John O’Conor, who turns 65 early in the new year, has been living and working with Beethoven’s piano sonatas for a half-century, yet he always manages to make them sound fresh, as if they are spontaneously springing from his fingers. This rare ability is one of the reasons tonight’s recital at the Jane Mallett Theatre is not to be missed. But how does he do it?
The affable pianist, a lifelong Dubliner, makes the key to spontaneiety sound at once easy and complicated.
The longtime head of the Royal Irish Academy of Music (he retired in 2010) and frequent leader of master classes says that a great pianist needs to do three things: hear the music in their head, hear the music from the audience’s perspective, and then translate these sonic impressions into instructions for his or her fingers.
And, because a pianist gets a different piano in a different space for each concert during a tour, he or she needs to take the different touch, response and acoustics into account.
“I tell my students that I can really screw up your brain if you let me,” he chuckles.
O’Conor brings a wonderful — and wonderfully simple — programme to the Jane Mallett Theatre tonight for Music Toronto: The Op. 10, No 3 Sonata in D Major and the Six Bagatelles, Op. 126, by Ludwig van Beethoven and Franz Schubert’s C-minor Sonata, D 958.
He picked this Schubert work, “because it is the most Beethovenian of all the sonatas.” He calls all of the pieces “absolute gems.” Just don’t expect him to play Beethoven like it was Schubert.
“One is arrogant, the other isn’t,” he says of their personalities — and this needs to be reflected in how their music is interpreted. “Beethoven needs to sound like Beethoven and Schubert like Schubert, and never the twain shall meet.”
That’s easy to say. But what does it mean?
“A composer doesn’t wake up one morning and say, ‘I think I want to write something in D Major,'” O’Conor explains. “They hear something in their mind; it has a character, a tempo, a phrasing, it has colour. You have to hear it in your mind before you can play it on the piano. You have to reproduce the idea the composer has, which is why you have to read a lot about each composer.”
“You have to be able to get inside their head,” he insists. “I don’t think you can ever finish getting to know Beethoven. There is always something else there, and there is always something in the search.”
It is this search, happening in real time, that makes the music sound fresh.
O’Conor talks about how he took the Beethoven sonatas to the former Soviet Union, playing the full cycle 13 times during the tour, about 30 years ago. His interpreter (“probably a KGB agent,” he muses) marvelled at how the music sounded a bit different each time.
“Every night you feel different. It’s a different hall and a different audience. It’s something new,” O’Conor replied. He adds: “I want to argue with Glenn Gould – a recording sounds the same all the time, but when you go to a live concert, you never know what’s going to happen…. The possibilities are absolutely endless in any piece of Beethoven that I play.”
As it is for Plato’s philosopher-king, playing the piano in public is an endless act of imagination and striving — but not attainment.
“The day you walk off the stage and say that was perfect is the day you give up, because your standards have slipped,” says O’Conor.
For more on tonight’s recital click here.
Here, as an appetiser, is a little clip of O’Conor playing the Op. 53 “Waldstein” sonata (not on tonight’s programme):
John Terauds
- Classical Music 101: What Does A Conductor Do? - June 17, 2019
- Classical Music 101 | What Does Period Instrument Mean? - May 6, 2019
- CLASSICAL MUSIC 101 | What Does It Mean To Be In Tune? - April 23, 2019
