So there
the Portuguese pianist Maria João Pires
is, sitting at the piano expecting one concerto, and guess what? Yup, the
conductor starts off on another concerto completely.
In fact, I
came across this last night as I was lurching out of a sleep to feed a body
screaming for carbohydrates—in short, I was half asleep. So I wasn’t entirely
sure—had I dreamed this? Was it my own nightmare? Had I somehow switched sexes
and instruments?
I can now
tell you—yes, it’s real. And this video below, shot in 1998, has now gone as
viral as it gets in the classical music world; if not a million hits, it’s got
a respectable 724,000. And people are saying, “wow, that’s amazing—she plays a
concerto she wasn’t expecting, and she plays it perfectly! That’s incredible!”
Only Stephen Hough gets it
right: it is and it isn’t.
Maria João
Pires didn’t start playing piano a couple weeks ago—she gave her first recital
at age 4 or 5. And she’s been practicing and playing ever since; she’s had half
a century of grind at the piano. And she’s played this concerto every season in
her life. More to the point, Mozart
doesn’t pose the technical challenges that Chopin or—God forbid—Liszt do. So the real deal here
is that she remembered a piano concerto, to which I say…
…big deal.
I say this
because every musician is walking around with a lot of music stuffed between
the ears. I sat down to play Bach suites a few weeks ago after an absence of
five years, and did I drag out the music? Confession—I’m not even sure I have
the music, since the termites have gotten into a lot of it. I had to throw a
lot of music away….
Which meant
comparatively little, since most of the repertoire is in my head. And yes, my
memory is unusually good, but not that good. And not, of course, as good as it
was: I could learn a piece without effort in a day or two. As Hough points out,
the real miracle is that Pires is a marvelous pianist, and, as it turns out, an
interesting person as well. How interesting? Well, check out this portion of an
interview with David
Patrick Stearns of the Philadelphia Inquirer:
DPS:
But
certainly you’ve spent a lot of time alone as a student practicing.
MJP: I never did it because I
had no time. I was always very busy with other things…I had children very early
and I had to take care of everything. I never had much time for the piano. I
was always an amateur somehow. I did the career … it was not on purpose. It was
not wanted and it was not very natural.
DPS: But you have such a
natural facility for piano.
MJP: I don’t think so. I have
small hands. Many technical problems – not many but some. Of course I found my
own body language with the piano and my own way of getting out of my problems
but they’re still problems. The other thing is I don’t really like to play
concerts. I don’t like to be onstage. That’s not a comfortable thing for me.
An
amateur? Well, as a Buddhist, Pires is saying it, but the rest of the world is.
Here, ripped off from her biography
on Deautsche Grammophon is a quote from The Times of London:
“I
can’t think of a pianist with a more ideal command of Chopin’s style. Pires
trips through the roulades with filigree dexterity, but her tone is so
thoughtful, serious and weighty that they arrive with immense emotional
profundity.”
OK—so an
amateur with “filigree dexterity….”
Also an
amateur who won
the Beethoven Bicentennial Competition in 1970, and who has performed around
the world ever since. Although not, incidentally, much in the United States:
she was reluctant to play or travel to America during the Bush years.
And an
amateur who really prefers to share the stage—her peeve with Chopin is not the
pianistic difficulties he presents, but that he started the piano recital; it
has bedeviled her all her life.
And in a
field dominated by, well, dominating personalities, Maria João Pires is
self-effacing. Or rather, her focus is outward—here’s what she says later in
her interview with Stearns:
People
care about careers and themselves and all the business that is around music.
And that is, for me, somehow, nonsense. Art has nothing to do with that.
Competitions take the soul out of the musicians. And the first moments you want
to make music in your life it’s for reasons other than business. And in
competition you feel like you have to kill someone to have his place. This is
horrible. This is not art. So I would like to give young people the possibility
of taking the mission of the society in the world. Not fighting against that
but finding new ways. I’m not saying to change the world. This is very
pretentious. What better than to have artists in projects in many places in the
world where problems are big. It’s not decent that we’re eating a lot and
having a lot of luxury and people are dying because they have no food or no
water. Our mission should be to try to change things. And art is something that
can give people their dignity back.
She
started a school in Belgais, Portugal, and the experience wasn’t…well, wait.
She says she learned a lot, and she might be, as a Buddhist, the last person to
describe the experience as bad. At any rate, she applied for Brazilian
nationality, and her relationship with her native country may be strained.
There
are pianists who somehow win your heart, who manage to take on the prodigious
technical demands on the piano, and throw them off completely. Martha Argerich is one,
Radu Lupu another. They’re
people who know: it’s not about them, still less about the piano. It’s all
about the music.
