A Window, Not a Wall: A conversation with pianist Peter Takács

A Window, Not a Wall: A conversation with pianist Peter Takács

 

I wouldn’t dare program or perform Beethoven’s monumental final piano sonata, Opus 111 in C minor, and I have two “good” hands. Master-pianist Peter Takács recently did so (January 14, 2016; Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall) preceded by other “late-Beethoven” pieces, and he did it with a broken right hand.

Let’s let that sink in for a moment, shall we? At the time, he was in pain, but the exact nature of it was still undiagnosed. He had fallen while in New York City, the day after his previous “middle-Beethoven” recital in November 2015. The day of the fall was the same day as the massive terror attack in Paris—obviously a bad energy was at work that day.

Nevertheless, no trace of bad energy accompanied the two of us when we sat down for a French bistro lunch in midtown New York on Bach’s birthday, March 21, 2016. Call it a meeting of minds, if you will. I had been so transfixed by the intensely personal style of his playing in the three-concert Beethoven series that I just had to get to know more about the man and the musician.

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Turns out we have a lot of points in common, even if separated by time and circumstance. I had almost attended Oberlin Conservatory, thinking to begin college one year early, but decided against it. My sophomore year would have been his first teaching year (of forty) there. Also, much earlier in his development, he attended the Paris Conservatoire, as did I years later. As the lunch progressed, we found many musical ideals and a lot of childhood peregrination in common, including emigration. His family (of Transylvanian Jewish descent) was persecuted in Romania for wishing to leave, eventually making their way to Vienna, Paris, then Milwaukee of all places.

Mr. Takács possessed obvious and prodigious gifts. As a four-year-old, he would observe the lessons and practice of his year-and-a-half older sister and learn everything she played, by ear, gleefully pointing out her mistakes all the while. His recital debut, in Bucharest, was at age seven, and some years of fruitful instruction (Russian tradition) were able to form him prior to the emigration. After his parents came out in the open about their desire to leave Romania, however, public performances by the young Peter were forbidden, and he was also kicked out of his school, having to take lessons clandestinely and attend a “secret” school for outsiders. What artists go through for their work! Post-graduate studies with legendary pianist Leon Fleisher probably were the most influential on Mr. Takács’ musical development—he speaks of his former mentor with reverence.

We spoke at length about the “heart” of the canonic Western tradition of piano (and chamber/orchestral) music, centering on the former Austro-Hungarian empire, and radiating outward to include some of eastern and north-central Europe. This is a broad over-simplification, of course, but upon examination, it seems to hold true with the exception of French repertoire—even there, after all, Louis XV married a daughter of the king of Poland, and Louis XVI the famous Marie Antoinette, an archduchess of Austria. Perhaps we would have had an “Archduchess” Trio if things had turned out differently.

Mr. Takács achieves two things (at least) simultaneously whenever he plays: 1) what I call “fidelity to the markings on the page,” and 2) a striking degree of personal feeling that makes it sound as if he himself were the creator, not just the re-creator. We agreed that he probably falls more in the C.P.E. Bach line (J.S. Bach’s best-known son), who said: “A musician cannot move others unless he too is moved. He must of necessity feel all of the effects that he hopes to arouse in his audience.”

Mr. Takács tells his students however, that they must be “generals, not soldiers,” taking the larger view of the area (music) instead of getting lost down in the details, which must all have been incorporated before, of course. His other analogy was to building a house. If you were merely laying bricks with no blueprint, things might get a bit messy or out of proportion. He suggests a zoom in/zoom out approach. And he added, there must be some level of technical control that won’t fall apart when one is giving way to the rapture of the moment.

We agreed that there really is no such thing as an urtext, that one must collect all the best editions and advice one can find and then make decisions based on taste, instinct, conviction, and knowledge. His (Mr. Takács) wonderful saying: “The score is a window, not a wall,” speaks precisely to the need to decipher what all those marks really mean, since notation is inherently a limitation on whatever the composer originally heard with his inner ear.

We both also agreed on sometimes teaching with programmatic imagery, especially for “absolute” music, pieces with abstract titles like “sonata,” etc. He often encounters some bewilderment among his younger students when he asks them: What is the affect of this piece? This led to a brief lamentation about the internet and its seductions toward superficiality: lots of information, but not so much knowledge, and even less wisdom.

Mr. Takács always tries to stimulate the students’ ears to pre-hear the sound they want to make, which must be different for every composer and period. His voice took on a very intense tone when saying that “Beethoven must never be played like Chopin.” That Beethoven’s sonority needs to be noble, singing, and serious at all times, never “perfumed.” Genre also must be considered: is the movement a dance form, song, chorale, imitation of orchestral texture? The inner conception of the tone must precede everything. One approach does not fit all at the piano.

Mr. Takács performed all the Beethoven sonatas over two seasons (1998/99 and 99/2000) at Oberlin. A small label specializing in historic piano reissues, contemporary pianists, and other good things (Cambria Music), heard about him, and offered to record the entire set. The box has done very well, and the sound is sumptuous, Mr. Takács having used the Boesendorfer Imperial concert grand, “the” modern Viennese piano par excellence. It also includes early works from the Bonn period (without opus) and Beethoven’s sole sonata for piano four-hands

When I asked him what was the most important thing that he had learned from his students, he opined that it was probably how to be more creative in approaches to each individual, finding the proper “key” to diagnose their issues and move them forward supportively, while accessing their creative sides and developing that.

We spoke of “desert island” composers, pieces, and movements. Of course, I told him I’d have to have a very well-equipped desert island: Hamburg Steinway concert grand and technician on hand and humidity control (so, I guess not so deserted!). His would be the second (final) movement “Arietta” of Beethoven’s Sonata No. 32 in C minor. If we were trapped there together, we agreed we could play the Schubert F Minor Fantasy (D. 940) forever.

Mr. Takács was presented in the three concert overview of Beethoven in 2015/16 by a novel series titled “Key Pianists” produced by Terry Eder, a pianist herself. He was the first virtuoso of what I hope will become a thriving annual series. The aim is to present wonderfully gifted pianists who might otherwise be overlooked by the “star system” that seems to decree who gets heard. The coming season heralds (so far) New York recitals by Ann Schein, Terry Eder herself, and Sara Davis Buechner.

An afternoon with a great humanist such as Mr. Takács is an irreproducible moment, as well as unforgettable. We agreed that the next lunch should be over some hearty mamaliga in one of the Romanian cafes in my neighborhood in Queens. I can’t wait.

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Key Pianists presents Peter Takács: The Beethoven Experience—Late Beethoven in Review

Key Pianists presents Peter Takács: The Beethoven Experience—Late Beethoven in Review

Key Pianists presents Peter Takács: The Beethoven Experience—Late Beethoven
Peter Takács, piano; Soovin Kim, violin; Virgil Hartinger, tenor
Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, New York, NY
January 14, 2016

 

January is only two weeks old and already there is a litany of loss: Pierre Boulez, David Bowie, Alan Rickman, and many more unheralded. Now I must selfishly mourn the end of this satisfying mini-overview of Beethoven’s music provided by master pianist Peter Takács. He brings old-world virtues of golden singing tone, and myriads of shifting colors based on his keen knowledge of every chord and its relative weight and where every phrase is headed. Nothing clinical, cold, or “post-modern perfect” about this pianist, thank goodness. We have enough of that.

Instead, as I have noted previously, we have a soul who has entered deeply into the creative act “beside” Beethoven, as it were. He reveals it freshly every time, risks and all. The sense of struggle was always a key feature not only in Beethoven’s compositional practice, but also in his dealing with life events such as the obvious: deafness, and the subtler: fight for financial security and emotional fulfillment. We shouldn’t want to air-brush that tension away.

It was good of Mr. Takács to begin the concert with Beethoven’s true swan-song for solo piano, the set of six Kleinigkeiten, Op. 126 ( Bagatelles, or “Trifles”). These miniatures, as distinct from his prior two sets (Op. 33 and Op. 119, mainly written and published for money) may be small in length, but they are giant in visionary power. One hears glimmers of many of the late-period processes being tossed about, from hearty stomps to melting lyricism to transcendent spatial insights and echoes across alpine valleys. Mr. Takács observed the con moto indications found in them, to give a more earthy view, less freighted with mysticism than usual.

The yearning for a “lost Arcadia” (as Maynard Solomon points out in his excellent book Late Beethoven: Music, Thought, Imagination) is often symbolized by Beethoven’s use of G major as tonality. We had that in two of the above bagatelles and in the second work on the program: the delightful and underplayed Violin Sonata No. 10 in G major, Op. 96. A product of Beethoven’s Archduke Rudolph “period,” if you will, it switches from the pastoral to the spiritual in the blink of an eye. Violinist Soovin Kim was excellently subtle and poised as a partner, without losing any enthusiasm where it was needed. The two musicians were perfectly aligned in concept and execution. The fourth movement rondo with variations was particularly touching in its disinclination to say “goodbye,” consisting of several attempts at an ending, finally bursting forth in joy.

After intermission, Mr. Takács utilized another collaborative artist, the sweet-voiced lyric tenor Virgil Hartinger, in the innovative song-cycle An die ferne Geliebte, Op. 98 (To the Distant Beloved). This was the first interconnected cycle ever, paving the way for subsequent works by Schubert and Schumann. The words were written by Alois Isidor Jeitteles, probably at Beethoven’s request, and are full of the tropes of Romanticism: separation, longing, nature. Can we still identify with these sentiments in an age of Skype, Snapchat, and the rest? I certainly hope so.

Nimm sie hin denn, diese Lieder,/Die ich dir, Geliebte, sang. . .” (Take you then these songs/Which I sing to you, Beloved) goes the sixth and final song. It proves a fitting motto for what Mr. Takács has been saying to us all fall and winter. Mr. Hartinger grew on me: his demeanor was generally still, which I appreciated—no histrionics—although I did find some issues with diction, legato, and the sudden dynamic shifts required, perhaps just stiffness, for when he got to the fifth and sixth songs, the “money shot,” he was very moving, and provided vivid contrasts and much more emotional involvement.

To conclude, Mr. Takács scaled the Everest of the last piano sonata, Op. 111, in C minor. Claudio Arrau always taught that one should never divide between the hands the treacherous opening double octave for the left hand alone that descends a diminished seventh, that it would minimize the sense of Herculean struggle. Mr. Takács did not divide two of the three, and he missed both of them. Folks, I’m here to tell you, it’s okay. It’s not what happens, it’s how you continue that is the mark of the true artist. In a way, the whole movement was dominated by Mr. Takács’ grappling with some memory issues. However, each time something repeated he nailed it with truly Beethovenian determination. In the Arietta (the second of only two movements) he created the spiritual stillness of the theme gorgeously, and each variation, spun like heavenly weaving out of the one before, worked its magical effect. I am reminded of Alfred Brendel’s note to Op. 111 about the final cadences that withdraw quietly to silence: “a silence that we now perceive to be even more important than the sound which preceded it.”

Thank you, Peter Takács, and may I issue a challenge? That you return soon and often, with the other twenty-seven piano sonatas, all the piano-based instrumental chamber music, and all the variations, miscellaneous pieces, and Lieder. That ought to keep Mr. Takács and New York nourished for quite some time!

 

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Key Pianists presents Peter Takács: The Beethoven Experience—Middle Beethoven in Review

Key Pianists presents Peter Takács: The Beethoven Experience—Middle Beethoven in Review

Key Pianists presents Peter Takács: The Beethoven Experience—Middle Beethoven
Peter Takács, Piano
Guest artist: Robert deMaine, Cello
Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, New York, NY
November 12, 2015

 

Peter Takács continued his admirable Beethoven series, this time focusing on works of the “middle period,” during which Beethoven swore to “take a new way.” Indeed he did, the works are much larger, exploratory, reveling in virtuosic figures and lyrical profundity, interrupted by mysterious keyboard recitatives.

The great thing about this evening was its palpable feeling of lived experience through the music, and passion. Mr. Takács sweeps away any sense of routine or intellectual concept (driven by the past thirty-some years of so-called historically informed performance practice). We aren’t thinking about metronome speeds or nit-picky articulation with Mr. Takács, only emotional meaning. Every single note, even in the brutally rapid passage work, sings. His demeanor at the keyboard is very quiet, economical, never showy or grandstanding.

He opened with the middle sonata of the three from Op. 31, nicknamed the Tempest, supposedly because Beethoven, always annoyed at being asked what his pieces “meant,” growled: “Oh, go read Shakespeare’s Tempest!” No matter, the work was revealed as a romantic struggle of opposites, mysterious sonorities and pleading melodies. Played with more elasticity than customary, Mr. Takács took his own “new way” convincingly.

He was then joined by the excellent cellist Robert deMaine (principal cellist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic) for a transcendent reading of the Cello Sonata No. 3 in A major, Op. 69. Both players shared the same approach, with Mr. deMaine’s passionate expansion mirrored in Takác’s finely detailed partnering. The short introduction to the finale was tear-inducing. The pair also brought out the weirdly obsessive qualities inherent in some of Beethoven’s writing in this, the latest composed of the works on this program.

After intermission, Mr. Takács insisted on playing the Andante favori, WoO 57, (originally intended as the slow movement to the Op. 53 Waldstein sonata) before the actual Waldstein, without interruption. It was an interesting idea, beautifully executed, although since Beethoven actually thought better and removed it from the sonata, I felt it was almost “too much,” especially to hear it before the immense sonata itself. In the Andante, Mr. Takács created a wonderful sense of spatial atmosphere, as though music were being heard across a mountain valley, especially in the poignant coda.

We may now say that Mr. Takács has “climbed K2” after this performance of the Waldstein, and when he completes this series in January with Op. 111, he can be said to have “conquered Everest.” His Waldstein was played with visceral excitement. The phrasing in the Rondo finale was particularly gorgeous. His solutions to the nightmarish glissando octaves in the same finale were ingenious and incredibly soft. All-in-all, a wonderfully lived performance of a touchstone that can all too often just sort of “go by” in the hands of other pianists.

As an encore, he favored his large enthusiastic audience with the Menuetto from the Piano Sonata No. 18 in E-flat major, Op. 31, No. 3 (The Hunt). You have one more chance to hear this artist, with “late” Beethoven, in January. Don’t miss it!

 

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Key Pianists presents Peter Takács :The Beethoven Experience—Early Beethoven in Review

Key Pianists presents Peter Takács :The Beethoven Experience—Early Beethoven in Review

Key Pianists presents Peter Takács:The Beethoven Experience—Early Beethoven
Peter Takács, piano
Guest artists: Boris Allakhverdyan, Clarinet; Carter Brey, Cello
Weill Recital Hall at Carnegie Hall, New York, NY
October 18, 2015

I was irreverently suggesting prior to this concert that at this point Beethoven needs no publicity. His devoted performers and listeners do, however, need repeated exposure to these testaments of creativity, which continue to speak and sing no matter how well we think we know them. One of the pleasures of hearing such iconic material is that one can focus in much more detailed fashion on the performance and performer(s).

Beethoven is in extremely fine hands with the esteemed Romanian-born pianist, Peter Takács. His playing overall was full of satisfying risk-taking. He did what is all too rare nowadays: he gave the sensation that he was creating the music “on the spot.” The music breathed where it needed to breathe, bombast was appropriately bombastic, lyrical lines sang, and the whole demonstrated passionate commitment. His ability to change emotional character as quickly as the musical figures changed made the program spring to vivid life.

The very first solo piano sonata given an opus number (Op. 2, No. 1 in F minor) made a fitting opening to this concert (and the first of a three-part series). Mr. Takács’ tone was miraculously transparent on the nine-foot modern Steinway, even at times evoking the more slender tones of instruments Beethoven may have known (and which he always found insufficient). The Adagio, that first of Beethoven’s essays in “humanitäts-Melodie,” was taken a tad faster than I am used to, but to great effect. Its last two chords were magical, not perfunctory.

Mr. Takács was then joined by Boris Allakhverdyan and Carter Brey for the diverting Trio for Clarinet, Cello and Piano, Op. 11. I take issue with only one of Mr. Takács good program notes here, for he states that B-flat major was a key used by Beethoven to signify light-heartedness. I don’t think the “Archduke” trio or the “Hammerklavier” sonata would be mistaken for light-hearted, but no matter. The afternoon became truly thrilling with this performance. Mr. Allakhverdyan and Mr. Brey are well-known to New Yorkers through their fine contributions to the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra and the New York Philharmonic respectively. They played as though they had been a fully formed ensemble for years, teasing out every nugget of chamber music gold, with easeful runs and great good humor, particularly in the rousing Finale, based on a popular comic-opera tune that truly is the anthem of every starving artist “Before I work, I must have something to eat.” Beethoven must surely have had a hearty laugh about the reference. mr. Takács enjoyed the impish turn to G Major near the end, a remote key here, and you could see the playful quality on his face.

After intermission, Mr. Takács favored the audience with the two “sides” of C, minor and major, represented respectively by the famous “Pathétique” sonata Op. 13 and then the final sonata of Op. 2: No. 3. In the Adagio of Op. 13, there was an old-fashioned desynchronization of the hands, which I did not find disturbing for once. This may actually have a lot more to do with a “historically informed” performance practice that we would rather gloss over in our “intellectual” age. Don’t rush out to do this, everyone: let’s just allow Mr. Takács to do it. He also found meltingly sentimental colors in this same movement, where many pianists just “pass over” it. Mr. Takács actually improvised a cadenza in the last movement’s rondo, before the reappearance of the theme, rather than just “sit there” on the fermata. Bravo!

The C major sonata, more like a concerto without orchestra, was brilliant and full of bold contrasts, especially in the unusually “big” slow movement. He arpeggiated large left-hand chords unapologetically, especially in the development section, a smart solution to the problem every pianist faces about too-massive sonority. His passagework and trills in the finale were marvelous and clear. It seems churlish even to mention passagework when one has been given such a gift.

There is an internet meme circulating for some time now about something Beethoven supposedly said to his student Czerny: “Anyone can play a wrong note sometimes, but to play without passion is inexcusable.” Beethoven would have been proud of this performance.

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