Actually, it started with one of my occasional, peripatetic Internet crawls. The term was something like "hardest piano piece" . I'm always on the lookout for music that makes my jaw drop. Doesn't matter the instrument. I mean, you may hate the pan flute, but this is insane:
Google led me down the YouTube into a world of wonder. Mind you, the first video I viewed was a female pianist, claimed to be the world's fastest, absolutely butchering the piece she was playing...breakneck speed, yes, accuracy...not so much. One particular comment suggested anyone wanting to play something really challenging, and prestissimo, should check out Alkan's Scherzo diabolico. Well, didn't that title bear further investigation.
What impressed me wasn't just the formidable technique, but the musicality. This piece is beautiful. I'd never heard of Charles-Valentin Alkan before--to this day, few have, even though he was one of the greatest piano virtuosos of his age, with an ability that humbled his more famous friends Chopin and Liszt. Fame didn't so much elude Alkan as Alkan eluded fame. He was reclusive, particularly in his latter years, and didn't perform much. Today, his music is championed by Marc-Andre Hamelin, a pianist-slash-freak of nature who performs ivory impossibilities with an insouciance that leaves the listener honestly confused.
If you can read music, read this, and weep.
I've been playing piano since I was three. I got to Grade VI in lessons before I dropped out in free-spirited disgrace. If I had stayed in lessons for another, oh, roughly 428 years, I might have attempted a piece like this. To me, this is piano's Mount Everest.
So I bought me some Alkan off iTunes and set out to tell the few friends I have who might appreciate (ugh) piano music about Alkan and Hamelin. My best friend took that ball and ran with it. He came back a couple days later with an email saying, in effect, "you think Alkan's good? Check out Kapustin."
I have to admit, it ticked me off a little. Like, hey, my unknown composer eats your unknown composer for breakfast. I held off investigating this Kapustin upstart for almost a week out of some ridiculous species of spite. Jay emailed me a few times in that week, saying this Kapustin was the best thing since sliced or whole bread and he was going to buy a CD.
That got my attention. Jason, buy? As in, spend money on? Music? The guy torrents so much he might as well run a whitewater rafting company.
A week later, and here's the state of things. I have 989 songs on my iPod. Twenty three are composed by Charles-Valentin Alkan. Nearly 200 of them are by Nikolai Kapustin.
Kapustin is Russian, but you'd never know it from his music. The best way to describe it is jazz done in classical form: preludes and fugues, concertos, sonatas, and so on. Now, I am not a fan of jazz. I can appreciate the musicianship, and there are a few standards I like, but improvised free-flow jazz is just not my thing. I like my music with structure. I like recurring themes my mind can latch on to. Most of all, I like to visualize what I'm hearing, by studying the score. Jazz doesn't usually have scores--too restrictive.
Kapustin's 'jazz' does.
It's been a week now and I've listened to nothing but Kapustin, and the damnedest thing is I can't even tell you why. If you'd told me a month ago that I'd be jazzing out to this stuff, I'd have said you were nuts. But I find the music supremely relaxing--even the lightning quick stuff--and conducive to deep thinking. I'm amazed that he manages to capture every jazzy detail in meticulous notation.
This happened to be the first piece of his I heard, also performed by Marc-Andre Hamelin:
Hamelin takes this too fast, in my opinion. The musicality is almost lost. It works better about four metronome ticks slower. The more I listen to Hamelin, the more I'm in total awe of his technique, but I also think he occasionally speeds things up just because he can.
Perhaps most surprising? I'm now officially a pirate.
I'd happily buy this music...if I could. Most of it is available one of three ways: off YouTube via one of the video-to-mp3 sites; off a torrent; or by going to Russia and travelling back in time twenty years or so. The vast majority of Kapustin's work, especially his orchestral work, has not been released outside the Soviet Union. Like Alkan before him, the man shuns fame.
I've mostly figured out how to download/extract and import. I'm still having trouble with track names occasionally going missing or coming out totally scrambled. I'm kind of anal about having the right names for the pieces in my library. It's necessitated a lot of YouTubing.
I figure it'll be about a year before this obsession passes...
7 comments:
I like the fact that you have discovered and are writing about both Alkan and Kapustin. I am a bit dismayed that you have chosen to criticize Marc-Andre because of the tempo that he uses for the selected piece of Nicolai Kapustin. Marc-Andre has, numerous times in interviews, etc., mentioned that he doesn't do that much listening to other pianists...he studies the scores and tries to follow the intent of the composers' markings as closely as possible. You may notice that at the top of this piece, the marking indicates a quarternote beat of 144. Check it out and you will see that MAH is right on the money. MAH abhors gratuitous displays of virtuosity, so your comment that he is perhaps playing this fast simply because he can, is, I believe, off the mark. There seems to be virtually nothing that MAH is incapable of playing, technically, which allows him to interpret at a completely elevated level when compared with most other pianists.
Thank you for this. I'm new to all this, please go easy... You're right about the metronome marking, and there's a pianist on YouTube who actually plays this *faster* (how?)
My friend felt that Hamelin didn't display enough emotion in his playing. I disagree. Some of the Alkan passages are tenderness personified.
In any event, I'll be listening to more Hamelin...I love his 'In A State Of Jazz' album...
I appreciate your candor in your response. In think you have chosen one of the greatest pianists to focus on - and honestly, you could spend a huge amount of time listening to him, as MAH has recorded an astonishing number of CDs. Since you are just getting started with him, you may want to spend some time with his CD, Kaleidoscope, which is filled with more encore-type repertoire. His prodigious abilities place him in a truly unique class at the top of the heap of the all-time greats.
Dude must go througha lot of chapstick.
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To be fair, Hamelin *is* something. That Alkan piece is not performed often. It's beyond the ability of most pianists, even professional ones--and Hamelin makes it look like he's having *fun* with it.
sfphil: I think I've determined what it is about the Hamelin recordings I don't like. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the man's playing and everything to do (I think) with the recording process itself. Listening to Kapustin play his own work, the sound is raw and real: a bar-room piano without the wonky tuning. The Hamelin recordings I've heard of the same work sound...processed, somehow. Less immediate. Not as much sparkle to the sound.
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