I am sure that the local presenters of Hélène Grimaud's recital last night, Villa Montalvo and the Steinway Society of the Bay Area, are not too happy with her, for she made them jump through hoops you wouldn't believe. And the product she delivered by no means justified such arrogant behavior.
For the benefit of those of you who have never attended a concert at Villa Montalvo in Saratoga, approximately 50 miles south of San Francisco, the following is a quote from its web page. "Situated in the foothills of California's Santa Cruz Mountains above Silicon Valley, Villa Montalvo is a Mediterranean-style villa built at the turn of the century and left as a legacy for the support and encouragement of music, art, literature and architecture. Several miles of nature trails trace small creeks and hillsides over the 175-acre estate, which also serves as a public park and is open free to visitors year-round."
The above does not describe the grandeur of the villa itself with its elegant situation and huge public rooms larger than those found in some European hotels. Concerts, however, are not held in the villa, but in the Carriage House. In case you are thinking that while listening to music our nostrils are assaulted by the aroma of horse droppings and moldy straw, guess again, for the Carriage House, twice as large as most people's homes, has been renovated and turned into a lovely, comfortable recital hall seating 300. Villa Montalvo's offerings this year feature artists of the stature of Alicia De Larrocha, Louis Lortie, Robert Taub, the Eroica Trio, Kiri Te Kanawa, Emmanuel Ax and Yeffim Bronfman.
Those arriving at the Carriage House to hear Hélène Grimaud on this rainy stormy evening were in for a surprise. Attendants on hand at the Carriage House were informing patrons that the concert had been moved to the main house, so we schlepped through the rain over to the villa and squeezed into one of the public rooms waiting to be let into the large paneled living room. We could hear the piano technician tuning the piano, which had been moved from the Carriage House. Well, we waited, and we waited. As we were waiting, rumors abounded that Ms. Grimaud had not been happy with the acoustics of the Carriage House and for that reason the concert's venue had been changed. Another rumour had it that when she heard that the hall was not sold out, she refused to play in a half full house, and thus demanded that the concert take place in the smaller room so that it would be full.
Finally we were admitted into the main living room, which had been set up with the kind of chairs you would find at a convention in a hotel ballroom. Approximately 160 people were shoehorned into this lovely room. Those of us in the front rows were so close we could reach out and touch the piano.
The concert, scheduled to begin at 7:30 pm finally kicked off at 8:15 pm as Ms. Grimaud slipped into the room wearing a black pants suit (well, maybe you might call it a "pants suit") that reminded me of a famous image of a very young Franz Liszt in a black frock coat.
Although she did not apologize for the inconvenience and delay, she did explain it. After arriving during the afternoon and trying out the piano in the Carriage House, she went over to the Villa and practiced on the venerable restored Steinway B, vintage 1882 that resided in the elegant paneled library. She was so charmed by the ambiance of the Villa, which reminded her of some she had known in European festivals, that she decided to play the concert there, rather than in the Carriage House because she felt it would result in a more intimate performance. She also said that when the presenters complied with her request, it showed that they had artistic sensitivity.
What this meant was that the presenters had to find a moving company to work after hours on a Friday evening (you can imagine what that cost) to break down the piano and move it to the new location. They then had to find the personnel to set up almost 200 chairs in the living room. An additional and very time consuming logistical problem also had to be addressed. The tickets that had already been sold for the Carriage House were reserved seats. Therefore, Villa Montalvo staff had to arrange the chairs in a way to approximate the seating plan of the Carriage House, and every seat had a little label hand written and attached to it so that patrons could find their seats. The piano technician, after tuning the piano in the afternoon, had to be recalled for a brush up tuning. And 160 people (please note that she did not sell out the 300-seat Carriage House) were inconvenienced no end on a miserable rainy evening.
I wish I could tell you that it was all worth the inconvenience, the delay and the crowded conditions. I wish I could tell you that because she was playing in an charming setting, instead of a more impersonal recital hall, that we were treated to a lovely, intimate concert such as you might experience in someone's living room in an elegant villa.
This was not the case. Although we were seated in a room approximately 50 by 25 feet in dimension, Ms. Grimaud subjected us to a performance appropriate to the final pages of the Tchaikowsky Piano Concerto for 6,000 people in the Royal Albert Hall. I have heard lots of bangers before, but never have I heard a piano so assaulted that at times I winced with pain. You don't need a lesson in physics to know that the harder you pound on a piano, the more strident the upper overtones become, giving you increasingly ugly sounds. Of course, for the Tchaikowsky Concerto, competing with a full orchestra, this would be acceptable, but certainly not in such an intimate setting. Ms. Grimaud's dynamics rarely went below
mezzo forte even in the most tender works on the program, the three Brahms
Intermezzi, Op. 117, which can be a marvel of subtle dynamics and elegantly shaped phrasing. Somehow, she succeeded in making them sound like passages from the B-flat Concerto.
Ms. Grimaud opened the concert with two works in D Minor, the Bach-Busoni Chaconne and Rachmaninoff's Variations on a Theme of Corelli, which she explained in verbal program notes both had themes with an accent on the second beat. What they most had in common was the vicious treatment they received,
which represented the Arnold Schwarzenegger Style of Piano Playing - "I am going to beat your piano into submission. Have a nice Day!"
The concert closed with the two Rhapsodies, Op. 79, by Brahms. Of the two, the first in B Minor received the more brutal treatment. Unrelenting
fortissimos and a shamelessly over pedaled, overly loud performance of the lovely middle section in B Major made this an insult to our musical sensitivities. The G Minor Rhapsody similarly was over pedaled and over played.
What is happening here? Is Ms. Grimaud losing her hearing? No, I don't think so, for people losing their hearing often speak in an unnaturally loud voice, and this was not the case with Ms. Grimaud. However, she tends to make a lot of audible sound at the piano, not singing, and not groaning, but somewhere in between, and this can't help but interfere with her ability to listen to her own playing. It is as though she is conducting in her mind some gigantic musical instrument of which her piano playing is only a part.
Ms. Grimaud's recorded legacy to us spanning fifteen years suggests that she has the capability to become one of the great pianists of her generation, for she has without doubt a complete mastery of the piano - there is nothing she cannot play. Schnabel once said, that as pianists we are tour guides revealing to the public the beauties of the works we play, but, as tour guides, we must never get in the way of the view.
Sometimes, we suspect that the artist has contempt for us and considers us to be the "hicks in the sticks." In truth, I cannot imagine Ms. Grimaud playing the way she did last night in Carnegie Hall in front of a sophisticated audience or New York Times critics, Bernard Holland, Anthony Tommasini, or Harold C. Schonberg.
It is interesting that most of the great pianists of the past, for example, Rachmaninoff, Moiseiwitsch, Gieseking, Schnabel, Rubinstein or Lipatti, never produced an ugly sound, and yet often today in concert we hear artists seeming unconcerned with the quality of sound they produce. Could it have been the instrument itself? Often the concerts at Villa Montalvo sponsored jointly with the Bay Area Steinway Society utilize New York Steinways provided by the Steinway dealer, Sherman Clay, and we have heard some very fine instruments coming from this dealer. However, on this occasion the piano, a recent vintage New York Steinway, came from Pro Piano in San Francisco. This was not a particularly distinguished instrument, and although its treble was quite nice, it was weak in the base and tenor.
We hope Ms. Grimaud eventually realizes that surrendering to virtuosity at the expense of musical values tends to diminish her effectiveness as a musician. She has it all, and we hope someday she will find the way to become one with the works she plays.
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