To Play Again

by Carol Rosenberger

  My favorite memory is the time the students were all stretched out on the floor, thinking through in slow motion a piece of music they would be performing. I had asked each student to choose one piece for some experimental kinds of performance preparation. As they were thinking through their self-assignments, they closed their eyes, and the room fell into absolute silence. At one point, a door leading to the hallway opened, and there stood a group of people, led by the head of the USC School of Music. He was saying “and this is our Preparation for Performance . . .” then suddenly broke off, as he and his visitors saw the array of motionless bodies, all with their eyes closed. It was too soon after the Jonestown Massacre media coverage for the visitors to feel anything but visceral alarm at such a sight. I hurried to the door and explained.

  As the class continued, we discussed subjects I had long brought up with my private students and in concert-connected workshops. A topic that everyone seemed to like was the musician’s focus in performance—the other side of the painstaking preparation that involved the performer’s slow-motion internalizing of musical detail. We discussed the all-too-common thinking that accompanied playing for “juries” and competitions: “How well am I doing? . . . Can I measure up? . . . What will they think of me? . . . Can I do this?”

  Here, however, we emphasized a performance focus that projects to the audience one’s own understanding of, and feelings about, the musical material. Just as it helps while practicing to respond silently and continuously to an entire piece, a section, or even a single phrase with whatever emotions the music elicits, so it helps to focus on those emotions in performance. “You are so beautiful! . . . How you sparkle! . . . You are magnificent! . . . Ah, now you’re preparing me for something startling!”—and on and on, with infinite variations and intertwinings—are all expressions of feelings that direct the shaping and character of one’s playing.

  The class turned out to be so popular that the head of the USC School of Music soon asked me to repeat it the following semester.

  Meanwhile, Amelia had become excited about the then-very-new digital recording process. She had met and conferred at length with a fascinating pioneer in digital recording, scientist-inventor Thomas Stockham, who had invented the prototype Soundstream Digital Recorder. As she was pondering what might be a suitable project for Delos’s first venture into the digital realm, Amelia and I were invited to a concert featuring trumpet virtuoso-conductor Gerard Schwarz in Los Angeles. He was succeeding Neville Marriner as music director of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and neither of us had yet heard him in live performance. We were both bowled over by his joyful virtuosity and captivating musicianship, and when Amelia came up with a brilliant idea, I agreed wholeheartedly: Why not try to work out a digital recording with him?

  By the time we went backstage, Gerard (“Jerry”) Schwarz was about to leave the auditorium to catch a plane back to New York. But in the few minutes we had together, he expressed great enthusiasm for Amelia’s project and said he wanted to get the New York Chamber Symphony and the New York Trumpet Ensemble involved.

  Amelia and Jerry pursued the project with continued excitement, and in early 1979 two landmark digital recordings, the Haydn/Hummel Trumpet Concertos and The Sound of Trumpets, were made in New York, at the 92nd Street Y. These recordings would mark Jerry’s last appearances as a trumpet virtuoso and his first as a conductor.

  Amelia had invited her friend, American composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, to help on the production side in New York. She had gotten to know Ellen a few years earlier, during the Delos recording sessions for the Boston Musica Viva’s American Composers Series. California engineer Stan Ricker traveled with Amelia to New York, and Tom Stockham brought his Soundstream equipment and his own engineers. The series of sessions attracted a great deal of music-industry attention.

  During the first session, there was a glitch in the Soundstream recorder, which erased part of Jerry’s cadenza in one of the concertos. Tom and his engineers were distressed, but when Amelia broke the news to Jerry, he was unfazed. “His lip was swollen out to here,” she demonstrated, “but he just said cheerfully, ‘No problem. I’ll do it again,’ and went back out on stage and did a brilliant cadenza.”

  Jerry marveled at Amelia’s ability to create an atmosphere of calm and focus for everyone. “We must have had thirty music writers at that session,” he said afterward. “I was oblivious to them all. That’s how it felt with Amelia—nothing else mattered except the music.”

  I went with Amelia to Salt Lake City for the editing sessions, which took place in Tom’s basement. The hard drives went into machines of a size and shape that very much resembled electric washers; in fact, Amelia and I called them “the wash-tubs.” Each huge hard drive held approximately seven minutes of music. The editing process was basic and cumbersome by today’s standards, but a brave new world to us at the time.

  The transfer from the recorder to the editing equipment was especially sensitive, as we had to go from one “washtub” to another during a take, and preferably not near an edit point. “Stand by, Amelia!” Tom would call in a clarion voice. “Stand by, Jim!” “Stand by, Jules!” And on through the list of those controlling the various posts through which another seven minutes of source takes would be transferred. We labored far into the night at the editing console, and Amelia and I took turns working with Tom’s engineers. Whoever was on break was free to take a catnap on the floor.

  I was enjoying my new role as an audio editor—partly because of the chemistry between Tom and me, partly because Amelia and I were having a great time with his young engineers, and partly because I was finding a new use for my lifelong musical training. I didn’t have to spend much of my shoulder-andarm capital during the process. I just had to indicate where the edit should be made, if the edit point should shift to the left or right, or what we might try that could smooth the edit. Those decisions required a nuanced grasp of the musical shaping and pacing and a sense of what would enhance the presentation.

  As Amelia, Tom, Stan, and I worked on further recordings, my new role became a more active one. Amelia planned a recording with the Sequoia Quartet, a beautiful group that played frequently in the Los Angeles area. Susann MacDonald, an internationally renowned harpist who was living in Los Angeles, was also interested in making a recording. We thought the Sequoia Quartet and Susann’s harp would record beautifully in the intimate, warm-sounding Immaculate Heart Auditorium, so I arranged some evening sessions. My friend and onetime colleague Theresa Di Rocco was thrilled at the idea and came on board as assistant producer for both recordings.

  Amelia, Stan, and Tom started trying to persuade me to record some Impressionistic music, mostly Ravel and Debussy, which I had been playing on tour. They all thought this special “sound world” could become a particularly exciting venture in the new digital medium.

  It occurred to me that my repertoire already included a group of Impressionistic pieces that were all about water. I had been drawn to them as music, of course, but there were other factors, too. Water had helped restore some of my life perspective in the years I had been living near the ocean. Water continued to be my salvation for rehabilitative exercises. And who knows what subliminal forces drew me even closer to the Impressionists’ “water music”? But I sensed that such a project would not only be meaningful for me but probably of interest for the new medium, too.

  While discussing the “water music” recording project, Tom mentioned having heard a Boesendorfer Imperial Concert Grand the year before and being stunned by its range and beauty. I had admired Boesendorfers during my years in Vienna and marveled at their singing sound. As we began looking around, it was exciting to discover that one of the few Boesendorfer Imperials in the United States could be found in Southern California.

  Amelia and I soon made a trip to the Colton Piano Company in Orange County for a live encounter with the exotic Imperial. After an hour or so of playing a variety of repertoire on the splendid instrument, I had fallen h
opelessly in love. Amelia, who hadn’t encountered a Boesendorfer up close, was ecstatic. We inquired about rental availability for possible sessions in June.

  “Yes, it’s available, if it hasn’t been sold by then,” the manager answered. Sold? This glorious instrument was for sale? And someone else might buy it?

  I did a quick but intense soul-search, made my peace with a long-term financial obligation, and became the lifelong guardian of “Boesie,” as we came to call the magnificent Imperial. Boesie must have been comfortable with the arrangement, as it has been singing happily ever since.

  Amelia and Stan decided that Bridges Auditorium in Claremont, California, would be the right place to make the Water Music of the Impressionists recording, preferably when Boesie could spend a couple of days before the session, getting acclimated to the hall. As Amelia later wrote, the hall was “a large, warm room with height . . . irregular surfaces and lots of wood . . . we tried to create the sensation that you (the listener) are seated in choice seats—about ten to twelve rows back in the hall . . .”

  Boesie revisited Bridges Auditorium the following year, when Jerry invited me to record the Shostakovich Piano Concerto No. 1 with the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, of which he was by then music director. Jerry’s Los Angeles audiences, along with the players and his Delos fans, were excited by his brilliant, joyous, and lyrical performances as a conductor. His first recordings for Delos, with both his New York and Los Angeles orchestras, had those same qualities and were being celebrated worldwide—receiving such honors as a Grammy nomination and a Record of the Year award from Stereo Review.

  Chapter Twenty

  My Walk with Beethoven

  I’m not sure who first brought it up, but soon Amelia, Stan, Tom, and the Delos volunteer group began talking about another solo recording for Boesie and me: Beethoven’s magnificent Opus 111.

  My friends knew that the Opus 111 had decades of special meaning for me. They had heard my stories of “living with” that piece while I was a polio invalid. They knew that I had performed it many times on tour over a period of some fifteen years. So, they asked, what could be better for the next project? The prospect of recording what was, to me, an almost-sacred masterpiece was both exciting and frightening. But excitement won out.

  The next step was to decide on a companion piece for the album. Tom jumped in enthusiastically with a vote for Beethoven’s Sonata, Opus 57, the “Appassionata.” He couldn’t wait to hear it played on Boesie. Tom’s excitement about the piece, the light in his eyes and special resonance in his voice as he spoke its name, were contagious.

  I had a special history with the “Appassionata” as well. It was the masterpiece whose architectural wonders Franz Eibner was exploring when I chanced upon his Schenker-theory seminar in my Vienna days. The “Appassionata” had drawn me into those Schenker explorations and, in that sense, had also helped me through the polio years.

  The recording was set for March of 1981, and once again Boesie traveled to Claremont. If a single event symbolized reaching the summit of my personal Everest, it would be the day Boesie and I recorded the Opus 111 together. There had been other progress markers in my twenty-five-year climb out of the polio rubble, but recording Beethoven’s final testament for the piano represented the peak of that climb—and always will.

  I took some notes immediately after the recording experience, and here they are, as I wrote them.

  March 21, 1981

  I walk through the neighborhood in Claremont. Flat-roofed ranch houses across the street from the Griswold Motel—what everyone thinks of as California. Beethoven loved to walk, too, but he would have been walking in Doebling, outside of Vienna. The Beethoven Gang (Beethoven Walk) and its little signs that point you in a certain direction so you can retrace Beethoven’s path exactly . . . People there speaking as if they had known him personally: “Beethoven used to stand right here. Then he would walk that way.” You have the feeling that you, too, are seeing that eccentric genius.

  Claremont is so different from the “Beethoven Walk,” and yet here I am, walking with Beethoven’s music playing in my head. He wouldn’t think it too daring of me to record his Opus 111, would he?

  Trees still grow and people still go shopping—and worry about other things besides the Opus 111. I must do some more relaxation exercises. But don’t plan in such an anxious fashion. I need to take everything in sequence, in an unhurried way.

  As I let the Arietta and the gently rolling first variation play through in my mind, it seems as if I must have walked here many times. But I know that feeling is overlaid with other familiar things. The short red raincoat I’ve taken on tour with me for years, the scarf of many colors that I’ve worn so many times, the mounting adrenaline and half-conscious relaxing of neck and arms that I do automatically when working up to a performance.

  I wonder if I should think through every note, as I do before a performance, going back if I have let my mind wander, lingering on every chord or passage that might be in the least fuzzy.

  But today I decide that isn’t necessary. After all these years of performing Opus 111, I don’t need to practice it mentally at present. And yet it keeps playing in my mind. It might well be the sum of all the times I’ve played, and thought through, and heard the piece. I want it to be all of that, when I record it a couple of hours from now.

  By then I’ll be fighting anxiety, and now I am remembering many of my peak times with the sonata . . . and some of my lowest moments, when the music seemed in greatest contrast with my life. The seemingly endless failures as Webster tried steadfastly to help me, day after day, some twenty years ago. Mom and Dad never losing hope on my behalf. Dad grinning affectionately, with tears in his eyes. . . . Mom always saying, lovingly, whether in person or on the phone, “I’ll be listening!”

  All the way back to a very sick version of myself, semi-reclining on cushions in Boulanger’s studio some twenty-five years ago. Mademoiselle wanting to know what music would mean the most to me just then. I knew that she was asking, “What would help you to feel that you haven’t lost everything?”

  The answer was the musical-philosophical world of late Beethoven and musical essences . . . life essences . . . the beauty of Opus 111’s Arietta . . . the warm glow of Opus 109.

  I had needed magnificent creations to dwarf that devastating blow, to make the polio losses seem temporary. As with so many good things, my relationship with the Opus 111 began in pain.

  As I return to the motel, Amelia is about to get some refreshments for the recording team at the local supermarket. I go with her, as I am most comfortable when in her company. I’m sitting on the sidelines in the supermarket, waiting while she selects the groceries. I’m doing finger stretches. First, with thumb hooked under chin, I stretch the fascia between each finger. Then I pull each finger gently, in line with arm and wrist. I’m also doing shoulder rolls and neck stretches.

  Amelia says laughingly after this routine that she was getting looks of sympathy from other shoppers who had seen us come in together, as if to say that it can’t be easy having such a strange adult daughter. People look at me disapprovingly as we leave and she opens doors, handles all the bags, and puts everything in the trunk, while I stand idly by, shrugging my shoulders and doing head rolls to relax neck muscles. When looked at from that perspective, she has a lot to put up with.

  Once we get to the hall, Amelia tells the rest of the team the supermarket story with that rich, relaxed laugh of hers, enjoying the phenomenon of what is about to take place. She and I already know that each recording session where I manage to hold up and hit performance level for the entire span feels miraculous to us both.

  My contact lenses are getting cloudy for some reason. I think I’m probably exuding anxiety from my eyes. Am I only pretending to be a pianist? (The same old question that keeps popping up in important moments.)

  And yet just recently I received word that Water Music of the Impressionists was named Critics Choice in Gramophone magazine.
It’s that “if they only knew” feeling. But they do know by now, at least part of it. My polio story has been out for some fifteen years.

  And there is one thing I know for sure: Opus 111 is one of “my” pieces.

  The “Downward Leap into Space,” or “Leap into the Abyss,” in the opening movement . . . like my own leap into space—in how many performances of this piece, and in how many life situations surrounding it?

  The “Deep Song” of the Arietta . . . letting it flow out into the hall, joining every experience I’ve ever had with this music.

  Overcoming the feeling that the microphones are closing in . . . moving past them and taking the space as my own . . . filling the empty hall with the sound . . . letting the sound float back to me.

  In between sonic adjustments I smile and remember Martha’s little three-year-old niece, who thought that the music was there in the piano and I was the person who knew how to turn it on—how to make it work. What I have to do now is release the music into the room. It helps to feel that it’s all there, waiting to be let out, waiting to be tapped into.

  I come downstairs to listen to a playback of a complete take. I hear the sound and the flow, and a few isolated errors. But I can’t focus on it. The active involvement is too great. I am too excited, too adrenalized, too grim, too anxious.

  Stan hands me the headphones. “Listen through these.” I hear more hall resonance. It sounds bigger than it does to me upstairs.

  Amelia and Stan turn to me with raised eyebrows and smiles. Amelia says, “Good take, don’t you think?” George Baker, our brilliant organist friend, and today the assistant producer, enthusiastically nods his assent. I tell them honestly that I don’t know.