Ingrid Fliter at Tippet Rise
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Ingrid Fliter I
Peter Halstead
ngrid leads a quadruple life, as does her husband, the Russian clarinetist Anton Dressler. Not only do they value their family life with their young child, Alma, but they play chamber music, solo recitals, and orchestral engagements all over the world. Although playing with orchestras is essential to the gravitas of musical careers, it is playing chamber music which provides the guilty pleasures, and solo recitals where musicians reveal their souls. Playing a recital brings an artist the freedom of changing the tempo, accents, phrasing, responding to the feedback from the audience with small nuances which capture the moment, and being able to vary the push and pull of pacing which lends vibrancy to otherwise routine notes and creates in everyone present the memory of a three-dimensional performance. This was what happened in August of 2018 at Tippet Rise, and we are fortunate to be able to offer her unique presentation of the Chopin nocturnes in high-definition 24/96 stereo here.
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Ingrid has recorded other performances of the nocturnes for VAI and Linn. As happens with operas, when you’ve heard one you’ve heard only the tip of the iceberg, because there are many other equally valid and yet different versions available on record. This is true of Ingrid’s music, which she shapes for a particular audience on a special night in a room and with a piano, which all influence the music. It is Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, or the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics: the observers influence what is seen or heard, and become part of the reality of an event. Michael Frayn wrote a play about it, Copenhagen. Ingrid’s recording of the Chopin waltzes was Editor’s Choice in both Gramophone and Classic FM Magazine. VAI also offers her live performance of the nocturnes from the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. Linn Records has recorded her Chopin preludes, and just released her new version of the nocturnes. As the Daily Mail wrote of it: She must be the finest piano talent to come out of Argentina since Martha Argerich, and her Chopin playing has now achieved a level of sculpted perfection that few can match. Fliter does not moon about, but keeps each Nocturne on the move while maintaining an immaculate legato and inner strength. The pieces almost seem to be playing themselves.
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Speaking of mooning about, Ingrid is also a wonderful painter, and her Impressionist intaglio of moonlight can be seen on the cover of the Linn album. Its diptych reveals how the filter of the moon alters the scraggly scenery of day into a more directed and more Gothic Caspar David Friedrich hallucination, a metaphor for how Chopin’s nocturnes distill reality into a night garden of animate ectoplasms, spectral versions which shape the chaos of reality into the illusory beauty of art. Monet painted his gardens at Giverny without his glasses on, because the myopia of his unaided eyes was a portal into the meaning of the verdure, not the mere appearance of it. Chopin saw the night that way, and Ingrid’s brush strokes, on canvas and on the piano, bring the carriage lamps of 1848 flooding back into half-seen apparitions, the shadows of a bel canto age whose descants and obbligatos have become obscured by a world which may be more focused, but which lacks the vast, vague lattices and longueurs of Proust. 8 Ingrid Fliter
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Ingrid Fliter Chopin Nocturnes
I
first encountered my beloved Chopin when I was a child, through one of his nocturnes. At that time I could only feel and imagine the magic and mystery of this music. Later on, growing up and deepening into the world of Chopin’s music, I discovered the richness, complexity, and beauty of each nocturne, and they became my life companions. The singing quality of this music is quintessential, it comes from the lungs as much as it comes from the fingers. Chopin deeply loved Italian opera, which he regularly listened to in the Théâtre-Italien in Paris. He wanted to “defeat” the natural characteristic of a percussive instrument by creating the illusion of the continuity of the sound. So when I play this music I try to imagine I’m a wonderful opera singer! But most importantly, this music speaks directly to our hearts. It reveals feelings that come from the depths of his soul. And he chooses each of us to tell his story, his secrets, and about his life as a best friend would do.
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Chopin's Nocturnes Revisited A
Peter Halstead
s Simon Callow has suggested, by re-ordering Shakespeare’s sonnets, the story behind them is revealed. Possibly by changing the traditional numbering of Chopin’s nocturnes, new profiles are unleashed. Chopin saw a different night than we do, in a different light, if you will. His night was filled with carriage wheels, the stench of corpses, the miasma of the Seine’s questionable effluvia, and a sky without interference from any motorized urban presence. His foray into the seamy underground world of transvestites in the Bois du Boulogne, thinly masked by the prettified salons given in wainscoted drawing rooms above Baron Haussmann’s broad avenues, was a highly successful attempt to revamp John Field’s 18 schmaltzy works, generously called by Liszt “half-formed sighs” and “vague Aeolian harmonies.” Now Chopin’s 21 own fantasies of the night need to be rescued from a performance tradition which barely hears the music because of performance conventions. A vesper or a compline in Gregorian chant is a prayer chanted in the evening or just before midnight, when nocturnes were originally meant to be played. Like tribal masks on the doors of mud huts, such songs were meant to dispel the devil, to exorcise the demons of the day from sleep, the sleep of the righteous when monks spoke to the angels, which restored their faith. at Tippet Rise 13
Rudolf Steiner felt that a deep sleep made it possible for humans to touch the angels, to converse with their dead beloveds, to channel the heavens through dreams. Without that energy, the next day would be almost lifeless. We have all felt the exhaustion of a light sleep. In 2018, we presented the Goldberg Variations, meant by Bach to be played by his friend the harpsichordist Johann Goldberg to put Johann’s patron, Count Kaiserling, to sleep. Also performed was Schubert’s incantatory Notturno, referencing the Italian form from which later versions of the nocturne derive. We also presented Mompou’s somnolent Galician sarabandes, Ravel’s “Noctuelles,” and Kernis’s music of the spheres: newer versions of Chopin’s night vision. Perhaps we have the need to speak to our angels more than ever. Chopin’s inventive fantasies have no form at all, although many of them have a wilder midsection, the opposite of the slow movement in a sonata. Chopin was disrupting tradition. Of course, his schizophrenic inversions of classical form have now become their own traditions, and need to be themselves disrupted, in order to regain the stillness of a lost world. The nocturnes have a schizophrenic quality because most of them become bored with their soporific dream state and digress into explosions of waking vitality, into energetic variations on the original quieter theme, before this dream of day subsides again into the lilting night of the initial melody, as if the underlying reality of the Parisian world was not day, but night. Artists are creatures of the night, well portrayed in Puccini’s opera La Bohème of 1896 and in Richard O’Brien’s stage production of The Rocky Horror Picture Show of 1973.
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Chopin lived, however, a very disciplined life. He rose at eight, took language lessons at ten, received students until noon and practiced until two, after which he changed out of his dressing gown, went for walks, and eventually went to dinner. He wrote in 1848: ….one has to sit two hours at table with the men, look at them talking and listen to them drinking. I am bored to death (I am thinking of one thing and they of another, in spite of all their courtesy and French remarks at table). Then I go to the drawing-room, where it takes all my efforts to be a little animated—because then they usually want to hear me—; then my good Daniel carries me up to my bedroom (as you know that is usually upstairs here), undresses me, gets me to bed, leaves the light; and I am free to breathe and dream till it is time to begin all over again…. In a letter from Vienna to Matuszyński in 1830:
After dinner black coffee is drunk in the best Kaffeehaus; that is the custom here…. Then I pay visits, return home at dusk, curl my hair, change my shoes and go out for the eve- ning; about ten, eleven or sometimes midnight, —never later—I come back, play, weep, read, look, laugh, go to bed, put the light out and always dream about some of you.
So it would seem that Chopin wrote his music during his work day, in between visits from language masters and students. Professional artists don’t need inspiration to compose; they schedule genius like a haircut. Chopin didn’t need the night for his nocturnes. And yet he was only the third composer to pay lavish attention to the form. Paris is the city of night; gas lamps make it inviting; there was no street crime in the 1800s, at least in the better arrondissements. And the countryside around it would be entirely dark. 16 Ingrid Fliter
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So nocturnes reflected a different world from the one we know, and maybe we can absorb a little of the reflected moonlight of the 19th century from the reflective interpretations of Ingrid Fliter. James Attlee, in his book Nocturnes: A Journey in Search of Moonlight, discusses how human beings in urban environments are “devolving,” losing their ability to relate to the natural world, a circumstance which we in Montana are ideally situated to avoid. Scheduling Chopin’s night music is a reminder to us all of a world of dreams which we want to treasure and preserve. It is not just the imaginary angels, Nabokov’s “the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs,” who restore us in the night; it is moonlight itself which triggers temporal structures in the cycles of complex organisms on which they base their lives; we all apparently need the structure of night and day to integrate our own biologies into the universe. Attlee describes the freedom of the night as seen by many writers, such as Goethe strolling in Naples: I can’t begin to tell you the glory of a night by full moon when we strolled through the streets and squares to the endless promenade of the Chiaia, and then walked up and down the sea shore. I was quite overwhelmed by a feeling of infinite space. Gothic literature, such as Dracula (1897), makes much of moonlight, as does the poetry of Verlaine, on which Debussy based his Clair de Lune of 1890. Clair de Lune was in turn a new take on Chopin’s nocturnes, which were written between 1827 and 1846. As John Ruskin pointed out one night in 1844, moonlight over Mont Blanc obscures as much as it reveals, as the snow- covered slopes disappear into each other. Our modern concept of the night is a medley of these insights, codified by Chopin in his songs of the endless schizophrenic Gothic Parisian night. at Tippet Rise 19
The Nocturne in C-sharp Minor, B. 49, written in 1830 and published posthumously in 1870, is thought by some to be spurious, possibly because it wears its simple heart on its idyllic sleeve. But it is also one of the most beautiful pieces ever written, and why should it be consigned to the drawer of lost socks just because its provenance can’t be traced? If that were the case, Shakespeare’s posthumous plays would also be spurious. Since Shakespeare himself can’t be accounted for, other than to say he sued a local tradesman for six pounds and left his second best bed to Anne Hathaway (presumably not the American actress), we might as well tag all his plays as spurious (since it makes more sense that they were written by well-traveled aristocrats with libraries, such as the Earl of Southampton or the Earl of Oxford). This nocturne was played by the Holocaust survivor Natalia Karp for the Nazi concentration camp commandant Amon Goeth. Goeth was so impressed by her artistry that he spared her life. This is similar to a story in Roman Polanski’s film The Pianist, based on the story of Władysław Szpilman, who played Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 for the German captain Wilm Hosenfeld, who thereafter spared his life and brought him food. This same ballade is the subject of the book Play It Again: Why Amateurs Should Attempt the Impossible, by Alan Rusbridger, the former editor-in-chief of The Guardian, the story of the year he spent learning the piece. The E Minor Nocturne of 1827 was published posthumously as Opus 72, No. 1, in 1855. The Nocturne in C Minor, B. 108, composed in 1837, was published posthumously in 1938, more than a century after it was written, and was the last of his 21 known nocturnes to be published.
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Night Music W
Peter Halstead
hen I think of Chopin’s nocturnes I think of that despairing French photo, maybe by René-Jacques, when the world was in black and white and every kiss was a matter of life or death, coming just after the war when the universal instinct was to make love in the ruins, and Paris was in ruins, as were people, so I think of that photo of the night flying down some rain-soaked stairs to the dark dirty banks of the Seine, dank underworld highways of sex and failure which surround us in our trench coats, glistening in the rain, on the run from the night, like Aznavour in Shoot the Piano Player, losers with lamplit halos, lovers of lost color, of daylight and dead music, trapped in the steel of cities destroyed by their own technologies, by the engines of war, knowing that leaves have been dead in the countryside for months, that nothing will come of the spring, that first love is the beginning of betrayal, but still the camera flies down the Fritz Lang steps of the storm, holding back all that despair, the small rooms of the night, renounced by the vast clueless rage that moves the world, yet rhyming still the mesh of perfect marriages with dappled carriages, even though rhymes no longer matter to a society blown apart by weapons and the rain of rust, fog hurling itself around those filthy river walks where transvestites shiver in the litter, hoping even now that the chilling, stripping rain will bring auras to the streetlamps and that somewhere in the mist someone sings for real, all the decades of deceit ripped away, and there the photo stands, listening to night, waiting for morning, for the flirting, restorative day, aiming at tenderness despite the baggage of camp, the sniggers of the broken, strangifying and strangling the walking dumb, the busted, the aficionados disgusted with their own expertise,
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their inability to start over—it’s all there in that photo, in the music of night, the Kantian echo of black and white, where everything is either true or false, before philosophers started to dicker, to recant (as Freud, Jung, Sartre, and Eliot all did), too late as always, their doubts hushed by acolytes who were already profiting from their youthful mistakes: well, here’s Chopin’s rain again, washing out sores, and let’s hope it scours all of us. In this most naked of confessions entrusted over the masking river swell of warm certainty where the conclusion of the right hand is as affirming as the left, what moves me are the harmonies sprung out of older leftovers, new subtleties invented from already dying notes, cascading and spiraling stairways entirely independent of rhythm, the busy demands of reality overcome with invention, the right hand in its own world, anchoring itself just in time in the river on the bottom, the gently flowing Danube of the salons never descending into those embarrassing gallery-opening clichés, keeping its own company and consequently its timelessness: never imitated, never solved, still hanging, small fragile scents in the summer air, too personal to become a slogan, a motto, a movement, too inner to be a theme. Chopin was never part of a school, a group, which explains perhaps his inability to be explained, uncovered, espoused, exposed, exhumed. No defense is the best defense, as grass bends to wind, as someone said of Chopin: flowers and cannons, where chords are as indefinable as clouds, too airy to be earthy; where tonality defies reduction—to clarify it is to ruin it, the way roads destroy the delicate tapestry of fields, the way a flashlight illuminates the obvious and erases the subtle, diminishing as it enlarges. Let me become hysterical here.
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Musicians often keep pictures or stories in their minds to help them capture the mood they want, or conversely capture the mood by ignoring the piece, a bit like inner tennis where a mantra’s purpose is to distract the player so the body can go about its business, that is, play it straight. So we by indirections find directions out. But to what extent do our inner programs, rather than distracting us, focus us on the programs themselves, which then replicate in the music, as if Marilyn Monroe, while pretending to be a peach to forget her fear, actually became a peach? Here in the nocturne, from the start to the end, the constant bass notes descend like snow on a quiet Swiss village, while the melody imitates that bass with exactly the same notes, give or take a few, so that you can see Chopin in the process of inventing his melody from his accompaniment, the way Michelangelo said he found his sculptures by chipping away the stone that didn’t belong to them. But maybe I am just snow-blind.
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Chopin's Nocturnes I
Ingrid Fliter, piano
n 2018, Ms. Fliter made her Tippet Rise debut, playing Chopin’s gorgeously melodic songs of the night. “There is no questioning Fliter’s innate affinity for Chopin…Fliter realizes her poetic potential most convincingly,” said Gramophone of her 2018 recording, Nocturnes. Ms. Fliter is the only woman, and one of just a handful of pianists, to win the Gilmore Artist Award. No. 8 in D-flat Major, Op. 27, No. 2 No. 9 in B Major, Op. 32, No. 1 No. 3 in B Major, Op. 9, No. 3 No. 6 in G Minor, Op. 15, No. 3 No. 12 in G Major, Op. 37, No. 2 No. 5 in F-sharp Major, Op. 15, No. 2 No. 13 in C Minor, Op. 48, No. 1 No. 10 in A-flat Major, Op. 32, No. 2 No. 17 in B Major, Op. 62, No. 1 No. 15 in F Minor, Op. 55, No. 1 No. 4 in F Major, Op. 15, No. 1 No. 1 in B-flat Minor, Op. 9, No. 1 No. 2 in E-flat Major, Op. 9, No. 2 No. 16 in E-flat Major, Op. 55, No. 2 No. 14 in F-sharp Minor, Op. 48, No. 2 No. 7 in C-sharp Minor, Op. 27, No. 1 No. 11 in G Minor, Op. 37, No. 1 No. 18 in E Major, Op. 62, No. 2 Encore: E Minor (posthumous) Encore: C-sharp Minor (posthumous) 28 Ingrid Fliter
CLICK HERE TO PLAY INGRID'S CONCERT VIDEO at Tippet Rise 29
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Technical Specifications Recorded: 08/10/2018 Recording Engineer: Monte Nickles Assisted by Jim Ruberto, Intern Phil Tock Sound Editor: Jim Ruberto Mix and Mastered by: Monte Nickles Performer: Ingrid Fliter Piano: Steinway, Seraphina, 1897, Serial Number 86769 D Piano Technician: Mike Toia Recorded in Auro3D format for immersive playback in 32bit 384kHz DXD.
Microphone preamps: Grace M802s Converters: Merging Technology's HAPI and HORUS with Premium converter cards DAW: Recorded in Merging Technology's Pyramix Mixed with Avid Pro Tool's
Microphones used: Main array: Left: DPA 4006a Right: DPA 4006a Center: DPA 4006a Sur L: DPA 4041a Sur R: DPA 4041a Height FL: DPA 4006a 40mm APE Height FR: DPA 4006a 40mm APE Height RL: DPA 4006a 40mm APE Height RR: DPA 4006a 40mm APE Spot Microphones: DPA 4060a pair DPA 4006a pair at Tippet Rise 31
Ingrid Fliter at Tippet Rise
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