The Well-Tempered Ear
Classical music: Pianist Gabriela Montero and the Madison Symphony Orchestra show that a gift for improvisation also serves the printed score of old masterpieces well. | January 22, 2013
A REQUEST: Apparently the Overture Center and the Madison Symphony Orchestra don’t recognize that we are currently in the middle of a serious flu epidemic as measured by cases, hospitalizations and deaths. At the concert I attended Sunday afternoon, there were NO dispensers of hand sanitizers, not even in the restroom, and an usher I asked didn’t recall seeing any all weekend long. I seem to recall that the Madison Opera used them. And it makes good sense when you are sitting so close and shaking hands, touching handrails, seat armrests etc. I hope that the situation can be remedied soon. Hand sanitizer is a good, well proven public health measure.
By Jacob Stockinger
Venezuelan-born pianist Gabriela Montero has a very special talent, even a extraordinary gift: She can improvise in a structured, classical manner and in a variety of styles. And she does so without appearing nervous or unsure of herself, so complete is her relaxation and command of herself on-stage. She simply does not stumble.
Montero (below) demonstrated her gift in abundance during her three performances with the Madison Symphony Orchestra last weekend.
On Friday night, she improvised on the tune “On Wisconsin” and then played a free association that someone described as a Scriabin-like nocturne.
On Sunday afternoon I heard her improvise to “I’ve Been Working on the Railroad” (“I never heard that one before,” she quipped, after someone in the audience shouted it out and before she sounded it out and then improvised) . She also played a kind of lyrical meditation that she said was inspired by the pleasures of her stay in Madison. To my ears, it possessed a Faure-like.
Some of her improvisations – many of which you can find on best-selling recordings (below) — I really like. Some others sound to me like just a cut or two above cocktail lounge or piano-bar fare. But improvising remains a skill that too many classical musicians lack today, one that used to be a prerequisite for classical musicians and composers in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries.
Ironically, however, I found that Montero’s gift for improvisation served her best not in the impressive solo improvisations that she played as popular encores -– they drew standing ovations and cheers from the sizable audiences – but rather in the way she took small but exciting liberties with the printed score to Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 1, which dates back to 1798.
Montero brought the kind of zesty and improvisational life to the piano part that one imagines the young and rebellious Beethoven himself brought to his own impressive appearances in the usually staid city of Haydn and Mozart.
Her first movement was all high-energy. It emphasized counterpoint, dialogue with the orchestra and glittering and dramatic passage work, but also featured big contrasts and a particular attention to soft-and-loud. The most glaring weakness to me was her own cadenza, which may have been intended to sound Beethoven-like but which can’t compare to the third and longest cadenza that Beethoven, himself a keyboard virtuoso, wrote for his concerto.
In Montero’s hands, the slow movement provided a beautiful foretaste of dreamy and lyrical Romanticism in its extreme slowness – almost a stasis that barely seemed to move or advance, said one keen and correct observer.
And the third and final movement, by contrast, turned into exactly the kind of fast and free-wheeling rondo that a young virtuoso like the young Beethoven (below) –- who was often known for his fast metronome markings as well as his ability to improvise –- would have appreciated. It was the fastest I ever heard that movement played, but it worked. And The Improviser also played right to the end along with the orchestra, even though the printed score calls for the orchestra to finish alone.
The concerto was bookended by two solid performances of contemporary and classical works.
The first was the opening 13-minute tone poem “blue cathedral” by Jennifer Higdon (below), an American composer who has won a Pulitzer Prize and a Grammy Award. She is accessible and popular, but also serious. This piece from 2000 — composed to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and to memorialize the composer’s brother, who died of cancer – has already been played by over 400 orchestras. Not many new pieces or contemporary classical composers can make that claim.
That is impressive for so-called new music. And the brother-clarinet, sister-flute dialogue in the piece was performed superbly by the MSO. The whole work has a kind of Copland-like harmonic spaciousness or mood to it, a Gothic-like grandeur of innerness that reminded me of Monet’s Impressionist paintings of the “blue cathedral” at Rouen (below):
The concerto finished with perfect winter fare: the Symphony No. 6 in D Major by Antonin Dvorak (below. Music by Dvorak is invariably tuneful, melodic and toe-tapping. Conductor John DeMain proved especially adept at bringing out lines and at whipping the orchestra up to a controlled frenzy in the folk dance Scherzo-Furiant (at bottom) and the brassy finale.
The MSO should play, and we should hear, more Dvorak. After all, this was the MSO’ premiere performance of a work composed back in 1880.
Of course, The Ear wasn’t alone in making sense of this infectious and ear-grabbing concert, which I found to be one of the best and most memorable of the season.
Here are links to other reviews and of course you have every right to your own your judgment or critique, which you can leave in the COMMENT section:
Here is a link to John W. Barker’s review in Isthmus:
http://www.thedailypage.com/daily/article.php?article=38831&sid=c1d6a3392855f01fd34ff614eed4f68c
Here is a link to Lindsay Christians review for 77 Square, The Capital Times and The Wisconsin State Journal:
Here is a link to Greg Hettmansberger’s review for the “Classically Speaking” blog he wrotes for Madison Magazine:
3 Comments »
We ought to listen to the comments of Glenn Gould and Keith Jarrett, both of whom did not take classical music as ANY basis for improvisation. They both improvise(d), and compose(d) classical music, but those two genres do not cross anymore, precisely because there is too much improvised music out there that sounds loungy or film-scorish, or otherwise recycles ideas that some composer has already written down.
I NEVER use classical formats as improv frameworks. I’ll play freely in a tonal or non-tonal style, or I’ll play on standard songs from the American songbook. I teach people to do this as well.
I usually read music when I play classical pieces, so that I am not ever tempted to bluff, improv or otherwise fudge the piece, which I could all to easily do, but which the audience rightly expects to sound like what the composer wrote.
If Ms. Montero can riff out, that’s great, but I did not go see that show because I don’t want to go hear someone jam that uses it as a sideline or worse, a gimmick. Blowin’ on Workin’ on the Railroad and On Wisconsin, not worth a big ticket ticket. MBB
Comment by Michael BB — January 22, 2013 @ 1:52 am
I agree with you, Mike. Most good jazz pianists are also great improvisers. It is a talent I wish I had. But I did not like the interpretation of the Beethoven or the improvised cadenza in the first movement.
Comment by Irmgard Bittar — January 22, 2013 @ 12:19 pm
I attended Montero’s Friday and Sunday concerts. The Friday cadenza pleased me, although I wouldn’t say it sounded like Beethoven. The Sunday cadenza was decidedly inferior. I even heard some wrong notes. Her improvisation on “On Wisconsin” didn’t convince me either; after all, she didn’t get the tune right. “I’m Workin’ on the Railroad” seemed to fit her better. But Montero’s final, free improvisation of Sunday that, at least in my ears, sounded truly inspired, formally rounded, and of course technically flawless. That was a piece you could print and sell, which is not true of everything she comes up with.
Montero is not perfect, neither as an improviser nor as a classical pianist, and there may be many points on which to disagree with her (including her tendency to please the crowd). I admit that at her worst she sounds like a better bar pianist. And of course, unlike great jazz musicians, she does not have a voice of her own as an improviser. Rather, she speaks in the voices of others.
But was Glenn Gould flawless? Couldn’t you disagree with him on anything? Which brings me to the comment of MBB, which strikes me as philistine. Twentieth century at its worst. Does MBB forget that there has been a continuous tradition of “classical” improvisation among organists? Is there anything wrong with that one, too? Of course, there are jazz organists as well–but again, someone like Barbara Dennerlein is not shy of crossing over into classical territory. Same goes for some of the best jazz pianists of our day. Jarrett’s ventures into the 18th century are well known, but an even better example would be Aziza Mustafa Zadeh, whose music is not only entrenched in Middle Eastern traditions but also indebted to the Russian piano school and its repertory (it’s a pity she is barely known in the U.S.).
I am a decent improviser myself–on the piano. And I always use classical styles. Why? Because that’s my kind of music, roughly from Bach through Messiaen. Under my fingers, jazz standards inevitably assume the guise of classical pieces. And then, so be it. Why should I try to do something against my nature? Why should Gabriela Montero?
Comment by Albrecht Gaub — January 27, 2013 @ 12:28 pm