Right after Radu's death, his pianistic bff Murray Perahia turns 75. For my entire adulthood so far I have tried to adapt myself to Perahia's playing, and failed miserably. Over the years I have learned to desperately love the playing of other 'Very Serious Pianists' who used to somewhat revolt me like Brendel and Schiff, and in just the last 48 hours, Radu Lupu has come to seem like an ideal even beyond what I ever thought he was.
What has irritated me in the past about guys like Brendel and Schiff is how little the wider world mattered in their artistry. Other pianists have huge repertoire and overwhelming personality in everything they play. Sometimes these pianists do too, but even among the ones I love, it sometimes seems as though something as profane as a personality would violate the sensibilities of these priests of music.
There is a specific type of pianist who wears his or her modesty with a Capital M, and fills their recitals with little but Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert, with some Bach or Brahms thrown in occasionally to spice things up - or Schumann if they're feeling particularly adventurous. If there's Liszt or Chopin, it's to make a point about their more 'musicianly' qualities which crasser pianists ignore, and therefore antithetical to the populist spirit of these two ultimate piano composers. There's nothing Russian in their concerts, there's rarely even any Debussy or Ravel, and an extreme paucity of 20th century music, let alone 21st...
Music is a temple to them, and wonders of the wider world pass them by completely. They're possessed of musical sensibilities so fine that no idea can violate them, and therefore nothing learned from their performances, no new insights, just high-minded perfection without any trace of kitsch, which might ultimately be the most kitschy quality of all. But of all those high-minded pianists, there is none quite so gratingly 'high-minded' as Perahia.
Brendel, Schiff, Lupu, all three come from the Austro-Hungarian lands where Mozart and Schubert are the lingua franca. The music of their homes is a perfectly legitimate way to process the trauma of growing up in their fatherlands. And if their conceptions once seemed studied and imposed, they have come to inhabit the music far more simply and naturally with age. But no such evolution has happened to Murray Perahia. His playing is still just conventionally exquisite like a luxury chocolate.
Perahia is not from bombed out Budapest or provincial Romania, he's from the fucking Bronx... He grew up not just around Bernstein and Rubinstein but with the sounds of Jazz, R&B and Brill Building echoing everywhere. There was a whole world of music surrounding him on every streetcorner, and it seemed to have no effect on him at all. Manny Ax, Peter Serkin, Jeffrey Kahane, Garrick Ohlsson, they all took on the wider world of music with all its experiments and innovations, but Perahia took no notice and simply played on as though he has to pass another Juilliard performance jury tomorrow.
After 75 years, Perahia has never given a single performance with a single phrase which could possibly be construed as being in questionable taste. He's the perfect product of America's A-list musical education, with pedigrees of studying with Serkin and Schneider and Casals and Horszowski, and has never given a performance that could disappoint such fine teachers. He is, in a word, the ultimate 'High Priest of the Piano', and has rarely given a performance with so much as an interesting idea in it.
Maybe all of this is Freudian....
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