Mature Piano Music

[cschauer]

Was wondering what of the piano repertory pedagogues and performers alike consider to be mature (obviously one of those really subjective questions - like hardest, most difficult, etc. - but for ex., Schumann's  op.17 Fantasie, which John Ogdon I think in an EPTA interview believed shouldn't be approached by those under 40)?

[adusha]

Hi,

I think that the age is not important, but the development in professionalism of technique and music overall. Here are three of many works that, in my opinion, you have to be technically and musically mature to play:

-Rachmaninoff, Piano Concerto No. 3
-Ravel, Gaspard de la nuit
-Prokofiev, Piano Sonata No. 7
...

[cheesypencil]

Beethoven's op. 111 arietta!

[sordel]

I don't have an informed opinion on this, but I suspect that the answer to your question has changed significantly in recent years. It used to be the case that young musicians were held off many major works (such as Tchaikovsky's first piano concerto) because they were supposedly emotionally immature to play them. With the influx of prodigies from the East, however, most people recognise that nothing is served by holding musicians off works in this way.

The gap between technical proficiency (which is attainable at an ever-younger age as the years go by) and emotional expressivity seems to have narrowed greatly in classical performance. I sometimes wonder whether that supposed emotional expressivity wasn't, in many cases, just an audience's response to the pianist's facility in pulling faces at the keyboard.

[quantum]

Sordel makes an interesting point.  Does the recent influx of prodigies playing mature works saturate the ear that such frequent playing of mature works attenuates the perception of maturity?

[mandryka]

Hi everyone. This is my first post here.

I think that you can be a very good pianist before 50, but you need to have lived 50 years to be a great pianist.

If you listen to Sokolov’s recordings, you can hear how he has developed  as he aged. His older recordings show an extraordinary technique, but they lack they lack the character, the face, which you can hear in the later recordings. This is really clear when you compare like for like – as in Opus 111 and some Brahms Intermezzi. Nothing he produced when he was younger compares with what we have heard from him over the past few years.

Much the same for Ranki. His early Mozart  recordings are good I suppose. But the Mozart sonata performances  from the last two years are extraordinary.  The early Haydn is great – but the Haydn concert he gave a couple of years ago in Budapest is even greater. The Schumann and Kurtag and Bach and Liszt that he’s performed over the past couple of years has shown a depth of response, an intensity, only hinted at previously.

I could provide similar examples for Lubimov and Virssaladze. And similar things applied to some historical pianists -- Fiorentino, Cortot, even Gould's final recordings show a rapt interiority you don't hear elsewhere;  Sofronitsky too maybe.  Moiseiwitsch and maybe Richter  are the exceptions that prove the rule

[sordel]

Hi everyone. This is my first post here.

I think that you can be a very good pianist before 50, but you need to have lived 50 years to be a great pianist.

Welcome Mandryka.

Are there really no great pianists under 50? Glenn Gould died at fifty and I don't think that it was the last year of his life that made him great.

That said, I am sure that experience, and repeated performances of works, probably does contribute to the authority of a pianist's performance. In a narrow range of works, that authority might in some way elevate a performer from good to great. Perhaps it's just that the recording industry traditionally called for second cycles of the great works at about that point in a performer's career, so pianists above fifty got more opportunities to show improvement. (Going back to Gould, he was such a recording star that he got an early opportunity to play the Goldberg Variations for a second time, but his earlier set is generally preferred.)

The initial question, though, was not whether a pianist would get better at playing a piece after a certain age but whether it would be wrong to attempt it at a younger age. I am very sceptical about this, and while it used to be that technical prodigies were directed towards showpieces such as the Rachmaninoff Paganini Rhapsody, they now seem to play more or less everything.