Missing the Miracle

On the face of it, it looks like the classic “oh, fuck” moment. Or maybe like those dreams I still have, at age 57, of taking an exam for a class that I have somehow completely forgotten that I was taking.

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.