We all know the general outlines of the idealized career path for a solo classical artist, as told to us by publicists and liner notes. Lessons with Mom as a precocious toddler; a concerto appearance with the local symphony by early adolescence. Admission to a top conservatory to study with a revered pedagogue; summers spent rubbing elbows with established superstars at chamber music festivals in the countryside. And finally arriving at the promised land of 100 well-paid performances per year and an exclusive recording contract by the time he or she reaches the age of majority. But if all you listen to are the household names with this kind of CV, you’ll be missing a lot of great music-making. Even in the allegedly constrained world of classical music, there are plenty of talented people who must make a considerably less charmed journey in order to say what they need to say as artists. Four new albums from off-the-radar pianists make the point very nicely.
Peter Schaaf, now approaching 80, was a student of the legendary Rosina Lhévine at Juilliard and subsequently had plenty of work as a sought-after accompanist—he was at the keyboard for Yo-Yo Ma’s New York City recital debut in 1971, for example. But Schaaf was also a gifted photographer, specializing in musician portraits, and a successful music journalist. He eschewed the piano for decades before returning to his instrument in 2008 to master and ultimately record a work he loved, Isaac Albéniz’s Iberia (TAS 223). A program of waltzes by Dvořák, Schubert, Brahms, and Ravel followed (TAS 272) plus two discs of Chopin, including this 2022 recording of the Andante Spinato in G Major and eight Polonaises. The pianist issues recordings on his own label; they’re available gratis on the artist’s website—this one as 24-bit FLAC and WAV files, no less—though Schaaf gently suggests that, if you do opt for a free download, you consider purchasing a CD or two as gifts for others.
Schaaf’s Chopin is technically secure but never flashy, the music unfolding with songful grace. Some might play the characteristic polonaise rhythm with more of a “hitch” but, honestly, that can get old pretty fast. More important than flamboyant execution or matters of stylistic “authenticity” is that Schaaf clearly comprehends that these pieces, so enjoyable without much deep thought, represent a great composer’s ability to imbue an unassuming dance form with profound musical meaning. The piano’s treble register manifests some “pinginess,” which doesn’t disqualify this CD in the least, even for the sonically obsessed.
Thomas Bartlett’s musical interests are wide-ranging, to say the least, his collaborators as a young man a who’s who of New York artistic chic—Yoko Ono, David Byrne, Laurie Anderson, that sort of crowd. Early on, Bartlett played piano and, calling himself “Doveman,” was the singer for a band with a fluid roster of musicians. He’s a long-term member of The Gloaming, an Irish/American supergroup. Increasingly, Bartlett has served as a producer for others, artists as varied as Sufjan Stevens, Mandy Patinkin, Florence and the Machine, Norah Jones, and Rufus Wainwright.
Bartlett has worked with composer Nico Muhly for years on a number of projects but has never, on his own, been associated with mainstream classical music. Yet when Bartlett hunkered down for a stretch of the pandemic in an English farmhouse with his partner, actress Ella Hunt, he found himself chipping away at the keyboard repertoire he played as a child and prepared a recital for Hunt’s parents that included one of J.S. Bach’s French Suites. On returning to New York, Bartlett recorded (for The Dwelling Music, LLC) four of the six Suites on a Yamaha upright. The audio quality is pretty awful, dull and airless, sometimes sounding barely like a piano. It’s almost as if Bartlett wants to obscure his technical limitations with bad sound. There’s metrical unevenness, inconsistent tone production, and dynamic shadings can seem arbitrary. His playing seems overly cautious, with even the joyous gigues are decidedly earthbound. But the fact is…these performances grow on you. Bartlett is obviously deeply connected to the music and you may find yourself unable to decline his invitation to join him in his explorations. The lesson here may be that we’re all entitled to obsessively consume the music we care about most, perhaps even bringing others along for the ride.
The centerpiece of Americanist, Elizabeth Newkirk’s first solo recording on the adventuresome Bright Shiny Things label, may actually not be the performances but, rather, the heady 2500-word essay the pianist wrote to accompany the CD. Newkirk dissects the myth of the American dream with commanding intellectual precision, maintaining that an understanding of the country’s cultural identity is best accomplished through the lens of two important philosophical schools—the transcendentalist movement, personified by such thinkers as Whitman, Emerson and Thoreau, and the “New Negro” movement, led by W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and others. For Newkirk, it was largely Black intellectuals who were responsible for the reconciliation of the “serious” and “popular” aspects of American culture.
By programming piano reductions of three orchestral works composed during the period between the two World Wars, Newkirk offers powerful support for her thesis. Ravel’s La Valse references jazz and the quasi-hallucinogenic imagery of Edgar Allan Poe; no composer more effectively bridged the worlds of serious and popular art than George Gershwin, whose An American in Paris follows next. Third on the CD is the four-movement Africa suite by William Grant Still, a representative of the “New Negro” elite. Newkirk’s La Valse has a dreamlike, half-remembered quality and she negotiates the Gershwin and Still pieces idiomatically. The soloist is awarded a full, involving piano sonority in a relaxed yet clarifying acoustic.
You can inquire online about piano lessons with Matei Varga, an undertaking that’s unlikely to lead anywhere with, say, Lang Lang, Martha Argerich, or Emanuel Ax. This, despite glowing reviews as a soloist on both sides of the Atlantic, Varga’s receipt of the 2021 Romanian-American Fine Arts Award, and his position as the Artistic Director of a prestigious international piano competition. Varga doesn’t have a major label recording contract and the liner notes for his new CD, The Year That Never Was, thank two-dozen Kickstarter backers that made the release possible. We should thank them, as well.
Like Schaaf and Bartlett, Varga describes the corrosive effect of the pandemic on a performing artist’s life, though allowing that it wasn’t all bad: “Staying home with my piano,” he wrote, “offered me a better view towards my inner self and a chance to experience the joy of a new discovery.” That discovery was the music of Ernesto Lecuona (1895–1963), the Havana-born composer and pianist, sometimes known as the “Chopin of the Tropics” or the “Cuban Gershwin.” Varga plays 10 Lecuona miniatures along with some actual Chopin and Gershwin, plus short pieces by Scarlatti, Beethoven, Balakirev, and the living Romanian composer Andrei Tudor (his madcap Rondo alla Crazy). Varga has a monster technique—check out his performance of Chopin’s Revolutionary Etude in C Minor, Op. 10, No.12—and all of his interpretations are fully idiomatic. He spent his Kickstarter cash well, engaging Sono Luminus of Boyce, Virginia to record his program; there’s nobody better than Daniel Shores when it comes to making piano recordings. The keyboard sound has power, body, and the ideal degree of immediacy.
When interviewed several years ago, Varga was asked for what advice he’d give a young pianist. “Resist assimilation,” he answered. I suspect that the other three artists noted above would offer similar counsel.
