When I was a student, the brilliant polymath and pianist Charles Rosen came to my college as a visiting professor. When he wasn’t playing, he talked – incessantly. He had mastered the noble art of taking a breath only at syntactically crucial parts of a sentence so that it was almost impossible to interrupt him. But at least what he said was fascinating: reminiscences of grand old pianists from 1930s New York, re-evaluations of early Schumann, recollections of conversations with Boulez, and much else. Amid the many majesties of his tireless monologues, one anecdote and one random remark especially stuck in my mind.

The anecdote was an amusing exchange he had overheard during the interval of a pre-war Carnegie Hall concert by Josef Hofmann. Hofmann had in the first half given an unusually brisk and decidedly unsentimental performance of a Chopin Nocturne. ‘Why on earth did he play it so fast!?’ complained an audience member. ‘Because even he can’t play it any faster!’ came his companion’s witty reply.

The random remark was a comment by Rosen himself, made during a discussion of Elliott Carter’s Night Fantasies, a piece for which I had little liking. Rosen simply stated: ‘contemporary piano music is always played badly!’ It was, admittedly, a typical Rosen remark, intended to provoke as much as to inform, and no doubt not intended to refer to his own performance of Night Fantasies, which I heard a few days later. But it did contain a grain of truth – and it came to mind again relatively recently, when I was recording an album of new piano music by a colleague, the Portuguese composer Pedro Faria Gomes. I was, almost needless to say, doing my best not to perform ‘badly’, but I suspect Rosen hadn’t just been talking, unlike Eric Morecambe, about playing ‘the right notes in the right order’.

We pianists are blessed, or cursed, with a truly massive historical repertoire of music. One could spend a lifetime on only a fraction of it. From childhood, we conscientiously chisel away at Bach and Beethoven, Chopin and Liszt. By early adulthood, we’ve already spent thousands of hours on their pieces, and on those of other great masters. Our technique is formed by this music, our fledgling careers stand or fall with it. What’s more, whenever we record the ‘standard repertoire’, we battle against a rich history of rival performances, and enrol ourselves in an interpretative arms race. Whose Liszt octaves are the fastest? Whose Chopin nocturnes the most poetic? Whose Beethoven the most grimly rugged? And so on …

Recording contemporary music is inevitably altogether different. We can’t possibly – and this is undoubtedly what Rosen meant – have practised it as intensively as the pieces we’ve been playing for decades, can’t have lived with the works in the same way, nor have reached ‘maturity’ in our view of them. But this has its advantages, too. We encounter the music just a little before the audience does, without significant preconceptions, without the weight of the heavy hand of history. If we are lucky enough to make the first recording of a piece, as happily I was, then we have the privilege of contributing to the repertoire in a unique and hopefully refreshing way. In return we can try to bestow on contemporary music, where appropriate, the same variety of sonority, the same sinuously sculpted tone colours, that we would bestow on pieces from the pianistic Golden Age. New music it may be, and sometimes novel and challenging, but it need not always be harsh, metallic and ugly.

To be sure, it can be a little unsettling to have a composer standing beside you saying, ‘that’s not quite what I meant there’. (Beethoven never dared say that to me, no matter how often I performed his sonatas.) But at least misconceptions can be cleared up immediately, rather than after decades of musicological research. We don’t have to deduce what might lie within the ambiguities of an unavoidably imperfect notation – we can simply ask. I confess, for example, that I didn’t really ‘get’ the rhythm of a certain tune in one of Pedro’s pieces until he played me a recording of the original Portuguese folk song on which it was based. Then suddenly it clicked. At first, I’d been playing it with an obtrusive Scotch snap: too much Hebrides, too little Hesperia.

And, unquestionably, it’s a relief not to be in competition with previous renditions, to have no great tradition of performance either to respect like an obsequious acolyte, or rebelliously to cast aside like a truculent teenager. For as we all know, traditions can be errant as well as enlightening. For many decades, the ineffably beautiful melody of Chopin’s Étude Op 10 No 3 has been regularly played much more slowly than indicated by the composer’s original metronome marking. There are several reasons for this: the notable increase in the sustaining power of the piano after Chopin’s death, aesthetic tendencies in late Romanticism towards extremes of tempo, and not least Richard Tauber’s unforgettable, intensely slow intoning of ‘So deep is the night’, a song that adopted Chopin’s tune but not its tempo. The result is that the speed marked in the score now seems preposterously fast to many audience members, as I discovered myself when playing the piece at (roughly) the original tempo. The reaction was, alas, always as above. In other words, ‘why on earth did he play it so fast!?’. Ironically, my own performance is now slowing down, too. I’m turning into a late Romantic – or perhaps I’m just getting older.

However, our interpretation of new music is, like Shakespeare’s ever-intriguing Cleopatra, neither staled by custom nor withered by age. Just as it’s possible to over-practise, it’s also possible to have performed a piece too much, to have played it to the point of unconscious routine. Eccentricities creep in, sometimes unnoticed; the flames of passion are drenched by daily domestication. We may be going through the motions with exceptional fluency, but we’ve lost the thrill. The violinist Joseph Joachim once recalled what a wonderful experience it was to play with Liszt – the first time round. By the second or third rendition, Liszt would begin to get bored, and start to add a host of quirks and quiddities. Single notes would turn into octaves, simple scales would become thirds and sixths. A fantasia on the accompaniment would emerge, in place of the now tedious original. Of course, Liszt himself was an original, but it’s possible for anyone’s interpretation to become over-ripe. At that point, it’s time to retire the piece from our repertoire until we can remember why we loved it so much in the first place. We may occasionally play contemporary music ‘badly’, as Rosen alleged, but – to misappropriate Othello – we can also play historical repertoire ‘not wisely, but too well’. 

This article originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of International Piano. Never miss an issue – subscribe today