Showing posts with label Sviatoslav Richter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Sviatoslav Richter. Show all posts

Tuesday, December 29, 2020

Farewell to Fou Ts'ong (1934-2020)

Late last night the tragic news reached me that the great Chinese pianist Fou Ts'ong has died, aged 86, of Covid-19. This phenomenal artist was part of my childhood, as from the age of 10 to 17 I studied piano with his wife, Patsy Toh. He would flit by occasionally, a somewhat shy and shadowy figure in a doorway or in the hall, and my small self was rather terrified of him. I knew little of his story then, nothing about the horrific fate of his family in the Chinese Cultural Revolution or his dramatic escape via Poland after the Chopin Competition - though I did know he was friendly with Richter, because I once turned up for a lesson to find that Richter was there in the house, practising Schubert. Finally, as editor of what was then Classical Piano Magazine in the 1990s, I had the chance to interview him on the occasion of his 60th birthday. I asked him one question and he talked for two hours. Fortunately I still have the text, so I am rerunning it below in tribute to him. 


Fou Ts'ong
(Picture source: Svensk Konsertdirektion AB Website)

"I am always a beginner. I am always learning..." 

Fou Ts'ong tells Jessica Duchen the extraordinary story of his childhood in China and his escape to the West


Fou Ts'ong's life and career have been unconventional in almost every way, sometimes spectacular, sometimes unobtrusive, yet always sincere, taking him from the cosmopolitan Shanghai of the 1930s through Poland in the 1950s to the shores of Lake Como in the 1990s. There, under the auspices of the International Piano Foundation, he works with other eminent teachers and a select group of the best young pianists, creating, as he puts it, "the Davidsbündler of our time".


Fou talks with great enthusiasm (and an astonishing gift for mimicry) about his childhood and the early part of his career. This world could not have been more different. "My childhood would have been peculiar anywhere," he begins, "but was especially so in China, then a country of 450 million people over 90% of whom were peasants and the small core of intellectuals a tiny percentage." Fou belonged to that minimal number, being the son of a leading Chinese scholar, Fu Lei, who, having travelled freely to Europe and studied in Paris for five years, was exceptionally equally well versed in both Classical Chinese and modern philosophy. Among his works he counted the translation into Chinese of Romain Rolland's immense and influential novel Jean Christophe and the complete works of Balzac. [Fu Lei's Family Letters, a best-seller in China, published the correspondence of father and son and the progress of the youthful musician's piano studies.]


"Jean Christophe was an enormous influence in China, much more so than in Europe," explains Fou. "I think that was because it represented the liberation of the individual. To the Chinese this is the crucial issue - to this day it is not solved. My father was an extraordinary person, a renaissance man of great humanism; that is the way I was brought up. I was taught classical Chinese from a very early age by my father himself and this kind of classical education even in my generation is very rare. And my father, when he was teaching me Lao-tse or Confucius, would also quote Aristotle or Plato or Bertrand Russell or Voltaire."


"Those were very frenetic years in China, we were under Japanese occupation from 1941-45 - and for four years my father never went out of the house. There was hardly any food, just very coarse rice. Very hard times, but also it was a very hopeful time because the whole of China was in a ferment; everybody felt that fascism was evil, and evil and good were very clear cut. We were good, so we fought for the cause."


Fou's family also possessed a large number of records of classical music. Fou grew up to the sounds of artists such as Alfred Cortot, Edwin Fischer, Wilhelm Furtwangler, Pablo Casals. From a very early age he was mesmerised by music, yet it was not until he was 17 years old that he began to take the piano seriously as the focus of his life. Early lessons when he was ten were given by a pupil of his father, a young woman who had studied with a Russian pianist in Shanghai. Her loving and encouraging approach provided "the greatest joy in my life" for the otherwise strictly reared child. He progressed by leaps and bounds, but when he was sent instead to the Italian pianist and conductor Paci, one-time assistant to Toscanini at La Scala Milan and the founder of the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra - who had "got stuck" in Shanghai thanks to a passion for gambling - he found himself facing a very different approach which took all the joy away. He was given nothing but exercises to play for a year, plus the indignity of balancing a coin on the back of the hand.


After the family moved to Kuming in Yunan province, Fou became a rebellious teenager, passionately committed to the idea of communist revolution. His father, among the first Chinese to realise the truth about Stalin and the lies of Bolshevik communisim in Russia, acted as "a Cassandra of his time" and foretold disaster. His son disagreed and eventually a family split ensued. His father went back to Shanghai while Fou, alone in Yunan, was thrown out of school after school and finally, running out of schools and excuses, applied to and was accepted at the University of Yunan at the age of 15. He enrolled for English literature but spent his time "making revolution all over the place, falling in and out of love all the time, drinking and playing bridge!" 


But word got out that he could play the piano. When two rival churches in the town both put on Handel's Messiah at Christmas they competed for Fou's services as accompanist. Fortunately the performances were on different days, so he played for both. By exam time he was terrified, having done no work. Instead, he put on, with the help of fellow students, a concert in one church where he played an album called 101 Favourite Piano Pieces from cover to cover on a wartime upright. At the end a collection was made for him and immediately he had enough funds to make his way back to Shanghai by himself to continue his musical development.


The 17-year old thoroughly impressed his father with his difficult two-month solitary journey; his father agreed to help him pursue studies with the aim of becoming a concert pianist. These took on a distinctly surprising slant as Fou had very few lessons; one piano teacher emigrated to Canada after three months; next, what lessons he did have were from not a pianist but a violinist, the aging Alfred Wittenburg, a refugee from Nazi Germany, ex-concert master of the Berlin Opera and chamber music partner of Artur Schnabel. After Wittenburg's death, "I studied by intuition, thinking and reading books. I studied on my own and made my debut one year later. In Shanghai that made such a stir that central government, who wanted to send someone abroad for a competition, came to Shanghai to search out for me as one of the candidates."


That was how Fou went to a competition in Bucharest, where he won third prize, and then, fatefully, to Poland, where the government sent Andrzej Panufnik himself to listen to him to find out if he was worthy to participate in the Chopin Competition  Panufnik raved, "and soon everyone in Poland was raving. 'Have you heard him play mazurkas? Listen to those mazurkas!' I became a sort of performing monkey, everyone was asking me to play mazurkas all the time!" Fou laughs. He duly entered the competition and won the mazurka prize.


https://youtu.be/SqFOylOw2Ls


After the competition Fou studied in Warsaw and Cracow, thriving on the enthusiasm and encouragement he received there and falling in love again, this time with Mozart, an affair which lasts to this day. Professor Drzewicki, who also taught Halina Czerny-Stefanska and Adam Haraciewicz, sat and smiled through Fou's lessons. "After the competition he told me, 'Ts'ong you are different, you are so original and personal, you should only come to my lesson maybe once a month, no more'. Altogether I can count on my fingers the number of times I went. He said, 'I am here only to guide you if you go out of way'. 


"I was a great counterfeiter because I managed to hide all my troubles by my unique way of fingering, by my imagination, somehow by hoping to produce the goods. I always wanted to realise whatever vision I had in my head - in what way I don't know, I found it in my own way. Unless the vision was presented in a way that didn't show its deficiencies I would not allow it to go out. In a way I am my own downfall because I camouflage so well. In some ways it's also good because my way is original. But the struggle I have had with pianistic problems over the years is unbelievable, even to this day. I have to practise awfully hard; I envy pianists who have a great facility because I wish I had more time to play more music. Musically I am very greedy!'


Fou extended his stay in Poland as long as he could, for by then it had become dangerous for him to return to China where the anti-rightist movement - "the dress rehearsal of the Cultural Revolution" - had begun, and condemned him and his father. "It was a matter of life and death." He was desperate to go to Russia where a new friend and supporter was doing his best to offer help: Sviatoslav Richter, who wrote an enthusiastic article about Fou for a communist magazine entitled Friendship, published jointly in Russia and China. Richter had hoped thus to help Fou come officially to Russia, but while the article appeared in the Russian edition, the Chinese never carried it; nothing came of the scheme. Fou did not learn of this episode until many years afterwards.


His dramatic escape to Britain was made possible by the help of some more eminent beings: Wanda Wilkomirska, who helped to persuade the Polish authorities to "look the other way"; a music-loving wealthy Englishman named Auberon Herbert, who helped arrange an invitation for Fou to play in London, for which he could obtain a visa; and the pianist Julius Katchen, who lent him the air fare. To help throw the Chinese authorities off the scent, a "farewell"concert was announced at the last minute; Fou Ts'ong would perform two concertos, Mozart 's C major K503 and Chopin's F minor (both of which he learned in a week - on Saturday evening, 23 December. Another red herring, a farewell recital, was also announced for a later date, though pianist and organisers knew it would never happen. Early the next morning - a Sunday and Christmas Eve in a strongly Catholic country, a day on which "even the most diehard military police will become a little bit lax!" - Fou Ts'ong took a British Airways plane to London. He was free and an immediate celebrity in the West. Caught in the Cultural Revolution in China, Fou's father and mother both committed suicide.


Today, looking back over this extraordinary story and his varied fortunes since that time, Fou has some sensible advice to offer young would-be pianists. "First, you must have good self awareness, to know what you're made of. If you really have got it in you, not only talent but real aspiration, that means you are ready to sacrifice your life for it, totally dedicated to it, that's almost more important than talent. And even with these two, you have to be prepared to get nowhere in terms of worldly 'success'. You must know what you're in for! I wouldn't advise anyone to go on for the wrong reasons. 


"I consider myself terribly lucky, although I wouldn't consider my career that easy, partly because I have my deficiencies, also partly and largely because of my character. My wife Patsy [pianist and teacher Patsy Toh] says to me, 'You shouldn't complain, because you made your own destiny'. And that's true. Today I think to myself, thank God, now I'm really beginning to understand music. But I consider myself a beginner. I am always a beginner. I am always learning. I think I am very lucky that I never had so much success that I could be blinded by vanity. And to be in music, you are very lucky. When I was very young, I wrote to my father from Poland that I was sad and lonely. He wrote back: 'You could never be lonely. Don't you think you are living with the greatest souls of the history of mankind all the time?' Now that's how I feel, always."







Thursday, March 19, 2015

Richter: The Centenary

March 20 marks the centenary of a pianist without whom the history of 20th-century music would have looked very different. Sviatoslav Richter was a colossus, the dominant figure of the instrument in his age, the artist whom everyone aspired to be. He was born in Zhitomir on 20 March 1915, and his story was that of his century, his country and his art.

Yet he was always an enigma - the title that the director Bruno Monsaingeon wisely chose for a film portrait of him, made in 1998. We knew strangely little, during his lifetime, of his personality, his attitudes, his private life, let alone his politics. At times it could almost seem that Richter was a blank slate onto whom were projected the hopes, fears, aspirations, loves, hatreds and musical attitudes of generation after generation of pianists and pianophiles.

His playing to some was a force of nature, to others almost too perfect; to some brutal, to others overrefined. The truth went beyond the lot. The legend of his performances have extended to disc after disc issued and reissued: some are of genius, among them the Sofia Recital, recorded live in 1958, which contains perhaps the most intense and visionary account of the Mussorgsky Pictures at an Exhibition that one could ever hope to hear. This was my only choice - my only possible choice - when I did a 'Building a Library' article on the work for BBC Music Magazine a few years ago. Here's an extract:

This towering Russian pianist made it his mission to convey Mussorgsky exactly as written, but to embody in his performance of the unadulterated score all the emotion and philosophical great-heartedness that others try to achieve (usually unsuccessfully) through embellishment.
 Richter regarded Ravel’s transcription as “an abomination, a decorative travesty of the most profound masterpiece of Russian piano music”. His own interpretation offers what the filmmaker Bruno Monsaingeon described as a “wild and intractable purity”. It’s some of the most extraordinary piano playing you could hope to hear. His ‘Catacombae’ magically transforms every chord into a great cave, seeming to achieve that supposed pianistic impossibility, a crescendo in mid-resonance. Baba Yaga has a terrifying, pagan, monolithic power – contrast this with the delicacy of the unhatched chicks and the innocence of the Tuilieries children. In the grand finale the radiant carillon of Kiev and the evocation of Russian orthodox choirs behind cathedral screens are unforgettable. There’s a conceptual scale to Richter that goes beyond what most pianists can imagine: he throws himself into Mussorgsky’s truth and fuses with it.

Behind the Iron Curtain, Richter spoke perhaps more openly than he ever did in the West. The byways of the Internet have turned up some gems, notably this blog that reproduces some fascinating material. Here is an extract of an interview from Budapest in 1958 (retranslated by Zsolt Bognár):

Interviewer: "Please tell us about yourself. How do you live? Where did you spend your summer?" Richter: "I have a small house on the river Oka. I lived there during the summer, close to the water and far from people, four kilometers from the nearest village. There I was surrounded only by nature, the forests, fields, the air... this I enjoy tremendously. There everything is natural, tranquil, and I have no distractions or worries. One can bathe in the nude. If a thunderstorm comes, one experiences the elements very close-up: the house is of wooden construction, and when the rain patters on the roof, to be inside is like being in a dream."

I nearly met Richter (though not quite) when I was about eleven years old. My then piano teacher, Patsy Toh, was married to the pianist Fou Ts'ong and they lived in a big house in a Hampstead side street. Each weekend my dad would take me up there for a lesson and usually would wait in the car for an hour while Patsy put my unruly self through scales, studies and grade exam pieces. The Steinways were on the ground floor; Patsy taught upstairs in a smaller studio. Ts'ong, who had made a dramatic defection from China, knew Richter well from earlier times. One day I pitched up for a lesson to hear some exquisite Schubert emanating from behind a closed door off the hallway. "That's Sviatoslav Richter," Patsy whispered, ushering me towards the stairs. She remarked that shaking hands with him was like holding a beefsteak. I may not have known the full significance of the figure in the lounge, but I knew it was something that would interest my father, so before we started my lesson I zipped out, banged on the car window and said, "Dad, Richter's in there, practising!" Dad leapt out of the car and dashed up to the house; I don't think I ever saw him run quite so fast as then. Upstairs I delivered Hanon with rather sweaty palms.

The one time I was ever lucky enough to hear him in recital must have been his last performance at the Royal Festival Hall - given in darkness, but for one angle-poise lamp on the piano. He began with an account of the Schubert G major Sonata in which the first chord went on for so long that I thought we were all going to die (and yes, it was symptomatic of the movement's entire tempo that day). To end, though, there was Prokofiev: I remember the numbness and incredulity that passed through me at the thought that this man not only was friends with the composer, but gave the first performance of several of his masterpieces and was now bringing us all into direct contact with that history as his notes filled our ears. [UPDATE: A kind friend tells me - and sends proof - that on this occasion Richter played the Sonata No.4. I remember it, and wrote about it earlier, as No.7. Clearly I am mistaken, and therefore have amended this post accordingly - yet very oddly I can hear it in mind and memory as No.7.... well, 1989 was a while ago. The programme also included the Schumann Nachtstücke.]

Richter performed rarely in London in his later years, but he would sometimes do what we'd now called pop-up concerts. Yes - Richter would pop up. These very occasional surprise concerts would take place in churches, some like St James Piccadilly, others off the beaten track; they would be announced at the last minute and word of mouth would be spread by his fans, who'd drop everything and run; and the concerts, by all accounts, would be full, and intimate, and pure, free of media attention, social desirability or anything extraneous to passion for music. Something about this remains both remarkable and wonderful. I can think of several pianists who I wish would follow suit.

Bruno Monsaingeon's film, made when Richter was ageing and already ill, is in many ways a sad portrait, deeply moving, occasionally astonishing, and empathetic in the extreme. As we remember Richter this week, do see it.




Friday, April 05, 2013

Friday Historical: Beethoven's Triple in Moscow, 1970

Heads up, first, to a feisty performance of this extraordinary piece at St George's Hanover Square yesterday. The Orpheus Foundation's mission is to help young musicians bridge the gap between finishing college and finding their way into the profession by providing orchestral performing experience with the Orpheus Sinfonia. Yesterday their cello soloist was one of their increasing number of success stories: born in Belorus, Aleksei Kiseliov played with the ensemble for several years and, besides winning a number of prizes, he has now been appointed principal cello of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Beethoven's Triple Concerto features a virtually irrational workout for the cello, which has to undertake all manner of stratospherical pyrotechnics, but Aleksei stayed cool as can be, maintaining exquisitely beautiful tone throughout. Expert contributions, too, from his fellow soloists - the fine young violinist Benjamin Baker and our neighbour-in-SW-London Anthony Hewitt, who was in volcanically eloquent mode at the piano.

Since giving that talk a couple of weeks ago, I've been preoccupied with Beethoven. It's too easy to take him for granted. Rather than musing at length, though, let's hear some...

So here are the Triple's second and third movements, played live in Moscow in 1970 by David Oistrakh (violin), Sviatoslav Richter (piano) and Mstislav Rostropovich in "that" cello part. Kirill Kondrashin conducts the Moscow Philharmonic in the Great Hall of the Moscow Conservatory.


Saturday, October 01, 2011

Saturday Bach: Richter plays Fantasia in C minor BWV906

This Saturday Bach thing is becoming a habit, but I could think of worse ones, so let's stick with it. Here is Richter. How do you like his performance?