Golden Sound

Frederick Chopin, the great composer who elevated music for the piano, was said to have possessed the remarkable ability to imitate the human singing voice at the piano...Franz Liszt, the ultimate virtuoso was said to make the piano sound like a full range orchestra, blending and shading nuances to a high degree.  Indeed, audience members in the packed concert halls would often swoon from the intoxication of these heavenly strains that emerged from the instrument...In the 1960's eager fans would brave the cold uninviting streets of Manhattan and wait on line through the night, wrapped around 57th Street hoping for a chance to score a ticket to a concert of Vladimir Horowitz...

What was the magic that all these geniuses of the piano possessed in such abundance?  It was, among other things, their ability to draw from the piano a richly beautiful tone...a tone that translated into a vehicle of communicating musical and para-musical ideas in the most compelling way.  This manner of playing would draw the audience to a rapt, nearly hypnotic state of attention--This was clearly a time to receive a message, and through the purity of the tone, each audience member was made pliant and receptive.  There would be no 'dozers-offers' in the hall...and no background snores to compete with the music at hand.

I have always been a big fan of historical recordings.  Legendary pianists of the past such as Cortot, Paderewski, Hoffman, Rachmaninoff and more recent pianists such as Rubinstein and Horowitz would always be the ones I would turn to for inspiration.  I was around 13 years old at the time, and didn't yet have the analytical skills to be able to pinpoint what it was about these performances that drew me in, but yet any comparison to a modern approach always justified my preference.  The funny thing was, in my mind I was hoping that in the live concerts I would attend, this kind of playing would automatically be found, but it was not so. 

It began to dawn on me that this kind of tone, which I later found out was referred to as the 'golden tone' of piano playing, possessed by the descendants of the schools primarily of Chopin, Liszt and Leschetizky seemed to only be an aural fossil of the past.  

But in 1990 I struck pianistic jackpot.  It was then that I did for the first and only time in my 30+ years of life hear this 'golden tone' in a live concert.  The concert was given in NYC by a pianist named Mordecai Shehori (www.cembaldamour.com)  I sat in the balcony of Carnegie Hall, the lights dimmed and the first notes that emerged from the piano were so compelling, so vibrant, so crystalline pure--It was absolute magic and I must say with each passing note the effect was made even more intoxicating.  

I had the good fortune to study for over ten years with this musical titan...Through stroke of fate, the technique required to produce this kind of 'golden sound' was imparted to him painstakingly and tirelessly from his teacher Mindru Katz.  And as he transmitted these invaluable lessons to me, I became aware of the level of commitment required to achieve it.  It was not a simple quick fix--To be able to produce even a small iota of this kind of sound would require a complete relearning and recalibration of approach--one that would span many years.

Tone used to be a pianist's biggest prerequisite at the end of the 19th and into the mid 20th century.  It was commonplace to be able just on the hearing of a few notes to identify the performer instantly.  Somehow from the 1950's and beyond, virtuous tone got replaced with other considerations--speed, percussiveness are just two that come to mind.  To boot, the knowledge of how to produce the golden tone was also getting more distant, like a xerox copy that is generations away from the source.

Is tone important?  Especially for an instrument that is at it's essence mechanical like the piano?  I obviously think, yes, even more so because pianists have to reach beyond the limitations of the mechanics to produce the sound.  Other instrumentalists, for instance, violinists have the advantage of having direct contact with the string and bow which produces the tone--as for pianists, they have a intermediary to contend with, that is the 'key' which is depressed by the finger and through which an intricate array of parts called the 'piano action' is set into motion.  This chain reaction of events  finally gets to the conclusive heart of the matter when tone is produced: the hammer hits the string.  

Because the pianist never gets an opportunity to directly feel the string or the hammer as the sound happens, there is a lot of focus on the part of the process that the pianist can actually control--that is the approach of the finger to the key.  This being an indirect approach having very direct consequences, I can attest there are many schools of thought on the subject and sadly many misconceptions that have arisen, preventing people from achieving the tone that their inner ear and heart longs for.