The Improvisatory Muse Yefim Bronfman Plays Beethoven, Salonen, Debussy, and Brahms
Har r y Haskell
In a sense, most composition is an act of improvisation—the spontaneous interaction between a composer’s sensibility and technique and the musical material at hand. But for the four composers whose music we hear tonight, improvisation was and is key to unlocking the storehouse of artistic creation. “Real improvisation,” Beethoven wrote not long after composing his C-minor Variations, “comes only when we are unconcerned [with] what we play, so— if we want to improvise in the best, truest manner in public—we should give ourselves over freely to what comes to mind.” In the same spirit, one of Brahms’s friends remarked that he played the piano “like one who is himself creating, who interprets the works of the masters as an equal, not merely reproducing them, but rendering them as if they gushed forth directly and powerfully from the heart.” Schumann’s indelible image of the young Brahms having sprung forth “like Minerva fully armed from the head of Jove” is mirrored in accounts of Debussy as a conservatory student, improvising on the piano “successions of weird, barbarous chords” that would revolutionize music’s harmonic vocabulary. For Beethoven, ever more dependent on his mind’s ear as his physical hearing failed, freely embracing “what comes to mind” was both an artistic imperative and a practical necessity. Yet a similarly improvisatory impulse lies behind the “capricious and dream-like” music of Esa-Pekka Salonen.
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