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The pianist was Hélène Grimaud and the programme was Bach and Beethoven. She began by playing the Prelude and Fugue in c minor, the 2nd set in the 1st volume of the Well-Tempered Clavier. The prelude is a rhythmic flurry of notes, which she executed with a romantic flow, in a way that may not be quintessentially Bach-ian but that fit in well to the overarching concept of her concert; the fugue is a lightly troubled series of questions and answers, which she executed with a likewise luminous tone.
She moved on to the Prelude and Fugue in c# minor (4th set, 1st volume), which are very slow and sombre, and, in my experience, somehow awkward to play because the many sharps have a thickening effect on the tone. (I sometimes think, though it may be complete nonsense, that Bach and Händel "engineered" this thickening on purpose in their music, so that the thin sounds of the harpsichord would be richer.) There she brought out the sacral element well – the prelude brings to mind the strains of an organ in an empty church, and if the Philharmonic were a cathedral and the concert were being filmed, a camera would have been panning the soaring stained glass windows – and the tone was beautifully fit to bring out the melody to its full advantage. But the fugues are at times an unforgiving tangle of thoughts, and this one, through no fault of the performer, felt interminable.
The third Prelude and Fugue, in d minor (6th set, 2nd volume), are less my cup of tea than the others. They are a desultory wandering that, to be a bit mean, is fine background music, for instance at that point in a concert where everyone is inclined to snooze and even the performer has been hypnotized out of his self-consciousness, but not in itself so meaningful. As often happens in Bach pieces, the first bars pose a problem whose solution neither promises to be particularly interesting nor, most likely, even exists. In concrete terms, I suppose what I mean is that you always expect the minor key to be resolved into a major key, or the theme to progress into another theme (not a weird intellectual one, but one that is hummable), but nothing of the sort happens, which feels unsatisfactory. It is like the rambling Gregorian chants; they are quite beautiful as a process, but a dreadful bore if you have to sit down for an hour or so and listen to them as a performance. What is rather interesting is how Bach's preludes often have the effect of starting in medias res, which is to say, in the midst of the action.
Then Hélène Grimaud launched on Ferruccio Busoni's rewriting of Bach's chaconne (familiar as part of the violin repertoire), BWV 1004. Here her skills were most apparent. While her earlier rendering of Bach was too fluent and frictionless, and she was playing it with so resplendent a polish that it sounded as if she was playing it in an empty room for a recording (Papa told me later that her concert programme was, in fact, taken from her new CD), the conviction that Bach was not so much for her was dispelled as she gradually got into the mood. But what made her rendering of this work especially good was that, like a fine ballet dancer, she contrived to make the effort seem effortless. She did not assume virtuoso airs because of the piece's difficulty, and instead she played the octave scales, chromatic scales, etc., with an elegant sensitivity that made music out of something that otherwise bears a tiresomely close resemblance to finger exercises.
When this piece was over – with brio of course – there was a brief pause for applause, and then she started again with a Prelude and Fugue in a minor (20th set, 2nd volume), which were the epitome of desultory wandering, and very much an anticlimax. I thought that they, and the following work (i.e. Liszt's reworking of another a minor Prelude and Fugue, BWV 543), could profitably have been left out of the programme. To employ a geographical metaphor, in between the massive continental plates of the first and second halves of the programme, they were like an insignificant and superfluous fragment of oceanic crust. For a while I considered how the programme might have been constructed differently; probably it would have worked to play a more energetic and interesting pair of pieces, capable of standing on their own, instead.
*Intermission*
After the intermission, the programme moved on to Beethoven's Sonata in E major, Op. 109, one of the composer's last. (Frankly, I dislike the beginning so much that, in my peregrinations through the later sonatas, it has consistently been skipped; so it was mostly terra incognita to me.) As Hélène Grimaud played it, it was very satisfactory and recognizable as Beethoven, in his pleasant classical phase. It has much of the clarity and loveliness that is more characteristic of Mozart. The theme of the andante movement is remarkable for its rather lovely gravitas, too, and she did due justice to it. Sadly, the variations on the theme were not so great, I thought. Beethoven's variations for cello and piano are diverse and imaginative to the point of genius (the only rivals I can think of are Bach's Goldberg Variations), but his variations for piano solo are at times terribly uninspired. Maybe he tended to find it more important to finish a work, imperfect or not, than to perfect it and beautify it during the writing of it.
The concert ended with Bach's Prelude and Fugue in E major (9th set, 2nd volume) and a Prelude in E major (BWV 1006) that was reworked by Sergei Rachmaninoff. For some reason I can't remember this last prelude, but the prelude and fugue I like, and the pianist played them well. They evoke the ringing of church bells, engaging in a quid pro quo and a mutual echoing: the prelude is higher-pitched and livelier, bringing to mind little bells like those in a carillon, whereas the fugue is lower-pitched and more ponderous, bringing to mind the truly weighty bells.
After these pieces, the vigorous clapping went on for minutes and minutes. There were ca. seven call-backs, an adorable incident where a young lad came to the stage with a bouquet and handed it up to Hélène Grimaud, who then shook his hand, and two encores. The first encore was, I thought, something by Scriabin or Ravel; the second encore sounded very much like a Rachmaninoff prelude reft of the melody and the sense (fault of composer, not of performer).
In fine, to use an old expression, there are four questions that help me determine what I think of a performance in its entirety. Firstly, would I want to hear the performance again? Secondly, do I remember the music (not the opus number but the music itself) that was played? Thirdly, do I love the music that was played? Lastly, do I want to go home and play the music myself? – In the course of the past two days I've thought about them, and the answer to all of them is an enthusiastic yes. (There were, of course, exceptions that I mentioned above, but there always are.) This is, after all, the first time when I've gone out of a concert cheerfully, though perhaps annoyingly, humming part of the programme.
***
In other news, yesterday the family celebrated St. Martin's with an aunt, uncle, cousin, and two friends. Mama put up lanterns, cooked gulash, and deep-fried the incredibly rich Pöfferkes; besides, there were mandarin oranges, nuts, gingerbread, Printen (a dentist's nightmare, being an exceedingly tough variant of gingerbread, mined with large sugar crystals), Spekulatius, and Pfeffernüsse. Though I was tired by 11:30 and went to bed early (my sleeping hours are now orthodox but peculiarly short; even though I could sleep in, I somehow don't), it was most enjoyable. The conversation was extremely entertaining, as usual. After dissections of American politics and politicians, the talk turned to children's literature (old friends like The Little Princess, The Hobbit, and the Narnia series), abbreviated parodies of German poems, Sviatoslav Richter, films like Quantum of Solace, etc. Which reminds me that I would like to take the opportunity to say that I find The Hobbit much better than Lord of the Rings, because it is more healthy and less kitschy, and that I like the Ring films, though I infinitely prefer them when I can skip the tedious scenes (the Aragorn and Arwen nonsense, for instance). As far as German children's literature goes, what was discussed especially is a new film based on Otfried Preußler's book Krabat; I read it some seven years ago and found it too dark and oppressive, as opposed to the author's delightful lighthearted fare like Die Kleine Hexe, Hörbe, Wanja, etc., which I've enjoyed long after I was too old for them. Anyway, I might have said a lot yesterday evening where I didn't contribute a peep of conversation, but the preference for listening over talking is still firmly engrained in me, especially as I have little practice in formulating ideas on the spur of the moment (which is admittedly something I should work on), and moreover always was and always will be a trifle slow on the uptake.
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