Classical musicians/music lovers, a question about interpretation.

Cafe Society
1

I took piano lessons for about a year. During that time the Pianist came out and I saw it and bought the soundtrack. One of the pieces was Chopin’s Ballade No.1 which was featured in a pivotal scene in the movie. It was played on the soundtrack by Janusz Olejniczak. I thought it was excellent.

So I brought the soundtrack in to share with my teacher(B.A. piano performance, working on MFA at the time). Next week’s lesson she said she was kind of underwhelmed by the pianist’s interpretation.

So my question is what makes a good interpretation? Why Glenn Gould’s Bach or Kissin’s Chopin or Uchida’s Mozart? I’ve listened to other versions of the Ballade but I never heard one where I thought OMG that’s horrible.

I don’t listen to a tremendous amount of classical and 99% of my classical music education before taking piano lessons came from cartoons, commercials and movies.

2

If you were to ask me, I’d voice the opinion that musical interpretation is a personal matter of opinion. I also think that a person’s like or dislike of a particular interpretation is a matter of how they were trained, what they’re used to hearing, etc. A single piece of music can be interpreted many different ways. Just because one person doesn’t like the way a piece was performed, doesn’t make it any less valid as an art performance.

That said, there’s a LOT of classical pieces I’ve heard performed that I just don’t care for. I could have done it better. IMHO!

3

How you are trained, especially in classical contexts, matters an awful lot. You’re expected to show a very high loyalty to your teacher’s school and style, at least until you’ve earned a few laurels under his or her tutelage.

4

I find I’m particularly partial to pieces I’ve played and poured my heart and soul into. If I hear someone do it and they don’t seem to have their heart in it, I can tell… and I don’t like it. I know how it should go, and when it doesn’t go that way, I don’t like it. The music itself hasn’t changed, but how it was played has.

5

enomaj, have you listened to other interpretations of that piece? Did your teacher recommend one?

I had to buy a new copy of some Beethoven sonatas, since I don’t have a turntable any more, and I got one with three sonatas–Moonlight, Les Adieux, Pathetique–that I thought just sucked. Particularly Moonlight. It sounded hesitant, to me. Yet somebody found it worthy enough to record. So I had to buy another one or else not listen (or I could always play it myself, except talk about hesitant!).

Also, I used to listen to a version of the Ruslan & Ludmilla overture in the morning to wake me up–perfect wakeup music, fast and dynamic. I went to a Denver symphony concert where it was played and I almost cried it was so bad (Marin Allsop conducting, in general I don’t think much of her). Slow, draggy, no fff and no ppp, no color and a distinct lack of passion. If they couldn’t play it at speed they shouldn’t have played it at all IMO. I hardly recognized the piece. But people clapped.

Okay, so if there’s a slow interpretation and a faster one I will almost always prefer the faster one. The performers should still get most of the notes right and play in tune.

Listen to more pieces, and different versions. You will probably be able to tell the difference and have your own preference.

6

I agree that taste plays a major role in any evaluation of an interpretation; so do musical education and experience, which tend to reshape your taste over time.

When you say, you like or dislike an interpretation, it’d be unbearably arrogant to tell you that you are wrong to do so, but that doesn’t exclude a discussion of the skill of the player, the consistency of his approach and its variation from other interpretations and the likely intentions of the composer.

The Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23 is a fine piece to teach your ears to hear all of that and more.

It took Chopin four years to complete it; the final work was done when he arrived in Paris and was admitted into society.

The ballad is influenced by one of Mickiewicz’ poems, Konrad Wallenrod, and was dedicated to Monsieur le Baron de Stockhausen.

“So what?”, you might ask. Well, if you know the poem, for instance, you realize immediately why Chopin used alternating keys and what he wanted to express by it; you also understand that Chopin “narrates” a developing story that leads to an explosive conclusion.

If you have an idea about the intentions of a great composer, you have a much easier time to understand how he translated them into notation and why he chose, for instance, in m.216 and m. 218 Neapolitan chords held with an accented bass C.

Just think about the differences you’d hear, if he had chosen an iv chord …

The better you understand the accents, the melody, and the harmonic structure Chopin chose, the more you will get his idea and you will hear more and more differences among various interpretations.

An interpretation isn’t better because it follows Chopin’s intentions more closely, but the pianist should have a reason to deviate and his intentions should be consistently heard and create a harmonious or integral whole. Otherwise, he is second rate.

And btw., Chopin’s and Beethoven’s sonatas almost always tell you something about the pianist’s hands: he or she might play incredibly well, but only large hands will be able to play the entire score. :slight_smile:

7

Interpretation is how the performer has made sense of the composer’s ‘argument’. Consider the music like a paragraph of prose - as long as someone reads it and gets all the words right, it is a legitimate reading, but someone who is ‘only’ getting the words right isn’t getting to interpretation. To make true sense of the thing, the reader needs to understand every word, what it means in the context of the sentence and how it contributes to the sense of the paragraph. As wintertime stated so well, the composer chose our notes for us, but we have to ask ‘why?’ The answers we come up with will be unique to us, and form the basis of interpretation.

Part and parcel of that question ‘what does the composer mean by X?’ means trying to interpret in terms of the composer’s milieu and that idea changes radically over time. One of the interesting things from the original post is the mention of Glenn Gould playing Bach - in terms of our modern performance practice, there are those who dispute Gould’s interpretation. (There are those who just throw him out the window because he’s playing on a modern piano at modern pitch. I try not to speak to those people.) What I love about Gould’s Bach is how every phrase in a fugue is shaped in terms of its place in the phrase, in the paragraph and in the overall structure. I’ve heard other performers where a repeat had no meaning, it was just the same thing over again. If Gould hadn’t found the ‘why’, he didn’t do the repeat.

It’s interesting to listen for how interpretation has evolved over the years. The current taste is for a much stricter reading, based what went before and avoiding the influence of what came after. I’m thinking particularly of symphony recordings as I write this. The Mozart of Karl Bӧhm is now considered too romantic, too heavy, too pompous. Even played on modern instruments, the interpretation of James Levine is now considered ‘better’. And then, there are those who specialize in the interpretation of Mozart on period instruments - Nicholas Harnoncourt, Trevor Pinnock, etc. To my ears, the baby has gone out with the bathwater (I love the old Bӧhm recordings, even though I’m made to feel like some kind of old fart by some of my politically correct colleagues. Period instruments just get on my nerves, or maybe it’s just the vapid interpretations that often go along with them.)

Interpretation can also involve specialty. Gould’s intense intellectual rigour meant that his interpretation of more emotional music was rather stiff and awkward to my ears. He did much better with Hindemith and Schӧnberg than he did with Chopin and Strauss. The logic of the romantics is based on emotion rather than intellect, and that’ why I prefer someone like Rubenstein, Horowitz or Ashkenazi playing Chopin. (Actually, my favourite performance of the g minor is by Witold Malcuzinski, but I don’t know if it’s available other than as a used piece of vinyl. It was on the Angel label - I’ve heard him on other recordings that don’t move me as much, but on that session, he found something wonderful.)

Anyway, to me, once all the notes are right and the tempo is right, everything else that distinguishes one performance from another comes down to interpretation.

8

I only own one version of the Ballade. but iI have heard it once live(Leon Bates). My other listenings have come from youtube. We really didn’t discuss why she didn’t like the piece all that much though.

I used to listen to that recording so much that when I finally heard someone else play it, I thought, “Well. That’s different.” For instance Vladimir Horowitz uses a lot less pedal in the finale of the Ballade than Olejniczak