Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Pianist Corner Is the new crop better than the old???

Nostalgia makes everything taste better.
In other news, Asian pianists play "without feelings".

A famous teacher and pianist has said something along the lines of: the young classical piano students of today are not very interesting people and are not leading interesting lives, unlike those of some time ago. And their playing reflects it.

I don't agree completely, but think there is some truth to that generalization. There are times when I feel like something akin to Invasion of the Body Snatchers has occurred and that most classical musicians have turned into pod people. Except they are slightly more advanced pod people than those in the movie, because they can achieve some shallow emotion. But the real depth and poetic truth that is possible in some classical music seems completely unknown to them.

Avoiding the "body snatchers" image, since it's a movie I've never seen, I will simply repeat what many have said in various guises: In order to portray or project an emotion, you have to have experienced that emotion.

Young musicians just out of the conservatory have very little of life experience with which they can "colour" or inform their interpretations. Given time, as I suggested in an earlier post, many of these bright young things may eventually develop into musicians of great character, insight and interpretation.

How can we expect these new musicians to have depth and character in their interpretations (unless they simply copy what they are told to copy) until they have some maturing experiences? Let's give them some time before we write them off as superficial, unfeeling technical wizards.

Of course, if one doesn't believe that life experiences have an impact and effect on interpretation, then my point is moot, isn't it?

Regards,

I wasn't talking about the OP though, I was referring to Atrys' comment about technique. I think I even included the whole double quote...not that you cared to read the 2 sentences I included for that reason.

The way I see it, this is a pedagogical problem. We have lots of teachers doing a great job of teaching their students how to train their fingers, but doing a poor job of teaching their students how to train their music sense. Many or all of the fast fingered younguns have the capability to be great musicians, and they may very well become great musicians.

Yes, I think life experience will affect interpretation, but the teacher/pianist I was talking about was comparing students of different eras, not students and older performers. I think his thought was that the culture and the people it produces, or at least those going into classical music, have changed.

I think he may be at least partly right, although it's difficult to describe the change. I don't feel far enough removed from it to see it with much clarity. But it seems to me we are living in times that are really quite different than those that produced the "great" pianists and pianist/composers of the past.

Here's an example, just a tiny little sliver of modern life that I think is telling. Just a couple of days ago, I was in a hardware store, surrounded by plumbing supplies. The background music, while I was figuring out which ballcock replacement assembly I needed, was the last movement of the Waldstein sonata. My guess is that they were piping in the local "lite" Classical radio station, which happened to get a bit "heavy" for a moment or two.

But what is truly strange to me and very different from even the fairly recent past is how we live in times where, for one thing, hardware stores even have background music at all, but moreover, that something like the Waldstein is just more vaguely musical noise that's going on while shopping. From my point of view, I'd think everybody in the store would be stopped dead in their tracks to listen, but of course, no one in the place seemed to pay any special attention at all.

Things are not the same...

Trigalg693,

My aim was not to single you out. The thread addressed technique very early on, as many think better technique is all-round 'better.' It's also not wrong for the post to have gone in that direction. I just wanted to point it out. I could have quoted Atrys to make the same point, but I wasn't prepared to have my feelings hurt again.

Technique is a resource, it'a like money. I like Bruce's speech about life experience, that's also a resource. We all have different things that go into our music.

I like Barenboim's comment that the difference between the old guys and modern players is the sense of harmony. There's a harmonic grammar that is heard in old recordings that I can't say I've heard live yet.

I will add that the writings on piano technique from the 'golden age' invariably emphasize that a student of piano should also investigate other subjects such as literature, art, philosophy, foreign languages and they should travel as much as possible to see the world. Of course undergraduate studies will require some electives in other subjects but I think the approach is quite different from what it used to be. With a more rounded education I would think a pianist may have a lot more to say over just playing the notes correctly.

This discussion of life experience reminds me of a monologue by the English comedienne, Joyce Grenfell. In this monologue she is an impressionable "young thing" talking to a famous author (I paraphrase; I don't have the exact text) :

"Do you think that ... ah ... a writer has to experience the things that he writes about? I mean, have you actually experienced ... ah ... those things?

Oh, really? Well, then, I guess I shall never write about anything. I mean, I live in the country and nothing ever happens in the country!"

Regards,

There are feelings that are intrinsic to music, right there in the score, no outside experience really needed. Calmness, tension, release, anxiety, joy, it's all there.

Last month I attended some student recitals. One was a Copland piece. When it was finished I was all jitters and on edge. The next piece was a Mozart violin sonata. It was the perfect "antidote" to the Copland.

It might be "all there" in the music, but the question of understanding the depth of it because you have experienced it yourself cannot necessarily be gleaned from what is marked in the score.

For that reason one of the great pianists - I wish I had the particular quote at hand - said that he never even attempted to begin to study the late Beethoven Sonatas until past the age of 50 because he was not mature enough (i.e. not enough life experience) to begin to understand and be able to interpret them as his later wisdom told him that they should be interpreted.

It's hard to appreciate how a mature performance of a great work can be realized by someone whose only connection with the emotions inherent in the music is what is written on the page.

Regards,

Life experience doesn't make a good musician.

Life experience makes a better musician.

I wouldn't say they were better, just different and more of them, which I find odd. I haven't found anyone in the new crop that interests me as much and I really wish there were, if only to get better fidelity recordings of the pieces I like.

Despite my very advanced age , I do think that people mistake life experience for musical maturity.

I've heard what struck me as rather immature performances from mature pianists, and amazingly mature performances from young pianists. If I didn't know who was playing, I'd have guessed that the mature performances were by pianists much older. But that's me succumbing to my preconceptions - that only pianists of mature years can produce mature performances.

Let's take the late Beethoven piano sonatas, the locus classicus of piano works that 'demand' musical maturity. Maurizio Pollini's performance of Op.111, to my mind, has never been surpassed for its insight, Innigkeit, spirituality and, of course, complete technical control. Listen to his live YouTube performance, made when he was.....31. His famous studio recordings of Op.109 - 111 followed soon after.

And the latest pianist to follow in his footsteps is even younger - Igor Levit, whose recent late Beethoven sonatas (in live performances and on CD) were universally acclaimed, with good reason. He is just 26. Has he lived long enough to even think of presenting this sublime music to the world? Has he gone through enough life experiences to do justice to Beethoven's greatest utterances? He can certainly play Rzewski's The People United Will Never Be Defeated! with great aplomb, and supply his own brilliant cadenza for it, but late Beethoven???

Well, listen to his performances without preconceptions and prejudices, and......believe .

It can, but you have to have the life experience and musical experience it takes to hear it.

There have been numerous performers and composers whose art I didn't really appreciate until I had accumulated enough experience so that I could comprehend what I was hearing. The great thing about that is that, once you realize how it works, you can see that there doesn't have to be an end to learning and growing in musical understanding, as long as you are alive and your mental faculties are more or less intact.

I agree with this, when we speak of classical music.
In rock and pop (possibly jazz as well, with which I am not very familiar), recordings exist as well; but life performances don't sound like the recordings. In fact, I believe that a rock or pop artist where every life performance sounded exactly like the recordings would not stay in business for long.

In classical music, there is maybe a type of music where for layman ears technical accuracy is less important than musicality: Avant-garde compositions. In fact, I believe that in a serial piece, or one without harmony or rhythm, many people couldn't tell if all the notes are really the notes the composer intended. The challenge here is to bring the music alive to people; to make it interesting.

Maybe that was the challenge for the old pianists who were active before mass media: Bring the pieces alive. If not all notes are correct: Who cares; as long as the overall impression is moving.

Today, the pieces are known to the public (at least the pieces mostly played; the likes of Bach, Beethoven, Chopin, Liszt or Rachmaninoff seem to dominate the piano recitals); so maybe young pianists try to impress the public with technical prowess. Some may like it; others may prefer a technically less accurate performance if it moves them.

So to answer the OP: No, the old crop is not better than the new, or vice-versa. It's just different.
Reason: In music, there is no universal "better". It's all a matter of taste.

IMO comments that most of today's young pianists are just technicians is completely untrue. I have been going to the Mannes IKIF for 15 years and have heard numerous young pianists who I think are terrific musically as well as technically. I just heard another one tonight...the amazing Magdalena Baczewska. Last year, the unbelievably great Federico Coli comes to mind. I have heard both Baczewska and Kobrin many times in master classes, and I guarantee anyone who hears them give just a single one hour lesson would be amazed at their musical understanding.

I think one could easily argue that since the general level of technical ability is so high today, the logical conclusion is that the young pianists who have won major competitions must have something else besides technique because a big technique for all the finalists is a given.

I think if one looks at the winners or finalists of any of the majors competitions, virtually all of them are great musicians as well as big technicians.

Right. Prior to the advent of recordings, nobody much cared whether they were note perfect or not, since they hadn't been invented yet.

To be more serious - in addition to the effect recordings have had on performance, there was also the shift away from a somewhat cavalier attitude towards scores to the idea of being "true to the text" and its close sibling, the urtext edition. To me, both seem connected, at least in spirit, to the ideal of the note perfect performance/recording.

Finalists, yes, if by major you mean the kind of competition that will make you an instant international star. Winners, not necessarily. Often times they'll hand the top prize to the people with higher accuracy and control but considerably less musicality. Other times politics kick in.