Pianist Yuri Lotakov has it all. His technical equipment is formidable, his ability to shape a phrase musically is superb, and he has a wide range of dynamics (especially impressive on the subtle soft end of the spectrum). And he has impressive credentials, for he was born in Russia in 1945 and is a graduate of the Kiev State Conservatory where he studied with Vsevolod Topilin, the famous Russian pianist and teacher who studied under Heinrich Neuhaus with Sviatoslav Richter and Emil Gilels.
Why then was it such an unsatisfying event when he appeared in recital at the University of California Santa Cruz Music Center Recital Hall on Wednesday November 7th? To begin with, it was a peculiar recital program consisting before intermission of Handel’s Chaconne in G Major, Six Preludes from Op. 34 by Shostakovich and Schubert’s “Wanderer” Fantasie. After intermission, we heard both books of the Brahms Paganini Variations, two “Songs Without Words” by Mendelssohn, and Scriabin’s Sonata No. 5, Op. 53. Surely it would have made more sense to have the two Mendelssohn pieces follow the Chaconne and to insert the Shostakovich Preludes between the Brahms and the Scriabin.
Aside from the stylistic considerations of building a recital program, one can question the wisdom of programming such blockbusters as the “Wanderer” Fantasie, the Brahms Paganini Variations (both books, yet!) and the Scriabin Sonata No. 5 all on the same program by an artist who apparently has not been playing recitals for twenty years, and now wants to reenter the music field and establish a name and reputation for himself.
As a pianist and teacher, I often make the following analogy. Imagine a plank of wood twelve feet long and two feet wide. If you place it on the floor you can walk its length, and if you step off the plank, no damage is done. But, let’s place this same plank suspended six feet off the floor, and now if you step off the plank, you can break a leg. Finally, imagine the plank suspended between two tall ten-story buildings, so now if you step off, you squash. Please note that I am not talking about walking a tightrope, but a plank of wood twelve feet long and two feet wide. The difference between walking on it at different height placements is in a word, “risk.”
To place this in a musical context, if you are performing on your own piano in your own home, the plank is on the floor. If twenty people enter the room and start listening to you play, you just moved the plank up six feet. If you are transported to a concert hall for a formal public recital in front of a paying audience, then the plank just went up ten stories. What exactly is the risk? The performer is the same, the music is the same, and the piano is the same. But the risk is that if there are any memory slips or blatantly wrong notes, they are heard and noticed by increasingly large numbers of people. For a performer it is more often the fear of memory slips that paralyzes us, and this fear robs us of the safe secure feeling we have when playing only for ourselves.
How important is it to play without memory slips or occasional wrong notes? Actually, it is not important at all. In live concert I once heard Horowitz get totally lost in a performance of Liszt’s
Au bord d’une source and waffle around for twenty seconds before finding his way back to the score, and few people were even aware of it. I have heard pianists like Arrau, Horowitz, Richter, Gilels and others play passages littered with wrong notes, and again we have to say what does 20 seconds of memory slips or 20 instances of wrong notes really matter in a recital lasting 75 minutes? What really matters is making music that is effective and expressive that moves an audience.
And this is precisely what Yuri Lotakov managed to do in his performance of the Six Shostakovich Preludes and the Scriabin Sonata No. 5. In these works we heard artistic playing of the highest order, and I can’t imagine them played any better. The playing was bold, authoritative and totally convincing. It was also pleasing to report that Mr. Lotakov does not push the resources of the piano beyond its limits. This was great music making.
The Handel Chaconne that began the program didn’t sound much like Handel stylistically, for much of the time it seemed overplayed, over pedaled, and over scaled. However, in the section in G Minor, we suddenly heard playing of incredible beauty that you wanted to prolong forever. We heard many of these same qualities in the Shostakovich Preludes where in the quieter moments there was playing of great beauty and refinement. Also in the more impassioned sections of the Shostakovich we heard plenty of fire and passion.
The Schubert “Wanderer” Fantasy was uneven, yet it was a performance that demonstrated a first class musical mind that understood the complexities of the work and managed to bring out clearly most of the important musical details.
It was the Brahms-Paganini Variations that was the most unsatisfying portion of the program. It almost seemed like arrogance to program both books I and II (many performers these days make a selection from the two books), for in addition to its seeming to be too long for the program, the technical mastery required to bring off these difficult works was not quite there. I would assume that when Mr. Lotakov plays these Variations in his own home (the plank on the floor) they go ever so much better, and, if he were on a tour right now playing the same program every few days, the accuracy and mastery of the Brahms would undoubtedly have been much greater.
Something has to be said about Lotakov’s stage presence. I once saw a television interview with an executive from the Herbert Barrett Management, who said that their experience with émigré Russians was that they needed to learn a new style of stage presence. It is simply not enough to walk out on stage with a solemn, grim facial expression that implies to the audience, “I am here to play. You are here to listen. Let’s get on with it.”
Mr. Lotakov could well heed this advice. He did not appear to be enjoying being on stage, for never during the recital was there even a hint of a smile or exuberant pleasure at having performed portions of his program in such an exalted artistic manner. He didn’t seem to respond to the audience, and the audience didn’t seem to respond to him. There were no bravos after the Scriabin (however much they were deserved), and he offered us only one encore, however he did not let the audience know what it was. As we made our way through the parking lot, I heard several people inquiring what the encore was.
However, the bottom line is that Yuri Lotakov is a very impressive pianist, and I would very much like to hear him again in a more carefully chosen program.
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