It’s still quite unusual these days to attend a concert where the programme begins with a quiet and/or slow piece. Often performers have a favourite “warm up” piece, one with which they feel very comfortable, which is a helpful way to ease into the main programme, warm up the fingers and settle in for the concert. For some performers, a Prelude and Fugue by Bach, or something similar, is a good opener.
I recently attended a concert where the pianist began his programme (which included Beethoven’s heavenly penultimate piano sonata, the Op 110, and closed with Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue) with two very quiet, very slow sonatas by Scarlatti. It helped that the pianist in question can produce the most poetic sound (at any dynamic) on the piano, but there was something about the intimacy and muted sounds of this music that made for a very concentrated listening experience.
In fact, I think beginning a concert in this way is a stroke of genius as it can create an immediate sense of intimacy and focus. The audience is forced to listen closely and pay attention to the nuances of the music – a very effective way of drawing the audience in and engaging them with the performance, and ensuring their attention for the remainder of the concert. Opening with a quiet piece or pieces can also create a sense of anticipation and expectation: the audience may be more likely to be attentive and engaged if they are waiting for something to happen. This can be particularly powerful in a concert setting where the audience is large or the venue is imposing, as it can help to create a sense of connection and shared experience.
A quiet piece can be a very effective way of setting the tone for the entire concert and can establish a mood and atmosphere that will carry through the entire concert. This can be especially effective if the quiet piece is followed by more up-tempo or energetic pieces and the contrast can be very effective in creating a dynamic and varied performance. Beginning with a quiet piece can be a bold and unexpected choice, challenging the audience’s expectations and encouraging them to approach the performance with an open mind.
Finally, starting with a quiet piece can be a very effective way of showcasing the performer’s skill. It’s not easy to perform a quiet piece effectively, and is a real demonstration of the performer’s control, sensitivity, and expressiveness. This can be especially powerful if the performer is able to create a sense of intimacy and connection with the audience.
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When I try to understand my life as a critic in the dazzling world of piano music, I am at a loss. We have inherited so much over 300 years that I feel overwhelmed. There is no obvious focal point. What is at the heart of piano world?
Personally, I could not make it through the day without the stimulation of piano performance. My home resounds with keyboards all my waking hours, constantly renewed from the thousand-odd CDs I have accumulated.
I know of no legal substance that can alter your mind like music, and it does so without a hangover. My moods are at the mercy of Haydn, Ravel, Debussy and many others.
Sheet music too is floating around the web for reprinting privately at home. I don’t mind that more and more paid subscriptions and other charges cropping up. Performers deserve a good slice of the pie.
To get a grip on this subject, I have opened my personal diary, beginning a typical day with two giants and continuing to bedtime with lullabies. Taken together, these choices demonstrate the power of the piano.
EARLY MORNING – My morning never starts until I flip on the CD player and rearrange the five discs it rotates. I need Bach and Mozart and a bit of Galuppi for chasing the cobwebs from my brain. Specifically, I probably put on Glenn Gould’s Goldberg Variations (1981 version) and Mozart’s wonderfully inventive piano sonatas played by Mitsuko Uchida. Galuppi’s sonata in C major, of course. Next, to lighten the atmosphere, I like to have 15 minutes of Erik Satie.
STARTING TO WORK – I spend most days writing and painting, with great music in the background to encourage the creative process. The trick is to find the right volume so it tweaks your nervous system but does not mess up your concentration. As I write this, Brahms’ Scherzo in E-flat minor Op. 4, quietly played by William Grant Naboré, is the best medicine I can find.
William Grant Naboré, a drawing by the author, Michael Johnson
FIRST COFFEE BREAK – Now I can turn up the volume and change my perspective with Prokofiev’s piano sonatas, preferably played by Murray McLachlan. It’s stirring music, dissonant, wild and avant-garde for the 1930s but a particularly shocking chord always catches my attention. At one point Sergei calls for the player to hit the keyboard “con pugno” (with fist). This is a cluster chord, a percussive whack on the piano that can be found scattered throughout the 20th century repertoire, notably in Charles Ives and bits of Sorabji, Messiaen, Louvier, Xenakis, Ligeti, and yes even Stockhausen. Someone has written that Prokofiev used it to frighten “the old ladies of both sexes” in the audience.
BACK TO WORK – Turning the volume down to moderately quiet, the I race through Franz Liszt’s La Campanella Grande Etude (Paganini) or Gnomenreigen, both melodic wonders and sunny virtuoso exercises. Thank you, Franz, for making me want to dance as I work. These pieces have defeated numerous pianists over the years but dozens of fine recordings are out there. Take your pick. As a listener, I know them by heart and hum along as they spin.
REVISIONS –At this point I look back, sometimes appalled, at my morning’s output, and attack it again. For this, I depend on the aggressive stimulation of Scriabin, ranging from his early Chopin derivatives to his later ground-breaking ideas. Recordings worth a visit are Ashkenazy, Berman, and Hamelin. I finish in a sweat, either from the music or my revisions, I’m never sure which.
LUNCHTIME RECITAL – I allow myself the freedom to wander around 300 years of music in small samples, creating my own DIY piano recital. Keeping the volume at medium so as not to annoy my wife, I go through some of Bach’s 1722 shimmering masterpiece Well-Tempered Clavier played by Sviatoslav Richter, to another collection of preludes and fugues by Rodion Shchedrin, to Messiaen’s solo piano, beginning with La Colombe (The Dove) which juxtaposes the dissonant and the consonant. And finally, as a dessert, the frightening Cziffra arrangement of “Flight of the Bumblebee” played by Georgy himself.
AFTERNOON – Following my relaxed and musical lunch, nothing gets me back to work like Rachmaninov’s little gem, the Prelude Op.23 No.5 in G-minor. My player here is one I am grateful to – the willowy Belgian-Russian Irina Lankova, a product of the great Gnessin School in Moscow and now a happy expat. She brings a driving momentum to the work, exactly what Rachmaninov desired. The piece leaves you panting for more but it ends peacefully at 3:43.
To complete my afternoon I will put on Schubert’s monumental sonata in C-minor, with its contrasting darks and lights, played Brendel. As Andras Schiff writes in his new book “Music Comes Out of Silence”, he knows where to expect “the proverbial goose pimples” in Schubert, and at the end of the first movement in the C-minor is a passage that reverberates in a different way – “terrifying me in the true sense of the word.” But he survives, and plays it to perfection.
TWILIGHT – I need some fun after a demanding day. One has to smile a bit, and Grieg’s “Wedding Day at Troldhaugen” provides it – a celebratory Norwegian dance number full of Peer Gynt allusions and Norwegian folklore, played with bouncing good humour by Garrick Ohlsson. Completing the day’s adventures is Chopin’s Berceuse in E-flat major, a quiet piece guaranteed to bring your mind back to total calm.
DINNER – In background as the table groans under a full French evening meal, I need some pep and vigour, and I find it in the Spanish themes of Enrique Granados delightfully played by French pianist Jean-Francois Dichamp. His CD programme marries Granados with Scarlatti, a pairing that came to him in an inspiration while on a solitary evening stroll in summertime Barcelona. He plays them alternately in recitals, convinced that the audience hears a piece differently when compared to the work that precedes it.
LIGHTS OUT – One of my favourite compositions in the repertoire is floating, lilting “Au Lac de Wallenstadt” performed by Wilhelm Kempf. I listen to it over and over with increasing emotion. It seems conceived for snuggling or sleeping or both. Still awake? Turn to Morton Feldman‘s Palais de Mari or all of Bertrand Chamayou CD “Good Night”.
It is with humility that I have made the piano a large part of my life, enriching and stimulating myself, and (as with Cziffra) amazing me.
Michael Johnson is a music critic with particular interest in piano.
Johnson worked as a reporter and editor in New York, Moscow, Paris and London over his journalism career. He covered European technology for Business Week for five years, and served nine years as chief editor of International Management magazine and was chief editor of the French technology weekly 01 Informatique. He also spent four years as Moscow correspondent of The Associated Press. He is the author of five books.
Michael Johnson is based in Bordeaux.
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As a writer, the marks I make on paper, or via the word-processing programme on my laptop, are the outward signifiers of my creativity. When I publish an article or essay those marks are made public, put out there and held up for scrutiny.
I am also a musician, a pianist in fact, a role, which, like writing, is largely undertaken in isolation. The outward signifier of my musical creativity comes when I perform for others; like my writing, the work, the graft, the practising is done alone.
The tools of the musician’s craft, in addition to their instrument and intent, are the “text”, the “literature” contained within musical scores, and these documents provide the map for our musical journeys. On a most basic level, the markings we make on the score relate to fingering schemes, dynamics and marks of expression, pedalling and so forth. Learning music is a complex mental and physical process, and anything that assists in that process is useful. Often it is simply not possible to remember all the details in the music, and annotations provide a useful aide memoir and an immediate mnemonic for the practice of practising. These marks are our individual “hieroglyphs”, and our own secret code, through which our scores become precious, often highly personal documents.
Our writings on the score reveal our individual working processes and practice patterns, our attempts to dig away at the surface of the music, to look beyond the notes to find a deeper meaning. The permanence of a pencil mark is such that, until we choose to erase that mark, it remains there on the page in front of our eyes.
The markings and annotations we make on our scores may also be deeply associated with memories – of significant teachers or mentors, special concerts and venues, colleagues and friends, and may even correspond to certain periods in our lives. Returning to the piano after a 20-year absence, I came upon an earlier teacher’s markings in my dog-eared edition of Bach’s ‘48’. In a curiously potent Proustian rush, I was a gauche teenager again, back in Mrs Murdoch’s living room, her big Steinway stretched out before me, the book of Preludes and Fugues open on the music desk. Returning to a score after a break from it, one reacquaints oneself not only with the dots upon the staves; in the interim, the annotations have become a snapshot of another time and place.
Looking at another musician’s annotated score is an act of voyeurism: a score liberally marked with someone else’s fingering and comments might reveal someone’s deepest insecurities and frustrations, their unspoken hopes and most secret desires…..
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It was perhaps inevitable that pianist and writer Susan Tomes would turn her attention eventually to the extraordinarily broad repertoire of the piano – her instrument, and mine, and that of countless others, both professional and amateur players. While her previous books have been concerned with the myriad aspects of being a pianist – from performing, recording and teaching, concert preparation, etiquette and attire, and audiences to the daily exigencies of practising and rehearsing – her latest volume, The Piano: A History in 100 Pieces is concerned with repertoire and how the piano’s development and capabilities have influenced how composers write for it.
The book was inspired by Neil MacGregor’s AHistory of the World in 100 Objects, and takes a similar approach, using specific pieces to illustrate the piano’s history and illuminate its development, from the moment in the early 18th century when it began to supplant the harpsichord as the keyboard instrument du jour to the modern piano as we know it today.
This new instrument offered composers a greater varieties of colours, effects and timbres, and so their music reflected the piano’s capabilities and range, its potential for songful lyricism or an orchestral richness of sound, amply demonstrated in the piano sonatas of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven, for example, the song accompaniments of Schubert, or Chopin’s Nocturnes with their bel canto melodies.
The book begins in “pre-history”, as it were, with music written for the harpsichord, the most famous of which is Bach’s Goldberg Variations, a pinnacle of the repertoire and a work which continues to fascinate performers, audiences and commentators alike. Bach’s Italian Concerto also features in this section, together with works by Domenico Scarlatti and CPE Bach – all works which can be played and enjoyed equally on harpsichord or piano.
We then move from the harpsichord to the fortepiano and thence to the piano itself, in its earliest iteration, a much smaller instrument physically, but already one with far greater range and tonal projection than the harpsichord or fortepiano, as is clear from the music of Haydn and Mozart. One of the pieces explored in this chapter is Haydn’s Variations in f minor, Un piccolo divertimento, Hob. XVII: 6, a work of profound expression, which foreshadows Schubert, and pianistic breadth. Unsurprisingly, Haydn’s great E-flat major Sonata, Hob. XVI:52 is also covered in detail in this chapter, a work which utilises the capabilities of the piano to their fullest extent in a work of great character, texture and variety.
But as these early chapters reveal, this book is not simply a chronology of the piano, not by any means; but rather a detailed exploration of some of the greatest music composed for the instrument as well as lesser-known gems, written from the authoritative standpoint of someone who knows both instrument and repertoire intimately. And it comes right up to date with a chapter focussing on music by living composer Arvo Pärt, Philip Glass, Judith Weir and Thomas Adès
Susan Tomes writes with a lucid eloquence founded on knowledge, experience and, above all, affection for the piano, which shines through every paragraph. She not only offers the reader important analysis, contextual details and performance notes for each work, but also demonstrates a deep understanding of what it feels like to actually play this music, the sensation of the notes “under the hands”, how it sparks the imagination and provokes emotions, and the experience of learning and shaping it to bring it to life in concert – fascinating insights which take the reader “beyond the notes”, as it were. Thus, the book acts as both a historical survey and a primer for those seeking more detailed information about specific works, with guidance on performance practice and interpretation, drawn from Tomes’s own experience as a soloist, chamber musician and teacher.
The range of pieces explored in the book reflects the vast breadth of the piano’s repertoire, and Tomes is the perfect guide through this almost overwhelming embarrassment of musical riches.
Nor does she confine herself only to the solo repertoire. Concerti and chamber music also feature heavily, from, for example, Schubert’s much-loved ‘Trout’ Quintet to Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3, to demonstrate the piano’s importance in these genres and how it interacts with and complements other instruments. Jazz is also covered, while the final chapter explores where the piano and its repertoire might be heading, and how we as listeners, and players, might open our ears and minds to a different range of music, presented in less traditional performance settings.
This comprehensive, informative and highly readable celebration of the piano and its literature is a must-read for pianophiles and music lovers. With its wealth of analysis and contextual information it is also a significant resource for those who teach and play the piano, a book to keep close by the instrument to refer to, dip into, and cherish.
The Piano: A History in 100 Pieces is published by Yale University Press
The Cross-Eyed Pianist is free to access and ad-free, and takes many hours every month to research, write, and maintain.
If you find joy and value in what I do, please consider making a donation to support the continuance of the site
It was perhaps inevitable that pianist and writer Susan Tomes would turn her attention eventually to the extraordinarily broad repertoire of the piano – her instrument, and mine, and that of countless others, both professional and amateur players. While her previous books have been concerned with the myriad aspects of being a pianist – from performing, recording and teaching, concert preparation, etiquette and attire, and audiences to the daily exigencies of practising and rehearsing – her latest volume, The Piano: A History in 100 Pieces is concerned with repertoire and how the piano’s development and capabilities have influenced how composers write for it. 
The Cross-Eyed Pianist 