What Music Critics Wish Pianists Knew
By Dr. Melinda Bargreen
Music critic since 1974
I’m going to try to take you behind the scenes from the perspective of the music critic who is, we all hope, going to be sitting out there in the dark, reviewing your recital. While you may think critics are adversaries, the revers is often true. They are almost always on your side: they love music, they hate bad concerts; they want to hear a great concert, so they’re hoping you will be fabulous.
Along the way, you will learn what critics listen for and what impresses them – and also what they wish you wouldn’t do.
And you also will discover why developing your own powers of critical thinking will make you an even better pianist.
First of all, here are some aspects of performance that everyone hopes to see (and hear):
CONCERT PRESENTATION
-- Present yourself as unhurried, confident, pleased to be there. Stride out of the wings, and acknowledge the applause gracefully but not lengthily. Sit down, and unless this is absolutely necessary to your success at the keyboard, do not take a long pause where you close your eyes, gaze upward, and commune with the Gods of the Steinway or the Spirit of Immortal Beethoven. Or gaze at the keys as if you are about to beat the living daylights out of them. After awhile, your audience will assume you are thinking something like, “Dear God: I am not prepared for this performance. Please don’t let me get lost in the Diabelli Variations. And please help me through that tricky bit in the Waldstein, you know which one. I will practice forever and evermore, I promise. Amen.”
-- In his early career years, the great Murray Perahia used to dart out of the wings, heading to the piano, and when taking a cursory bow he would get that deer-in-the-headlights look: “There’s an audience? I thought it was just me and the piano!” At least look up and make some eye contact at some point, as if to remind your listeners that you are there to entertain and enlighten them. Of course, if you can play like Perahia, your audience won’t care if you come out onstage walking backwards or doing cartwheels.
-- Wear normal attire. Women, if you dress like Yuja Wang onstage a few years ago at the Hollywood Bowl, in a skirt so short it was described by one reviewer as “a bandage,” you can expect whoever’s in the audience to be writing about the skirt and what it all means, instead of how you play. You want them to write about how you play, even if you have great legs.
(Check out Yuja’s concert photo at http://welltempered.files.wordpress.com/2011/08/yuja-wang-dress.jpg. But really, all you have to do is google “Yuja skirt.”)
Men, if you are Awadagin Pratt, it’s fine to wear brilliant multicolored Versace shirts on the stage. Unless you feel strongly in that direction, though, and your mentors and teachers concur, stick to normal concert dress. It is a sign of respect to your audience: you have dressed up for them. Later, when you are famous, you can express your innermost self in your concert attire.
CHOOSING YOUR PROGRAM
-- Think deeply before you choose a recital program. Especially when you start out, play the music that speaks to you, the pieces you’re crazy about. Think about the overall arc of what you are playing: how to introduce yourself to your listeners, how to bring the audience up, how to calm them down, which pieces sound wonderful or awful in juxtaposition. Think about whether you’re trying to make a “common origins” point about juxtaposing a work with an earlier piece that inspired the composer. And give the audience a break: maybe you love Messiaen, but most people in the house, unless they were warned in advance, will be screaming for mercy after two and a half hours.
Ask yourself: whom am I playing for? Myself alone, with my wonderful taste? Or my audience, who paid for tickets? (Hint: It’s not Answer No. 1.)
-- Your recital program does not have to be chronological, with that obligatory nod to Haydn or Mozart. Many artists program 18th-century and classical-era sonatas without any real feeling for the music, just as a routine starter … sort of like a stale hors d’oeuvre that you didn’t really want to order. The classical-era sonata is just there so they can say, “See, I am a serious artist, before I go on to hammer the bejesus out of the keyboard in the romantic repertoire that will really show off how fast and loud I can play.” If you’re going to start with Haydn or Mozart anyway, make sure it is a piece you believe in and adore. These are wonderful composers – obviously! – and music lovers in the audience will be depressed if they are played without genuine involvement.
-- Get to know the composers you’re performing as if they were considerably more than your Facebook friends. Read their biographies and anything they’ve written: letters, essays, quotations. Read what other musicians and historians have to say about their music. Find out and explore what else they wrote, besides the piece you are choosing for your recital. When you play, you are an advocate for them. And, if you’re playing music of a living composer, seek him or her out and ask, “Do you have a few minutes to discuss your sonata with me?” You may find the composer is flattered to be consulted, and full of interesting comments about interpretation.
-- Find out what all the other big-name touring pianists are playing in that market in the coming season. Even if your gig is in a small church, chances are that piano aficionados who attend it will go to the “big” recitals as well. Do you really want to be the third “Appassionata” in Portland that month?
-- Avoid trends. I remember one year when everybody, absolutely everybody, played the Liszt Sonata because it was the thing of the moment. Some of the recitalists had no idea what they were doing; no idea how to bring off this long and complicated piece, except that it involved a lot of fast and loud playing. Critics’ eyes glazed over, and audiences looked around as if seeking the exits.
-- Should you play weird stuff? You know the sort of music I mean: experimental, atonal, perhaps involving some extra effects from that tambourine you’ve hidden over the bass strings, or the outer-space wailing from the recording that accompanies the keyboard part.
Before you program it, play it widely for several people you trust. If you hear loud laughter or groans in the middle, you should probably keep the piece off your program.
More seriously: do program experimental contemporary pieces, but only if they are wonderful. Apply the same standard to inclusion that you do with the rest of your musical lineup. Don’t play it if you don’t personally believe it’s terrific. Never choose a piece just for shock value or to “shake things up” a little, or to appear on the cutting edge. Cutting edge or no, the music has to be of great quality to stand with the rest of the works you have chosen.
If you have a world premiere, and it’s a great piece (otherwise you wouldn’t have programmed it), make sure that this fact is mentioned saliently in all your publicity materials, phone calls, Facebook posts, and emails. And make sure your composer is doing the same thing. This is good ammunition to get an interview in the press.
TALKING AND ENCORES
-- Should you talk at your recital? This is a hot subject just now, and one that draws a lot of controversy. Many audiences will prefer a straight recital that preserves the musical mood without interruption by discussion. But many people also love it when the artist has something to say. That last clause is the important issue: “something to say.” If you have a few well-chosen words about your world premiere, or a music-related anecdote of great interest, AND if you’re a good talker, I think it’s fine. But never come right out on the stage and start talking before you play, unless you are saying, “Ladies and gentlemen, I beg your indulgence because I have dragged myself here out of a hospital bed with a broken fibula rather than cancel this important event.” It also is appropriate to mention any change in the printed program, so your listeners don’t wonder why that so-called “Mozart sonata” has six movements. If you are making other remarks to the audience, it’s better to do so after intermission, or at the very least, after the first musical set. Ask yourself, “Are these remarks necessary?” and speak up so you can be heard clearly. And keep it short.
-- Should you announce your encore(s)? Are you kidding? Yes, you should! And do so quite loudly and clearly after the applause has died down, so everyone can hear you. (You don’t need opus numbers.) I don’t care if it’s “Für Elise.” Announce anyway. Unannounced encores will mean the first minute or two of the music is spoiled by patrons buzzing to each other: “Do you know which piece that is? It sounds like Chopin, but maybe Szymanowski? Or Debussy? I know it, but I just can’t think of the title! What do you think?” etc. The same thing will happen if you announce the encore too soon, while the applause is still going on, or if you announce it too feebly (“Did you hear what he said? Did he say Schubert? Or was that Schumann? Or maybe Chopin?”). Don’t sabotage your own encore.
-- Learn the rules of encore management, which require reading your audience. Are they dying to hear more? Or more perfunctory in their applause? Are you hearing any shouts and whistles? – of a favorable nature? If you can tell you’re probably going to play only one encore, play whatever you like, but keep it short; don’t make the audience sorry 15 minutes later that they applauded so vigorously. If you’re probably going to perform more than one: play a really spectacular one first, and then something short and sweet and understated, to bring down the excitement a little and let people know it’s time to go home. (If they are still clapping wildly after that, you don’t need any of my advice.)
GETTING PAST STAGE FRIGHT
If you are almost paralyzed by fear as you head out onto the stage, I’ve always thought it is helpful to shift your perspective to the audience for a moment. What is going on in the minds of your listeners while you are playing? You are nervous because your performance is the most important thing in the world to you right now. But out in the house, this is what is happening: most of your audience is giving you some degree of respectful attention, but your performance is not nearly that important to them, even if they have paid for tickets. Their attention will wander; they will be checking out the hot girl across the aisle, or wishing the old guy behind them would turn down his hearing aids, or peeking covertly at a text on their iPhones. They might be eating M&Ms or making crunching noises with their Lifesavers.
They will be listening to your Mozart, sure, but they will also be thinking about other things, unless they are your parents. And I’ve been to concerts where the pianist got completely, totally lost for about three minutes, and just noodled around on the keyboard, and finally wandered back into the piece, and almost nobody in the house noticed. So while you are giving your performance your very best and most inspired shot, it also helps to lighten up a little. Give yourself the freedom to enjoy what you’re doing, without that life-or-death attitude.
GETTING ATTENTION
-- How to get your concert reviewed? That is increasingly the issue these days as newspapers are in decline, and blogs are so scatter-shot and amorphous that it’s difficult to know whom to trust and how to get them into the concert hall.
First of all, understand your local newspaper, since that is still the most prominent media outlet. Do you know why newspapers are in decline? Of course you know that the digital revolution has meant most people increasingly rely on electronics, rather than paper, for their information. That’s also why bookstores are having a tough time these days.
But newspapers appear online, too, so why aren’t they thriving? It’s very simple. The engine that used to drive the newspaper was the classified-ad section, which was an indispensable source of information. It’s where everyone went to look for a job, an apartment, a car, or a labradoodle puppy. But with the advent of free online marketplaces like Craigslist, nobody was reading classifieds, or paying to put a classified ad in the newspaper, and consequently the newspapers’ ad revenues dropped like a load of bricks. Yes, newspapers can get ad revenue from online ads … only not so much. So their financial picture is somewhere south of horrible.
That means it’s harder than before to get written about. I mean, my job – classical music critic for The Seattle Times -- was declared extraneous in 2008. So you need to make a good case for yourself if you want their attention. Read the newspapers carefully for a good period of time, at least a few weeks, and see (1) who is writing about your kind of music, (2) what he or she has recently written about, (3) what sort of events get covered, and (4) what kinds of features are being written about people who are at least a little similar to you (i.e. emerging artists).
So then you contact the person most likely to be interested in you with some creative ideas. A phone call in which you say, “Hi! I’m Your Name Here, and I am playing a piano recital next week, and I sure hope you will review it! Goodbye!” will not get you very far. You should, of course, make certain the newspaper’s arts section knows about your event, by sending in to the right destinations a press release that follows their online guidelines. And you should, of course, contact the most likely person to be interested in you.
But you should say something more interesting than “Review my concert, please.” Here is your chance to advocate for yourself, to demonstrate why you are the interesting and fascinating player that you know yourself to be. In my opinion, what works best is an email beforehand in which you introduce yourself in all your wonderfulness: You are not only a prize-winning young virtuoso, but also writing a children’s book about the life of Beethoven, and you also have organized an entire piano studio to visit the hospice once a month and play music for the residents, as part of an ongoing program of music therapy to combat depression and pain.
And your teacher, a respected figure in the community, has added his or her comments to the email letter, saying that you are the most promising student in a long time, and that your Beethoven is electrifying. Attach a sound clip – a short one – of your most exquisite playing, to make it easy for the contact person to hear what you can do.
The great novelist E.M. Forster’s famous dictum in the novel “Howard’s End” was “Only connect.” Take that motto to heart. Make every connection you can. Contact the music directors of good local community symphonies like the Auburn or the Cascade here in the Northwest. Check out local churches that present musical events and ask if you can play on their series. If there are young-artist programs or children’s concerts at your local symphony orchestra, find out about playing beforehand (many of these have pre-event activities) on those, as a way to get great experience and also potentially attract some notice. Contact the local radio station that plays classical music, and ask if they will play your recording. Ask if they’d like you to play for groups of young visitors occasionally at places like the Seattle Symphony’s “Soundbridge” education center. If there is a Young Composers’ program affiliated with your region’s major orchestra, offer to play any of the new keyboard compositions for the student concerts. Contact assistant and associate conductors of major orchestras in your area and ask to audition for them. The worst that can happen is a “No, thanks.”
-- Does Facebook help? I think it does. If you have 1,250 friends and just ten percent of them show up at your concert, that’s 125 people right off the bat. Sometimes people forward interesting notices, too, to their music-loving friends, so they can spread the word. By all means, record snippets of your repertoire and post the video and/or audio recordings to your Facebook updates and your page. YouTube is also a great way to get the word out, particularly if you are wearing a Yuja Wang skirt. Just kidding!
-- Get yourself a website, and put up as much wonderful content as you can – including good photos of yourself and great sound clips of your playing, along with comments by others about how excellent you are. List your repertoire and your contact information and your concert experience. Ask for a recommendation from your teacher that you can post.
-- What about blogs? Classical music blogs of a local nature tend to rise and then fall and disappear. I’d be hard pressed to think of a local one that offers opinions consistently worth reading. In Seattle, there was formerly an ad-hoc blog called “The Gathering Note,” formed from the ashes of another extinct blog called “Classical in Seattle,” but both of those seem to have been discontinued. One of their critics has now gone to a blog called “The SunBreak,” which is still extant, at this writing anyway. Sometimes you can find classical items on the so-called “seattlepi.com” blog, and sometimes on the Crosscut.com blog, but relatively seldom. “Northwest Reverb” sometimes has Seattle news and reviews, but both its critics are based in Portland, and neither is highly recommended.
Investigate what is happening in your own market, and if there are any good classical or piano-related blogs, get in touch with the bloggers, take them out for coffee, and ask them to write about you.
CRITICAL THINKING: LISTEN, THINK, READ
-- Attend every concert you can, particularly ones featuring the piano. Don’t just sit there and listen. Bring a notepad and take notes; be a critic. What worked about the performance? What didn’t? Did the playing sound routine, or inspired, or a little of both? Which works were the most convincing, and why? If you had been that soloist, would you be delighted or appalled by what came out of the piano? What about the programming: was it creative, interesting, dull, formulaic? What can you as an artist learn from what you have just heard?
Afterward, go home and write your own review. It can be two sentences or 20 pages, whatever it takes. You will learn as you write, and your reviews will be a very useful record of what you’ve heard and how you can apply it to your own playing.
Critical thinking will improve you as an artist. Record yourself; review the recording. What worked? What was unconvincing, or left you cold as a listener? Is what you hear as a listener the same music you hear from the piano bench?
Listen to as many recordings as you can find of the pieces you are preparing. Once all the mistakes are airbrushed out of those recordings, what is left? That is the quality you should aim for. Pianists tend to get hung up on the little technical imperfections that don’t really matter that much in the overall scheme of performance.
Over the years I have heard many, many piano recitals and concerto performances. I have never heard a live performance that was technically perfect in the way that recordings are today. Even the greatest players miss a few notes here and there, but audiences soon forget all about that because of the overall impact of the playing and the brilliance of the interpretation. This doesn’t mean you should make a practice of being sloppy, though. Your playing should always be as good as you can make it.
I’m sure your teachers have been telling you to listen to great recordings of past masters. As you listen, write reviews of their playing, too. Here’s an interesting place to start: http://www.limelightmagazine.com.au/Article/306444,the-10-greatest-pianists-of-all-time.aspx/0
This is a fascinating ten-best-in-history list compiled for Limelight Magazine of Australia by some of today’s top pianists, including Ashkenazy, Schiff, Brendel, Hough, Rogé, Biss, and several others. Starting from No. 10, the ten-best list includes Artur Schnabel, Wilhelm Kempff, Alfred Brendel, Glenn Gould, Alfred Cortot, Emil Gilels, Arthur Rubinstein, Sviatoslav Richter, Vladimir Horowitz, and Sergei Rachmaninoff. Some of these artists have left behind recordings peppered with technical mistakes, but nobody cares because their playing is so magical. As you listen to their recordings, ask yourself what distinguishes these pianists’ playing … and how you can learn from them.
Also on the subject of technical errors: one of my acquaintances is a flute teacher, who met up with several of her students after a big recital by Jean-Pierre Rampal at the height of his career. The students gleefully reported, “He made three mistakes!” Their teacher asked: “How were the other 6,500 notes? And what did you learn from hearing them?”
Don’t let anything obscure the “big picture” of the music you are creating.
-- Go out and buy Randolph Hokanson’s book, “With Head to the Music Bent,” which is available at the UW Bookstore (it is a paperback, neither very long nor very expensive). Mr. Hokanson, a retired UW professor of piano, is 102 now and he’s still exploring Bach and Beethoven and playing recitals for the lucky residents in his retirement complex. The ardor and fascination with which he writes about his life in music, his great teachers in England after World War I, and his views on what it takes to be a real artist are well worth exploring.
-- Read the blogs of two very brilliant and successful pianists: Stephen Hough, who writes in the Telegraph (of England), and Jeremy Denk, whose blog is called “Think Denk” as a sort of linguistic pun (the verb “denken” means “to think” in German). They have all sorts of interesting observations from the standpoint of top careers. And think about writing a blog of your own, especially after you have spent some time writing your own reviews of live and recorded performances. Your observations may make very interesting reading for other keyboard fans.
ABOUT CRITICS
-- What goes on in a critic’s mind when he or she sits back to hear the music? If the pianist is really bad or really unfocused, the critic’s mind wanders away to “What’s for dinner?” and “Why am I here?” No, actually, the critic is probably taking lots of unfavorable notes about why the recital isn’t working.
Everyone’s procedure is a little different. Most critics tend to make notes when something really good or inspiring happens. You listen hard to assess what makes this Beethoven sonata different from, better than, less successful than, the others you have heard. Is there a fresh voice emerging from the piano? Or does it sound dutiful, with that feeling of “I don’t really love Beethoven, but my teacher made me program this”? Do the movements feel connected; is there an overall arc to the sonata? Is the pianist just trying to get through it as fast as possible so you’ll be impressed by those speedy fingers? Does the interpretation sound fresh and original? Or is the music being distorted by the will of the player?
People sometimes think of critics as mean spoilers, just waiting to pounce on the smallest defect. What is true instead is that the vast majority of critics are music lovers first and foremost, not people haters. They want you to succeed! They want you to play a great concert, so they will be enlightened and entertained and filled with the joy of Schubert or Gubaidulina or whoever it happens to be. They are sitting out in the house thinking, “Come on! Be great!” not “I can’t wait to savage you in an evil review.” However: by the same token, when the performance is terrible, the critic feels an intense disappointment compounded by the specter of a completely wasted evening. And the review will reflect those feelings.
These days everyone expects near-perfection in terms of hitting all the right notes. That’s almost a given. However, as we’ve already indicated, you are not dead if you miss a few notes, especially in places where most pianists miss them. Even the greatest pianists have moments when they go “on walkabout” or lose concentration for just an instant. Critics are more interested in how inspiring the performance sounds, and the interesting, inspiring ideas from the performer, and the sense of overall mastery of what is being performed, than in complete perfection (which is never attainable by us mere mortals in any case). That is why music lovers, as we have seen in that ten-best list, still go back to hear old recordings by pianists like Schnabel and Hofmann and the early Arthur Rubinstein, in spite of the fact that these recordings include lots of mistakes. When you listen to the musicality of these pianists, the occasional blip here and there doesn’t make much difference.
What is frustrating to reviewers is the recital in which there is so much variability in the quality of what you hear that you don’t really know how to characterize the overall performance (or, of course, the artist in question). Horrible, mechanical Haydn; okay but not mind-bending Liszt; and, finally, Debussy that is so exquisitely colored and shaded that you think you’ve walked into an Impressionist painting. It’s a challenge. And you don’t want to write, “This pianist should play nothing but Debussy,” because maybe her Ravel is even more wonderful, or she does a knockout Messiaen. Or, if we had but heard it, there might have been some miraculous Schumann or Scarlatti.
This is another reason why your recital program should represent what you do, and love, the best.
One of the best recitals I ever heard was a mid-1970s performance by Vladimir Ashkenazy, who played nothing but Scriabin and Rachmaninoff Preludes. These were scores that he obviously adored and knew inside out, and the results were a revelation.
GETTING GOOD ADVICE
-- The absolute best source I know for advice to artists on career development and business issues is Edna Landau’s website, http://www.ednalandau.com/artist.php?view=askedna
She was for 23 years the managing director of IMG Artists Management, from which throne she directed the careers of Lang Lang, Murray Perahia, Itzhak Perlman, Joshua Bell, Hilary Hahn, Evgeny Kissin, and a host of other luminaries too numerous to mention. She also has taught career management at the Colburn School in Los Angeles.
Also highly recommended is her wonderful piece, “Getting Noticed in the 21st Century,” which you can download – also for free – on the Musical America website. Here is the URL:
http://www.musicalamerica.com/mablogs/wp-content/uploads/2011/09/Getting_Noticed_Web.pdf
She is also on Facebook as “Ask Edna,” where you will find a link to a highly valuable post called “Choosing the Best Competition for You,” available by free download at:
There are lots of other interesting ideas, articles, and blog posts on the Musical America site, to help you think in new directions. And that is exactly what you should be doing, because in this historic art form we all love, survival in the 21st century requires a mastery of the new.