Perfect Pianists at the BBC

For the last 60 years, the BBC has been broadcasting performances

from the great names in history of the piano.

From Horowitz to Hess.

From Richter to Rubinstein.

Lupu to Lang Lang.

Tonight, I'm going to show you some of the finest of them,

our Perfect Pianists.

There couldn't be a better place to think about pianists than here

at Hatchlands in Surrey, home to the Cobbe collection

of keyboard instruments.

With gems like this Broadwood grand,

on which Frederic Chopin played his last recital in London in 1848.

Every piano has its own distinctive voice and every pianist is unique.

APPLAUSE

We're going to start with a pianist who for some was the greatest of all time -

Vladimir Horowitz.

He would travel the world with his own piano

and sell-out halls across the globe.

The BBC filmed his last recital in London in 1982.

Horowitz was famous for playing with flattish fingers,

but I notice more how he tucks in his little fingers

and only unfurls them when he needs them.

Kissin does the same.

What a sport's scientist would make of it, I can't imagine,

but it doesn't seem too slow them down.

APPLAUSE

Vladimir Horowitz was still playing in public well into his eighties,

as was our next perfect pianist, Arthur Rubinstein,

the embodiment of the great tradition,

the long unbroken line of pianists going back to the 19th century.

Here he is in the Royal Festival Hall in 1968 at the age of 81

playing the A-flat Polonaise by his fellow countryman Chopin.

This is Chopin's own piano, by the way.

Look out for Rubinstein's relaxed hands.

Here's Rubinstein in conversation with Bernard Levin,

explaining how our great pianist keeps a piece fresh every time.

How do you work into the music while you're playing?

I mean, work which is entirely familiar to you,

the notes themselves are deep buried in your subconscious,

you don't need to think about them - how does it come?

-Well, you used the word familiar, but you shouldn't have used.

-I'm sorry. I know, I know.

-You know what I mean?

-Yes, I do.

-That's just the one thing I'm not.

-Yes?

The work are not familiar with me.

-I never, never treated them in a familiar way.

-Mm-hm.

You see, I played hundreds of times the Polonaise of Chopin A-flat.

I played very many times the Appassionata of Beethoven.

I played most of Chopin's ballades or Scherzo.

I mean, works of Chopin very, very, very much.

But I...

I mean, knowing them well - I mean, well in my head,

I never play them through. Never.

I go to the concert with a feeling of the little heart beating -

do I own the piece, or not? I mean, what will happen?

And this, "what will happen?" is all for the good,

because that prompts that new approach,

that same mystery about it that the public feels.

That makes it alive, that makes it alive.

You'll get a good view of the famous Rubinstein long little finger

sliding from a black note to a white note.

It's an aspect of technique that's sometimes forgotten these days,

but, you know, that's why the black notes have sloping ends.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

One of the reasons we can put together a programme like this at the BBC

is that so many pianists choose to live in London,

Uchida and Perahia, for instance.

The 1970s were a particular heyday.

Here's the German-American Andre Previn

and the Romanian pianist Radu Lupu on his trademark kitchen chair

taking us back to those hairier days in London

with the Grieg Concerto - best loved of all.

Think 1973.

Some aspects of the great tradition - white tie and tails, for instance -

right out of the window, though back with us mainly these days.

But the playing is firmly in the tradition.

Except, watch for Lupu's technical innovation,

when instead of bothering with both hands for the arpeggios

all the way up the keyboard, he just leaves it to the right hand on its own.

A pianist I much admire is Sviatoslav Richter.

APPLAUSE

There's a story that when he was invited to Paris to record Chopin's ballades,

he spent days on end in bed smoking while the money ticked away

and then one day he turned up at the recording studio

and gave the most wonderful performance and vanished.

He was very much more than just a keyboard lion -

he was a wonderful Debussy player -

but I can't resist showing you two films, maybe 20 years apart,

of Chopin's C-sharp minor study.

And if you think it's fast at the beginning - you wait.

Richter - always associated with those dazzling fingers.

Our next perfect pianist, Alfred Brendel,

is more generally associated with his dazzling intellect.

Here he is playing Schubert's G-flat Impromptu,

with the plasters that he always wears on his finger ends.

One of my favourite melodies. Schubert, the great song composer,

found the secret of making the piano sing, too.

In the 20th century, people came to think about tradition in different ways.

Not just handing it on, or inhabiting it,

but inventing new ones or rediscovering forgotten ones.

Take the music of JS Bach, for instance.

Dame Myra Hess, still famous for her morale-building

wartime concerts in the National Gallery,

made an arrangement of the chorale Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring.

And it practically became her signature tune.

Myra Hess, with her own arrangement of Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring.

Every virtuoso will interpret music in a personal way.

And one of the most personal of Bach interpreters

became one of the most charismatic

and controversial pianists of the 20th century.

The Canadian, Glenn Gould, who was on a mission

to free performance from unnecessary clutter.

His performance of Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier

was considered so exquisite that they put it on Voyager 1 in 1977

so that some alien civilisation would see

the best of what the human race could do.

Here's the youthful Humphrey Burton,

to whom British music on television became to owe so much,

interviewing Glenn Gould.

First of all, Gould explains his whole philosophy of performance.

Pretty startling, Humphrey found it, as you'll see.

So let me give you one example, the Allemande from Partita.

Now, this is the way, as I recall, I played it back in 1957,

on recording, if you can believe it.

Would you like a dose of smelling salts now, or later?

-A dose of smelling salts?

-Yes. I mean, it's disgraceful.

One has to be revived after hearing Bach played like that.

-On the other hand...

-Play it how you think it should be played.

How I think it should be...? Well, it's obvious.

JAUNTY RECITAL

This is not a piece about which one can have doubts.

What I sacrificed in version number one, in the recorded version,

was the spine of the music. The whole backbone was gone.

And it was gone precisely because I knew perfectly well,

as a travelling pro, so to speak,

that if, in fact, I kept that backbone,

it would sound a little tedious in a concert hall.

Because that great, vast thing that needs to be absorbed out there,

um...was going to ruin... It wasn't going to project

the clarity that I wanted people to live off.

You're really a recording pianist, aren't you?

Totally a recording pianist, I'm happy to say now.

Why so much love for recordings?

Because it's the future. The concert hall as we know it is dead.

It's dead.

The Festival Hall's doing quite good business,

as is the New York Philharmonic Hall.

I don't know if you're a gambling man, but don't put money on it

that it will still be doing good business in the year 1999.

You mean, the people won't want to go

and listen to a Tchaikovsky concert, even, or...?

I'll be very disappointed in the audience I think is growing up now

if they do want to go and listen to a Tchaikovsky concert.

CHEERING AND APPLAUSE

Well, here are thousands of people

listening to Tchaikovsky in the Royal Albert Hall.

A big disappointment to Glenn Gould, I dare say.

Lang Lang delighting the unrepentant crowd.

The founder of modern piano technique was Franz Liszt,

with his Etudes of Transcendental Execution.

And it was Liszt who catapulted the brilliant British pianist

John Ogdon to fame when he won the London Liszt competition in 1961.

That same year, aged 24, he came into the BBC to record

Liszt's phenomenally-challenging Dante Sonata.

This little piano, built in London in 1778,

bears the signature of Johann Sebastian Bach's youngest son,

Johann Christian, who came to live in London

after he'd been the organist of the cathedral in Milan.

It was in northern Italy that the pianoforte was invented

at the beginning of the 18th century by Bartolomeo Cristofori.

The harpsichord with little hammers, they called it at first.

And the first great composer to write for it was an Italian, too.

Domenico Scarlatti. An exact contemporary of JS Bach.

People used to think Scarlatti's sonatas

were written for the harpsichord, but we pianists know better.

Here's Murray Perahia, fresh from his triumph

in the 1972 Leeds piano competition,

with Scarlatti's Sprightly G major Sonata.

Pure and clear, with the left hand just as good as the right.

Murray Perahia with Scarlatti from the 18th century,

like this little instrument.

And believe it or not, it was this tiny sort of instrument

for which the world's first piano concertos were written.

In London, about the year 1770,

with an orchestra of just two violins and a cello,

so as not to drown it.

HE PLAYS

Everything's got a lot bigger since then.

When Rachmaninov wrote his second piano concerto,

he was a master of the rich textures

and colours of the symphony orchestra as we know it today.

At the first performance,

Rachmaninov played the solo part himself.

And 100 years later, another Russian-born pianist,

Evgeny Kissin, played it at the Proms.

The full panoply of the Russian tradition.

Evgeny Kissin is a celebrated interpreter of Rachmaninov's music,

but our next perfect pianist actually knew the great composer.

His name was Benno Moiseiwitsch.

And Rachmaninov even called him his spiritual heir.

Here's Moiseiwitsch in 1954 playing Traumes Wirren, Confused Dreams,

by Robert Schumann,

a composer whose own dreams of becoming a virtuoso pianist

were spoilt by injury.

Look at Moiseiwitsch's lovely, level, balanced hands.

Although he must have played this piece hundreds of times,

he manages to make those little hesitations

that he decides to introduce between the phrases

sound perfectly spontaneous.

During the 1950s,

the BBC regularly broadcast recitals from great classical musicians.

In 1956, they invited a pianist from the East End of London

who was so famous that he needed just a single name - Solomon.

No programme on perfect pianists could be complete

without the music of Mozart.

In fact, in his time,

he was as famous a pianist as he was a composer.

Here's Ingrid Fliter with the A major Concerto (K.488).

Piano concertos are always vehicles for virtuosos.

Mozart wrote his piano concertos to show the people of Vienna

what a marvellous pianist he was.

And when Beethoven arrived there in his turn, he followed suit.

The great moment in a concerto is always the cadenza,

when the orchestra puts its instruments down

and the spotlight's just on the soloist.

Beethoven wrote some marvels for his fourth piano concerto in G.

And Dame Mitsuko Uchida's performance of it

alternates between delicacy and power.

RAPTUROUS APPLAUSE

And now to Beethoven's piano sonatas, the core of the repertoire.

Beethoven's pianistic diary all through his life.

Here's Claudio Arrau from Chile with an intense performance

of what many of us regard as Beethoven's greatest piano sonata,

Opus 111 in C minor.

You'll notice how Arrau makes his famously magisterial tone

by pressing down the notes more slowly.

Even the fast ones.

The piano offers us such variety.

From a thread of half-heard melody to a peal of clanging chords.

No wonder it has such a special place in the musical world,

and our perfect pianists along with it.

Let's end with the BBC Proms and Stephen Hough,

certainly one of today's most perfect pianists.

With the final two variations from Rachmaninov's masterpiece,

Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini.

RAPTUROUS APPLAUSE

Good night

and bonsoir.

Bonsoir and good night

to all my friends here and abroad.

Good night and bonsoir.

PIANO RECITAL

APPLAUSE