In one lesson a student could play through two studies, an entire concerto, and a movement of a sonata, only to receive a few choice syllables from the seated maestro, delivered through clouds of Marlboro smoke in the measured monotone of someone who is tired of always being right. “Legato playing. Even bow and vibrato speed. Watch distance from bridge. Right arm higher. Release pressure. Practise.” He was a remarkable analyst and a great diagnostician and these terse instructions are an example of his perfectly articulated solutions to specific problems. Students were introduced to the violin repertoire through a strictly enforced, developmentally organized sequence—always studying Bruch before studying Lalo, Lalo before Vieuxtemps, etc. The teaching of the bow grip and of bow technique was Galamian’s most significant contribution and his students are recognizable by the similarity of their bow arm—hand suspended from the wrist with the palm shaped as if containing an apple; fingers separated, index finger visibly forward; arm drawn to a ninety-degree angle at upper third of bow—and as a result they play with a richly textured sound and crackerjack technique. Whereas Auer taught the semantics, the structure and meaning of the music, and expected his students to translate it into the syntax, or the grammar, of playing, that tradition was gradually inverted by Galamian (and others), who taught the syntax of violin playing and relied on the musical instincts of the student to reveal the semantic. What Elman worked out in the privacy of his talent, Galamian articulated for the benefit of all. So, in fact, you didn’t have to be as talented as Heifetz to play the violin well, and Galamian’s democratic ideal has had a real impact on the level and quality of string playing in America.
The art of performance is the ability to give meaning to the original aesthetic by illustrating the nuances and details that express that aesthetic. It’s a complex integration of the formal structure of the piece, the cultural and historical tradition from which the music was written, the influences that inspired the composer, the particular temper or spirit by which that composer was informed, and the performer’s personal response to those elements. For a serious musician, the dialogue with the music is a lifelong conversation. Interpretations of the same piece will be rethought and change over time. Like an archaeologist in constant search of another fossil, the artist scours the manuscript again and again, the notes just thin clues to the once grand civilization of thought.
In 1970, Oistrakh, who was Jewish, and others were still prisoners of oppressive Soviet policies, and it was during that era the world witnessed the dramatic defections of several major Soviet artists—Rostropovich, Makarova, Baryshnikov, Vishnevskaya, to name a few. (The old joke: What do you call the Leningrad Symphony after a tour? The Leningrad quartet.) To stem the tide of this exodus, performers were not allowed to tour with their families outside Russia, a restriction Oistrakh found extremely painful. His presence in Montreal, then, attracted not just the culturally informed, but the politically conscious as well, and when activists, planted in the Chanel-soaked audience at Place des Arts, used the intermission as an opportunity to protest the conditions of the Jews in Russia by distributing leaflets and generally causing the kind of disturbance better suited to the sloppy rallies of the sixties, Oistrakh’s heart nearly failed. I witnessed his reaction from the corner of the dressing room where I sat, quietly, dabbing at the bloodstains on my ankle, trying to figure out how to disguise the runs that were now eating their way up my nylons, and I felt the weight of his burden and the depth of his pain. It was another measure of his greatness that the second half of the concert did not reflect any of this suffering, and when he died, rather suddenly, four years later at sixty-six of a heart attack, I felt a personal loss. I mourned not just the loss of Oistrakh, but also the slow decline of the influence of his generation of musicians.
The Auer tradition, though limited to the gifted, produced artists whose performances sizzled like sparklers, their interpretations expressions of the dynamic relationship between themselves and the music. In the semantic translation from the musical idea to the instrument, these players created their own inimitable sound, the repertoire of their technique formed around the context and demands of the music. This is very different from the “new school” approach, where the emphasis is on how to produce a sound, not on what sound to produce. Each domain requires accessing a distinct cognitive faculty. I know that when I am faced with a particularly difficult passage and focus my attention entirely on the mechanics of it, I can accomplish it, but the continuity of the music suffers. What I lose in my playing, and what the listener loses, is the musical logic of that phrase, and the large sweeps of the formal outline of the piece are lost in a web of notes. So I force myself to hear something different, to think about the sound I need to produce, and to forget about the many details, the subtle shifts in pressure of my right and left hand that I have spent hours practicing. I force myself to turn my language into the ether of an image and to transform my thinking from the linear to the non-linear so I can take the risk, like Oistrakh and his contemporaries, of navigating the geography of beauty.
To do justice to great music, a player must have a solid technical foundation, and both schools insist on a daily diet of scales and exercises. Once the mechanics of playing the instrument are solidified, the music can be tackled. In the new school, music is decoded directly into the language of the instrument. Every nuance is analyzed and translated into the grammar of the execution. More often than not, fingerings and bowings, details that play a significant role in the interpretation of a piece, are pre-established. Students learn a catalogue of skills (for example, how to play different dynamics, loud or soft, or how to play dolce) through a careful study of the physical motions. This refined equipment is then pulled off the shelf and applied where instructed in the music. While this method is more universally accessible and gives the performer a greater degree of control and comfort, it tends to standardize interpretations because nuances, like vibrato or an sf marking, are prescribed. Most significantly, it interferes with the personal and organic relationship between the performer and the composer.
When I think of Heifetz’s performance of Sarasate’s fantasy on Carmen, and the goosebump surges of colour and temper underscored by a technical acumen that defies duplication—people have tried; I know violinists who slowed down the speed on their recordings of Heifetz to analyze the number of pulses in his vibrato—I realize that he never thought of the mechanics of playing when he performed. He didn’t reduce the music to the physical motions necessary to produce the sound, but was consumed by its momentum. He was not distracted by the sheer complexity of the execution; his thoughts channelled to the maverick improvisations of creativity. In the vocabulary of the syntax, we can expect to hear what is possible. When the semantics of the music is directly transposed onto the instrument, we can witness the impossible. Because the way we think, what is in our mind, is communicated. As performers, we also and unwittingly narrate our own story.
Today there is less of a personal signature in performances and it is harder to distinguish one great player from another or one orchestra from another. Aside from the difference in training practices, there are, of course, other reasons: the technological advances of the recording industry and the anonymity of perfection that it produces; the volume of concerts and repertoire in the schedule of a performer; the behind-the-screen auditions for orchestra positions. There has also been a shift in values that has taken over the general culture. In an age that campaigns for individual rights and freedoms, there is an ironic contempt for personal expression. We are so inundated with “virtual reality” that many of us have no experience of the authentic. We don’t even know we are missing something. Of course there are exceptions. Glenn Gould stands out as a prime example of semantic-type thinking and artists such as Jacqueline du Pré, Maxim Vengerov, Itzhak Perlman, Richard Goode, and others carry on the legacy of that tradition from the background of their hybrid training and from the natural authority of their great talent. But, in general, music-making today is more perfect and accurate than it used to be, but less able to uncork the inspiration of its original source.
Many years after the concert in Montreal that night, I was in Paris and went to hear the Polish-French pianist Vlado Perlemuter, a celebrated interpreter of French music who was on the faculty at a Mount Orford summer session I attended when I was a very young student. The program was devoted to the works of Ravel and Debussy. He was by now a very old man, almost unrecognizable, but seeing him again reminded me of his eccentric habit of loosening one of the strings at the top of the piano before a concert so that he could worry about that one note instead of a difficult passage: the slippery charms of self-deception. I wondered if he still engaged in this after a lifetime of performance and acclaim, but when he appeared on the stage of La Salle Pleyel, I remember thinking that he was nervous. Like all performing artists, he felt the weight of his responsibility, the huge task of surrendering himself to the maieutics of performance, to act as mediator between the voices from above and the voice of the instrument. That concert still sits with me, not as a memory but as part of the ongoing and inscrutable alchemy of my own identity.
On an ordinary evening, somewhere in the middle of my life, I sat in a theatre in France and Perlemuter walked on a stage, sat down at a piano, and brushed the canvas of the keyboard that brushed the canvas of Ravel who brushed the canvas of my soul.
