Trifonov Shifts Attention from Europe to Americas

Pianist Daniil Trifonov has been a regular visitor to San Francisco, both as concerto soloist and recitalist, over the course of several years. This coming February, he will return to Davies Symphony Hall as soloist in a performance of Sergei Prokofiev’s Opus 18 (second) piano concerto in G minor with the San Francisco Symphony. In addition, this site has tried to keep up with his Deutsche Grammophon recordings, the most recent of which was Bach: The Art of Life, a “family portrait” that juxtaposed works by Johann Sebastian Bach with selections by four of his sons.

Daniil Trifonov on the cover of his latest album (courtesy of Crossover Media)

Trifonov’s latest album takes him across the Atlantic Ocean, so to speak. It is the first of two releases both under the title My American Story. The subtitle for that first release is North, and it offers an impressively diverse account of music composed in the United States. Taken as a whole, it amounts to an engaging account of how music was being made during the twentieth century.

The breadth of that diversity can be oriented around the two concerto selections on the album, each reflecting a different perspective across the two centuries. The first of these is George Gershwin’s “Concerto in F” (originally given the title “New York Concerto”). Following the success of “Rhapsody in Blue,” the conductor Walter Damrosch commissioned Gershwin to compose a full-scale piano concerto for his New York Symphony Orchestra. “Rhapsody in Blue” has been composed for solo piano and jazz band, but it was subsequently prepared for orchestral performance by Ferde Grofé. The concerto, on the other hand, is entirely a product of Gershwin’s own efforts.

A little less than a century later, Mason Bates composed his first piano concerto. It was written for Trifonov and given its first performance in January of 2022. It was co-commissioned by Trifonov and the Philadelphia Orchestra, with whom he played the work’s debut. The recording of that concerto on North was made with that same ensemble led by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, who has been the ensemble’s music director since 2012.

I feel as if I have been following Bates’ work for almost as long as I have been writing on this site. Unless I am mistaken, that dates back to the spring of 2009, when Michael Tilson Thomas conducted Bates’ “The B-Sides” with the San Francisco Symphony. It took me a while to get used to him (which may be the same for any thoughts he may have had when reading what I wrote about him); but I came away from listening to his concerto with the sense that he had approached it with more security than Gershwin had brought to his “parallel” effort. Indeed, I can confess that my very first impression of Bates leaned towards “enfant terrible;” but the firm and secure hand he brought to composing for both piano and ensemble is a far cry from either of those words!

All the other selections on this first My American Story album are solo performances. I must confess that I was particularly taken with the tracks that involved arrangements of popular tunes by leading pianists from each half of the twentieth century. The earlier of these was one of the most influential musicians (who happened to play piano) of his time, Art Tatum. The second could be said the same for his time, the pianist being Bill Evans. In listening to these tracks, one can easily detect Trifonov’s appreciation of both of those jazz masters. That appreciation also extends to the final track on the album, which is “4’33”,” John Cage’s “silent” composition. On the other hand his approach to the more “serious” composers, such as Aaron Copland, John Adams, and John Corigliano, struck me as more dutiful than engaging; but that is probably just because I am not shy in voicing personal opinions!

The Latest Discovery of Art Tatum Recordings

Cover of the album being discussed

Some readers may have observed that, every now and then when writing about pianists, I find of a way of injecting the name of Art Tatum into the context. To call him a jazz pianist of prodigious inventiveness would be selling him short. Indeed, since he was a contemporary of Sergei Rachmaninoff, I like to fantasize over what might have happened had the two of them been in the same place at the same time. (To the best of my knowledge, this never happened; but I can still wonder whether each listened to recordings of the other!)

As a result, even though I have both of the “Complete” box sets released by Pablo (one for solos and one for combos), I never miss an opportunity to add recordings of Tatum performances to my collection. So when I learned that Resonance Records was releasing a three-CD collection of live performances from the Blue Note jazz club in Chicago, recorded between August 16 and 28 in 1953, I was as happy as a pig in you-know-what. The title of the collection is Jewels in the Treasure Box, and it could not be more accurate.

With the exception of a few solo tracks, all of the performances are of a trio that Tatum led. He was joined by guitarist Everett Barksdale and Slam Stewart on piano. Every now and then, each of them gets an opportunity for a solo take or two; but, for the most part it’s Tatum’s show. My guess is that almost all of the tunes are familiar and have been previously recorded, but Tatum’s inventiveness knows no bounds. It seems as if, every time he returns to a tune, he has another way of approaching it.

It is also worth noting that those approaches often involved a radical shift in connotation. One of Tatum’s favorite sources from the classical repertoire was Jules Massenet’s “Élégie” (which the composer himself repurposed several times). As the title suggested, the composer conceived this as a musical evocation of melancholia. The score page I found through IMSLP gives the tempo as “Triste et très lent.” In this Chicago collection, Tatum’s performance is anything but “triste,” since he performs it at an eye-popping breakneck pace!

Since these are club performances, there is no shortage of “background noise.” Nevertheless, the recording technology consistently keeps the music in the foreground. When any imposition from the background finds its way onto the recording, it is inevitably a sign of appreciation from the audience that is bound to concur with anyone listening to that particular track. It is also worth noting that the album includes a fifteen-page booklet, which includes a diverse collection of retrospective reflections by other musicians with first-hand experiences of Tatum’s talents, such as Ahmad Jamal and Sonny Rollins. I also rather liked Rollins’ reflection that, when Earl (“Fatha”) HInes was at one of Tatum’s performances, he said, “God is in the house!”

Enjoy the journey!

Lara Downes Previews her Latest Solo Album at Noontime Concerts

This Friday Sono Luminus will release pianist Lara Downes’ latest solo album. As is usually the case, Amazon.com is currently accepting pre-orders for those who can’t wait. The title of the album is America Again, which was taken from the poem “Let America Be America Again,” written in 1938 by Langston Hughes. While it is all too easy to associate the phrase with the current election-year climate (particularly since Hughes was never one to mince words on matters of politics and race), it is worth noting that America has long been a dominant theme in the recordings Downes has made. Thus, there is her American Ballads album, which dates back to 2001, and her far more recent A Billie Holiday Songbook, released in March of 2015. For that matter, almost all of the composers represented on her 2011 album 13 Ways of Looking at the Goldberg are American; and many of the exiles in her Exiles’ Cafe album found their exile in the United States. In other words Downes has built up a recital repertoire through which she has become a champion of American composers, both those born here and those who made this country their second home. The title of her new album basically reassures us that she is still at it.

None of this is intended to dismiss the Hughes connection to this album. Over the course of twenty compositions, Downes’ album offers a perspective of the American dream that, like Hughes poetry, acknowledges its elusive qualities. As a result, most (but not all) of the composers included constitute departures from the mainstream at such a distance that most of us need to be reminded just who they were. Thus, the album includes Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s arrangement of “Deep River,” from a more extensive volume he compiled of solo piano arrangements of African American spirituals. Closer to the present is “Sueno Recurrente,” composed in 2002 by Angélica Negrón, born in Puerto Rico and now living in Brooklyn. Other female composers on the album include Amy Beach (“From Blackbird Hills”) and Florence Price (“Fantasie Negre”).

This is not to suggest that all of the tracks are likely to be unfamiliar to most listeners. Scott Joplin is there with his “Gladiolus Rag;” and the final track is Harold Arlen’s “Over the Rainbow.” However, there are also some arrangements that definitely deserve special attention. “I Loves You Porgy” from George Gershwin’s only opera Porgy and Bess, is included but in an arrangement by Nina Simone. Similarly, Downes chose to play Art Tatum’s arrangement of Irving Berlin’s “Blue Skies.” I have to confess that, as a listener, I cannot get enough of Tatum; but I feel the same way about Lou Harrison. So the inclusion of his set of three New York Waltzes was a personal delight.

This afternoon at Old St. Mary’s Cathedral, Downes was the Noontime Concerts (“San Francisco’s Musical Lunch Break”) recitalist. She used the occasion to preview two of the tracks from America Again. The first of these was the “Deep River,” preceded by the explanation that Coleridge-Taylor was an English composer (without emphasizing the Creole side of his ancestry). Thus, his interest in African American spirituals could be compared with Béla Bartók seeking out folk music from Romania and other eastern European lands to add to the sources he had gathered from Hungary. Coleridge-Taylor’s style, however, is closer to Franz Liszt than to Bartók; and Downes’ account of his rich approach to embellishment and invention was highly absorbing.

By way of contrast, she then turned to the first track on her album, Morton Gould’s “American Caprice.” There was no mistaking the sassy “American” qualities of this music from a man who, in his day, was more frequently associated with music for programs broadcast on both radio and television. However, his roots go back to Tin Pan Alley and a versatility that enabled him to do just about anything to pick up wages during the Great Depression.

Downes then turned to Gould’s “elder,” George Gershwin. (As a conductor Gould became a great champion of Gershwin’s “serious” music.) She played the arrangement for solo piano that Gershwin himself made of his score for “Rhapsody in Blue.” This has a few departures from the original version, none of which mar the thoroughly American spirit of this music, which seems to be able to survive anything, even being mangled by United Airlines. This is also music that Downes recorded; and her “singles” release is still available for download from Amazon.com. She then remained with Gershwin for her encore, performing that Simone arrangement of “I Loves You Porgy.”

Finally, it is worth noting that Coleridge-Taylor’s somewhat Lisztian approach to “Deep River” was given an unabashedly nineteenth-century “overture.” Downes began her recital with four of the short pieces that Robert Schumann collected in his Opus 12 Fantasiestücke (fantasy pieces). These were given accounts that were appropriately expressive, thus setting the context for Coleridge-Taylor’s own rhetorical stance, while also “phasing in” the audience with a more familiar bill of fare.

Finding the Right Framework for Jazz

I find that I have been casting a broader net in writing about jazz on Examiner.com.  It certainly is not that there is not enough to cover in the “traditional classical” domain;  nor do I think it has to do with a need to ride my jazz-as-chamber-music-by-other-means hobby horse more often.  Rather, I think it has to do with my fundamental precept that all listening can only take place in the context of other listening experiences, so I like to keep my contexts both broad and flexible.

One result of my activities is that I sometimes get interesting feedback from those people primarily in the jazz world.  There are, of course, the ones who figure that I don't know what the hell I’m talking about because my mind is cluttered with too much thinking about classical music.  Every now and then, however, I get some feedback to the effect that I am writing at both greater length and depth than most jazz writers do.  I take that as a positive sign.  When I wrote about the SFJAZZ performance by Michel Camilo and his trio this past weekend, it was natural to evoke names from different corners of jazz history (Art Tatum, John Coltrane, Cecil Taylor) to illustrate the breadth of Camilo’s imaginative inventiveness.  On the other hand it also made sense to add Morton Feldman to that mix, not so much because Camilo’s piano solos sounded like Feldman as because he had a way of dwelling on the sonorities of individual notes that struck me as a perfectly valid reflection of Feldman’s aesthetic.

Will this make a difference to jazz lovers?  Quite honestly, I know no more about those who go to SFJAZZ events than I do about those who pay good money for a seat in Davies Symphony Hall and then only seem to care about how loud they shout “Bravo!” at the end.  I suppose one reason why I prefer jazz in Herbst Theatre to any club setting is that Herbst is more conducive to listening than any club is.  Charles Mingus used to be very fussy about receiving respectful attention at a club gig;  but I am not sure how high the listening priority is for most club-goers.  The real point is that today’s jazz holds up to serious listening at the same level as a chamber music recital in Herbst or a symphony concert in Davies.  It may be that most folks at any of these venues do not care about this very much;  but it is nice to discover, from time to time, that my stuff gets read by those who do care.

Miles Davis and Gregor Piatigorsky

Perhaps the only thing more awesome than the thoroughness with which Robin Kelley has accounted for the life of Thelonious Monk is the scope of his bibliography. As I read the book, I would occasionally tick off an item in one of the footnotes when it struck me as a source for further examination. Given the length of Kelley's book, I knew I should do this sparingly. Yesterday I took stock of all the ticks and started checking off which ones I could find in the San Francisco Public Library. I quickly realized that I would have to come up with a list short enough for a pile of books I could manage to carry home! I spent yesterday afternoon at the Library examining all of the candidates, homing in on six and rejecting five. I am not going to enumerate those five, because I suspect that there is still value in them. I had to make a pragmatic decision on what I could manage, and I am sure that I shall be reminded of all five of these books as my research proceeds.

Of the books that I did select, the most fascinating was probably Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews by Arthur Taylor. I realized that, in my own quest to tease out how and why it is that the nature of music has more to do with how that music is performed, rather than how it is documented in artifacts of notation, I often forget that the study of performance has more to do with anthropology (such as is practiced by someone like Pierre Bourdieu) than with music theory or music history. Anthropology, in turn, tends to be a product of methods of observation and interviewing. The problem in both of these settings, however, is that the anthropologist is almost always an outsider; and there any number of jokes about what happens when that outsider status goes awry.

Taylor, on the other hand, was very much an insider. His experiences as a drummer brought him in contact with so many of the leading figures of jazz history that, had he directed his efforts otherwise, he could have been as significant a chronicler of jazz as Jean Froissart had been for the first half of the Hundred Years' War. Instead, he chose a much more modest path. Beginning in 1966 he began to interview musicians whom he had worked with or known to document their perspectives on what "making jazz" meant to them. Notes and Tones is the result of that interviewing process, and it was one of those books that I could not wait to begin.

When the book first appeared, the first interview was with Miles Davis. In a subsequent edition published by Da Capo Press, Miles is preceded by Dexter Gordon; but my Library copy was the original Perigee edition. As could have been anticipated, Miles was not the most cooperative interview subject; but he also made it clear that he felt more comfortable talking with Taylor than with an outsider.

The passage from the interview that interested me the most was the following response to a question about how much things had changed since Miles was first starting to play jazz:

They don’t have anyplace to experiment for young guys who start playing and who play their own stuff. It’s because of all those records they make nowadays … you know, the guys copy off the records, so they don’t have anything original. You can’t find a musician who plays anything different. They all copy off each other. If I were starting out again, I wouldn’t listen to records. I very seldom listen to jazz records, because they all do the same thing. I only listen to guys that are original, like Ahmad Jamal and Duke Ellington, guys like Dizzy Gillespie, Sonny Rollins and Coltrane.

This interview was conducted on January 28, 1968. About a decade later I was working in Santa Barbara; and one of my colleagues had previously been in the Music Department at the University of Southern California, where he has served as a pianist for some of the classes taught by Gregor Piatigorsky. He told me that, when Piatigorsky got really mad at a student, the worst thing he could say was, "You sound just like a Rostropovich recording!" In retrospect I realize that he was saying exactly the same thing that Miles was saying to Taylor: The student was so obsessed with copying what (s)he heard on a recording that (s)he did not "have anything original" to say in his/her performance.

Any thought of performance as a "realization" of a notation document is a dangerous misconstruction. Performance is about "having something to say," which is worth saying only if it adds to an ongoing conversation, rather than just repeating what has already been said. The notation may provide the framework for structuring what one says; but the content of what one says resides in the approach one takes to performing, rather than in the notation being performed. This may be more evident when we consider the practices of jazz performers who relied almost entirely on working by ear (such as Art Tatum and Monk); but it is just as applicable in the classical domain, no matter how detailed the notated specifications may be. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why it was not hard for Pierre Boulez to find common ground with Frank Zappa. Both saw notation as a path to push the envelope of what one could do in performance; but both knew that the music was in the performance, rather than the notation. My only regret is that, of the two of them, Boulez is now the only one left to keep reminding us of the significance of this precept.

Ultimately, Miles' complaint to Taylor had to do with "young guys" trying to perform without adequate education. Piatigorsky was up against the same problem. Has this situation improved? As usual, it depends which end of the telescope you use to examine the situation. When I hang out at master classes taught at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, I encounter all sorts of imaginative strategies that direct students away from the details in the notation and towards the more subtle details concerned with performance. This reinforces me when I then confront so much of the junk that is now out there on the Internet by those who are better at self-promotion than they are in cultivating a "self" worth promoting! Unfortunately, quality is not its own reward. (Has it ever been?) Even Conservatory students with the richest of experiences will have to encounter the necessity of self-promotion in the world the Internet has made; but at least they will be going into that world with something that adds to, rather than repeats, the conversation!

Working without Notation

Yesterday I explored the hypothesis that those whose music education began with learning how to read the notation could not grasp the idea that one could learn to play anything of any "respectable" complexity any other way. The example that served as my point of departure had to do with Vladimir Horowitz' surprise that Art Tatum could come up with a variation on "Tea for Two" more elaborate than his own entirely by ear. Nevertheless, as I work my way through Robin D. G. Kelley's Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original, I realize that there is a perfectly good and familiar model for how Monk would teach his sidemen by ear. The problem (for musicians at least) is that the model is not to be found in music schools but in the worlds of classical ballet and modern dance.

While there have been a variety of noble efforts to develop notation for dance, none of them have established themselves as firmly as music notation. On the other hand this is a domain for which several centuries of practice have accumulated, and those centuries of practice still provide the foundations on which new dances are created and old ones are taught to new dancers. The process is a slow one, since it involves demonstrating every step, observing, and correcting. The primary channel for communication is body movement itself. Language intervenes to call attention to subtle detail or to provide context through which the learner may better perceive what the teacher is demonstrating. Since I first honed my writing chops as a dance critic, I had many opportunities to sit though sessions like these. They are real tests of both endurance and patience.

I remember once attending a lecture about dance notation. The lecturer asked us to imagine what it would be like if the New York Philharmonic had to learn what they were performing the way the members of American Ballet Theatre had to learn Sleeping Beauty. Think of Gustav Mahler's eighth symphony (which is probably on the minds of most San Francisco Symphony fans now that the classical Grammys have been awarded). It is hard to imagine that Mahler would have ever conceived of such music if he would have had to teach it the way a choreographer teaches a new work.

Yet that is the approach that Monk took in teaching his sidemen. Sometimes it could involve hours on getting the first measure right, which means that often a new sideman had not really learned all of the music before the first performance. So in reading Kelley's book we keep encountering stories of learning that takes place "on the stand." Monk accepted this as part of the process. Thus, with his most sympathetic audiences, such as those at the Five Spot, he could decide to play a piece a second time because they did not quite get it right on the first take.

None of this should warrant a condemnation of the use of notation in classical music. Rather, it is to raise the cautionary observation that, because notation is not everything, it runs the risk of warping perception with the illusion that it is everything. In contrast to practices in the dance world, notation provides an opportunity for almost-instant gratification, through which performers can "run through the whole thing before starting to work on the details." This overlooks that possibility that one or more of those details may actually critically influence how "the whole thing" is perceived in the first place. To invoke again the metaphor of a journey, it is as if one begins by thinking only in terms of getting from here to there without considering that the heart of the journey may involve why one path was selected over another. The nouns of the notation end up distracting from, rather than facilitating, the verbs of musical performance.

These days I suspect that there are many jazz performers who are as notation-bound as those devoted to classical traditions. If that is the case then we may face the possibility of playing by ear fading into obsolescence. That would be regrettable. The act of listening to music should be as important to performers as it is to the audience, and the idea that serious listening may gradually lose its value to performers is a depressing one. Perhaps we should consider the pedagogical asset of trying to learn by ear some of the shorter compositions whose notated form we take for granted, such as the individual movements of the keyboard suites by Johann Sebastian Bach. Having hypothesized that some of those movements may have been "the ultimate inspiration for John Coltrane's jazz improvisations," this would seem like a perfectly reasonable exercise the refine both ear and physical technique!

Who is an Expert on What?

Tucked away in a footnote in Robin D. G. Kelley's Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original is a telling anecdote that deserves serious consideration:

Although it appears to be apocryphal, a story has been circulating for many years among jazz musicians whereby Horowitz played his variation of "Tea for Two" for Art Tatum, whom he admired very much, and then when Tatum responded in kind with his variation, Horowitz was astounded. He asked Tatum, "How long did it take for you to make that up?" Tatum replied, "I don’t know, how long was it?" Horowitz found it amazing that he could improvise such an elaborate variation of the theme and, legend has it, he never played "Tea for Two" in public again. What is true is that the only recording we have of Horowitz playing "Tea for Two" took place that November 1962, and it was clearly not intended for release.

Whether or not this story is actually true, it makes an important point that extends beyond the domain of music into the nature of expertise and the behavior of those who claim to be experts.

My reading of this account begins with the premise that Horowitz saw himself as an expert pianist. That expertise included mastering the performance of major works, such as Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition and Franz Liszt's B minor piano sonata. While critics may differ in their opinions of how well Horowitz performed these compositions, they would probably agree that these are the sorts of pieces that establish the credibility of a piano virtuoso. From this point of view, while Horowitz may have admired Tatum "very much," he probably also felt superior to any pianist who could not pull off a performance lasting much more than three minutes. (For the record, according to my Complete Capitol Recordings CD, Tatum's recording of "Tea for Two" for Capitol lasted three minutes and five seconds.) There is thus a good chance that Horowitz figured he could impress Tatum by "pulling a Liszt" on "Tea for Two" while putting Tatum in his place at the same time.

Instead, it was Tatum who put Horowitz in his place; and I think the lesson to be learned from this is that those who are locked into the discipline of preparing performances from notated scores simply cannot conceive that a performance can be prepared in any other way. I have no idea to what extent Tatum worked with music notation. In the course of my travels, I picked up a Belwin publication entitled The Genius of Art Tatum, which purports to be transcriptions of Tatum's solos; and it gives absolutely no indication of whether or not those transcriptions were by Tatum himself or whether they were taken by ear from his recordings. On the other hand it is clear from the evidence in Kelley's book that both Monk and Bud Powell learned to play Tatum's interpretations by ear; and the interviews that Kelley cites indicate that Monk expected his sidemen to learn his own music exactly the same way. Kelley's evidence further indicates that most of the complexity in Monk's music was initially worked out by Monk at the keyboard, again by ear. In other words notation never served any purpose other than providing a documentary record that was, at best, incidental to the practice itself.

During Sunday's Day of Exploration With Midori at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, John Adams made a similar observation about recordings, saying something to the effect (since I cannot remember his exact words) that a recording was "just a document" that could never substitute for an actual performance. Unfortunately, he then went on to say some things about improvisation that suggested that he was no better informed about how jazz musicians can work (almost) entirely by ear than Horowitz had been. This was what first suggested to me that there was a broader lesson about expertise to be learned, which is that experts tend to fall into the trap of assuming that their own area of expertise is the only one that matters. This is a lesson that extends far beyond the domain of musical performance. As I wrote last year, "Stephen Jay Gould used to joke that cognitive scientists interested in whether or not non-human animals exhibited linguistic behavior spent too much time reading other cognitive scientists and not enough time studying animal trainers." At that time my target was economists who "assume that only other economists are worth reading." It does not matter which area of specialization you choose; this kind of narrow-mindedness is endemic to all of them!

Can it be avoided? Once upon a time there were those who believed that the purpose of a liberal education was to open the mind to the diversity of points of view, but the very idea of a liberal education has pretty much died of attrition. As a result, I see that the last time I cited this perspective was in a response to a Truthdig column by Chris Hedges entitled "The Best and the Brightest Led America Off a Cliff." As the old Monty Python sketch put it, say no more. So it does not matter whether we are talking about sitting at a keyboard to play or trying to puzzle out economic models. We have established a culture in which we approach complex problems from a position of confining ignorance, and then we wonder why we never arrive at any effective solutions!

One last thought: That 1962 recording that Horowitz made of "Tea for Two" took place over half a decade after Tatum's death in 1956!

"Young Pianists Play Liszt"

The above is the title of an annual event sponsored by the San Francisco Chapter of the American Liszt Society in collaboration with the San Francisco Conservatory Preparatory Division. Over the last four years the "young pianists" have been Preparatory Division Conservatory students. However, this afternoon at the fifth annual of these events, there were two "guests;" and the second half of the concert was performed by Collegiate Division (as in "not quite so young") students. Any way you cut it, that makes for a lot of Franz Liszt's piano music.

When classical and jazz pianists talk to each other, the conversation often turns to parallels between Liszt and Art Tatum. Both were "undisputed heavyweight champion" masters of the keyboard in their day, not just for technical skill but for the way in which that skill was applied to elaborate and complex embellishments of otherwise simple melodic material. Each had a successor who both continued the line and pushed the envelope further: Ferruccio Busoni and Oscar Peterson, respectively. After that the mold for both lines was pretty much broken, and the respective genres headed into new directions.

I bring this up because even the most avid of jazz listeners often confessed that, where Tatum was involved, a little bit goes a long way. Once CDs came along and the prospect of many hours in little physical space let to a knew "cottage industry" of anthologizing the jazz masters, it became easier to appreciate the wisdom of those listeners. It was not that Tatum was not innovative in his embellishments; it was that he was so innovative that one's cognitive capacity was sated after only a few numbers.

However, Tatum had an advantage over Liszt. He could restrict the duration of a performance to the capacity of a single 78 RPM side. Liszt came from an age where such temporal constraints did not matter, which makes it no surprise that he was one of Richard Wagner's most avid champions! However, this means that Liszt could just go one exploring new embellishments, closer to the spirit of John Coltrane than that of Tatum; and therein lies the risk of trying to arrange an all-Liszt program. The good news is that the risk is somewhat abated by having multiple pianists who bring different ways of performing Liszt to the program. The bad news is that Liszt's excesses often play out in a single composition.

At this particular recital the good news was pretty good. Seven Preparatory and five Collegiate students each executed their respective shares of the program with a sense of their own personality, and we as listeners could appreciate the extent to which that personality grew in depth with the age of the performers. The other good news was that the "bad news" pieces, such as the "Tarantella" movement from the "Venezia e Napoli" supplement to the second of the Annés de Pèlerinage, were kept to a minimum. Furthermore, one of the "guest" students even seemed to have a keen sense of the overall architecture of "Les jeux d'eaux à la villa d'Este," from the third of the Annés de Pèlerinage. Thus, over the "long haul" of a two-hour recital, Liszt fared relatively well in this setting, making it a good opportunity to learn a thing or two about listening to him.

Still, without going into details as excessive as Liszt's embellishments, I should observe that the recital ended with a roaring performance of the "Totentanz" (with a second piano covering the orchestra accompaniment), the same composition that Louis Lortie performed with the San Francisco Symphony under Kurt Masur near the beginning of this season. Now while I would think nothing of sitting through several performances of Tristan und Isolde in a single season (and my wife and I were sorely tempted to return to the movie house for the "repeat broadcast" from the Metropolitan Opera), I wasn't sure I would be up to a second "Totentanz" in a single season (even if separated by about six months). However, if Masur and Lortie seemed to have endowed their performance with the spirit of Halloween, I had to credit the young woman from the Collegiate Division for performing in a gown that was straight from the closet of Morticia Addams. She recognized, as Lortie did, that, for a piece like this, satisfying all the demands of execution is not enough; one must also honor the spirit of the work. In this case that is the spirit of either Halloween or The Addams Family!