Ill be away until the end of next week, but in the meantime, heres an interview I gave for an upcoming issue of Fanfare Magazine. I had a wonderful time discussing Beethoven, historical recordings, teaching and Humbert Humbert with Peter Rabinowitz! Nabokov, Nyiregyházi, and Unbridled Passion: A Conversation with Lisa Yui By PETER J. RABINOWITZ Lisa Yui’s new DVD/Blu-ray Beethoven recording not only includes illuminating performances of four familiar sonatas, but also commentary on each—commentary in which she appears as a charming, soft-spoken, articulate, and (to borrow Jerry Dubins’s description from his glowing review below) insightful advocate for the canonical music she plays. That video persona is surely accurate, as far as it goes. But if you travel to her Facebook page and her elaborate website, you’ll find that this is only a small part of the real Lisa Yui. I had checked out her on-line presence prior to our meeting in New York in June, and was dazzled with its range: music, literature, movies (she’s a self-described “film geek”), even cooking. At the same time, I’d been struck in particular by her claim that her favorite literary characters included Lolita’s Humbert Humbert. As someone who has worked extensively on Nabokov, I have to admit that her choice had given me a shudder—so it’s no surprise that I start out our conversation by mentioning that I wouldn’t trust any male who said that. She laughs, and ups the ante: “Iago is my favorite Shakespeare character.” She also mentions her fondness for Mephistopheles: “Not only in Liszt, but in Faust itself, Mephistopheles is so fascinating, more interesting than Faust in many ways.” I have to agree, noting that that’s why the Faust Symphony ends as it does. “The best movement!” she replies. “I love that movement. He’s so much more fun than Faust or Gretchen. And so I’m observing this in an artistic way, characteristics that captivate me.” When I point out that one of my favorite colleagues likes to model herself after Lady Macbeth, Yui quickly responds: “You don’t have to model yourself after your favorite characters. Just because I wrote ‘Humbert Humbert’ it doesn’t mean I model my life after him. I see him as a literary character who is incredibly self-aware. Like Iago: They’re so self-aware and so intelligent and so witty that you’re almost charmed by them, you’re attracted by them. And I find that to be a fascinating thing. If Humbert Humbert were despicable in a way that was not interesting, the book wouldn’t have held up. But he is so interesting, intelligent, well-spoken and sincere (in a really twisted way) that we’re almost tempted to believe that what he believes is really pure. I find that to be really interesting.” Self-aware: It became increasingly clear during the interview that Lisa Yui is nothing if not self-aware. And, as I’ve suggested, she’s impressively wide-ranging, too. For instance, two pianists she admires are Ervin Nyiregyházi (if you don’t know him, see Fanfare 17:6 and 32:1 for some background) and Solomon—and it’s hard to think of two pianists who are less alike. How does she navigate the differences? “I can’t really quite explain why I like all of these people,” she says. “I admire Nyiregyházi because … First of all, I believe his recordings are just a shadow of what he truly used to be. When we watch his old movies from the fifties like The Beast with Five Fingers, where he was a hand double, we can catch a glimpse, we can see that he was a phenomenally polished pianist. Even in his later performances, disastrous in some ways, we can hear this temperament, the risk that he takes, the kind of risk that was more polished in Cziffra. It’s a type of fearless playing that we really don’t hear these days. And I admire that quite deeply. Whether we play Bach or Beethoven, that kind of unbridled passion is something we should all strive for.” Fair enough; but certainly, I point out, Nyiregyházi’s volcanic, notes-be-damned playing is a far cry from Solomon’s purer, less extroverted playing. “With Solomon,” she says, “I admire the perfect technique, the conceptual clarity. He’s quite a virtuoso, although not many people describe him that way, because his technique is so perfect that we don’t notice.” As for passion: “I would never describe his music as cold in any way.” There’s a “controlled heat” underneath it all. Then, of course, there’s Horowitz: “Horowitz,” she says, “I admire… well, for everything: for his incredible imagination, mind, sensuality, sound and so forth. “And I want all of that. If I choose one pianist who I believe encompasses everything I want to be… how can I be a complete musician in that way? It’s like a student who studies with only one teacher for his entire life. I don’t believe in that. I don’t think that one person can teach you everything you need to know.” Given her sense that a good artist needs a wide variety of influences, it’s no surprise that Yui doesn’t share the philosophy of some teachers and performers who counsel against listening to other pianists’ records as they prepare a new piece. How does this work out in practice? I propose a hypothetical situation. How would she prepare, say, for a performance of the Scriabin Ninth? “I would immerse myself with many recordings,” she promptly replies, pointing out that she knows many of them already. “And as I’m doing that, all the ideas I think will become my own. There is no way I could play like Horowitz. I wish I could, you know. If I spend hours and hours and hours, will I end up playing like Horowitz? Probably not, or otherwise many people would have tried and they would be the next Horowitz. But it doesn’t work like that. “But there are certain ideas that other pianists have that make sense to me that I find fascinating. And in listening to certain sounds, certain timings, I would steal a lot of things. In the end, though, all that will come together and become my own. If your voice is strong enough, there is no way that it will not be heard. If one sounds artificial, if one sounds as if he or she is trying to copy so-and-so, it just means that the individual voice is not very strong.” In fact, at the Manhattan School of Music, Yui is offering a new class on historical recordings, starting with de Pachmann and Grünfeld and ending with Gould: “The only criteria is that they have to be great. I arrange by nationality and teachers: Busoni and his pupils, Goldenweiser and his students.…” “Busoni,” she reflects, “There’s a man who really believed in the connection between what you are and the music that you produce. I’m paraphrasing, but he said that even if you have one flaw in your character, it will reveal itself in your music. Which is really harsh, right?” Still, in a sense she agrees: “You can’t fake yourself in music. If you’re truly a cold a person, I don’t think you can create music that’s tender. Or if you’re stupid, I don’t think you can create music that’s intelligent and vice-versa.” Why teach a course like this? Yui is wary of some claims of the HIP movement: “We’re dealing with Beethoven through the eyes of today. We can talk about performance practice, but we don’t live 300 years ago, and so however we try to dress like Beethoven or eat his dinner, we are the people of today, we’re interpreting it. I say it with great respect, because I study the manuscripts, I read the letters, and I really want to understand his language. But I’m fully aware that this is my voice and I’m speaking to people who live today.” Still, she sees the folly of people who ignore historical information. Take Grünfeld’s recordings of his transcriptions of Johann Strauss: “Why, if you’re playing a Strauss waltz, why would you not listen to this? He knew Strauss, he witnessed people in Vienna dancing in a ballroom. This is the real thing. Instead of just saying ‘Oh, the third beat is a little longer or the first beat is a little heavy,’ listen! It’s organic, it’s real life. It’s just sheer ignorance and laziness if people don’t listen to this.” But the course is not aimed solely at recovering history—it’s also aimed at increasing her students’ appreciation for the thinking that lies behind great interpretations. “It’s not simply a history lesson: we’re really going to study these recordings.” As a final project, she is going to give her students “a list of very short pieces that are technically not very difficult. The project is to study and to attempt to capture the performance—tempo, touch, timing—as closely as possible.” Yui recognizes that, proclaimed baldly in this way, the project seems … well, at least controversial. In fact, as she says, “If I just say that you have to imitate it, it’s pretty stupid. It’s not helpful at all, it’s probably harmful, and it will sound artificial. But the purpose of this is to truly understand what these pianists are doing. Why is he taking a breath here and why does he go forward here? In the great recordings, there’s a reason, there’s musical purpose to the rubato or the pause that they make. Why did they play soft here? Perhaps it’s so that they could do a crescendo later or so forth. Listening is not enough. If we as musicians want to really suck up the juice from a recording, we actually have to physically try to imitate it and to make it authentic in order to understand why this pianist is doing this. “In the other fields, it’s common: you study from the masters. So why in music are they so fearful of recordings? So many teachers say, ‘Don’t listen to recordings.’ What does that mean? There is a certain recording of a ‘Song without Words’ by Ignaz Friedman, and I attempted to imitate it. Do you know how long it took me to imitate this three-minute piece? I would work on a phrase, and it would sound unnatural. I would listen to again, and say ‘Oh, my God, I didn’t notice that he did this.’ Hours—I listened to it for hours. And in the end it still didn’t sound like him. But I understood the essence of what he’s trying to do. And I learned a little more about producing his gorgeous sound.” She sings me an example of how Cortot treats the end of the second measure of Chopin’s Second Ballade: “Usually people play the repeated C’s going into the F major chord smoothly, without pause [sings the opening bars]. But he slows down at the end of the C’s, then so elegantly begins a new phrase at the pickup to the F major chord [sings the opening bars again]: he plays that final C as a dominant resolving into the tonic chord of F. If you’re not a musician, you’d just think he’s taking time. But the purpose of this project is to understand that he takes that time so that the dominant resolves nicely into the tonic. It’s so brilliant. And that kind of discovery excites me and keeps me up at night.” She mentions Carlos Kleiber as someone who listened carefully to recordings—which leads to a swerve in the conversation. Kleiber is known—as is Michelangeli—as someone with an extremely narrow repertoire, in clear contrast to people like Fischer-Dieskau, Richter, and Hamelin. How does she place herself? She resists the notion that it’s a matter of choice. “I don’t think,” she says, “that any of these people decided, ‘I’m going to be a specialist’ or ‘I’m going to play everything.’” I push her: “You think so? You don’t think that by your age Michelangeli knew what … You talked about self-consciousness, he was a self-conscious artist. He knew that …” She finishes the sentence: “…he was going to stick with these pieces alone? Perhaps. Perhaps he preferred to play a few pieces as closely as possible to his concept of 100% rather than play many pieces 80%. I don’t know, but he did cancel an awful lot: he wasn’t a great lover of performance.” Our discussion of Michelangeli reveals something crucial about Yui. On the one hand, she shares something of Michelangeli’s perfectionism: “I prefer perfecting something, chiseling it over and over and over again until I get something so clearly in my head. I don’t get bored playing the same piece, I never get bored.” But she assuredly does not share his distaste for performance: “Performing is very important to me. I need to be playing in a concert hall for people who come with the conscious intent of listening to me. I would play for a community school, it doesn’t matter. But it is important for me that it is a professional thing, that I take it seriously, as well as the audience.” Does recording serve the same function for her? “No. For me, concerts and recordings, are two completely different things. I don’t think one is lesser than the other. Glenn Gould knew that: He made recording into an art in itself. I think each has its own merit. But you have to treat recording as a completely different thing, where you can make changes. “Recording is kind of like painting.” (For the record, Yui is a painter as well as a pianist.) “You go back and fix it and perfect it until you finally can present it.” And while you can’t do as many edits in a video recording as you can in an audio-only recording (“That’s fine with me,” she says, “it’s more real”), it’s still a far different experience than performing a concert. I ask her how many edits there are in the last movement of her “Appassionata.” “In the coda,” she replies, “I did a lot. The thing about something like the ‘Appassionata’—it’s a drag because there’s no way you can play it really well, with all the fire and all the fearlessness, without missing notes. You miss notes in that coda. But in a recording, unfortunately, you can’t have missed notes, unless it’s a live performance and you promote it as such. Those are the kinds of things that bother me in recordings, the compensation that I feel I have to make.” Would her “Appassionata” at a concert be more unbridled, wilder, freer? “Perhaps,” she says. “More missed notes, probably!” She continues: “The psychology is different as well, because I know that it’s just once. That’s the great thing, it’s like life.” Which would she rather be known as? Does she think one represents an essential her in a better way? “I think live. I’m more on the edge. It’s scarier. That’s why Grigory Sokolov’s live recordings are so fabulous.” I point to the commentary on her Beethoven DVD, and she notes, “I almost always do that at concerts, I talk about each piece. I was afraid that people would think that I’m dumbing down the music, or that some of the professionals would be bored with it, but the feedback has always been really positive. Both musicians and amateurs have appreciated it.” Why does she do it? “Because I’m an educator, I find it important to make a connection with the audience. If that disappears, we’re really going to lose the concert audience. Gone are the days when pianists could just be up on a pedestal and go out and play and be this priest or priestess who speaks the word of Beethoven and then walks off expecting sixteen-year-olds to understand it on first hearing. If you don’t attract them in some way, if you don’t pique their interest in some way, we’re going lose them, and that is the terrifying thing for me. “I was inspired by people like David Dubal and James Huneker. Wonderful—their tone, the way that they write about music is not academic. They know the soul of the music so completely that historical accuracy is almost secondary, because their words attract you towards the music. Harold Schonberg was able to do the same thing.” What, in particular, does she want to convey in these talks? Some of it is historical: “And for me, one fun part of learning the music is knowing the historical information. For example, this three-note motive in the development section of Beethoven’s op. 10/2 is uncannily similar to the opening motive in Haydn’s C Major Sonata. Haydn’s is a monothematic sonata: the entire first movement is built on this three-note motive. And the development section of Beethoven’s sonata is only based on the three notes. I love to imagine that Beethoven’s there for a lesson with Haydn and Haydn says, ‘I’m just going to get some coffee, you just do your work’ and there’s this manuscript that Beethoven kind of looks at. Or maybe Haydn is showing him his manuscript and saying, ‘Ludwig, I’m working on this and you can learn from it.’ This kind of sounds silly, but it’s very possible that something like that really happened. It makes them into human beings.” Besides the historical information, there are at least three aspects of composers she feels she has to convey in these talks. “First of all, many of them were fantastically interesting people. The travel journals of Liszt and the sketches of all the people that he had met are wonderful. His letters are so witty and wise.” At the same time, the great composers “are even greater than what we could imagine today. It quite terrifies me when students play these masterpieces so casually. I think, ‘Do you understand how great these people truly were?’ Listen to the depth of the tragedy of Schubert’s late sonatas, the beauty of these works he wrote while he was in excruciating physical pain, knowing he was going to die at a young age. To be able to produce something like that—this is unfathomable greatness!” Third, she feels a responsibility to remind the audiences that, for all their greatness, they were human beings. “Brahms, this was a man who took walks and he had candy in his pocket so that when the kids flocked around him, he would give them candy.” To put it differently, she says, “We all have to educate, in an entertaining manner, the public. Both of those words—entertain and educate—are really important.” And it seems to me that for Yui, the key to both of them lies in passion. “I went to school for a long, long time, because of my doctoral, and I think of the teachers who I actually remember—I think about that a lot because I teach myself—and it’s not the ‘best’ teachers. I’ve had teachers who wrote wonderful notes and who prepared us so well for exams, but I don’t remember a thing these teachers said. And there are these kind of crazy, impatient people who just come in in a bad mood one day and then once in a while they would just talk about this piece with incredible passion and you think, ‘What is he talking about?’” She remembers one teacher talking about Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde: “He was so passionate about it and I wondered, ‘What is he blubbering about?’ And then I went and listened to it, and I never forget that piece.” That’s what students really hunger for, she says: “to be passionate about something. They want so much—I wanted so much to just focus this burning thing that was inside towards something—to be aware that there’s something out there greater than us. “I think passion, more than anything, plants a seed. And I think musicians are responsible for planting seeds. We’re not just doing this for ourselves. We do it because we love it, but the difference between amateurs, people who are perfectly happy just playing on their own (and I say that with all respect, because we need more amateurs) … the difference between amateurs versus people whose career is to perform, is that we have a responsibility to entertain and to educate.” Of course, Yui doesn’t educate only at her concerts—she’s teaches piano at the John J. Cali School of Music at Montclair State University, and a variety of courses at the Manhattan School of Music. She’s not entirely sanguine about contemporary education. “I don’t want to be all gloom and doom when I’m teaching at two amazing schools, but in the case of music, I don’t really have much hope in higher education today. It’s the best we’ve got, but in general, it is not geared towards developing an artist.” Why not? “First of all, there’s too little time spent with the teacher. And there’s too little time making it part of living: reading books, watching movies. I remember I had a teacher with whom I would have all-day lessons, literally all-day lessons, and during the lesson he would talk about a book or something and we would pull it out of the library and start reading passages. Or he’d say, ‘Oh, this reminds me of a movie,’ and then we’d go and watch the movie. And then he would say, ‘Oh, it’s lunch time’ and we would have lunch and we would talk, not always musical things. It was a relationship. People like Busoni or Rubinstein taught in that way as well. And of course, in Indian music, traditionally, you live with the guru. Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin would give lessons five times a week. It was not once a week for an hour. I think music requires something like that. It’s not like a license the student is trying to gain—learning music is an organic thing. That’s why, for me at least, I want to write, I want to draw, I want to teach, and I want to watch movies, and I want to read and play video games and travel and meet people and so forth. Because being a pianist is not just about playing the piano. It’s something more than that. If you just lock yourself up in a practice room and play, it’s not going to make you a great pianist—or an artist.” Still, she repeats, “I see this is the best we’ve got. I loved my school years. I really, really loved them. Most of it is because of the people I’ve met. I’ve met some really great people, very generous people, very good people, and I think school is wonderful in that it’s this place with this concentrated number of fantastic minds. And I think that because it’s that hub, it’s a very precious place. But not necessarily for what goes on in the classrooms. I wish we could gear music education in a different way so that it becomes something more flexible and fluid and organic. If the student is smart enough and lucky enough to encounter someone inspiring and intelligent, they can get a lot out of school. But if you just sit there and go to the classes and do what you’re told, I don’t think you’re going to get that much.” Any mention of education leads naturally to a discussion of the future—and I wonder, how she feels about the future of her students. Every year, she says, there are hundreds of kids who get masters, doctorates. “They’re masters, they’re doctors. But that’s not enough. You have to be really passionate, you have to be flexible, you have to learn how to get along with people, you have to learn how to say ‘Yes’ to a lot of things, you have to be on time. It’s the ones who are good with people, they get along with people, they’re well organized, they go to meetings on time, they get things done when they say they will, and they take chances, they try things that they’ve never done before. When you’re young, you really need to be flexible and adaptable. I’m glad I’m not in my 20s any more. It’s such a scary time, such an uncertain time.” How about her own future? “I’m usually working on a new program. I generally choose repertoire according to the balance of an entire program, rather than individual pieces.” Further ahead? “I would like to explore more contemporary music because I’ve been so in love with dead people’s music. I organize series of concerts presenting other musicians, and I aim to blend contemporary music with old music seamlessly, so they’re not so separated. Today, it’s such a separated world. But you know, one cannot exist without the other. So to try to separate ‘classical’ music and ‘contemporary’ is ridiculous. And yet I myself have been neglecting contemporary music.” The Mephistophelean issue arises once again when I return to Scriabin. Following up on my earlier question on preparing for the Scriabin Ninth, I point out that I didn’t pick that work at random: for she strikes me as a natural Scriabin player. She laughs: “Do I have the madness in me?” “Yes,” I say, “or at least the Faust/Mephistopheles doubleness.” “I try to convey myself as this carefree …you know,” she replies. I say, “It doesn’t work.” “It’s not something I’m hiding. To deny oneself an aspect of humanity.…” She points to the darkness in Liszt—and in Beethoven. “Beethoven is the person who most makes me feel human while I’m playing his music. And there’s this incredible joy one feels when that happens. When I play Beethoven I feel as if I understand what life is all about. And why is that? Why am I so happy when I play Beethoven? I think it’s because I feel so human, he captures all these aspects of humanity. He has darkness, incredible darkness, and he has something so earthy and yet so divine. I think the greater the artist the more variety, the more complete he is as a human being.” No wonder she lists Dostoevsky among her favorite writers. Which brings us back to Scriabin: “I am hoping,” she says, “to reach a stage where I am burning to play Scriabin. What beauty! He attracts me these days, and I’m happy about that. He never attracted me before. That’s an aspect of myself that I need to develop, to explore. So maybe Scriabin next time I see you—the complete sonatas!” Shortly after our interview, Yui wrote to me to say that she had removed Humbert Humbert from her list of favorite characters for fear of being misunderstood. I felt bad, since I sensed that I had, with my sense of mock outrage, encouraged her retreat—and since, in fact, that claim had been a really useful ice-breaker in our conversation. Still, Rochester and Isabel Archer are still on the list—and that, along with the complete Scriabin sonatas, will generate plenty of discussion the next time we meet.
Posted on: Wed, 06 Aug 2014 15:35:56 +0000
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