Seymour Bernstein: Chopin & Pedagogy (Interview)

i think was it chopin who told his students that the finger should feel like it's i said that that's you well you watch it i said that i get you and chopin confused a lot well i was choking so there's no reason to get confused [Music] seymour i have a question for you what uh i see here that you have what appears to be a severed human hand and i just wanted you to explain yourself well now look this will tell you whose hand it is it's your hand is there any question it's clearly your hand well don't be upset but this is chopin's left hand really i used to be chopin you did in another embodiment were you anybody in between chopin and seymour no or did it went straight from it's enough to be chopin i wanted to tell you now chopin's by the way i told this to a pupil a new pupil he never came back he probably thought i was a spook yeah well you are a spook um it's interesting holding chopin's hand he was known for a very delicate approach to playing as a matter of fact clifford kurzen had the original cast of it a millionaires in paris gave it to him as a present you know he had a studio built onto his mansion in london it's not a studio it's a concert hall and there was an illuminated cabinet and i said what's that in the cabinet he took it out put it in my lap whose hand is that i said oh that's the hand of a woman he said is chopin's left hand it's much thinner than this chopin's piano his the play el piano the octave was equivalent to our seventh really the keys were narrower so you know when he did this [Music] he didn't have to stretch so far see so it's harder for us playing all these shoes of course it is well chopin was a great teacher and he taught a lot of amateur students he's not like a conservatory oh getting students ready for competition what do you mean amateurs his fee was so high that only the aristocracy could study with him they weren't necessarily all i mean they were amateurs they they weren't professional pianists but he would only teach gifted people do you know he gave three lessons a week to each people do you think that's overkill no i mean you would like to i would love that i don't think lessons are nearly long enough in juilliard you know the lesson is one hour one hour and then out the door well and everyone in juilliard was a prodigy practically i wasn't well you were fabulously your technique must have been finished otherwise you wouldn't get in they wouldn't work with you on technique did they really some but technique is mostly something i had to discover for myself in a way of course my teachers taught me so much but i think for my body maybe it's like this for other students you have to figure it out for yourself at the end of the day i think if you speak to every pianist they'll tell you the same thing we all figure it out for ourselves i fooled my teachers i played practice so well that they thought i had a wonderful technic technique i had terrible problems so and they never addressed them you mentioned one of your problems and it reminded me of my own problem uh and that's tense oh the shoulders and i love what you said in your choreography lesson which is once you learn to to drop your shoulders at the piano you'll realize you can take this lesson into real life and start dropping your shoulders that's right any activity while mama's serving you soup keep your shoulders down but i i it was all the way until my mid-20s so we're talking two solid decades of piano lessons and piano practicing before i really started to let go and your teachers never commented they commented but it wasn't enough of an emphasis and i don't blame them because i had a lot of other problems i had when i was a early teen i had flat fingers i was tense in my forearms oh so they had a big job to do they had a lot of work to do um but you know so it was one thing at a time for a while but i think a lot of times teachers forget about the shoulders and they're often teaching from the from the forearm down that that's exactly right well mostly from the fingers down do you think they don't pay enough attention to the arms well it's somewhat mysterious right like of course letting go here can allow a kind of weight transfer well the whole look here this motion this motion see the wrist undulating yes that's one of the most important motions in all of piano playing because see that's the greatest control with this long lever all the way from here so now if i would hold you like this and see go up and down like this that's really injurious i think was it chopin who told his students that the finger should feel like i said that that's you well you always said that i get you and chopin confused a lot well i was choking so there's no reason to get confused no i said you have the feeling that the finger is this long and what what what message does that send a student to imagine that almost ridiculously long finger coming from the shoulder to the finger well archimedes archimedes said if i have it a leverage long enough i could lift the earth so the longer the lever the more control you have at the other end of it naming namely the finger so see if you're going to lower this note watch what's going to go on here see i can actually ride the key down and if i do this it's almost impossible if i go it's going to leak out this energy leaking out no energy is leaking out i've taught many lessons in my life not quite as many as you but i've noticed a classic problem with the with a beginner or early intermediate which is isolating the hand and the fingers so that practicing or playing becomes sort of a matter of almost typing on the keys well yeah they think the keys are lowered like this from the bridge down that's it right right and it's and what i always said was you know don't press don't push don't stab these are all the wrong kinds of motions it's for me it's a kind of drop or a fall do you see this but do you keep your fingers taut t-a-u-t or are they loose i taught my students to keep their fingers taut but that's a that's a real trick because i think one of the things that takes years of getting used to to really develop one's artistry on the piano tell me if you agree with this is knowing how to be firm in some places and free in other words that's that's true yes and so all i would ask a student okay feel taught or feel firmness in your fingertips right make a shape make a mold but the moment they did that they gripped here too it's like they couldn't find the a way to be firm here and and free here i mean there's tricks for this uh yeah if you're in order to be firm here you can the only ways is to contract this muscle because there are no muscles here so the point is to what degree do you contract that muscle but it has to be contracted so you can't encourage the pupil ple try no tension here just put it in your finger you can't there's no way to do that you mentioned tobias mate yeah and i'm glad you mentioned the the book he wrote called the uh invisible indian it's much shorter than his earlier book the art of the act of touch i think is the name of it but one thing he talks about in the invisible invisible is that there's actually small stabilizing muscles in the forearm that are active that simply keep us poised and balanced to begin with and those do need to be engaged but they're not they're not the bigger muscles that are they're very dangerous muscles they're very tender muscles if these get activated that's it leads to injuries right here how do you work with a student especially when they're you're just developing their foundations to get them to to feel and carry their own weight because it seems indispensable for for progressing on the piano that you develop an ability to actually hold your own arm do you find this a struggle and with your students well for one thing if i do we were playing this nocturne right yeah if a pupil does this right like that or [Music] or they go and they're not they're not there's no choreography of of rotation and the fingers are either too loose or too stiff or and so this is what i do please pick up my hand from underneath and don't drop me pick me up lower me thank you now i'm not squeezing i'm resting on this in the same way to say put your elbow here and just rest now you know if i picked you up you would be very heavy but you're not pressing are you calling me heavy but you're not pressing are you no i'm just you're just resting so that's what it is i'll never forget the worst teacher was alexander brylovsky did you know he was the first pianist ever to play all the chopin works he was an awful teacher so i one day i asked him i called him metra you know master how do you produce that beautiful sound to what he took my arm like this what do you mean how do i produce my sound it's an expression of my soul it's like this and he almost put a hole in my arm he went like this with real enormous pressure very similar to what we were just discussing here so so he knew that there was pressure the lechatisky school called it dead weight you know they by play with weight i'm connecting the key bez [Music] i'm resting from one key bed to the next is it dead weight though because i i i know that uh it's not dead weight writes against the notion of deadweight because he says deadweight is no it's not falls too far you do have to stabilize and stay i just use that word because people call it dead weight i used to tell students just drop your weight it's dead weight it's free and they got a little confused and i blame myself for this because they weren't sure how to which part of the arm or hand is holding yourself up and this is where mate says well there's actually small muscles active that allow you to stay poised and then you can feel that dead so to speak dead weight channeling through but this feeling is so hard for you as much energy that's going down there are retroactive energy retroactive rocket right something's doing this look something's pulling up at the same time to break the friction see to break this [Music] see if not yeah you know there's going to be percussion you're going to hear this how do we teach that there are very few pupils who are actually going to achieve that they'll try that reminds me of janos starker i knew it jealous i played lots of chamber music in maine with this cellist and a quartet in residence there he was studying with janice starker and he told me he played a theme for him and janice starker didn't say a word he picked up his own cello and played that theme for his pupil and he said to him you will try yes but you cannot how do you like that you will so inspiring but you cannot so my p this this jealous was led to believe he could try all he wants and he's never going to succeed these teachers you know in the medical profession if there's malpractice they're going to lose their license that's what's wrong some of their students had great success though in spite of them don't you know the really really gifted people survive anything they're they're destined it's biological i wish that and i loved my teachers when i was young i wouldn't be here without without them i wish if i had gone back in time and had been them there was one thing i would have impressed more of and it's not something i learned until i really felt until my 20s and i'm not sure if they could have done anything about it at the time but it's it's something that rubenstein once told pellini pelini asked rubenstein what's the secret to piano playing after a concert how do you play the way you play and he whispered and please or something to the effect of you feel my fingers it's more it's what brolovsky said to you in a way and it was just an intense amount of concentrated pressure and energy he says my fingers are extremely firm and the rest of me yes oh is that what i can play i can play my whole play until i'm 95 and i'm i never get hurt now there's a lot more to piano playing than that but just pulling he didn't need any help no he's dangerous did he no he didn't but he needed help about getting ice water out of his veins that's what he needed help with yes his his cold interpretations i think it works well in the petrushka though oh fantastic recording no i gave him another chance he went to carnegie hall a couple of years ago he started with the four ballads and i walked right out i was so insulted there's different approaches to chopin and i would say that yours is more of the poetic approach and pellinis is well what else can you do with chopin except to be poetic fair point shall i play a little chopin for you oh you want to i just want i want you to tell me yeah i'm already i'm already failing you will try yes but you cannot my father used to play this nocturne at least the opening phrases when i was was your father a professional pianist no he's a professional chemist oh is he alive he's alive oh wonderful and uh he did play as a somewhat serious amateur when i was a kid and then he had too many children and and work uh too much work so piano sort of stopped being a part of his life but when i was a kid at least i would sometimes hear in the middle of the night [Music] so and then i walked in here today and it's the first thing i heard you playing and it just it took me back coincidental that's so interesting now look here yeah if you would analyze what you did because you can have it played back you know almost every note except you did that beautifully and then this those three that you change the dynamic other than that almost all the notes are on the same dynamic glistening and beautiful shining beautiful sound perfect hand balance between the left and the right but the right hand too much on the same dynamic [Music] this f right now this how do we do this let's say we have one two three four we have four of them i go i do that you can go [Music] with good good effect but i like [Music] may i try to you will try but to you i'll never good [Music] my left hand rotation right one gesture [Music] okay now look now look look look [Music] in between moving moving before i play the whole like the bow of a violin it's never gonna stop [Music] and not [Music] so here in case you're making the exact correct choreographic gesture down roll roll roll but in between you're stopping so [Music] and overlap see as you go up that g flat is going to lift by itself so she's lifting myself [Music] there you go that bears no resemblance to the other that you played you

Channel: tonebase Piano

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Keywords: piano, classical piano, tonebase, tonebase Piano, piano lessons, learn piano

Id: 0O1gyGY7ioI

Length: 22min 14sec (1334 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 22 2020