The Most Kindest Cut of All
Advisory: Some Music Lovers Might Find the Following Comments Disturbing.
The Boston Symphony recently gave a Tanglewood performance of the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3 with the world-class pianist, Kirill Gerstein, at the keyboard. The concerto, considered one of the most technically challenging is in the entire piano repertoire, hovers around 45 minutes of lush, unapologetic Romanticism. Gerstein pulled it off with aplomb, hardly breaking a sweat. As a string player, I’ve often asked myself, “How can anyone play so many notes at the same time, and for so long?” I have enough trouble playing one at a time.
Did I use the word “hovers?” Maybe I should have said “wallows.” While there are indeed many transcendentally beautiful moments in the concerto (as there are in everything Rachmaninoff composed) those moments are repeated…and repeated…and repeated to the point that the music often loses any sense of direction. It’s like a river that meanders into a boundless wetland as it approaches the sea. (Picture the scene of Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn awaiting their torpid doom on the becalmed African Queen.)
It was not uncommon for great performers of earlier generations to make surgical cuts in music, including the Rachmaninoff Third, that had this tendency toward excessive repetition; for example, Jascha Heifetz’s rendering of the Tchaikovsky violin concerto and the Bruch “Scottish Fantasy.” (One reason might have been totally pragmatic: They had to fit a concerto on one side of an LP.)
Even symphonies, such as the Rachmaninoff Symphony No. 2, were subject to musical tummy tucks––careful, well-considered excision of a phrase here, a phrase there, reconnected seamlessly so there is no sense that anything is missing. All in all, a weight reduction of five to ten percent. I recall performing that symphony with the acclaimed conductor James DePreist, who revised the score with even more cuts than was customary. It might have been a leaner and meaner Rachmaninoff, but it lost none of the lush, Romantic sheen for which it is justifiably admired. Additionally, the cuts made the architecture of the piece more perceptible to the listener, enhancing the experience.
These days there has been a trend towards musical “authenticity.” Ironically, that trend means opposite things depending on whether you’re playing Baroque music or music that came later. Baroque composers not only accepted, but expected the performer to take the score and run with it; i.e., creatively mold it into something new every time it’s performed by adding ornaments, cadenzas, changes of tempo, dynamics, and the like. Some of today’s great Baroque artists create magically reinvented performances of everything from Vivaldi to Handel.
On the other hand, starting with the music of Mozart and moving forward, there has been a growing tendency to make every note and every marking in the score sacrosanct, and to tinker has become verboten. Hence, those well-chosen cuts in Rachmaninoff have often been taken off the boards. What we’re left with are bloated and outdated musical dirigibles. Gerstein’s performance of the piano concerto would have been at least as impressive in a tightened version. (The longest that I’ve found, by Evgeny Kissin, clocked in at 50 minutes. The quickest—and, I imagine, with cuts—was by Yefim Bronfman at 38. Vladimir Horowitz, who made that concerto his signature piece, did it in a middle of the road 43 minutes.) As an author, I’ve stated in the past that if Mahler had had a good editor, as they do in book publishing, his Fifth Symphony would have been a much better piece of music.
As the great entertainer, Liberace, said of the reason for his success––For those who scoff, from the 1950s to the 1970s he was the highest paid entertainer in the world––was that he played "classical music with the boring parts left out." It’s the opposite end of purism, perhaps, but still something that should be considered, especially by composers.
In a related issue, what about repeats in symphonies? Baroque suites and sinfonias were generally five to fifteen minutes long in their entirety. They were often based upon traditional dances and, as such, movements were in bipartite form, each section repeating. In musical terms: A-A, B-B. Over the next several generations, well into the 19th and early 20th centuries, that form evolved into symphonies that were thirty, forty, fifty, sixty…ninety minutes long. Yet, almost like a vestigial organ, composers often kept those repeat signs at the end of each section.
Does it make sense to make some of those repeats? Certainly. Does it make sense to make all of them? I don’t think so, especially at the end of a long symphony. Who needs to hear the same ending twice? Where’s the surprise in that? The second half of the last movement of Mozart’s Symphony No. 41, “Jupiter,” is a miracle the first time through. The second time, it’s “Been there, done that.” A decade ago, the Boston Symphony performed the last three Mozart symphonies under James Levine. He had great ideas, but he took every repeat. The concert was over three hours long. Oof. Who wasn’t looking at their watch, other than Levine? In the 1980s, Sir Colin Davis conducted the BSO in a performance of Schubert’s “Great” C Major Symphony, a symphony that’s as dear to my heart as any. Again, he took all the repeats. It took an hour, earning the wrath of the violin players, whose arms were falling off. So were his, and, to my knowledge, he never did it that way again.
When these symphonies were first performed, I think it was valid and important to play all the repeats for the following reasons: 1) They had never been heard before, so listeners needed to absorb it the first time around in order to fully appreciate it the second time through; and 2) We’re talking about the days before recorded music, so a concert was a major event with audiences experiencing these symphonies for the one and only time in their lives.
These days, we can listen to all the great symphonies at the click of a mouse. It may swell a conductor’s sense of dedication to the composer to take all the repeats in a live performance, but it is not only redundant and often boring, it’s also misplaced. The nineteenth-century conductor, Fritz Steinbach, a friend and colleague of Brahms, whose interpretations of Brahms’s symphonies won the composer’s praise, claimed that Brahms himself never took first movement repeats, and advised against them. A friend of mine recently related to me how Brahms, in a rare interview, responded to the question of whether the repeat should be made in the first movement of his Symphony No. 2. To paraphrase: “If the performance is in Mannheim, take the repeat because they’ve never heard it there. If it’s in Vienna, don’t bother, because they’ve heard it a lot.”
Brahms conducting
So, there you go. Oh, before I forget… Guess which great pianist made ten minutes of cuts in the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3 when he recorded it with Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1940? You guessed it. Serge Rachmaninoff.
Practicality and common sense rule the day. And you thought Liberace and Rachmaninoff had nothing in common.
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