Rekindling My Inner Pianist

     Ever since I gave up my youthful ambition to be a concert pianist and decided to be an opera coach instead, which was back in the early '80s, I also gave up playing solo piano music. I even gave up listening to it. True to my obsessive nature, I focused all my energy and concentration on opera. My pianistic skills were then used to learn and study as many opera scores as I could. Even art song was pushed aside, only to emerge whenever I was hired to play the occasional voice recital.

     Playing opera scores—piano reductions of orchestral scores, that is—is an entirely different discipline from playing solo piano repertoire; I had to forget about all the interpretive freedom that goes along with being a solo pianist, and learn to think like an orchestra following a conductor, slowing down when he slowed down, speeding up when he sped up. I had to play like an orchestra, imitating woodwinds, brass, legato strings, pizzicato strings. There really is no freedom to be your own artist, musically, that is; but the technique has to be solid and flexible enough to cope with all the difficulties inherent in playing music that wasn't written for the piano. Many opera pianists are a bit stumped as to how to play Rossini, for example, whose music can be hideously unpianistic. This is where the fine art of "cheating" comes into play (forgive the pun). Take, for a typical Rossinian example, the shaving scene in Barbiere: the tempo is lightning fast, one of the fastest tempos in the entire score, and the strings are playing all these scrubby repeated notes. What does a pianist do? Broken octaves. It's cheating, but it's necessary. (However, not all repeated notes can be substituted with broken octaves—in Rigoletto's big aria "Cortigiani, vil razza" the tempo isn't fast enough; broken octaves would sound downright silly. In this instance, the pianist simply has to have the finger technique required to play clean repeated notes.)

     The secret to good cheating, of course, is to sound as if you're not cheating. I became known as a very good cheater, and was often asked to coach other pianists on Rossini, and also Handel. But after some years of cheating, thinking like an orchestra, and following the bouncing baton, I began to miss playing real piano music. I knew I could never be a solo pianist, but the artist in me was getting stale and my playing getting more and more mechanical. The only remedy was to dust off my old Bach, Mozart, and Chopin scores and make time in my already demanding schedule to nurture my inner pianist. The most gratifying part of this was finding that my technique had greatly improved; passages I had once found beastly difficult were suddenly easier; even learning new pieces came more easily. Best of all, I was once again exercising the interpretive muscles which had become stiff over the years. Once again, if only in the solitude of my studio, I was my own artist, making my own musical choices, following my own baton. All of this made me a better operatic pianist as well.

     When I left opera and entered the monastery in 2004, I had to give up the piano. There was simply no time or place in monastic life, with its emphasis on relative silence, for playing seriously and on a daily basis any kind of instrument except the organ—which I was permitted to learn, but even so, I had to use the quietest registration while practicing! Giving up the piano altogether was hard, yes, but nothing is too difficult or painful if it's done for God. If he asks you to do it, you must believe it's for a greater good. I've already recounted, in earlier posts, the good that giving up the piano has done me and my overgrown ego, not to mention my blood pressure.

     It has been eight years since I gave it up. Even though I've been back in the world since November of 2006, I've felt no real need to play again, but I have lately given it a fleeting thought or two. What has most emphatically come back into my life, just in the past few months, is listening to piano music. Since I haven't done that, really, for so many years—three decades, in fact—I'm only now discovering all the wonderful pianists playing today. Among them, my all-around choice is Stephen Hough, though there are many others I admire. And of course, I've had the pleasure of reacquainting myself with pianists I loved in my youth—de Larrocha, Arrau, Brendel, Gould, Fleisher, Rubinstein, Vásáry, Cortot, Benedetti Michelangeli, Bachauer, Kraus, Landowska, Kempff—all my old ghostly mentors! I'm also becoming interested in a broader range of repertoire, expanding my knowledge and tastes.

     The most wonderful thing of all is actually a kind of compromise: though I myself no longer experience the joy and satisfaction of producing music with my own hands, I experience it by proxy, through the art of pianists who've been given a far greater gift than mine. My quiet days are underscored with music, with all its poetry and passion. That's enough for me. That's everything.