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Basking In The Afterglow Of The Moonlight.
David Golub
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David Golub divides his time between Europe, where he lives in Milan with his wife Maria, and the United States. As a soloist, he has performed with the London Symphony, the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Orchestre de Paris, and with the Rotterdam Philharmonic has toured Holland, Spain and Austria. His chamber music collaborators have included Leonard Rose, Isaac Stern and Pinchas Zukerman, and the Emerson and Tokyo String Quartets. With CMS he performed at the piano and conducted Rossini's rarely heard Petite Messe Solennelle; he has also appeared as pianist/conductor with the Orchestra di Padova e del Veneto. Each year Mr. Golub, violinist Mark Kaplan and cellist Colin Carr tour throughout the world as the Golub-Kaplan-Carr Trio. The trio has recorded the complete Schubert, Mendelssohn and Brahms trios, and the trios of Smetana and Tchaikovsky. Mr. Golub's recording of Gershwin's Concerto in F and Rhapsody in Blue with the London Symphony Orchestra was chosen by Time Magazine as one of the ten best records of 1988. When an interviewer started to hum the Rossini mass in his presence, Mr. Golub politely overlooked the vocal quality and reflexively, helpfully began to conduct.
"I live in Milan, where you certainly can't complain about the food, but sometimes I do find myself with a hankering for some cold bean curd with sesame sauce! I suppose what I miss most is an often spontaneous quality about the way we speak to each other and a certain looseness and informality about the American society which is much less the case in Europe. But there are, of course, things about Europe that I love. After all, the vast majority of the music we play is rooted in European culture, and there is something revealing about learning and playing it in that setting, where all that you experience around you ties up with what you're doing. Because all the arts are related, they're all expressing similar things, and to see architecture, painting, or just experience a way of life that's the product of the same impulses that produced the music you play, feeds into what you do as a musician.
"My father played a number of instruments and when I was a kid he bought an upright piano to play in the evenings for relaxation. One of the pieces he would often play, and which intrigued me the most, was the first movement of the Moonlight sonata. By day, while he was at work, I would go to the piano and pick out the notes to it. One day, returning home, he heard me playing the beginning of the sonata and realized I had some talent and that's how my piano lessons started.
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"I find myself with a hankering for some cold bean curd with sesame sauce!"
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"It's very difficult for young performers to find their own voice. As a youngster, you have to begin arriving at interpretations before you're mature enough to have experienced a very wide range of emotions and insights, and you almost inevitably end up synthesizing things you've heard other people do without completely understanding them. In master classes, I try to get people to listen closely to themselves, to hear with their own ears rather than through the received values of someone else's ideas. The teachers who forced me to question what I was doing and why I was doing it were the ones who opened my mind and enabled me to hear the music from inside my own ear.
"The median level of performance that one hears is so much higher than it ever was, but I don't think the top level is any greater, and I think that our era probably produces fewer people on that level. Speaking just of pianists, and thinking back to a time that produced Rachmaninoff, Cortot, Fischer, Schnabel, Rubenstein and Horowitz, to name only a very few, I can't say that we enjoy such a golden period nowadays. I suppose that it was a different time, one that tended to emphasize an individualism in performing that perhaps nurtured that type of talent. Our time has benefitted from the greater cultivation of the average musician in general. Rachmaninoff was a great composer as well as a great pianist -- and yet in 1928, the centennial of Schubert's death, he allowed that he hadn't known that Schubert had written piano sonatas, which shows the distance we've traveled in that respect.
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"I had an epiphany when I attended Carlos Kleiber's Otello rehearsals at La Scala."
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"I had an epiphany about ten years ago when I attended a series of Carlos Kleiber's Otello rehearsals at La Scala. Kleiber has a great gift for language and metaphor and the things he said to the musicians were expressive and evocative. But he shows so much with his hands and his body that you almost have to see him as well as hear him to understand everything that he wants to convey. Watching him, I saw that when he began to conduct, the music completely took him over; he almost ceased to be Kleiber and became a total medium for the music. I had always assumed that what made one a really good musician was the force of personality, but watching Kleiber, I felt that his own personality disappeared and was replaced by the greater ‘personality' of the music he was conducting. There were no personal idiosyncrasies or identifying mannerisms, just totally committed and high-voltage music-making. I saw that personality could be an impediment if it cut one's responses to the music while performing. I never thought the same way about performing again.
"Opera has been a passion for me since I was a child. For me, the sound of a great human voice is the most moving sound there can be, and I think that instrumental musicians should aspire to make their instruments sound like voices. Oftentimes, I miss a real sense of the dramatic in performances I hear. There is a tendency to go to a concert as if we're going to worship in church and often musicians tend to play as if they were priests, but I think the intention of most composers was that the venue be rather more like a theater and the musicians more like actors. My love for opera taught me a great deal about vocalism and influenced my own playing a great deal. It's hard for me to imagine playing Mozart without knowing his operas or Schubert without knowing his lieder, because since composers tend to use the same types of musical gestures to express similar emotional states, seeing the music with the text can be very illuminating about the same character of music when no text is present.
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"A great human voice is the most moving sound there can be."
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"A string quartet differs from any other chamber music combination. You have four instruments that ideally must sound just like one instrument and that possess a similarity of timbre and texture and therefore an enhanced capacity to blend together horizontal lines in a vertical manner. The composer who wishes to express himself most intimately might gravitate to the string quartet. The piano trio, because of the opposition of choirs and the multiplicity of voices, is suitable for a more dramatic statement. There is the possibility to contrast the different characters of piano and strings, as well as to combine the different timbres in a way that begins to simulate an orchestra. This orchestral factor can lead to certain performance problems, particularly in late 19th-century chamber music with piano, which are most often manifested in the calibration of balances; if you think, Hey, I'm doing a piece of chamber music, you'll probably miss the mark. These pieces tend to be so dramatically conceived that you are almost compelled much of the time to think symphonically, as the composer was probably doing.
"A composer I really love who I think is very underestimated is Elgar. It's a frustration that he wrote so little for the piano, but at least the Piano Quintet, which I love to play, is one of his masterpieces. If I had to list my ten favorite slow movements, at least three would be by Elgar: the slow movement of the Quintet, the Violin Concerto and the First Symphony. I'm always moved by the nostalgic and poignant quality of this music. I think he's a great deal like Mahler; there's a self-confessional quality and a tortured search for solutions. The difference is that Elgar usually finds a way to end happily whereas Mahler never does.
"I like reading about how languages are constructed and in that sense, looking at older languages can be very interesting. Spending a little time in the Engadine in Switzerland one summer led me to study a bit of Ladino, which is still spoken in some valleys of the Alps. I always loved Chaucer and that propelled me to want to read it in the original language, so I made the effort to learn Middle English and felt myself well rewarded. If I ever had the time, I would like to study medieval French, the troubador language, of which one dialect, Langued'oc, is currently being revived in southern France. I think that nothing reveals people and their epoch more than language, so in a way, studying these languages is a bit like time travel.
"I'm extremely gratified by the development at the Chamber Music Society in the last few years. The level of music making, the adventurous nature of the programming and the directions in which David Shifrin is taking it make this a very exciting time to be a part of it. The Chamber Music Society is where the most dynamic ideas and high-level performances in chamber music are taking place anywhere in the world."
Ideal person to have dinner with tonight:
"From the standpoint of enjoying the company, Rossini would be high on the list. Mozart is certainly someone I would have liked to meet, and Beethoven, although I'm not sure how enjoyable the dinner would have been. I'd really have liked to know Verdi. And Berlioz. And Brahms."
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