Comprehension Questions and Points for Discussion

1. Briefly outline Gould's career, describe his repertoire.

2. What points are discussed in the Interview with Gould? What did the recording process mean to Glenn Gould?

3. Why does the interpreter of Bach's keyboard music have to solve the problems of tempo, dynamics, and articulation? What is it that makes Gould's interpretation an authentic performance?

4. Do you agree with Glenn Gould that music must be listened to in private? Give your reasons.

5. What do you know about Gould's visit to the Soviet Union?

6. Which do you prefer: to hear Bach's keyboard music played on the harpsichord or on the piano? Why? Who, in your opinion, is the best harpsichordist of our time?

7. Why, in your opinion, do some performers differ vastly in their artistic approach to the recording studio and the concert hall?

THE ART OF VIOLIN PLAYING: EUGENE YSAYE

Ysaye, Eugene (1858-1931), Belgian violinist, conductor, and composer. He studied at the Liege Conservatoire with Joseph Massait, and later with Wieniawsky

(from 1873) and Vleuxtemps (from 1876). From 1879 to 1882 Ysaye was first violin in Belse's orchestra (Berlin). In the early 1880s he gave some successful concerts in Leipzig and Paris. From 1886 to 1898 Eugène Ysaye held a professorship at the Brussels Conservatoire, training a whole galaxy of excellent violinists. He founded and conducted the Ysaye concerts in Brussels. His American début was in 1894. Ysaye made many tours from 1899. His appearances on the leading concert plat­forms of the world, which lasted for nearly forty years, comprise an epoch in the history of musical interpretation at the turn of the century. Ysaye was considered - one of the most remarkable virtuosi of his day, with powerful tone. He wrote six violin concertos, several solo violin sonatas. He conducted the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra from 1918 to 1922.

Eugène Ysaye's artistic personality should be studied in its unity of performer and composer. It cannot be denied that his aesthetic views underwent certain modifications in the course of his life.

While speaking of his many-sided musical gifts and noting the artistic value of some of his compositions, we should, nevertheless, accord first place to Ysaye's art as an interpreter, for it was this art that for decades used to attract vast audiences in all parts of the world and excite their unbounded admiration. Eugène Ysaye was nicknamed "the king of violinists", "the artist of the bow", "the king of the violin", and his concerts were invariably his triumphs.

In the first place, it was the artist's rich gifts, his vivid creative personality. His listeners were captivated by the romantic fervor, poetry, lyricism and improvisatory nature of his interpretation, and they enjoyed the artist's original and perfect mastery of all the ex­pressive potentialities of his instrument.

Eugène Ysaye is often spoken of as the last representative of the romantic trend in violin playing, a trend initiated by Paganini, whose exponents - in a greater or less degree - were Joseph Slavik, Henryk Wieniawski, Henry Vieuxtemps, Pablo de Sarasate and some other virtuosi of the past century.

At the same time much in Ysaye's playing was determined by realistic principles.

Ysaye's art was truthful and sincere, deeply felt and thought out. He used to say that art was the result of perfect harmony between thought and feeling.

His vivid artistic personality, rich imagination, unity of emotion and intellect, subjective and lyrical, and the objective and the no­tional; his ability to bend his artistic impulses to the logic of the phrase and of the entire work, are qualities which put Ysaye in the same rank with such outstanding performers as Joachim, Casals, Enesco, Rachmaninov - to name but a few.

As in the case of these artists-instrumentalists, the originality of Ysaye's performing style was determined by his own creative person­ality and by the national cultural idiosyncrasies. Like these artists, the Belgian musician fully understood the creative nature of the in­terpretative art. He highly valued the ability of the artist to create visions, to express good and bad, joy and sorrow.

An entry in Ysaye's notebook reads: "Without the interpreter the composition is a voice crying in the wilderness... The interpretative artist is the life-blood of music."

Eugene Ysaye possessed a rare gift of penetrating the spirit of the music he was playing. He could bring it to life likе none other. The means he employed for this purpose were his astonishingly pure and expressive tone, warm vibration, virtuoso technique that was perfectly natural and spontaneous, exceedingly wide range of dynam­ics and highly original and poetic rubato.

This last device enabled the artist, for all his rhythmic precision, to overcome the purely metronomic regularity and attain a living declamatory phrasing, which was always noted by his contemporaries.

His rubato was not a matter of chance - it was called forth by the logic of the phrase, while its duration was determined by the artist's feeling, thinking and sense of style, of the spirit, of the work performed. Deeply thought out in the course of preliminary work and brought in conformity with the musical phrase, Ysaye's rubato during the performance was the result of his artistic intuition and in­spiration of the moment. It was simple and natural and usually k did not go beyond a musical phrase and contained no hint at premeditated effect.

"You must phrase as you breathe," Eugene Ysaye used to say. ;

Ysaye's style of interpretation combined the subjective and the objective; he knew how to convey the essence of the work per­formed and do it not in a detached and passionless way but to im­bue his performance with his own artistic understanding and creative feeling. The interpretative artist "must be at once subjective and ob­jective, he must be able to penetrate even deeper than the author himself into the aesthetics of the work. It is for him to bring into relief all those evanescent details which the author does not underline or even write, details which do not become apparent when the work is merely read. The interpretative artist is a sculptor whose work may well become permanent, for once a character has been created and has been brought into being by a model interpretation, it becomes a tradition. It remains an example to be followed, and is an integral part of the work itself," wrote Ysaye in his notebook.

Ysaye's beautiful and expressive tone was particularly impressive: now powerful and manly and again tender and lyrical, it was invari­ably pure and singing.

In everything he plays, Ysaye appears before us as a sincere and inspired artist who seems to share with the listeners his own emo­tions and moods, which cannot but reach the very heart of his audi­ence,

From: Eugene Ysaye by L. Ginsburg

Date: 2015-12-11; view: 853