I Went to Sokolov Too
We went to Dresden and visited the Dresden Philharmonic for the first time. It left an utterly charming impression. From the outside, modernism may not be the most beautiful architecture, but inside — it is wonderful. Interacting with modern concert halls, whether our Stadthalle in Chemnitz or the one in Dresden, is pure pleasure. The service was a particularly pleasant surprise: they took our coats and bags at the cloakroom without, as is customary in Germany, asking for money; tickets were checked at the entrance to the hall rather than at the entrance to the building. The wine was delicious and generously poured: Alyona and I shared a single glass between the two of us. The hall itself is magnificent, both acoustically and visually. A very pleasant semicircular stage — neither too small nor too large — on which any orchestra except perhaps a Mahler-sized one would feel both cozy and comfortable. I would very happily come here again for another orchestral concert.
Grigory Lipmanovich is a legend — what else is there to say? Even now, as I write this, I’m listening to a recording of the 32nd Sonata from his 2004 Bad Kissingen concert. An unbelievable sense of style, of era! And yet the performance is full of individuality, life, detail, temperament, living breath, rhetoric. And the colors of the instrument! Roaring and singing, explosive chords and the stern chorale of the Arietta — in a word, rapture. There are many pianists I enjoy, many whom I listen to simply in order to marvel at someone else’s ear, pianism, inner world — to hear something entirely different from my own understanding of music. Sokolov, however, has always been a kind of tuning fork for me, against which I check my own interpretations. Yes, one can “tune to 442 or to 415,” but it is still important to know how “440” sounds.
As expected, he played a thoroughly unpopular program: Beethoven’s Fourth Sonata, the Six Bagatelles op. 126, and Schubert’s Sonata in B-flat major, D. 960. Beethoven I had heard before at some point, even if I don’t “know” the music in my hands. Schubert, however, I was hearing for the very first time. What a revelation that should have been.
What I was not prepared for was the possibility that Grigory Lipmanovich’s genius had outgrown that “tuning fork” and stepped into the age of metamodernism. Only several days after the concert, reflecting on the experience, do I think I am beginning to understand his intention.
This was undoubtedly a performance piece: an exploration of us, the audience, rather than of the music. He walks on stage sternly, gives a restrained bow, and with a polished movement sits down and immediately begins the program, not waiting for the echoes of applause, the delayed coughing, the scraping of chairs, feet, and program booklets to fade away. Music written by the classics for performance in close proximity to listeners, on historical pianos and fortepianos, flowed uninterruptedly, note after note, out of a huge, obscenely expensive modern Steinway and out into a hall of 1,500 listeners for two full hours. Even if each of those 1,500 people coughs or rustles a program only once, that already becomes one extraneous sound every four seconds. And every single one of those sounds is perfectly audible. Almost like recordings of John Cage’s 4’33.
Very little happened in the music — and this was young Beethoven, no less. So little, in fact, that I found myself thinking about all sorts of things: about the strange coincidence that Sokolov fills fifteen-hundred-seat halls all over Europe and we paid €45 per ticket to attend, while my professor, a product of an even greater school, a magnificent pianist whose performances could sink a hall into silence, chose family life, then a philharmonic beyond the Arctic Circle, and later a life beyond the Urals, where most of her career unfolded. Then I began asking myself whether I was simply biased, whether I had lost the ability to enjoy another person’s art because of banal envy: because my former classmate substitutes for Yuja Wang in concerts, while I get asked whether I have recommendations from celebrities before being allowed to rent a school auditorium.
And I began recalling all the revelatory piano performances I’ve experienced in my life: the way Dima Karpov played the 31st Sonata during our tour through France, and how Beethoven first revealed himself to me there as vivid and humorous; how Lyova Terskov opened Grieg’s Op. 47 to me in such an unusual, sorrowful, beautiful way that I still hope to perform it myself one day; Bach’s Chaconne played by Elena Nesterenko in our small hall, and Scriabin sonatas played by Evgeny Mikhailov in the conservatory’s large hall; astonishing Corelli Variations by Tanya Chernichko at a memorial concert for her mother; Mozart’s 17th Concerto, which I first heard performed by Virsaladze with our symphony orchestra; Jeffrey Goldberg’s very unusual concert here in Chemnitz.
And then there were concerts that passed entirely by me: Lugansky at the opera house, Pletnev in one of Beijing’s principal concert halls. No, it definitely wasn’t envy. This attraction simply wasn’t for me.
I didn’t even notice when the sonata ended and the Bagatelles began: which one is this now?
At one point I even laughed to myself, thinking that if Grigory Lipmanovich had been my student, I would have had a long list of comments on what are, to me, the most basic things: on the una corda pedal, which exposes the upper register and makes it either wheeze or ring; on genre, which I consider the most important characteristic of a work; on style, both Classical style in general and Beethovenian style in particular — why do early Beethoven and late Beethoven sound the same? On the complete absence of any characterization whatsoever. And again I descended into self-analysis: perhaps you’re like our chamber ensemble department head Minasyan, measuring everyone against a ruler you invented yourself. Are you capable of simply listening to a musician? Of loosening the reins and letting him lead you where he intended?
But here is the problem: Grigory Lipmanovich leads nowhere. There is no more meaning in his interpretation than there is in abstract painting. But perhaps then the point is beauty? Perhaps one should stop searching for meaning or thought? Stop searching for time, circumstance, character, action, and instead simply surrender to the beauty of the instrument and of harmony?
Sokolov played the final scale, stood up, bowed just as modestly, then bowed twice more and left despite the unceasing ovation. We went to drink wine and look out over evening Dresden from the balcony. I tried to encourage an exhausted Sonya: that had been late Beethoven — surely Schubert would be more interesting.
HOW WRONG I WAS.
If Beethoven had felt like a misunderstanding, Schubert became outright torture, because Grigory Lipmanovich was very clearly and very deliberately mocking us. He played from memory, eyes closed, without striking a single wrong note in two hours. And without playing a single living one. More than that: every note in Schubert’s sonata was individually strangled by the finger assigned to it. Every note was condemned to be extracted separately from its neighbors — neither loudly nor softly, but in the most idiotic possible timbre. Whenever possible, in that same upper register that sounded either wheezy or metallic; somewhere between mp and mf with the una corda pedal, so that it resembled chalk scraping against a blackboard. I was hearing this music for the first time, but in every measure I heard murdered potential: an unborn phrase, unrealized polyphony, an unresolved dissonance, an undifferentiated texture, an undeveloped theme. One of the greatest pianists alive effortlessly retrieved notes from memory and played them in such a way that any conservatory student sight-reading the piece would, by comparison, seem a subtle interpreter.
Sokolov’s performance was so flawless and so sterile that it would undoubtedly have won the grand prize at any modern competition — the Chopin Competition, the Queen Elisabeth Competition, the Tchaikovsky Competition, the Cliburn. The program booklet said “Sokolov, Beethoven, Schubert,” but what stood on stage was the quintessence of the modern classical world. Ludovico Einaudi squared. With one hand Grigory Lipmanovich was strangling great music, and with the other recording the official time of death of the classical scene: the triumph of marketing and the shutting down of ears and souls, while waiting for the audience’s ovation that would not stop until he had played all six scheduled encores listed in the program.
The last time I felt this revolted was during Swan Lake at the Chemnitz theater. But there, clearly, the choreographer had simply been an idiot, and one could get up and leave. Here, however, there stood an unquestionable authority, and leaving felt impossible — people were listening. Almost like those conformity experiments in which eleven out of eleven people insist that black is white. Throughout the entire second half I fantasized about walking out after the concert and playing literally anything alive or beautiful on that piano, simply to prove that I was not the idiot, that the piano was not at fault, but that what we had just heard for two hours was complete bullshit.
I was ready to accept the possibility that it was simply a bad day. That all my friends and acquaintances in Berlin and Leipzig had heard magnificent concerts, that Grigory Lipmanovich had been in brilliant form there, and only tonight everything had gone wrong. That he felt unwell, that he hadn’t adjusted to the hall acoustically, that he was tired, that a friend had died, that he simply didn’t want to play at all. Yes, we were suffering; yes, it was impossible to listen to. But it must have been hard for him too. Soon the sonata would end, we would applaud politely, and everyone would go home.
But the sonata ended, Grigory Lipmanovich gave three routine bows and, just as sternly and serenely, sat down to play the first encore: a Chopin mazurka.
And my God, how wonderful it was!
Perhaps it was not the greatest Chopin mazurka in the world, but it was so charming, musical, beautiful, alive! Exactly everything for which I had been cursing this evening suddenly evaporated: phrase, style, epoch, composer, genre, timbre, texture, dynamics — everything appeared.
After the three routine bows came a Brahms Rhapsody, once again masterfully murdered. My professor once told me she could never understand why some people seek only beauty in music. After all, music can portray fascism magnificently too. And remembering my own experiences, I still cannot stop marveling at how unimaginably difficult it must be, with the pedantry of Hannibal Lecter, to murder music note by note, pouring death across a vast concert hall while preserving the composure and manners of an English butler — for what, exactly?
To demonstrate the corruption of the modern classical music world?
To expose people’s lack of taste?
Or perhaps to provoke action? To awaken us to life? To stir something within us?
Negative emotions are, after all, far stronger than positive ones. I have three unfinished glowing reviews of magnificent productions from the outgoing season lying on my desk. They remain unfinished because catharsis fades, impressions wear away, and the necessary nerve disappears — the thing that would force me to finish writing and force you to keep reading. But here an entire week has already passed, and my heart still goes thump-thump with anger. I can send our orchestra director as many brilliant videos as I like, but he won’t message me on Instagram because of them — only after I leave a comment under his advertisement saying that the audition website looks like a scam.
And it wasn’t only me: many people in the hall sensed the same message. When we left after the second encore, there were already people standing in the cloakroom and on the staircases who had instinctively followed the call — or rather, fled from the agonizing performer. Quietly they shared impressions: “No, he plays well, it’s just somehow not working for me tonight — maybe I’m tired.”
But perhaps this appeal is more concrete and more profound? Perhaps Grigory Lipmanovich is waiting for the ovations to stop, for us to say: no.
No! We are not people of dead art! No! We listen to and perform music in order to live, to speak, to endure our joys and sorrows together! To meet, with heart and mind, those long departed, and through them understand ourselves and the world around us. So that musician may recognize musician, and human being recognize human being. To express what otherwise cannot be said. And to hear oneself in another person. Or to hear another person within oneself. Music is life itself, and there is no place for death within it.
You called on us to fight death, and I answered the call.
