‘Cracking up!’
He could pretend no longer. ‘I’m going to pieces.’
‘Dear, oh dear.’ Oswald was ruffled with the greatest concern. ‘I’m extremely sorry to hear it. What can we do about that?’
‘A drink might help.’
‘Most certainly! Press that bell, will you.’
He pressed the bell.
Oswald urged a silver cigarette box on Philip. ‘You’ll have a cigarette?’
‘No thanks.’
Oswald took one for himself, tucked it between his teeth and snapped on a lighter. He looked enquiringly at Philip, exhaled smoke.
‘My dear fellow, what can the matter be?’
Philip’s face darkened. Oswald was a dangerous confidant. ‘You’d better give me an honest answer.’
Oswald looked suspiciously at his guest. Rarely was he asked to be honest.
‘Cub’s honour. Hope to die.’
‘What’s gone wrong with my playing?’
Oswald involuntarily smiled.
‘Please be serious.’
‘What’s wrong with anybody’s playing? You are doing what you have come to do, and what you are able to do.’
‘I’ve got problems, admit it.’
‘I’ll admit nothing.’
He had humiliated himself already. ‘Did you read the reviews?’
‘I don’t read reviews. I form my own opinion.’
‘You heard me play last year in Aldeburgh.’
‘Very fine, too.’
‘Oh, for God’s sake! Say what you really think! You’re always slagging off other pianists. Now’s a good chance to slag me off.’
Oswald was demure. ‘I don’t slag anyone off. The slag word is not in my vocabulary, thank you very much.’
‘Am I falling off?’
‘My dear fellow!’ He was pained and amused. He had not reckoned on a conversation like this in his private study after an exhausting party. ‘Nothing anybody can say to you makes a shred of difference if the main thing is there. If it isn’t, you’re lost anyway. You have what counts, and the rest is down to managing one’s temperament.’
Philip levered himself up in his chair. ‘That’s unusually diplomatic and evasive for someone with your talent for mockery.’
Oswald batted his eyelids. ‘You’re in wonderful form tonight.’
‘Yes. I know. Sorry.’
‘All very cosy in here,’ said a voice.
‘Brian!’
The broadly beaming face of Brian Bellew peered into the room. ‘Hello, hello, hello!’
Philip sighed heavily.
‘What impeccable timing,’ hailed Oswald. ‘Philip, you must talk to Brian.’
‘No, thank you. Brian’s a fucking critic!’
Brian thought this was most entertaining. ‘Fucking critic, eh!’
‘Philip’s having a crisis about his playing. You’d better join us.’
‘Love to.’
‘Oh, Christ!’
Brian crossed from the door in the direction of a third armchair. He tripped on the corner of the rug but just managed to keep his balance. He was a burly fifty-eight-year-old with a brainy forehead and glittery, irresponsible eyes.
‘You’re looking pretty festive,’ said Oswald.
‘D’you mean drunk, by any chance?’
‘Good heavens no, not drunk.’
Brian sank like a deadweight into the armchair. ‘Lovely party, my dear. Barry’s very attentive, I see.’
‘Thanks to the martinet skills of yours truly.’ Oswald curled a distinguished eyebrow. ‘Were I but twenty years younger . . .’
Brian’s torso rocked with schoolboy mirth.
‘I was very imposing as recently as ten years ago, I’ll have you know.’
‘You’re imposing now.’
‘I’m decomposing now!’
‘I think I might turn in,’ said Philip.
‘Don’t you dare!’ said Oswald. ‘Where the devil is Kevin? KEVIN!’
As luck would have it Barry was passing in the corridor outside. He stuck his head into the room.
Oswald snapped a finger. ‘Bottle of bubbly and three glasses for these gentlemen. Philip, stay where you are. We’re here to help.’
Barry nodded and vanished.
‘Patience, Brian! You’ll get an eyeful when he returns.’
Brian gasped at the imputation.
‘So hard to find diligent catamites these days.’
Brian burst out laughing. He recovered himself slowly, wiping a tear from his eye. ‘Philip, how are you?’
Oswald waved a cigarette. ‘Young Philip here wants to know what’s wrong with his playing.’
Brian blinked convincingly, commandeering seriousness.
‘He’s rather concerned about a review.’
Brian was deputy editor of the Musical Times. He crossed his legs. ‘A review?’
There was a pregnant pause.
‘Oh, yes. A review.’
‘Is this some kind of trap?’
Oswald smiled dangerously. ‘You look pretty trapped in that armchair.’
Brian was profoundly entrenched. ‘You’ll need a crane to get me out of here.’
‘Let’s not change the subject, shall we.’
Philip cast his eyes down in embarrassment.
‘Did you hear the recording?’
Brian tongued his underlip. ‘We haven’t . . . I think we haven’t done anything in the MT.’
‘Well, that in itself is cause for concern.’
‘Ignore him, Philip. He’s being mischievous.’
‘You’re thick with those bloodhounds at Gramophone?’
‘What am I saying? I did hear it. Somebody sent me the disc about a year ago. Gosh,’ Brian put fingers to forehead. ‘Sorry, Philip. No, I heard it. I thought . . .’
‘Say some reassuring words, for Christ’s sake, man!’
Brian wore his discomfort on his sleeve. ‘Well, I . . . what did I think . . . Of course you know I don’t do reviewing any more.’
Philip’s face was a mask.
‘That’s a paltry excuse!’
‘It was terrific. Technically remarkable. Beautifully refined, voiced, very sharply recorded. I think you’ve cut away a lot of lazy performance tradition . . .’
‘There you are, Philip.’
Brian nodded readily. ‘I’m a huge fan of your playing, Philip. Isn’t everyone?’
‘Not apparently your colleagues at Gramophone.’ Oswald turned ominously.
Brian shook his head in puzzlement.
‘Philip would like to know why.’
‘Well, I can’t answer for them.’
‘What!’ Oswald forced himself higher in the chair. ‘Are you telling me the profession has no weight of consensus! That you’re all breezy enthusiasts with your own opinionated grudges? I mean, is this just a sub-branch of belletrism, or what?’
Brian looked long-sufferingly at Philip. It was getting beyond a joke.
‘Can we trust Gramophone?’ said Oswald acidly.
Brian shook his head. ‘Reviewing’s not a science.’
‘This man is in a state of spiritual despair,’ said Oswald, ‘because of a beastly review in Gramophone magazine.’
‘Urn . . .’
‘Have you any idea what pain your pronouncements . . .’
‘ I haven’t pronounced . . .’
‘The pronouncements of your professional coterie cause to practising musicians?’
Brian began to laugh. ‘This is a bit rich, Oswald.’
Barry entered with a tray of champagne flutes and a packet of Bendick’s Mints; Kevin followed with Bollinger and towel. Brian looked around at the new arrivals, hoping to direct the focus of everybody’s attention away from himself and on to them.
‘Well trained,’ said Oswald.
Kevin released the cork with impressive control and administered the glasses. ‘Champagne, sir?’
‘Rather,’ said Brian.
‘Oh, the ple
asure of selected vulgarities. Present the mints please, Kevin.’
‘Was that a bottle of champagne I saw before me?’ said another voice.
‘Aha!’
Julius appeared in the doorway.
Oswald smiled fetchingly. ‘We’re having our own party in here.’
Brian turned in relief. ‘Hello, Julius.’
The American pianist looked rather manly and imposing in the doorway. ‘What fun! May I join you?’
‘We insist. There’s gallons of champagne to get through. Barry, be a dear and fetch up a couple more.’
Julius settled himself back on the chesterfield. ‘Actually, ah . . . Barry. Would you have something shorter? Malt or . . .’
Barry drew himself up to a level of perfect composure. ‘Talisker, Macallan, Laphroaig, Glenochil.’
‘You run a tight ship,’ smiled Brian appreciatively.
‘I’m getting tighter by the minute,’ drawled Oswald.
Philip was inert in the chair. A champagne flute had somehow been wedged by Kevin between his forefinger and thumb. From where he was sitting he could see the bulk of Julius’s midriff straining on a shirt button. The American pianist was developing weight around his jowls. His eyes were a little piggy. Even the arms of his glasses cut into the flesh of his cheek. He had the temporarily relaxed confidence of a man who has recently seen his double CD boxed set of Fetzler-Rose Symphonic Transcriptions in dumpbins at HMV. His self-esteem had survived a whole day in the company of world-class pianists, and he sprawled back now with the well-earned complacence of a busy professional who knows that whilst others are greater he has made his mark, earned his peers’ respect, and is content to take his place in the pantheon with all due humility at whatever level is assigned to him by whomever decides these things, because even if Serebriakov was tiringly the greatest, Lola the most smouldering, Vadim the most exciting, nobody else could get within a mile of his Fetzler-Rose Transcriptions at that level of polydextrous elucidation, and absolutely nothing could take that skyscraping achievement from him. He nonetheless gazed at the picture-rail of Oswald’s boudoir with cultural perplexity. What a curiously English place to celebrate the old Russian’s birthday! Oswald, it had to be said, he found characterful but anomalous. The classical music world was so small it forced odd bedfellows.
‘We’re having a lively debate,’ said Oswald, admiring Barry’s departure, ‘about the questionable authority and excessive power of music critics.’
Julius chuckled half-heartedly. ‘When they like me, they’re right. When they hate me, they’re wrong!’
‘That’s more like it.’
‘You can’t live with us and you can’t live without us,’ smiled Brian.
Philip came alive violently. They were skating over everything, burying him in banter. ‘You’re not taking me seriously.’
Julius looked up.
‘You’re not taking me seriously.’
‘I . . .’
‘No you’re not. I’ve been giving concerts for thirty-five years now. I’ve won a slew of awards. Hundreds of people write to me. Brian, I have credit in the bank, and yet nobody will tell me what is amiss now. I mean, what are we aiming at? Some gold standard held over our heads by dead pianists? Some academic formula of perfection? Some modernist paradigm of interpretative excellence? Show me the path. Don’t just scold me.’
‘Philip . . .’
‘Everybody’s talking about Slava. He’s had terrible press recently. Five years ago he was God. Has anybody any idea what he’s going through?’
‘Think of it as a stock-market correction. His share value had become inflated.’
Philip flinched. ‘What’s happened to my share value? Tell me the truth.’ He was suddenly pleading. ‘Patrick Peabody said that my performances lacked heart. He said there was a lack of commitment. Have I gone and mislaid something these last few years? It seems I have.’
Brian glanced at Oswald, who was impassively smoking.
Philip looked intently at the side of Brian’s head. The pause was unbearable.
‘You’d know it if you had.’ Brian turned to face him.
‘Does Slava know it?’
‘You can only answer for yourself.’
Philip wiped his forehead. ‘Perhaps I have. I feel differently these days.’
Brian stared at him. Julius averted his eyes.
‘Even so, I mean . . . I thought that CD . . . I believed in . . .’
Oswald gazed into the reflections of his champagne glass. Brian looked pensively at the rug. Julius maintained a serious, engaged expression, distilling his own reaction to what had been said.
Their silence was mortifying.
Brian brought his fist to his mouth. He coughed lightly. ‘I suppose there are . . . um . . . two perspectives here . . .’
Oswald regarded him coolly.
Philip closed his eyes.
Brian looked around tentatively, as if checking the assent of his audience. He seemed licensed to say something, to engage with Philip seriously. ‘There is the modernist view that if you do what the music says and play with stylistic accuracy the music will speak for itself - that meaning and feeling are programmed into the composition; and there’s the contrary view that what makes a performance work is an insight into something not manifest in the score’ - he glanced at Philip with scholarly penetration - ‘into the character of a work, its rhetoric or declamation, whatever, and that to perceive that something a performer’s emotional and intellectual experience must be co-extensive with the composer’s. He exhaled with demonstrative force. ‘If a . . .’
‘You’re saying I’m an emotional cripple?’
Brian raised his hands. ‘I wouldn’t presume to diagnose!’
‘I want diagnosis!’
Brian stared urgently at Philip. ‘I am simply tendering a basis for thinking about the problems you’ve raised.’ He swallowed, aware of the eggshells at his feet stretching as far as the eye could see in every direction. ‘Sometimes with Slava’s playing . . . one feels that too much is preplanned, that the head has come to distrust the heart. And then one likens music to a horse that’s not being ridden properly. Music can be harnessed, but not controlled. A good jockey releases some innate flow and energy in his charge. A bad jockey . . .’
Philip stared into the fireplace.
Oswald frowned into his champagne glass.
‘A bad jockey?’ said Philip softly.
Brian shook his head, dismissing the implied slight. ‘Some pianists, for example, are obsessed with surface and use their extraordinary control of the instrument to draw you into a soundworld of minutely inflected expression - Horowitz, for example - these sort of players assuming that the sum of such moments delivers the totality of a piece’s meaning. Relish the detail and the whole will look after itself, because structure is written in. There are others, less distracted by sensuousness, who perceive a composition’s unity from above, and this type of player seeks coherence in the symbolic structure of the piece, by which music is given a kind of narrative truth. In the first group interpretation is based on nervous sensitivity, which might fade. In the second, on a kind of cognitive insight, which might fail. In my view there is a transitional process that all great artists make between a subjective and objective view of emotion.’
‘Yes, but where does greatness come from?’
Brian was nonplussed.
‘A coherence that you can formulate is completely ersatz and superficial.’
‘Reviewing is a descriptive . . .’
‘You have no idea what it is to fall from grace. No idea what it means to attain grace.’
‘I didn’t . . .’
‘You presume to discern, to calibrate, to compare, but this is all beside the point, because no one knows where this state of grace comes from. You can’t source it.’
Brian was alarmed and baffled in equal parts. ‘I’m trying to share . . .’
‘And no one can explain the provenance of the sublime in mus
ic.’
‘I don’t disagree.’
‘The only thing that matters, the only significant thing is how the fuck does one do it? The answer is beyond everyone. Even the performer.’
Brian glanced guardedly at Oswald and Julius to see if anyone else wanted to come in on the argument.
Julius remained thoughtful behind steepled fingers. He knew better than to venture opinions from a mood of relative complacence. Even so, he looked stimulated to speak and was cagily computing how to enter the fray without annoying Philip.
‘We’re led to a religious terminology,’ said Brian.
‘Yes, and modern criticism has no concept of the soul.’
‘Well, I . . .’
‘We are guardians of the immortal soul in music. Yes! This is what we have to be. And who can tell us how to be it? Who can say through what purgatories we must pass to reach this state of grace? That’s why I need understanding, Brian, if I’ve lost the way.’
Brian sympathetically nodded.
‘Because you can’t fault me on detail. Dynamics, line, colour, perspective. I need to do more. Suffer harder for my art. Some sort of crisis or breakdown, which I’m already having . . .’
‘Or sabbatical.’
‘Or a sabbatical white-water rafting and eating pulses and soya derivatives and reading the classics . . .’
‘Philip . . .’
‘To recover the essence of great music, which Konstantine has at his fingertips every morning he rolls out of bed!’
‘Hang on!’
‘Don’t you see? I need support! I’m an endangered species!’
‘I . . .’
‘You guys already have Solomon, Gieseking, Kempff, Cortot. They had the historic sensibility, the unbroken tradition, the sympathy of an era. To reach their levels I have to live outside history, turning my back on contemporary culture. I have to screen out all the titillating data, the mass-media barrage of fornicating celebrities and Royal Family tat. The middle-class House and Garden fantasia. Become a bloody monk. Then I have to reclaim the emotional hypersensitivity of a consumptive Chopin or a schizoid Robert Schumann to do justice to music originating from a pitch of human experience that modern culture does not generate and can only appreciate passively. I have to go through agonies of preparation for a super-critical audience that barely exists any more. What I’m seeking with such difficulty, what I’m trying to keep alive, hardly matters to most people.’
The Concert Pianist Page 16