Intimacy

[Herewith the producer's message. -- The Producer]

I am a great believer in intimacy. Music should sound as it does to the pianist and his friends, not to his neighbors. The currently fashionable great distance from the recorded piano banishes tension, sweat, body heat, and agony from the keys, leaving them Bowdlerized, compressed, limited, equalized, normalized, at the expense of the personal hell every pianist endures to present the ugly with the beautiful, a complete, modern portrait, not a prettified perm from the beauty parlor.

    I have tried to live up to Brinkerhoff's presentation of the music, flaws and felicities, by leaving in the occasional musical glitch, more variation than mistake, so that the audience can luxuriate in the risk of live, unedited music, where the dangers of emotion create unbearably intimate discoveries, rather than the safe perfection which bleeds so many recordings today.

    Concert halls constrain the dynamic extremes into a middle arena of easy listening, where nothing is too soft or too loud, removing the key clicks, bench creaks, hammer thuds, and with them all the finesse of a pianississimo or the shock of a sudden sforzando. Thunder and whispers are safely muted into a comfortable midrange drone, and we expect this from records as well. In the same tradition, record albums are made with compressors, or limiters, and equilizers, which perform similar muted miracles.

    But this isn't how the musician hears music: it is extreme, violent, caressing, so soft you aren't sure you heard it. It takes risks, it speaks like a person, it hesitates, it pauses, it's personal. This can happen in a salon, or any of the old palace rooms built for intimate recitals. Pianos were built for these rooms, not for the circus maximus where the performers were meant to die. Baroque, rococo, and classical composers wrote for these small, ornate rooms.

    To me, pianos sound emotional, moving, in comfortable rooms. They envelop you, surround you, so you can hear the nuances of touch, you can breathe with the pianist, compose with the composer. Sound hangs sparkling in the air. Once you hear music this way you can listen for it somewhat successfully in a larger hall.

    It is however hard to pick up such nuances for the first time in an airplane-hangar auditorium, where the audience provides an energy that is quite distracting from the music.

    Playing in such spaces requires special gifts. Horowitz had the electricity to overpower the audience with his own private intensity; Rubinstein led an audience with his enormous warmth. And yet more private gifts should not be discounted.

    We all know when we've heard a great concert, when you stop breathing, you can hear a pin drop, and the notes float above your head like clouds. Some records have this ethereal quality: Joan Sutherland, Dinu Lipatti, Martha Argerich, Russell Sherman's Beethoven, each is suspended in time. We all have our favorite moments on every album, and we know when it happens. It is the way a violinist hears a violin, through his bones.

    I feel that, generally, large halls work against solo instruments. Halls splay out, diffuse the stage unnecessarily. Bodies soak up sound and damp the original sound intended by the architect, who almost never realizes that a full hall will mute the perfect room he may have designed.

    Halls are designed, not for idealized sound, but for economics, like a château, which must have 300,000 visitors a year to support its upkeep or be auctioned off.

    We are fortunate that Brinkerhoff has obliged us to listen to him in the intimacy of, ironically, a distant monastery, with its panoramas and dramas. As Abram Chasins said of Leopold Godowsky, the great virtuoso:

    No public performance, no recording I ever heard matched the freedom and beauty of Godowsky's playing in an intimate atmosphere, in the presence of admiring friends and colleagues. I am not alone in this opinion. One night he played for a few of us.... Later, when I was walking Hofmann back to his hotel, he said, 'Never forget what you heard tonight; never lose the memory of that sound. There's nothing like it in this world. It is tragic that the public has never heard Popsy as only he can play.'

    It is this feeling which induced me to chase the reprehensible, aggravating, irresponsible, thoroughly unrealistic Brinkerhoff halfway around the world to the most unimaginable site for a recording: because there was nothing like him in the world. And almost no one had heard him play. I could not hold my head up if I allowed him to slip through my fingers. I would have betrayed every precept with which I endlessly bore my friends. And as it turns out, I was just in time.