Murray Perahia overheats
NORDLINGER, JAY
Murray Perahia Overheats A Pianist's Disappointing Return to the Stage By Jay Nordlinger Piano recitals aren't normally big deals, but the one at Carnegie Hall on April 5 was different: Murray...
...And though he was no keyboard-eater, the mass of music fans recognized his rare musicality and bought his recordings in great numbers...
...And, indeed, he played it commendably, but he marred his performance with some ill-judged strayings from the score...
...Perahia was an heir to a peculiar tradition exemplified by Myra Hess and Dinu Lipatti: the self-effacing musician whose spiritual aura inspires a cultish adoration...
...He played this music well—he had not lost his essential nature—but he was playing with increasing speed, volume, and theatricality, as though someone had whispered in his ear, "Don't be such a square, Murray—put your heart into it...
...Little personality or individual emotion was involved...
...Per-ahia as Perahia was—is—good enough...
...The second movement went better, song-like and chaste, and the third movement was old Perahia, all elegant and aristocratic...
...He has been regarded as an important, mature pianist since he was 25, when he won the Leeds competition in England...
...The last move-ment—the well-loved "Harmonious Blacksmith" variations—sounded like Brahms by the end, and sloppy, bloated Brahms at that...
...He is full of body movement as well, making large, almost cartoonish arm gestures and shaking his head near-constantly...
...Horowitz was a brilliant man, no less a musician than Perahia, but he was a supervirtuoso and eccentric, the kind of musician that Perahia had decidedly not been...
...He was not a showhorse, no Artur Rubinstein or Vladimir Horowitz...
...And yet, he was unsatisfied...
...Per-ahia was the first pianist in years to be signed up by CBS Masterworks (now Sony...
...He wanted more—a big technique, a monster technique, a circus-freak technique, like, say, Andre Watts had...
...This type of physical prowess is unnecessary for the canonical repertory in which Perahia excelled, but it is required for the glitzier, flashier repertory, which he began to program and record...
...But he blustered through the piece like a talented teenager carried away in improvisation...
...Unsettling as Perahia's recital was, it was not, as two-thirds of the Schubert proved, completely bereft of the qualities that made him a pianist's pianist...
...Perahia opted for an extreme: a broad, romantic approach, outsized and over-pedaled...
...In his search for his own expressiveness, Perahia has become more ordinary...
...Though many have tried, no pianist has ever succeeded at Horowitz imitation, including Horowitz himself at times, when he fell into self-caricature...
...instead, he presented the music with humility, faithfulness, and reverence...
...When his legato is on, no pianist is creamier...
...his recordings of the complete Mozart concertos and the Schubert impromptus are bestsellers today and probably always will be...
...Maybe Perahia was traumatized by his exile from the piano...
...Diminished, too, is his singing line, formerly limpid and pristine...
...Then Perahia was laid up, leading to cruel speculation that his injury was punishment for (literal) overreaching...
...For example, he paused bizarrely before the top note of the opening phrase instead of playing it straightforwardly, as he once would have...
...Which is a crying shame...
...Next came Schumann's Kreisleri-ana, a stormy, histrionic work that benefits from the pianistic restraint that Perahia was famous for...
...What's more, he struck up an ominous friendship with Horowitz, in the older man's last years...
...He brooded, agonized, and took stock...
...Maybe he is more vulnerable to experimentation than most seasoned musicians because he was never a Wunderkind— he started fully formed...
...correctness, the kind of pianist every composer would wish to play his music, the kind of performer the pure-minded teachers would encourage their students to hear and emulate...
...The trick here is to balance Baroque harpsichord style with the capacities of the modern piano...
...He had been absent from the concert stage for most of the '90s, nursing an injury to his hand (caused by a mere paper cut, which led to an infection and bone spur...
...He fell into depression and intense self-examination...
...Per-ahia is markedly less modest than he was, more willing to place himself at the center of things...
...The Schubert "little A-major" sonata—so called to distinguish it from a later, larger work in the same key—ought to be right up Perahia's alley...
...Great enough, in fact...
...Much of the simplicity has been drained from Perahia's playing, its clarity and innocence...
...He was particularly effective with Mozart and Schubert...
...And when he reemerged last month, he was back to a more appropriate reper-tory—and yet he still played as though he believed he should be a grander, more passionate pianist...
...He was often described as a "priest" or "poet-priest" of the piano, approaching each piece as its servant, rather than using it as a plaything or vehicle...
...He can still ooze liquid from the keyboard, making the piano seem more a string instrument than a percussion one...
...And he still has a gift for allotting the proper weight to the notes, leaving nothing wrongly accented...
...He misses more notes now—and apparently not from lingering physical difficulties—and his playing seems strained...
...He was a stickler for Associate editor Jay Nordlinger last wrote for The Weekly Standard about Wagner's "Ring...
...Murray Perahia Overheats A Pianist's Disappointing Return to the Stage By Jay Nordlinger Piano recitals aren't normally big deals, but the one at Carnegie Hall on April 5 was different: Murray Perahia was back...
...These physical indulgences would not bear mentioning if they did not mirror an altered musical understanding...
...His Handel was fraught with muddles and affectations, which had never been part of his playing...
...He began his recital at Carnegie with a Handel suite in E-major...
...Perahia is 50 years old and ought to have another 25 years of concerts left in him...
Vol. 2 • May 1997 • No. 34
