New Beethoven Acquisitions: Annie Fischer and Claudio Arrau

I recently acquired two very interesting but two very different collections of Beethoven piano works.  The first was a long-sought-after complete set of Beethoven Sonatas by Annie Fischer on Hungaraton.  The other was a collection of Claudio Arrau's EMI Beethoven recordings from the mid-1950's.  Having acquired them virtually simultaneously, comparisons were inevitable.

The Fischer set has acquired quite a reputation.  Some have called it the most satisfying complete set of Beethoven Sonatas ever recorded, which is heady praise.  The complete set was available briefly as an import in the US, and some but not all of the individual volumes found their way across the water too.  These recordings have been out of print for some time and the lowest offering price on Amazon Marketplace for the complete set is currently $450.  All of these factors have given this set quite a cache and raise expectations to an unhealthy level.

After searching for over a decade, I finally landed a reasonably-priced copy.  My initial reaction was disappointment.  While there was nothing overtly “wrong”, I wouldn't rank this set higher than the middle of a very crowded pack.  The first word I would use to describe it is “stiff.”  The playing sounds a bit stiff, Fischer's mechanism, while capable of navigating the notes without mishap, sounds slightly uneven and stiff  too.  Even the action of the Bosendorfer she plays sounds stiff.  The tonal palate she achieves is quite limited.  While there is little banging, there is also little softness and even less beauty.  If I were listening blind and were asked to  identify  the provenance of the recording, I would have guessed  “a faculty member recital from a very good conservatory,” which it turns out isn't very far from the truth.  Fischer recorded several Beethoven Sonatas for EMI in London in the early 1960's.  Although the recorded sound is better on Hungaroton, I think the EMI recordings are better overall.

The Arrau was both an excellent contrast and an excellent example of my point.   Any 15 second segment announces that you are listening to a master pianist.  This set captures Arrau in a very interesting period of his career.  His playing is much more spontaneous and vibrant than it became even ten years later when he re-recorded all of the sonatas for Philips. His unique tonal palette and musical mastery are all there, even though many of the recordings themselves sound boxy.  EMI seems to have pawned him off to their “B” team, and some (but not all) of these recordings even as late as 1958 are in mono.  It's doubly sad considering what superior sound RCA, Mercury, Decca, and even Columbia were achieving contemporaneously and just how important Arrau's tone was to his artistry.   

Arrau can be an acquired taste.  Many find him to be too slow and deliberate, but there is also such depth of sound and such an incredible sense of  musical tension (Arrau famously believed that “speed was the enemy of passion”).  Once experienced, this tension seems so appropriate to Beethoven that one can't imagine anyone attempting this music without it.  This is one of the hallmarks of a great interpretation:  its way seems to be “the” way.  This isn't really true, but in the moment the performance holds you in its spell.  This element of “rightness” (even if it's “false rightness”) I find absent in Fischer's recordings.  

The Arrau box also contains a complete Beethoven Concerto cycle with Galliera conducting.  All but the Fourth are in stereo, though again not in wonderful sound.  Still, I think I'd choose this set as the best of Arrau's Beethoven Concerto cycles.  I had given up on Arrau in the First and Second Concertos.  His recordings for Philips (both in the mid-1960's and the mid-1980's) sound leaden.  It's not just the very slow tempi (though here they clearly don't help).  It feels that Arrau has trouble connecting with the spirit of very early Beethoven.  One wonders if he would have even bothered with these pieces if it weren't to complete a recording cycle.  The EMI recordings of these pieces are a major surprise.  They're good!  Now I wonder what made Arrau lose the thread of these works only a few years later.

The “Emperor” is a surprise as well.  It's absolutely fantastic.  I think it's the best of the four Arrau “Emperors” I now own (the others are Klemperer (live), Haitink (1970), and Davis (1984)).  Speaking of Klemperer, when I learned Arrau recorded the Beethoven Concerto cycle on EMI, I was initially  disappointed to learn  that EMI (i.e. Walter Legge) had chosen Galliera to conduct these recordings instead.  Now that I've heard them, I'm not disappointed at all.  Galliera is another one of those “sneaky great” conductors who didn't have a blazing reputation but never put out a bad recording.  And  thanks to Testament, we now have contemporaneous Arrau/Klemperer recordings of Concertos 3 through 5  as well.  Lucky early 21st century collectors,  though I wish EMI  hadn't waited  nearly 50 years to approve their release. 

Of course, these are just my reactions.  If you're reading this and feel differently, I'd love to hear what you think and why. You  may not change my mind, but you never know.  There was a time when I couldn't get past Arrau's slowness, which was even more pronounced in the later recordings which were my first exposure to him.   Let's discuss.

Slamming the Door in the Audience's Face

I attended the Vadim Repin recital on Friday April 5th at the Valley Performing Arts Center in Northridge. The recital was nearly as wonderful as my post-concert experience was horrible (I plan on posting a concert review shortly). The staff of the facility treated me and two other audience members with a level of arrogance and rudeness that was difficult to process let alone understand.

When I was a young piano student, my teacher told me that it was my duty to visit performers in the green room (the post-concert artist reception area) after concerts whenever possible. This didn't have anything to do with fame and it wasn't about asking anything more of the performers. The visit was meant as an expression of appreciation for the previous two hours the performer had just spent on the stage. If you got to the green room and it was sufficiently crowded, then it was okay to leave. But there's no emptier feeling for a performer than having given of themselves only to be left with an empty green room.

So over the last 40 years or so I've been frequenting green rooms at most of the major and at many of the minor performing halls both in the US and abroad. Typically all are welcome. It's not the artist's private dressing room; it's a public reception area. Sometimes the performers are very relaxed and generous with their time and sometimes they are not. I can remember rare occasions when the performers were either too tired, ill or otherwise indisposed to visit the green room. These occasions are rare because most performers genuinely enjoy the post-concert ritual. Typically it is one of brighter spots in the schedule of a touring musician.

It turned out that I actually had some degree of a personal connection with Vadim Repin I spent a week at the Verbier Music Festival in Switzerland in the summer of 2011. I made some friends who were in turn friends of Vadim Repin and Yuri Bashmet and I was invited along one evening for post-concert drinks. Much of the conversation took place in Russian, but I did manage to have a break-out conversation with Repin about musical icons, historical recordings, and the relative merits of innate talent versus dedication and perseverance. We didn't forge a life-long friendship or exchange email addresses, but it was a nice evening and an interesting exchange.

Hanging out with Vadim Repin and gypsy violinist Roby Lakatos in Verbier, July 2011

At the VPAC recital I was sitting in the fourth row slightly to the left-of-center, directly in Repin's sightline. Given my feelings about green room visits in general, it would have been doubly rude not to make an appearance afterward. I didn't expect him to remember my name or the particulars of our meeting, but I would have been surprised if he had no memory of it at all. So after the final applause died down, I asked the nearest usher how to get to the green room. Normally there is a door near the side of the stage. Instead, the usher told me I'd have to leave to the building, walk around its perimeter, and then look for the artist's entrance near a loading dock on the adjacent street. I asked another usher and he corroborated that these unusual instructions were in fact correct.

So outside and around the building I went. I found the loading dock and the door. I saw an idling Lincoln Navigator with a driver adjacent to the loading dock that most probably was Repin's ride. I was initially surprised that I was the only one there. A few minutes later a man and his 12-year-old daughter arrived too. They were Russian/Armenian musicians. The daughter was a promising young violinist. Her teacher knew Repin's teacher and had urged her to relay greetings from both after the concert. The father was a professional percussionist.

Percussionist Art Sinanyan and his violinist daughter Ani.  His website is artperc.com

We decided to ring the buzzer at the artist's entrance. A security guard and an official-looking woman with a walkie-talkie opened the door a crack. “Who are you? Do you have a wristband?” the woman barked out summarily. I gave her my name and said, “Vadim knows me but he probably won't remember my name. No, we don't have wristbands. This isn't a Van Halen concert. I've never heard of wristbands for a classical recital.” “Well, we use them here and you're not getting in without one”, she answered and let the door slam.

I couldn't believe what had just happened. The three of us (one a young girl) had been sent outside to a loading dock only to be treated rudely and have a door slammed in our face. It was a chilly night as well. I leaned on the buzzer again. Nothing happened for quite a while. Finally, the same woman opened it a crack . She saw that it was me again and before I could get half a word out she slammed the door shut again while hissing, “Go away!”

The young girl was in shock. She was excited to meet Vadim Repin and report back to her teacher. Instead she was shivering on a loading dock while being repeatedly humiliated. I explained to her that I seriously doubted that Vadim Repin knew anything about what was going on out here. Based on my sense of him he would be appalled if he did and he would personally try to fix the situation. I told her that unfortunately some people just need to feel important and they take any little chance life gives them to push other people around in order to do so. Her father and I conferred. We both agreed that Repin would have to walk out of the door sooner or later and we'd take our chances that would be sooner. I also told him that if we were unsuccessful, I might be able to email some of my friends from Verbier and get Repin to send a picture or an email to his daughter. He shouldn't tell her because I couldn't guarantee I'd be successful, but I was reasonably confident I would be. I just didn't want to leave his daughter with nothing but this negative experience.

Sure enough, the doors opened about ten minutes later. Out came Repin and an entourage of a dozen or so people, none of whom had wristbands. Repin saw the girl and her father and immediately walked up to them. They started conversing in Russian. With the mention of their teachers, he smiled and his eyes lit up. He posed for pictures with the girl and even said a few words to her in Armenian. He turned to me and said, “I know that we met but I can't remember your name.” I told him that I'd be surprised if he did remember it and I reminded him of the evening in Verbier. He was as cordial as I had expected him to be. I thanked him for a wonderful recital and told him he should visit Los Angeles more frequently, which is all I wanted to convey in the first place. After a short cigarette break, he got into his limo and drove off.

As soon as I went home I logged onto the VPAC website. I looked through the personnel listing, and with the assistance of Google Images I quickly identified the name of the self-appointed gatekeeper. Her title, ironically, is “Director of Audience Services.” She had her moment of importance and I hope she enjoyed it. I'd love to hear her justification for why she felt it necessary to behave as she did. I want to know exactly what threat she saw posed by two well-dressed middle-aged men and a 12-year-old girl, and why it was necessary to summarily dismiss them without even as much as an “I'm sorry”, a “please” or a “I'd like to thank you for attending the concert but...” The artist's warm, spontaneous, genuine reactions to the “interlopers” made it abundantly clear that her judgment was in error and that the very premise of her actions was completely out-of-line. In addition to posting this account on my blog and various social media, I'm forwarding this account to the VPAC hierarchy, some classical music bulletin boards, and anyone else I can think of who would even consider attending a concert at VPAC.

Normally I don't post things like this, but it is a particularly odious feeling to watch a 12-year-old girl's enthusiasm get trampled upon just because because somebody can. Bullies need to be called out. Such people should not be allowed anywhere near paying customers, much less be put in charge of Audience Services. The Valley Performing Arts Center is a very young institution. They clearly understand little about how successful performing arts organizations operate and how they need to treat their customers. They should take their cues from the wonderful music their performers play. This music is meant to inspire the greatness within our souls and to speak to our better selves. We can best serve it by treating each other with respect and by acting like decent human beings. What's the point of taking the trouble to put forth concerts by world-class artists only to negate the entire experience through the mindless actions of a few thoughtless individuals? Why would I ever go back there and why would I ever recommend anyone else to do so?