Bruce Brubaker: Celebrating Mozart
Bruce Brubaker
“Although there is a small quantity of notes in Mozart’s piano music, we play it for the great quality of the notes,� says Bruce Brubaker (echoing pianist Arthur Schnabel).
Chair of the NEC Piano Department, Brubaker was discussing the annual Piano Honors Concert which this year will be entirely focused on a single composer--Mozart. The performance by students chosen through competition will take place Sunday, April 30 at 8 p.m. in NEC’s Jordan Hall.
In the past, students could compete to play on the Honors program with music by a variety of composers chosen by the piano department, Brubaker explained over a recent lunch. “This year, we set up a variety of categories within the competition—sets of variations, sonatas, groups of short pieces. This was designed to make an interesting program for the final concert. Because this is a Mozart Year (the 250th anniversary of the composer’s birth, we decided we would limit the repertory to Mozart. This allowed us to preserve the format and still get to hear a lot and encourage students to play a lot of Mozart. It’s wonderful,� he added, “to saturate the building with Mozart’s music.�
Brubaker, who organized the Gunther Schuller festival last fall, very much favors the idea of short-term emphasis on a single composer or theme in a festival-like setting. He feels such convergence enriches both audience and players. But he admits that not everyone would agree with him. He recalls conductor Erich Leinsdorf’s recipe for celebrating the 1991 bicentennial of Mozart’s death. “He thought the best way to celebrate was to ban performances of the composer for a whole year! Then when you went back to playing Mozart’s music, you could hear it with new ears…�
Although such a stratagem might be appropriate for performers who are normally immersed in a particular composer, Brubaker believes young pianists don’t study enough Mozart. “He is not so central to what they are playing,� he said. Particularly in preparing for competitions, young pianists often focus on 19th and 20th Century blockbusters—by “Ravel, Liszt, Rachmaninoff, Tchaikovsky.� Mozart doesn’t seem like an obvious choice when trying to demonstrate one’s pianistic chops.
“In a strange paradox,� Brubaker said, “Mozart seems like something any child can play. Then there is a long period of early adulthood when it’s harder to play. Then, maybe it gets easier when one is much older.� In any case, young artists often feel the need to flex their muscles with the big showpieces rather than demonstrate their ability to probe deeply below Mozart’s deceptively simple surfaces.
This brought Brubaker around to the cyclical nature of musical interpretation. Over time, “certain pieces get easier to play technically. Take Ravel’s "Gaspard de la nuit." “Scarbo� (the last of the three pieces in the set and once considered fiendishly difficult) turns up routinely in competitions these days.� But Brubaker wonders if “certain kinds of expression and phrasemaking become easier and harder� at different periods of time. For example, he believes that the popular music that young musicians now listen to may make it more difficult for them to play music of the Classical period by Mozart or Haydn. “They have no close experience,� he said with a formal structure of “eight-bar phrases and regularly recurring harmonic resolutions.� If “they were listening to Rodgers and Hammerstein though—that’s not such a bad preparation for Mozart.�
Similarly, efforts to recreate period style are inevitably colored by the present. “We still don’t know how Beethoven sounded.� And historical performance practice is but “a product of our post-modern sensibilities. Fifty years from now, a new aesthetic view will change how that music sounds to us.�
As “an extreme example,� the pianist points to a Haydn program he did in 2004 and will perform next year at the Institute of Contemporary Art’s new waterfront building. Called Haydnseek, it combines Brubaker’s performance of Haydn’s piano sonatas with a “fabric of electronic sound� fashioned by keyboard player and composer (“DJ�) Nico Muhly. At times, the electronic tropes provide a “small wash of sound,� Brubaker said. “Sometimes they become very invasive.� Listening through the distraction of the electronic sound--a scrim of contempory sonorities--allows the audience to perceive the original Haydn in new ways.
Whether it’s performance art such as Haydnseek or a mini-festival of music by Mozart, Brubaker thinks such experiences are important because they serve as a model to students. “They demonstrate the possibilities of expressing musical ideas in ways that attract audiences. Audiences are looking for compelling performances that have something to say. That goes back to the origins of all music as communication.� Musicians today, if they want to make it in the world “will have to communicate well, not just adroitly.�