Shoot the pianist?
Last night, as I flopped onto the sofa after a day of essay marking and admin, I found myself glancing briefly between two shining display screens. One was the TV, where I’d inadvertently switched on BBC4 just at the point that we were being introduced to the semi-finalists of this year’s BBC Young Musician of the Year as the show began. The other was my phone, on which, among the various tweets that scrolled past my twitching thumb, I read: ‘The treatment of collaborative pianists on #bbcyoungmusician: a cry from the heart!’. And there was a link to an article, by pianist and writer Susan Tomes, in which she puts forward the case for treating accompanists (a word she seriously dislikes) as equal partners in the chamber music performed as part of this, and other, competitions and performances.
Speaking as someone who can still be found sitting at a piano from time to time, and who much prefers it when someone else is there making noise as well, this – if you’ll pardon the pun – struck a chord with me. As Tomes points out, chamber music is a close collaborative process and much repertoire, particularly after about 1800, invests each musical protagonist with equal significance in the piece. Learning how to perform with others, what Tomes describes as ‘a demonstrable awareness of, and respect for, one’s musical partner’, is a crucial part of becoming a professional musician.
Personally, I don’t have a major problem with the word ‘accompanist’. It is not ideal, I grant you, and within any performance worth its salt I would expect all participants to have moments of being at the front, middle and back of the musical landscape. It is a shorthand for those of us who would rather work primarily with others rather than on our own. (It takes a very rare bird indeed to do both things equally well.) And to me, ‘collaborative pianist’ sounds a bit like the sort of thing that an HR department would come up with to soothe bruised egos. But I do understand the wish to rescue, from the shadows at the back of the stage, the person sweating away in front of the many-toothed Steinway grand, and acknowledge their crucial role in proceedings.
Let’s face it: everybody loves a soloist. Several hundred years after it was first used as a successful PR device by the early Romantic virtuosos, we still adore the idea of a prodigiously talented individual sweating away in a practice room (ideally against a backdrop of deprivation and difficulty, so that their story is properly rags-to-riches), getting their big break despite all the odds, and making it into the big time. Classical music marketing, having worked out how pop was getting its albums shifted, is awash with pictures of gleaming soloists – partially, I suspect, in order to get the attention onto the living musician, and off the succession of dead white men whose music they are probably performing. Sometimes, I grant you, accompanists do appear beside their soloists. Sometimes they don’t because they don’t want to: Graham Johnson recalls that, when planning the Hyperion Complete Schubert Edition, he ‘refused to be a part of these covers, calculating that over thirty pictures of me in the company of the singers would both tire the eye and provide rather too graphic a depiction of the passing of time. I was placed, and only at Ted [Perry’s] request, on the cover of Volume 37, the final issue of the series.’
So it’s perhaps no wonder that, since everybody loves a soloist, and since marketing is often directed towards individual celebrity, the lines have to be drawn very clearly: the one out the front is the ‘soloist’, and the one driving the piano is a ‘not-soloist’ (or whatever you want to call them). I have been trying to think of examples in which both members of a duo have enjoyed equal reputations: Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau and Gerald Moore is most certainly one, Peter Pears and Benjamin Britten another. In each case, it is significant that they worked with each other with a certain level exclusivity, and most certainly longevity – and that they were prolific as duos. It seems as if duos are best established and treated as such if they are more like string quartets: that is, that they are considered as stable chamber ensembles (which allows, over time, for the kind of trust and mutual understanding that Tomes mentions) rather than as individuals who occasionally work together, but who have many other collaborators.
This can limit the horizons of those involved, of course, if they feel always bound to work with each other. But the idea of any musician having a trusted partner (or partners, if the ensemble is to be bigger than two) is surely no bad thing as they begin their career? Then again, if you’re 15 and trying to win a major competition like BBC Young Musician, you might not have found that person yet – and I believe that shouldn’t, at that age, be a handicap. Nevertheless, you do need someone to play with. So what is to be done?
A simple solution would be to interview the competitor and their fellow musician(s) together – even a few sentences would give us an idea of the nature of their working relationship, and put them firmly in the picture whilst allowing the Young Musician to remain at the focus of what we see. (The grump in me would like to add that, if the thing were shot a bit less like an episode of Masterchef, there would easily be time to do this within the run of the programme.) Another would be to light the stage in such a way that everyone up there is equally visible and thus visually of equal status. And also, I would suggest, giving more screen time within performances to the duo as a duo, rather than just the competitor. We don’t go to live performances, as a general rule, to watch one person to the exclusion of everyone else – we want to see all the people making music together, that’s what provides such a thrill. So come on, all you who film musical performances: turn the camera towards the piano. To misquote Oscar Wilde entirely: Shoot the pianist. They, too, will be doing their best.
