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Jeremy Denk: Playing Ligeti With A Dash Of Humor
http://www.npr.org/2012/05/23/153366344 ... h-of-humor



Interview Highlights

On Automne a Varsovie

"The idea of the piece is something [Gyorgy] Ligeti was obsessed with late in his life was this lamenting, descending chromatic idea. Descending chromatic lines like that have been used in music for centuries to designate sadness. And there's this way in which this idea becomes so obsessive and destructive and takes over and transforms from something beautiful into something sort of horrible and all-consuming."

On the scores

"The scores, at least some of them, tend to look like undifferentiated streams of data. Like you'd imagine a programming code might look. And it takes a little bit of practice to pick out the important ones. It's like reading a matrix or something. You have to know what he's after. Once you discover the principle behind the etude, the score will look a little more common-sensical, but it takes a little while."

On Ligeti

"He's written music at the edge of the human possibility for performing it. That is, so fast and complex as to be almost impossible to keep track of; dynamics that are incredibly extremely, incredible nuances of voicing — bringing out six different voices at one time, all in descending chromatic tones."

+ + + + +

^ Bell and Denk are perfect examples of how the western classics of music are reaching the masses in North America. The very best to them, especially Denk from the great state of North Carolina. You-hoo, over there.

An English pianist noted that when the trained musician can inspire the untrained musician to become excited about listening to classical music, then all the training will have been worth that cause and its purpose.

_________________
Since guitar technique has been mentioned in another thread, the Russian technique of piano playing allows for even the longest piece of music to be played without hand, wrist and arm fatigue. This particular technique can be explained in a word: détachement; or clarity of playing very loud passages to the very soft without physical strain. Détachement I began perfecting in my late teens, and I expect that foundational technique to serve me well into old age.

In other words, I believe technique is
all a pianist has; multiple composers’
styles can be expressed through it.

• Excerpts from a documentary presented on vimeo.
  
  ^ Barry Douglas, an Irish-born pianist and winner of the 1990 International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow, plays with variations of the Russian technique.
  
  
  ^ More Barry Douglas at home in Ireland.

Allegro wrote:An English pianist noted that when the trained musician can inspire the untrained musician to become excited about listening to classical music, then all the training will have been worth that cause and its purpose.

I guess Joshua Bell is going to have to try a little harder (just kidding -- I think it's the "untrained" masses that failed here, miserably):



Pearls Before Breakfast
Can one of the nation's great musicians cut through the fog of a D.C. rush hour? Let's find out.

. . . the final haul for his 43 minutes of playing was $32.17. Yes, some people gave pennies. . . .