I wonder if I've gotten my taste in pianists all wrong. Listening to Gilels and Serkin the last few days, whom I've always liked without loving; their playing has an austere, square jawed... not rightness, but moral authority. It does not capture an awareness of the expressive nuances and ironies which you get from a truly great brain like Schnabel or Brendel, but in the face of so much spiritual air and core, I wonder if that's as important as I long thought it was.
Listen to Gilels doing the Symphonic Etudes. He probably always did it better than anybody else. What other pianist can conjure a full orchestra like that while still maintaining that complete structural rectitude? But there is something deeper than that, as though this is an artist who knows what it means to come through the other side of suffering. This, like Lupu, is a pianist who has mastered what I call 'the fifth dimension of music.' Perhaps I should call it the 'sixth dimension.' First comes the notes themselves, then comes the quality of sound, then comes the language - dynamics, phrasing, color etc.; then comes the interpretation - which has to capture the expressive meaning and interpretation, then comes tailoring the interpretation to fit the composer's idiom and put it within the context of the composer's geography of imagination - what were his influences? What were the sounds he heard? What life circumstances and historical circumstances most affected them? Then comes what is, perhaps, the highest interpretive goal, at least the highest I know of, past which only composers can ascend.
This sixth-or-so dimension of music is the spiritual, healing powers of music. Hopefully you know when you hear it. It's when you feel the world behind this world, the world of essential meanings. It's a meaning almost beyond even the work itself and can only be conjured in the very specific moment of performance - I have to imagine it's still much more difficult to conjure in studio circumstances. It's a moral mission beyond serving the composer, it is using music for its ultimate purpose, which is, I must believe, to provide light in dark places. The music plays us as much as the player it, it communicates to the listeners that their tribulations are understood, and have meaning and reason beyond the existential absurdity of our life circumstances.
This is why Radu Lupu was so mourned earlier this year. Did audiences speak of any pianist of our time whose concerts would journey us to that dimension so often? That's the moral purpose which you hear in so many Eastern European pianists living under dictatorship, who devoted themselves spiritually to the great German masters in a manner that you don't necessarily hear from the Germans themselves. As I've said many times, I have trouble warming to a lot of Eastern European piano masters - Chopin even, but moreso Rachmaninov, Scriabin, and especially Liszt. But when so many Eastern European pianists devote themselves to Beethoven or Schumann or Bach, our eyes we can literally see the musical dimension with our ears. What so often is 'merely profound' in the hands of a pianist like Edwin Fischer is fraught with suffering and joy under the hands of Richter and Gilels. Beethoven never meant more than it did under the ears of dictatorship.
I could make yet another long list of the pianists in which you generally hear that moral light, and a still longer list of the pianists in which you generally don't. But beyond the level of thinking through one's interpretations, I think you can hear very well which musicians live suffering lives and which live fundamentally charmed ones. Simply to be an artist, you need to communicate something fundamental about life. If music is just pleasant noise, it's worthless. It's just a recreational drug to be cast aside at the end of the night - merely another pleasant way to spend a few hours whose memory doesn't matter at all. Whether through joy or suffering, any true artist communicate their worldview. The flame of art is there to light our way with meaning, and provide a roadmap of morale for all those who struggle mightily to find it.
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