Lydia's Brilliant Glazunov

Written by Stephen Brivati
Published: December 31, 2013 at 10:27 PM [UTC]

I really liked this performance. Lydia says she is not happy with it but I was impressed. I listened through to the end which is one of the biggest compliments I can pay a violinist. Lydia says she will never play like she did as a twelve year old again but I have to ask why can't she play even better? Lydia, surely you are smarter now? I am an exception to this rule, by the way....

It's interesting because in a recent post Lydia talked about developing a more richer, more soloistic sound, but actually she has a great sound. Listen to the video and check it out for yourself. At this level of playing although one can (and often should) go right back to basics just like Heifetz et al. did every morning, it is not as simple as pointing out to a novice that playing with the violin upside down while swinging from a chandelier is not the best way to get a sound. So I tried to find some answers from within the performance. This is not, by the way a critique of that per se, but simply using it as a spring board to get some ideas down.

When you listen to Ida Haendel play one distinctive feature of her art is she decides that a certain note has a great deal more significance than any of the surrounding notes and she just hammers you over the head with it. One is just recovering from this with some gorgeous sonority when, 'wham!' she whack you between the eyes again. This is not ad hoc of course although for my taste she overdoes it on occasion. It all creates a logical musical structure. Heifetz was an absolute master of unerringly picking out the single note that not only made a whole phrase cohere but even a whole movement. There is an f# in the slow movement of the Tchaikovsky that no violinist has ever poured so much gasoline on and it is just perfect. (You find it) This is what I wanted to hear more of.

After that I started thinking on what is one of the most significant aspects of a violinist's art: ending a phrase. Technical issues aside it is often a question of being in the present. Human nature being what it is, many violinists, including very advanced ones, are already thinking ahead before they have finished a phrase with the result that the ending in question is chucked away in an insensitive and inappropriate way. This is very common indeed. We are often exhorted to 'read ahead' and improve our sight reading by 'learning to read further and further ahead.' I think this is in part correct but either taken too far or misunderstood. Perhaps Szigeti explains this mystery best when he says 'we should never read ahead. That is what produces banal playing. Our mind literally should be in two places at once.' Go figure... Anyway, one of the few slightly negative impressions I got from the performance under discussion was of not quite paying attention to the brilliant top notes at the end of great sweeping passages as though the soloist was relieved to have got there and was only to anxious to get the next one over with. In this way much drama was lost. Possible solution: Kreutzer no.12.

Kreutzer is the business for us fiddle players. There has to be a good reason Heifetz, Szigeti, Wieniawski et al., played these etudes right to the end of their careers. Or that Zhakar Bron teaches them in their entirety twice to his full time students. Once when they are young and again 'at an artsitic level' when they are advanced. As an aside, if I had the kind of talent Lydia has and I was coming back from a ten year hiatus I would have great confidence in using only the Kreutzer etudes.

Then I asked myself 'When you can play a concerto like the Glazunov rather well from almost all perspectives how can one dig deeper to where the real learning begins?' Personally I would like to begin to see it unfolding as a kind of narrative. The more I have looked at this work over time the more it has settled in a kind of vision for me I cannot shake off.

That is: the first-ever extensive use of scorched earth warfare in history: Napoleon's unsuccessful invasion of Russia celebrated in the 1812 overture. The opening of the concerto is something dark and brooding on the Siberian horizon as black and menacing evil begins to awaken from slumber. The tranquillo section beginning figure four is an (probably) idyllic Russian village where peasants live out there lives and loves according to the seasons with little sense of the impending outside world. When the theme returns later in the cadenza it does not refer to the youthful innocence of rural life but rather I see an equally young shoeless French soldier with feet frozen black from gangrene. As he fall to his knees to die in the snow his last act is to pull out a picture of the girlfriend he left behind in France. The tears just freeze in his eye sockets. The same theme because the pity of war is always the fallen on both sides. The animando following this (fig29) is the tentative awakening of hope for victory and life beginning again in the hearts of frightened children. And of course the final Allegro is unrestrained joy interspersed with odd moments of doubt and returning fears as the inevitable bi-product of war.

Of course, this is just something I have stuck on top and is hardly valid for anyone else but, distinct from the idea of program music is in my opinion, the idea that the composer meant to say something or elicit something in some way beyond mere sound and pleasure in sound although that is enough for many. And who cares if it is the wrong thing?;)

Prokofiev once asked Szigeti if he could attend a rehearsal of his first violin concerto. Szigeti refused permission stating that he had developed his own ideas on the work. Justifying this action later, Szigeti explained with his customary eloquence that although a composer is a parent of a work, like all parents they have to let it go its own way at some point and that as a performer he had actually lived more with the work than the composer himself.

Anyway, thanks for sharing that thoroughly enjoyable performance. Looking forward to the next one. I think I need to get back to Kreutzer....

Happy New Year,
Buri