Mark Thomas of the Joachim Raff Society has previously had some positive things to say about my recordings on CD, although it seems from his more recent comments that my interpretations are not always to his taste. Of course, we all have our own preferences in the interpretation of piano music and I welcome the fact that several works of which I made the first recording have since been recorded by other pianists (for example, the Piano Sonata by Victor Bendix, of which I made the first recording in 2010, has since had a further two commercial recordings, both of which are interesting interpretations that add to our understanding and appreciation of the work).

Although I am happy to explain the basis and rationale of my interpretations should this benefit from further clarification (as has been done in this series of posts), I would hope that anyone who hears them would recognize firstly that they reflect conscious and considered interpretative choices, and secondly that as such they are part of an approach to the performance of the music that prizes coherence, integrity and fidelity to the spirit of the composer.

The rest is subjective taste. In some respects, I am an anti-virtuoso pianist, deliberately avoiding exhibitionism and overt display in favour of what I believe are more profound and vital musical qualities. This places me against the prevailing currents in pianism, and is not something everyone will identify with or like. It is, however, the way I believe the music in question should be played if it is to reveal the interpretative aspects that I regard as integral to my personal identification with the work in question.

As I hope will be obvious to any informed surveyor of my work as a pianist, I have the command to do whatever I want at the piano. If I often choose a slower tempo than might possibly be taken by others, I do so not because I cannot play faster, but because I believe the work in question gains from a broader approach and that I can express its emotional content more fully by playing it in this way. If a model is sought for this approach among the great pianists, then I would point to the strong influence on my musical outlook of such artists as Grigory Sokolov and Valery Afanassiev.

Mark Thomas writes, “I’ve found that, if one has the audio software to do it, the flatter performances can be injected with a lot more life by speeding things up by 5-10% (being careful to maintain the original pitch).” In some respects, it would be fair to say that once you purchase a recording you may do whatever you like with it. But I appeal to any who may read this not to do as he suggests.

My interpretative decisions as to speed may be controversially slow on occasion, and some may prefer faster or flashier approaches. If that is what is desired, then it is proper to look to other pianists who are more to one’s taste. The deliberate distortion by speeding up of my recordings, however, disrespects their integrity as interpretations. Please don’t do it.

A number of pianists have responded to the national lockdowns of 2020-21 by producing recordings from their homes. I decided to use the opportunity to do the same, and in doing so to choose music that particularly reflected my response to these events.

This has been the first time in living memory, if not for many centuries, that it has actually been illegal to give or attend a concert in England. As a former council member of the Libertarian Alliance until its dissolution in 2017, I spent a lot of time arguing for the preservation and indeed the extension of our civil liberties, and against governments that – on whatever pretext – would curtail them. The present events have served to emphasise the necessity of that work. I will leave a detailed discussion of lockdowns and their purported effectiveness for another occasion, but will mention that I am one of over 750,000 concerned citizens who are signatories to the Great Barrington Declaration. I also agree with many of the interventions made by Lord Sumption, who has said,

“I feel sad that we have the kind of laws which public-spirited people may need to break. I have always taken a line on this, which is probably different from that of most of my former colleagues. I do not believe that there is a moral obligation to obey the law… You have to have a high degree of respect, both for the object that the law is trying to achieve, and for the way that it’s been achieved. Some laws invite breach. I think this is one of them.”

Wherever one may stand on all this, there is without question a general sense of uncertainty, of transition, of alienation and of loss of control. These are all themes explored in the late sonatas of Beethoven and Schubert, which are written with an unparalleled awareness of human mortality and which reach forward into the world beyond our own. I decided that central to this series of recordings would be the last three sonatas of Beethoven and Schubert, together with other key late works of Beethoven.

In many ways, these works are the ultimate challenge for the pianist. They are, in Schnabel’s phrase, “better than they can be played”. No matter how well one may play them, they will always be bigger than any interpreter, and like Shakespeare, their emotional and humane range is of the widest imaginable. This compels at once a degree of humility on the part of the pianist and also a profound emotional and intellectual identification between interpreter and work as the full gamut of expressive effect is called upon.

Why should the spirits of Beethoven and Schubert still speak to us today? In some respects, they are different sides of the same coin. Schubert is sometimes held up as primarily lyrical and introspective in contrast to Beethoven’s heroic and indomitable style. But as his last piano works clearly show, Schubert also looks into the abyss and responds with optimism and the triumph of the human spirit. His last three sonatas all at various points confront nightmarish visions, with the first movement of the last sonata (D.960) perhaps providing us with the most compelling portrait of human isolation and tragedy. But there is no sense in which the music succumbs to despair. The ending of the last sonata is exuberant, even joyous. It breaks bonds and transcends limitations. It looks grim authority in the face and laughs at it.

Beethoven, too, is concerned with the juxtaposition of extreme contrasts, and the triptych of his last sonatas presents us with music that is concerned above all with transcendence. This is music that can at times return startlingly to convention, but at the same time remains unsettled and questing in spirit. Thomas Mann (borrowing from Adorno) discusses the sonata in chapter 8 of his novel Doctor Faustus, and speaking of the Arietta second movement of the last sonata (op. 111) says,

“But what now becomes of this gentle statement, this pensively tranquil figure, in terms of rhythm, harmony, counterpoint, what blessings its master bestows upon it, what curses he heaps upon it, into what darknesses and superilluminations, where cold and heat, serenity and ecstasy are one and the same, he hurls and elevates it one may well call it elaborate, miraculous, strange, and excessively grand without thereby giving it a name, because in actuality it is nameless…“

It is possible to read an overly religious subtext into Beethoven’s last sonatas, as did Wilfrid Mellers in suggesting that the last movement of the penultimate sonata (op. 110) is a wordless Passion (with its thematic links to the Bach St John Passion). There is surely something of Calvary in it; of suffering and deliverance. There is a sense of suppression in the quiet, slow passages (Arioso dolente), with their evocation of the human voice, that suggest both the impact of pain and the struggle of impaired communication. The sonata bears the date of Christmas Day, 1821.

By the time we reach the final sonata we have moved into more elemental territory. As the variations of the last movement reach an unprecedented level of rhythmic complexity, some hear a prototype of jazz in Beethoven’s anxious exuberance. In fact, this variation is more like a development of the baroque gigue and any resemblance to African-American music of a century later is purely coincidental.

Particularly in Schubert, I feel that this music benefits from a broad conception. In recent decades, pianism has been dominated by what might be referred to as a “modernist school” of interpretation, characterized by fast tempi, clear (and often dry) textures and a degree of emotional detachment. I do not find this approach appealing and my preference is for an altogether more Romantic and subjective aesthetic in which emotional response is the key objective. I do not always aim for an “orchestral” piano sonority, but I do often think in terms of different instrumental and vocal colours and textures.

In particular, the finale of Schubert’s C minor sonata (D.958) tends to be played not at its marked Allegro but more like Prestissimo. This excessive speed robs the movement of its anxious, at times hesitant, character, and the slightly surreal effect of its abrupt contrasts and episodes in distant keys. Another decision that short-circuits Schubert’s intentions is the omission of the exposition repeat in the B flat major sonata, D.960. Many fine pianists do this and it makes no sense to me whatsoever, given not only that Schubert provides a unique transition to the repeat but also that this transition contains material of vital importance to the movement that appears nowhere else.

In the first movement of Beethoven’s Hammerklavier sonata, there is a more immediate controversy in that Beethoven’s metronome marking imposes a breakneck tempo on the music that seems to me – even in the finest “fast” performances – to rob the music of its majesty, its contrasts and its symphonic character. There is certainly a need to give the music a powerful sense of forward momentum in its more dynamic moments, but in a convincing interpretation, Beethoven is not always pushing forward in a relentless manner. There is room to breathe, and indeed much music here that is ruminative and that benefits from a considered rather than hectic treatment.

A personal note is in order with respect to Beethoven’s “Tempest” sonata (op. 31 no. 2). This is the work that inspired me to become a pianist. I first heard it on BBC Radio 3, and thanks to BBC’s Genome project, I can now identify that the date of the broadcast was 10 May 1982, and the pianist was Pascal Rogé. I was nine years old. I was transfixed by the work and became, frankly, obsessed by it. In those days, my local public library had a large collection of music scores available to borrow. I duly took out the second volume of Augener’s complete edition of the Beethoven sonatas, and prevailed on our neighbour (who owned a piano) to allow me to try it out. At that point, my musical education consisted of singing in the school choir and playing the recorder indifferently. I could read the treble clef, and through a combination of luck and judgement managed to pick out the first few bars of Beethoven on the piano, and then improvise a little on the main ideas of the movement, to the astonishment of my neighbour. This was where it all began for me. Within weeks, my parents had bought me a piano and provided me with lessons; four years later I had won a Junior Exhibition Award to the Royal College of Music.

I did not play this, or anything else by Beethoven, in public until I was in my forties. I could play, after a fashion, all of the sonatas by my late teens and was thoroughly au fait with their structure and musical features. I also studied a lot of Beethoven during my time at the Royal College of Music; probably more than any other composer, and with a professor who was notably expert in Beethoven interpretation. Unfortunately, my awareness of the sheer magnitude of the music and of the shortcomings of my youthful approach to it had a deeply inhibiting effect. It was not until many years later that I had sufficient faith in the validity of my interpretation of Beethoven that I could put it before the public without feeling that I had let the composer down. Other pianists have spoken of similar experiences. Beethoven, perhaps more than any other composer, pushes the interpreter to go beyond their limits, in what I see as an essentially creative agon between performer and work. The Beethoven that we play now will not be the same as that which we play in five or ten years’ time. It is changing with us, constantly growing and developing, and is not just part of Beethoven’s creative universe but an organic part of ourselves.

These works carry with them not only their significance as music but also an immense cultural legacy. This is music which generations have held to represent the apex of Western civilization. If we are, as I believe, in a time when that civilization is under grave threat both internally and externally, then one of the most potent responses is for us to re-engage with the richness of this legacy and re-assert its greatness. At the time that I am writing this, it has been reported that some at the University of Oxford consider musical notation “colonialist” and want to “focus less on White European culture”. I have been actively opposed to the delegitimization of Western art music for many years, and find that the arguments and Cultural Marxist academic atmosphere that are encountered now have changed little from those which I first opposed at Cambridge twenty years ago. In such a situation, to play the music of the Austro-German Classical and Romantic schools might be held to constitute an openly reactionary act and stands as an eloquent response to its opponents. We might indeed venture the opinion that here is White European culture at its best.

Of course there are disadvantages in recording performances in such conditions as we face at the moment. Perhaps the most obvious is that it has been impossible to have pianos tuned during lockdown. Equally, audiences of Beethoven’s and Schubert’s time were probably far more used to compensating for this deficiency than we have become today. My lockdown recordings were made at home, in my music room. The basis for each recording was a live performance immediately followed by a patching session, edited with basic audio editing software. The result is unashamedly a personal view of the works concerned, and moreover a view that is influenced by the present time and circumstances.

I hope that you will find the results interesting and enjoyable. The recordings will be issued on my recording label, Romantic Discoveries Recordings.

When I was training as a pianist at the Royal College of Music, it was unthinkable that a solo pianist would perform anything from the standard repertoire using the score in performance. Indeed, I think it was written into most rubrics in those days that memorization was compulsory, and when a postgraduate contemporary of mine played some Brahms from the score in an internal RCM concert it brought about reactions of strong disapproval bordering on anger in some.

It could validly be argued that in this practice the RCM was merely following the standard of the profession. Most if not all piano competitions require memorization. And while there is more flexibility at the highest levels of the music profession, there is still an assumption on the part of most concert venues and audiences in favour of memorization.

Throughout my student years, I performed from memory. I did so not because I believed in it as a beneficial practice, but because it was both an effective requirement and a professional standard. Fortunately, I have never had problems with my memory in a performance, although I have witnessed at close hand the crippling effect such problems can have on other performers. Nevertheless, since leaving the RCM, I have given the vast majority of my solo performances from the score, and from my thirties onwards have made this a firm point of principle.

The seeds of that principle were sown early. In March 1989, in what would be one of the most formative concert experiences of my life, I had the unique opportunity to see Sviatoslav Richter play two concerts at the Royal Festival Hall and the Barbican Centre. The first recital consisted  of Schubert’s Sonata in G major, D894 as well as Prokofiev’s Fourth Sonata, Bartok (the Burlesques) and Schumann (the Nachtstücke). The second consisted of Mozart sonatas and Chopin etudes. Richter played in a hall that was completely dark with the exception of the exit signs and a single spot lamp trained upon the score. He himself was barely visible and his page-turner even more so. The second recital was filmed and its first half can be seen below.

The effect of this experience on me was not merely that of having heard great music interpreted by a genius. It struck me that what Richter was doing was making several important points. The only thing that he wanted the audience to concentrate on was the music, the profound alchemy that he wrought in sound, rather than on the appearance of the performer. Richter, like several other great pianists of his generation, eschewed keyboard histrionics and was personally self-effacing. The second aspect was that Richter’s interpretations, particularly in Schubert and Mozart, created that most paradoxical quality in a packed concert-hall, intimacy. The music was the more moving because we as the audience were compelled to listen actively; sound had become the centre of our experience without any extraneous distractions.

Was Richter’s performance the more remarkable because it was undertaken from the score? I believe so. There are various stories about why Richter, in middle age, began using the score in performance rather than continuing to play from memory. For me, the most important reason was part of the overall aesthetic of performance that he developed in that era of his playing. It was in keeping with the desire to present the music to the audience in as direct, honest and emotionally truthful way possible, often in small venues and with a highly personal choice of repertoire. It was also – despite Richter’s titanic technique – a powerful statement against virtuosity. Even when playing music that is ostensibly about solving technical problems, such as the Chopin Etudes, Richter concentrated on each etude as a musical tone-picture and never as a vehicle for display. Even in his choice of instrument – a Yamaha rather than a Steinway – Richter was avoiding a piano that would impose extravagant tone-colour where he clearly did not want it, offering him something far more neutral as a starting-point.

Some pianists who use scores in performance actually rarely look at them while playing. A study of the film of Richter above will show that this was not his approach. He read the score while playing. However good one’s memory, the score is where our interpretation starts and ends. If we are of the school of interpretation where every decision is predestined before we walk on stage, the score has little to offer us but a crutch. If, alternatively, we are open to the insight of a moment, to the inspiration that can come upon us when amid the energy of an audience, to the capacity for fresh ideas and the ability to convey them, then the score becomes a springboard. We can read it in the same way as we would read a sacred text, and could even construe it as the composer’s physical presence among us, the counterpart to his spiritual presence in the world of sound as interpreted through the performer as his medium.

I do not say that performing from the score is right for every pianist. I could well imagine those whose repertoire features works of great Romantic extroversion regarding memorization as integral to their concept of interpretation and performance. I am also aware that others simply feel that they play better from memory; that perhaps it adds an element that for them is one of liberation. They may not, in fact, want to be tied too closely to the score at all, but to express ideas that go beyond and even contradict the printed note.

These are legitimate approaches, but they do not negate those who do not do likewise. At the back of my mind remains one of the significant changes that has affected music of all kinds in the last few decades; as music has become increasingly commodified, so its marketing has concentrated upon image at the expense of substance, because image is easier to sell. The prevailing image of the youthful, physically attractive piano virtuoso sells, whereas the older, more thoughtful, even spiritual pianist is less of a marketable proposition. Such concentration on image also further entrenches the stereotypes of the profession, producing pressure for pianists to look and sound a particular way in order to appeal to the audience. Against such a background, it takes a level of determination, indeed of integrity, to choose instead to plough one’s own furrow.

The topic of memorization also reminds me of the journey I have been on as a pianist and that continues today. As a young pianist, technique and virtuosity were matters of great interest to me, leading me to the study of countless etudes, transcriptions and concert showpieces. As I grew older, my initial interests in music of communicative substance reasserted themselves. I was less interested in display at the keyboard and more interested in the expression and reception of emotional truths. I looked for music that moved me, and that I believed that I could play in such a way that others would share what I felt. That journey would eventually take me to a concentration – by no means exclusively – on certain works, of which Artur Schnabel said, “I am attracted only to music which I consider to be better than it can be performed. Therefore I feel (rightly or wrongly) that unless a piece of music presents a problem to me, a never-ending problem, it doesn’t interest me too much.” This means the Viennese classics above all, and particularly Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert, but it is not at all difficult to find later works of which the same can be said.

The two giants who did most to standardize memorization in the nineteenth-century – Liszt and Clara Schumann – have a certain amount in common, in that for them (and in respect of Clara Schumann, I am thinking of her husband’s music here) the score was merely a starting-point. If one were to play many piano works of Robert Schumann only adhering to the markings in the score, the result would be dull. Schumann’s many repeats are invitations to the performer to introduce variety, to change tone-colour, to use rubato to expressive effect. These inspirations of the moment could hardly be tied down without becoming unduly prescriptive. Liszt, meanwhile, would re-compose certain passages for greater effect or pianistic ease while performing. His performing editions of Schubert’s “Wanderer” Fantasy and Sonata D894 are illustrative of these practices. Nevertheless, Liszt reserved a far greater respect for the integrity of Beethoven’s scores, as shown both by his edition of Beethoven’s piano sonatas and of course by the piano transcriptions of the symphonies.

The practice of memorization in performing Beethoven is inauthentic. Beethoven himself disapproved of it, believing that the performer could not then address himself to the many expressive markings in the score. Beethoven’s scores are full of detail, and it is surprising how much of that detail does not always come across in performance (the precisely-notated but often ignored accents in Variation IV of the last movement of the Sonata op. 109 are a case in point). Similarly, it is not an authentic practice in Chopin or Mendelssohn.

In an interview, Richter was once asked why he used scores in performance, and answered “out of respect for the composer”. Nor was Richter the only pianist to have come to this conclusion. Myra Hess, Raoul Pugno, Bela Bartok, Clifford Curzon and John McCabe among others have similarly regarded memorisation as a barrier between the composer and the interpreter. The views of the cellist Janos Starker, as told to Janos Gereben are instructive;

“Contrary to the mores of concert life today, I use music to play Bach. It’s not because I don’t know the notes or I am worried about a memory lapse. I will never forget what Fritz Reiner told me when I was first cellist of the Chicago Symphony, and he was conducting the “Eroica.” He had a phenomenal memory, conducted rehearsals of just about everything from his head, but came the evening, and the performance, he put the score up and he was turning pages. It didn’t make sense to me at the time, in the era when the memory wizards came around, careers being made from conducting the “Rite of Spring” from memory – and I asked Reiner why he is using the score. He said: “When I look at the music, it gives me new ideas.” This is precisely what I am doing today. When I look at the music, I keep changing the performance. Instead of making an echo-effect in one bar, I play it in two bars. I differentiate when I repeat something from the second time. Let’s now do the more Germanesque version of the Gigue instead of the light one like at the beginning of the suite. This depends on acoustics, for example, if there is a reverberation in the hall – it’s the split personality of the performer: one who says what to do and the other who listens. One reason I am against playing without music in a group [switching from the topic of the Bach suite] is that sometimes you begin to play in a linear fashion [Starker might have meant “mechanically”], your part, not the totality of the work. My attitude has always been that I am one member of the community, I am the protagonist when I am playing a concerto, but I have only one part of the whole. Composers seldom write for the cello – they write a concerto (unless it’s Boccherini who was a cellist), they hear either vocal sounds or [generic] instrumental sounds. Now, as to the Gigue last night, I sometimes joke about the last movement getting faster because you’re hoping to get to the Scotch bottle. You say it sounded more “free” than the rest, and that’s where the music [the score] helps in that you can “improvise” more, you can take greater chances, you have greater freedom of varying your performance. You’re right, it was totally different from any of my recordings… and that’s what one hopes, that after playing it hundreds and hundreds of times, you can still find new ideas – that’s why Bach is a treasure hunt in a whole lifetime. You look for hidden treasures, and sometimes in the middle of the concert, you say: “How come I never thought of that?!” Mind you: you have to reach a certain age, a certain experience, a stage that you can afford the luxury of looking for new things. But then that’s what keeps one alive musically, artistically.”

Consider also the late John McCabe’s comments in his interview with Christopher Morley:

“JM… in the arts – it’s not only in music, it’s in the arts generally, I think that people are very suspicious of all-rounders. They think that if you play the piano you can’t possibly be a full-time composer, and if you’re a full-time composer, you can’t possibly be a proper pianist. Now one thing I do which people seem to think proves that is that I play from the music, always, never play from memory, but I do that because a) I couldn’t carry the repertoire that I do, which is vast, and b) I know that I’ve got a very quick, superficial memory which I do not trust, and really, if I’m going to play something from memory and forget, I’m not playing the music – I’m playing something else – not playing what the composer wrote. I’ve suffered from this myself as a composer, and I know that if somebody leaves out half a piece, which happened with one of mine, the audience is not actually going to hear what I wrote, and I don’t think it’s fair, and since I’m liable to do that if I play from memory, then that’s why I play from music – it’s not laziness, it’s …

CM: Like Richter, your hero.

JM: Well Richter, Clifford Curzon, Myra Hess … Klemperer actually admired Myra Hess for playing the Beethoven Fourth Concerto from the music – he said so.”

So for these musicians and others, the use of the score was a liberating process that contributed to a greater spontaneity and inspiration in performance, and a means by which a greater repertoire could be maintained. Since these are matters of cardinal importance for me as well, I began to use scores in performance to the point where I, too, experienced an artistic rebirth. I believe that the composer and the audience are certainly the beneficiaries.