Sir András Schiff plays Bach supremely well. Why bring Brexit into it?
I hadn’t intended to write about András Schiff’s performance of Bach’s six partitas, at the Wigmore Hall on Tuesday evening, a repeat of a concert given the previous Friday. But a trivial and dismissive paragraph in this week’s Spectator about the first evening – a paragraph which incidentally said nothing about the playing while simultaneously denigrating the man, the piano and the concert – has made me change my mind.
If you are one of the few who still resist Bach on the piano, you need to read no further. Among contemporary pianists, there are those who play this music wonderfully well: Murray Perahia and Richard Goode are two obvious cases. But Schiff, who has now been playing and recording this repertoire for nearly 40 years, stands, in the opinion of many of us, head and shoulders above the rest.
I first heard him play Bach when watching the final of the Leeds piano competition on television in 1975. He made the bold decision to eschew a war-horse concerto in favour of the Bach D minor. It was mesmerising, though it was rumoured that the presence of Rosalind Tureck on the jury cost him first prize, since she regarded the notion of anyone else performing Bach on the piano as lèse-majesté. Recalling that experience now brings to mind Susan Tomes’ description of hearing one of Schiff’s mentors and collaborators, Sándor Végh: “ I thought that instead of listening to music I was listening to information, and that I could not afford to miss a single link in the sense of it. I had no urge to drift in and out of the music as I so often do. It was like being lost in a maze, and hearing someone explain, just once, the way out of it.”
Since then there have been constant reminders of Schiff’s mastery of the great works in the canon of Bach’s keyboard music, of which the six partitas composed between 1725 and 1730 are a summit. Time after time, audiences at the Wigmore Hall and elsewhere have been treated to gargantuan evenings embodying all the English or the French suites, or the partitas, or an entire book of the Well-Tempered Clavier (or the Goldberg variations). Contrary to the claim in the Spectator, there is nothing “ridiculous” in a long evening being devoted to one of these sets of pieces; it is true that stamina and concentration are required from the listeners, but attendance at such events is not compulsory and the fact that the Wigmore often has to schedule each concert twice indicates no shortage of victims. The evening attended by the Spectator reviewer ended with a spontaneous standing ovation.
The Spectator article also belittles the speech which the pianist gave before starting to play.
Whilst I doubt that a musician as spontaneous as Schiff will have said the same thing twice running, his introduction on Tuesday night was a model, breaking down the fourth wall between performer and audience and enabling us to relax into the marathon ahead. He gave two reasons for performing the partitas in an unconventional order. Perhaps the more compelling motivation was to create a chain of ascending tonalities, from G major to E minor, but he also – disarmingly – explained that starting with No 5, the piece he knows the best having learned it as a child, helped him to overcome pre-performance nerves, though even that had not prevented him, he told us, from having “made a complete mess of it” in a previous performance. Such candour, especially in a musician whose technique and memory create the illusion of invulnerability, should be welcomed, not scorned.
Schiff then went on to make a light-hearted but deeply-felt allusion to current affairs, by pointing up the different European origins of the dances in the partitas – the gavotte from France, the sarabande from Spain and so on – and expressed the thought how sad it would be if the gigue (originating from Scotland or Ireland) decided to leave the partita and set up on its own. This gently humorous point seems a long way from the Communist harangues which Maurizio Pollini is reported to have imposed upon his audiences, and it is a pity that the columnist of a pro-Brexit magazine could not enjoy it on its own terms, but instead equated Schiff’s description of Bach as a great European, internationalist and humanist with the belief that the Egyptian pyramids were built by Martians. It is hard to imagine anything much cheaper, but perhaps the intention was to make someone laugh.
Ruskin wrote thousands of words on the great sequence of paintings by Tintoretto in the Scuola San Rocco. But when he came to the last, the Crucifixion, he fell silent, saying only, “I must leave this picture to work its will on the spectator; for it is beyond all analysis, and above all praise”. Some Spectators, it seems, resist for the sake of resisting. However, in the spirit of Ruskin, it is not possible or necessary to describe in detail the extraordinary experience of listening to a performance of the six partitas such as Schiff’s. He gives the impression of standing like a general on a hill surveying the field of battle, moving his troops and making his dispositions with perfect command and understanding. The overwhelming experience for the listener is one of joy, a joy that bursts to the surface in particular in the use which Schiff makes of ornamentation, The addition of turns, mordants, runs and other devices to vary material already heard is to follow Bach, who himself wrote in many such enrichments, and would have expected the performer to add more. How to do so is a difficult question of taste, but it is one that Schiff gets right every time.
It seems a pity when a concert, prepared for so seriously, delivered so generously and appreciated so universally by those who were there (and some attended twice), is used as mere pabulum for the admittedly “churlish” criticism offered in the Spectator this week. One is reminded of the novice monk who burned down the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto; when arrested, he told the police that “its beauty made me feel inferior”. Everyone feels inferior before Bach, but it is hard to believe that the composer himself can have imagined his music played any better than this.
