Amazing contrasts in programming at the Festival of the Sound today. At noon, a concert of three works where the musical traditions of China and India intersected with the traditional instruments of European chamber music -- a string quartet, a piano, and a double bass.
The Chinese work used the quartet to make sounds reminiscent of traditional Chinese music and instruments, very effectively. The next two works came from a young composer-in-residence, Dinuk Wijeratne, originally from Sri Lanka, who has lived and worked in a whole range of different countries with very different cultural traditions. His home tradition was represented by the Indian tabla, the tuned drums (to describe them very loosely) which are at the heart of a special and complicated musical tradition unique to them. Wijeratne's special achievement was to combine this complex hierarchy of sounds with the European instruments into works which planted a foot in both worlds simultaneously. If there's any better definition of the term "world music", I can't imagine what it might be.
The concluding work was a Canadian piece, Raven and the First Men, by Timothy Corlis. This was played with the accompaniment of children's paintings inspired by the music, as part of the now-annual tradition of Painted Sound concerts.
The afternoon at 2:30 was a full-length recital by Jamie Parker. Great selection of classical "night music", which meant a lengthy sequence of slow, mainly quiet music of great subtlety. Chopin, Schumann and Brahms, Debussy, Linda Smith, Bartok and Schubert -- Parker played all with sensitivity, tonal finesse, and created great variety out of seeming sameness.
And then, the let-down (it's rant time). Parker chose to finish with Beethoven's complete Moonlight Sonata. And the finale was simply too damn fast. I know that's the speed the score suggests. Maybe it would work better on a fortepiano, although I have my doubts. All I know is that each mad uprushing arpeggio in this movement ends with two emphatic chords, and in only two of them could I actually hear two chords. The other times I only heard one. I was seated a bare twenty feet from the piano so I could hardly have missed those second chords if they had sounded. And most of the arpeggios were unintelligible. If Beethoven really wanted nothing but a blur of sound, why didn't he just write a series of glissandi? He might as well have done, for all the good his careful scoring of arpeggios did here.
I'm not blaming Jamie Parker particularly -- it's a disease of our times, this insane need to "play it exactly the way the composer wrote it, never mind if it's musically feasible or not." Almost every pianist I have ever heard perform this sonata live has succumbed to this temptation to compete in the "Anything-You-Can-Play-I-Can-Play-Faster" Sweepstakes.
But now, go back and listen to a recording by one of my favourite pianists: Wilhelm Kempff. In his classic DGG cycle of the complete sonatas, this finale sounds intensely hectic just as it ought to sound. But compare the tempi with almost any of numerous live performances, and you will find that Kempff is just a little slower -- maybe on the order of a 5% difference. And it works. You can hear clearly every note of every arpeggio, each of those hammered double chords comes through loud and clear, nothing disappears in a roaring sea of blurry noise.
Please, pianists of the world, remember this advice:
"Never do your damnedest, if your next-to-damnedest will be better."
I forget who said that, but Wilhelm Kempff obviously knew it -- which is why I'd rather listen to his recording than any live performance of this sonata I have ever heard (and that includes, among others, Anton Kuerti and Maurizio Pollini).
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