There are so many great classical pianists in the world that we’ve had to wait past Cédric Tiberghien’s 38th birthday to hear him for the first time in this city. Thanks to the Toronto Summer Music Festival, we get a solo recital at Koerner Hall on Tuesday.
- 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
Tiberghien, who grew up about 100 km north of Paris, has been playing professionally for about 20 years, winning over audience after audience, conductor after conductor. His success has taken hundreds of overnights, dozens of concertos, numerous collaborations and a handful of critically praised recordings.
The French pianist brings a fascinating programme to his Toronto début, bookended by Franz Schubert (Six Moments Musicaux to get us centred and the dramatic C minor Sonata to close). In the middle are pieces by Claude Debussy and Alban Berg’s remarkable Piano Sonata.
Tiberghien admits that the programme wasn’t entirely his idea. He originally wanted explore the parallels between two Viennese composers from different eras — Schubert and Berg. Toronto Summer Music qualified its invitation with a request for some French content, as well.
The musician chose the Debussy pieces because they were written in the first decade of the 20th century, the time when Berg’s very different Sonata was born.
He sees a relationship between the Schubert and Berg Sonatas, because both are tightly structured works.
Schubert was notorious for his sprawling, repetitive musical ideas — but not so with the C minor Sonata. “It’s anti-Schubert, because it’s much closer to Beethoven,” in key choices and strength as well as length, explains Tiberghien. “Every section is the essential. It’s all about the form – it’s a sonata I really like.”
The pianist admits that Tuesday’s recital will be the first time he performs the Berg Sonata in public.
Given a gruelling concert schedule, I ask Tiberghien how he knows a piece of music is ready for a paying audience.
“You never know; that’s the big problem in my life,” he retorts, with a wry chuckle. “It’s the main stress thing in my life. It’s not performing on stage, but organizing the preparation of all the different programmes.
“I used to be completely crazy, playing a different programme for each concert and playing 20 concertos in one season. I’m trying to reduce this a little bit, bit it’s still not working,” he admits.
But he does have a way of learning new works that gives him satisfaction: He starts by simply sight-reading through a piece, sometimes years in advance.
“I do it to see what happens – without thinking but discovering a piece,” Tiberghien explains. “This is a very important moment of the process, because very often we come back to that after a lot of work, a lot of decisions, a lot of mistakes, and return to something that is very close to that first approach.”
He first set his eyes on the Berg Sonata — it had sat on his pianist’s bucket list for a long time — three years ago.
“I perfectly remember the day I received the score at home,” Tiberghien recounts. “I read it. It was a complete shock – and every time I play this piece I want to feel this shock, and I want the audience to feel this shock.
“This is not beautiful; it has to be shocking. The ideas, the intensity, the complexity, all of it has to be shocking, and I’ve worked to find this. I hope it works,” he laughs.
Berg’s one-movement Sonata is only 12 minutes long, but it’s so dense and there’s so much meaning packed into it that, “It’s as challenging to play as a complete Schubert sonata. It’s a real challenge physically as well as psychologically,” says Tiberghien.
I ask the pianist how much of himself needs to go into a piece of music.
“It’s such an important question for a performer: whether you have to bring something to what you perform, or whether you need to be completely transparent,” he explains, with relish. “My position, which is really strong, is that we shouldn’t be transparent. The performer has a personality and I should take what the composer says – sometimes it’s enormous, there are so many details… so I try to bring something personal to it. Sometimes it’s very difficult.”
And the interpretation is always changing, evolving.
“There are so many ways to play pieces, and it changes over a lifetime,” Tiberghien says. “Fifteen years ago, when I played Debussy’s music, I was focusing on the quality of tone and the colours, but, at some point, I realized that this [interpretation] was nearly sterile, that just thinking quality of colours and tones is not enough.
“It’s like what the composers say, it’s a tool to tell a story… I’m trying to go beyond using colours.”
+++
You’ll find all the details of Tiberghien’s recital here.
Here’s a great example of the pianist’s dramatic turn of interpretation in action, in a recording for the BBC of Maurice ravel’s Scarbo:
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
