWJLp-o

Header image: Palladian Xmas (Spread) by Robert Rauschenberg 1980. Solvent transfer, acrylic and collage on wooden panel with mirror and electric light (Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac London)

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Who or what inspired you to take up the piano and pursue a career in music?

Nobody has forced me or suggested me to become a musician. My parents had many recordings as they were classical music lover. So I often listened to classical music since when I was a child and I liked it very much. That’s how I started to become close to and to love classical music.

Who or what have been the greatest influences on your musical life and career?

I would say meeting with many great musicians have been the most important influences on my musical life, people like Myung-Whun Chung, Radu Lupu, Krystian Zimerman, Mikhail Pletnev, Alfred Brendel, Murray Perahia and many others…..I learned a lot even while having a conversation with them.

What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?

Maybe participating some competitions….. I wanted to play for audiences across the world and I thought winning the competition was the easiest way to reach that goal. And it was true, the Chopin Competition gave me a lot of opportunities, but I’m still against competitions. Many great musicians like Arcadi Volodos or Piotr Anderszewski didn’t win any competitions.  The competition kills the musical idea, imagination and freedom. I felt so free after I won the Chopin competition because I realized that I don’t have to do this kind of thing anymore.

Which performances/recordings are you most proud of?

Brahms Quartet in g minor from the Rubinstein competition in 2014. It was the only performance which I enjoyed during that competition.

Which particular works do you think you play best?

I have no idea…

How do you make your repertoire choices from season to season?

These days I simply play the pieces that I want to play. A few years ago, I wanted to show or express many sides of my musicality. But not anymore. I always feel comfortable when I play the music I love.

Do you have a favourite concert venue to perform in and why?

So many places where they have a good piano, good acoustic and good audience. Like Carnegie hall in New York, the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, Paris and Berlin’s Philharmonie, KKL in Luzern, Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, Suntory hall in Tokyo…..

Who are your favourite musicians?

Radu Lupu, Krystian Zimerman, Mikhail Pletnev, Alfred Cortot, Edwin Fischer, Arcadi Volodos, Grigory Sokolov, Carlos Kleiber, Myung Whun Chung any many others

What is your most memorable concert experience?

My debut recital in Korea in 2005 when I was 11. After the performance, I realized that I really loved sharing my music with the audience.

As a musician, what is your definition of success?

Actually I still don’t know what being successful as a musician is and I don’t want to think about it. My goal is play better than yesterday and to be satisfied with my performance more often. I’m rarely happy with my performance…

What advice would you give to young or aspiring musicians?

Don’t expect the compensation after you decide to become a pianist or musician

What is your idea of perfect happiness?

I love to be in a place where there no noise. I love silence. And having good food and drink with my family or friends.

 

Seong-Jin Cho was brought to the world’s attention in 2015 when he won the First Prize at the Chopin International Competition in Warsaw. This same competition launched the careers of world-class artists such as ‎Martha Argerich, ‎Maurizio Pollini, or ‎Krystian Zimerman.

In January 2016, Seong-Jin signed an exclusive contract with Deutsche Grammophon. The first recording was released in November 2016 featuring Chopin’s First Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra and Gianandrea Noseda and the Four Ballades. A solo Debussy recording was then released in November 2017. Both albums won impressive critical acclaim worldwide. In 2018 he will record a Mozart program with sonatas and the D minor concerto with the Chamber Orchestra of Europe and Yannick-Nézet-Seguin.

An active recitalist, he performs in many of the world’s most prestigious concert halls. In the 2018/19 season, he will return to the main stage of Carnegie Hall as part of the Keyboard Virtuoso series where he had sold out in 2017. He will also return to Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw in the Master Pianists series and will play recitals at the Berlin Philharmonie Kammermusiksaal (Berliner Philharmonic concert series), Frankfurt’s Alte Oper, Los Angeles’ Walt Disney Hall (Los Angeles Philharmonic recital series), Zurich’s Tonhalle-Maag, Stockholm’s Konserthuset, Munich’s Prinzregententheater, Chicago’s Mandel Hall, Lyon’s Auditorium, La Roque d’Anthéron Festival, Verbier Festival, Gstaad Menuhin Festival, Rheingau Festival among several other venues.

During the next two seasons, he will play with the London Symphony Orchestra and Gianandrea Noseda, at the Barbican Centre, Radio France Philharmonic Orchestra and Myung-Whun Chung at the Paris Philharmonie, Gewandhaus Orchestra with Antonio Pappano, Hong Kong Philharmonic with Jaap van Zweden, Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra with Manfred Honeck, Finnish Radio Orchestra and Hannu Lintu, Philadelphia Orchestra and Yannick-Nézet-Seguin, Orchestra della Scala with Myung-Whun Chung. He will also tour with the European Union Youth Orchestra and Gianandrea Noseda in venues like Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Royal Albert Hall, Berlin Konzerthaus, the London Philharmonic Orchestra and Robin Ticciati in Germany, the WDR Sinfonieorchester and Marek Janowski in Germany and Japan, and with the Santa Cecilia Orchestra and Antonio Pappano in Asia.

He collaborates with conductors at the highest level such as Sir Simon Rattle, Valery Gergiev, Esa-Pekka Salonen, Vladimir Ashkenazy, Yuri Temirkanov, Krzysztof Urbanski, Fabien Gabel, Marek Janowski, Vasily Petrenko, Jakub Hrusa, Leonard Slatkin or Mikhail Pletnev.

In November 2017, Seong-Jin stepped in for Lang Lang with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for concerts in Berlin, Frankfurt, Hong-Kong and Seoul. Other major orchestral appearances include the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, Orchestre de Paris, Mariinsky Orchestra, Munich Philharmonic Orchestra, Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, NHK Symphony Orchestra, Philharmonia Orchestra, Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra, Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, Budapest Festival Orchestra, Danish National Symphony Orchestra, Russian National Orchestra, Detroit Symphony Orchestra, NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester, RAI Symphony Orchestra, Hessischer Rundfunk Sinfonieorchester.

Born in 1994 in Seoul, Seong-Jin Cho started learning the piano at 6 and gave his first public recital at age 11. In 2009, he became the youngest-ever winner of Japan’s Hamamatsu International Piano Competition. In 2011, he won Third prize at the Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow at the age of 17. In 2012, he moved to Paris to study with Michel Béroff at the Paris Conservatoire National Supérieur de Musique where he graduated in 2015. He is now based in Berlin.

seongjin-cho.com

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Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire
― Gustav Mahler

A sense of reverence seems to pervade every corner of Classical Music. The artform is presented as the very pinnacle of man’s artistic, intellectual and spiritual achievement, rather than one art amongst many, and certain composers, works and artists enjoy such an elevated position that mere mortals often fear to approach or reproach them.

Such an attitude can alienate potential concert goers, who fear that they may not “know enough” or are not sufficiently “educated”, to appreciate or enjoy classical music. At concerts, I regularly meet people, clearly intelligent and culturally aware, who enthuse about the music they have just heard and then apologise for “not really knowing enough about it” (the fact that these people can explain the things they liked about the music – details of melody and structure, its emotional impact and the way it transported them to another place – demonstrate to me that they fully appreciate the art form!). And at least those people actually went to the concert; sadly, many are too intimidated by the reverence surrounding classical music to even step inside a concert hall for fear of doing something wrong or appearing ignorant.

After a concert, I want to grab people by the lapels and tell them how lucky we are as a species that, out of all the hundreds of billions of us who ever lived, one of us managed to come up with the Goldberg Variations. But I don’t, because that’s not the done thing. So instead I mention that the café downstairs does some fabulous chocolate éclairs.

– Armando Iannucci:Classical music, the love of my life

In concerts, reverence can limit programming: with a preponderance towards the “great works”, lesser-known composers and music, young composers or new music may be overlooked or excluded, thus denying audiences the opportunity to experience the wilder shores of the repertoire.

Classical music has a gatekeeping problem, and much of that can be traced through the word “great.”…..if the major selling point of classical music is how objectively Great it is or how Great the composers are, Greatness becomes insidious: effectively meaningless, but unchangeable, almost impossible to fight. Being sold Greatness is now what audiences expect. 

– Zoë Madonna, NPR

The ingrained rituals of the classical concert, which are themselves an aspect of reverence and are used by some to maintain the aura of specialness, exclusivity and gravitas, often preclude people from sampling classical music because they are nervous about how to behave, what to wear, and when to applaud. I remember once attending a Catholic wedding and it was so far removed from the Anglican ceremony that I spent most of the proceedings wondering what on earth was going on, while others around me seemed totally at home with it all: I imagine newcomers to classical music often feel like this (in fact I know they do because I shared a box with some classical music ingenues at the Proms in 2015 and they expressed all the anxieties noted above).

Reverence also breeds prejudice, almost as pervasive and polarised as the general problem in society today: mention Wagner, and you are adored by one group; mention Schoenberg, and you’re disdained by another; mention minimalism, and another group rolls their eyes. Certain composers are untouchable, beyond criticism, fetishized even – Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner and Mahler being examples which immediately spring to my mind. With such firmly-held beliefs about the greatness of certain composers, it becomes impossible to have reasoned conversations with other music-lovers. A friend of mine (also a pianist) really doesn’t like the music of Bach, nor Mozart. Mention this in one of the online piano forums to which we both belong, and he is greeted with shouts of horror and even abuse, suggesting that there is something “wrong” with him. It seems that one is just not permitted to dislike certain composers. Of these, Bach in particular enjoys especial veneration: cycles of Bach’s works are not “performances”, they are “journeys”, “voyages” or “pilgrimages”, suggesting that hearing and playing his music is a quasi-religious experience.

The elevation of certain performers to almost God-like status is another aspect reverence. I’ve felt it at concerts by Barenboim and Schiff, the veneration often created not by the performers (who strike me as fairly modest men) but by the audience and the pre-concert hype. Sadly, the idolised, almost cultish admiration of certain conductors, in particular, can lead to inappropriate behaviour and dangerous abuses of power, such as were revealed in the closing months of 2017.

***

The classical musician’s training is largely still about preserving tradition and the reverential “canonization” of repertoire: we’re taught from a young age that Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms, Tchaikovsky, Wagner, Mahler…. are the “great” composers. Revering the music in this way can create problems when learning and playing it: for pianists, as for other musicians, certain works – the Goldberg Variations, Beethoven’s last piano sonatas, Chopin’s Etudes, the great piano concertos, for example – have an elevated status on a par with the works of Aristotle, Shakespeare or Dickens. We hold the music in such awe, carrying with us the weight of its history, its heritage, the long line of great musicians who have played it, and feel such a tremendous responsibility to these “great works” that our creativity, artistry and personal interpretation may be stifled. The music is imbued with notions of ‘greatness’ even though the player might not actually be feeling it intuitively nor actually believe in it.

This also encourages in some musicians an obsessive attitude to the music which leads them to sacrifice normal life in order to practice for eight or ten hours a day. Such behaviour is mentally and physically unhealthy, causing anxiety and tension, and, as a result, is often counter-productive.

I’ve experienced it myself, with works by Beethoven and Chopin, and I’ve observed people on piano courses whose reverence towards the music gets in the way of their enjoyment of it.

Respect the music, for sure, but don’t revere it: that prevents us from getting right to the heart of the music and experiencing – and, importantly, enjoying it – in all its myriad variety.

The trouble with music appreciation in general is that people are taught to have too much respect for music. They should be taught to love it instead”

 – Stravinsky