Mannes: Richard Goode Master Class

When a non-musician sees a great pianist in recital, appearances can sometimes be deceiving .  So skillful and talented is the artist and so familiar is he with the piece at hand that a spectator often fails to appreciate all the thought and hard work that are involved before the pianist ever sets foot onstage.  So natural is the musician's playing and so effortless does he make it seem that one is tempted to think that with only a few hours practice one could do just as well himself.  Attending a master class such as that given yesterday morning at Mannes by Richard Goode serves an excellent corrective to any such misconceptions.

The class was in three parts and scheduled to last the same number of hours.  I only stayed myself for the first section which lasted 75 minutes and dealt with the Sonata in C major, Hob. XVI:50 by Joseph Haydn as performed by a highly talented student named Hsin-I Huang.

The class began with the student's performance of the opening movement Allegro.  Goode then joined him onstage and proceeded to analyze his technique.  Though it would be impossible to recapitulate everything that was said (at any rate, I wasn't taking notes and can only paraphrase), the thrust of Goode's advice was to move as far away as possible from any approach that would give the playing a mechanical sound.  He commented that though it is important to keep the proper tempo, the pianist should should not be ruled by the metronome.  

When it came to the second movement Adagio, Goode made the interesting observation that the hardest part of playing a slow movement is making the notes disappear.  In other words, the playing should be so fluid that a listener is never conscious of individual notes.  Instead of hearing them - and listeners tend to focus most especially on sixteenth notes - an audience should be listening to where they are going.

Anything else said would be too technical or too specific to be of general use.  The above are most interesting as an indication of the thoughts a pianist has, or should have, when first approaching a great work of music.  Obviously, he does not simply sit down at the keyboard and pound out a tune.  A great deal of deliberation must first go into determining the composer's original intentions and thereby deciding how the piece should best be performed.  In this regard, Goode noted that it was both a blessing and a curse that Haydn did not leave more explicit instructions for the instrumentalist.  While a pianist may lack the composer's guidance, he also has more freedom to maneuver in order to achieve the sound he considers most appropriate.

I wondered what the lasting effect of this class was on the student.  Though the assistance he received on this one work was obvious, how did that carry over to other pieces he might play in the future?  I would think the ultimate benefit lay not so much in the implementation of any specific advice as in the development of a general approach to be taken when performing a work for the first time.