Rostropovich: The Genius of the Cello

I have heard all the stories about Rostropovich over the years and of course have heard many of his recordings (and I saw him play once, in the early 1970s, when my parents took me to the first concert he gave in DC at the Kennedy Center, though I'm afraid I didn't totally appreciate it at the time).* But I recently happened across this BBC documentary about him that I found enlightening and that made me appreciate him in a new way.

I loved this film both for informative value and as a piece of cinema. It's beautifully done in every way. There are interviews with many of Rostropovich's students, with his wife, his daughters, and with him, as well as footage of performances going back to his Soviet days. There is a great deal of discussion about the many works that he inspired or commissioned and how this revitalized the cello as a solo instrument. One very interesting technique here is a number of sequences in which the interviewees are filmed while listening to the same music the viewer of the film is hearing -- it's quite moving.

It's about an hour and a half, well worth the time. I recommend it highly.




*After I posted this earlier, I was remembering that I believe I actually shared a stage with Rostropovich once, at the first Cello Congress that was held at the University of Maryland in 1982. There was an orchestra of about 200 cellists (scary thought, isn't it?), and I was somewhere in the back while he was conducting. But I don't remember him.

Also, I was once a finalist in the National Symphony's college level concerto competition, and though I didn't win, I did get a certificate that was signed by Rostropovich, who was conductor of the NSO at the time, though I'm sure he wasn't at the finals when I played the Rococo Variations on the stage at the Kennedy Center Concert Hall (and a good thing, too -- my friends who came helpfully told me, "You were the most out of tune of everyone who played." At least they were honest.).

More practicing help

I recently discovered a blog, Practising the Piano, written by the pianist Graham Fitch (I have added it to my blog list here), and his most recent post is an excellent guide to how to make the most of your practicing experience, starting with having a good teacher and going on from there. Here is a link to that post (British spelling courtesy of the original author, and respect for cultural differences :)):

Top Ten Tips to Maximise Your Practising

I actually already do a lot of these, but one I have been trying out the past couple of days is the idea of doing "one measure + one note"; that is, play just one measure and the following downbeat, stop, rinse, repeat as needed. He suggests at least doing a set number of repetitions, perhaps three, but I am finding that some measures require many more.

So far I'm finding this is especially helpful for two main issues:

1. Understanding where each downbeat is (in fact, where each beat is).
2. Ferreting out where there are technical and musical problems on a small enough scale to be able to fix them then and there.

I'm sure as I delve into his list further it will continue to help, but I wanted to share this particular idea because it kind of goes against a distaste for emphasizing bar lines that I have somehow imbibed over the years. Maybe you don't always want to emphasize them, but you do need to know where they are.

One

A quick follow-up from the last post:

Down with the count

I started playing music when I was so young (4 or 5) that I don't remember learning to read it or how I understood rhythms, meters, or counting; I just kind of did it. My formal lessons on piano didn't start until I was almost 10, and my teacher must have assumed knowledge on my part that I didn't necessarily have because I appeared to know so much already.

A few years later, when I started playing the cello and playing in groups, counting assumed more importance because I had to stay with the group and follow the conductor. Again, I don't remember this being much of an issue. I obviously have some native-born talent at this music stuff and an instinctive sense of how to do things, so the years went by, and I didn't do too badly overall. I eventually learned to play the cello well, earned three college degrees, and played innumerable concerts.

BUT ... until I started taking lessons with my current piano teacher a few months ago, no one had asked me to count while I played. A little cursory research has revealed that it's not at all common for this to be mentioned or taught, so it's not surprising that I had never encountered this as a discipline. Oh, I had done it on occasion, when working on something tricky or when teaching a student or playing chamber music, but not as a regular thing. I have always relied on the metronome to learn pulse and speed, and it is a useful tool, but it doesn't solve everything. Well, I've had more than a dozen lessons with this teacher so far, and I believe at each one he has asked me at least once, "Are you counting?" (after yet another display of my stumbling and rushing), and I have had to say, "Not really." I kept thinking, "I can do this any time, I just forget."

I finally decided I'd better get with the program, and I rolled up my sleeves and went at it. First on the cello, with Pezzo Capriccioso, because as I've whined about continuously here, I don't seem to have a handle on the pulse at all. Those reading this who play an instrument and want to try this at home: It is not at all easy! What I ended up doing was working on small sections (a few measures at a time) until I could play them at various speeds while counting (or at least grunting) out loud. I spent an hour and half on this at my first pass, and when I was done, it was the first time I felt really hopeful about being able to play this piece in public.

Counting the beats, whether out loud or mentally, works at a fear I've always had that I didn't really know what was happening on which beat, or vice versa. Also, counting out loud is a physical act that engages a different part of one's brain than playing and makes connections with intellectual understanding of what one is doing physically. And then, there's the sense I always have that any crazy new thing you do to add another dimension to practicing is at least useful, though this is more basic than that.

Speaking of another dimension, moving this to the piano adds more layers of complexity. Because it is possible to play the piano without using large muscles (which is not the case with the cello), it is harder to feel the beat, so counting takes much more effort and concentration. Plus, obviously, you have two hands playing different stuff from each other, and usually more than one line within each hand or crossing from hand to hand. Again, I am finding I have to break pieces down into small sections and practice counting through each one while playing. Another method my teacher likes to apply is playing one hand while conducting with the other, and I've been doing some of that this week also.

I spent some hours on this with the Bach D minor Prelude and Fugue from WTC II. And when I played it at my lesson today, darned if it wasn't much better! It's the first time it hasn't felt hopelessly out of control.

So, some exciting new ventures.

Practice tips and warming up

This is a meandering post about these two points, so I apologize for it being compositionally incoherent.

I found a wonderful list of practice tips here:

Practice tips
It's odd how I know all of these things, as I'm sure most trained musicians do, but when I'm in the heat of practicing it's hard to remember. I'm posting it here in case any readers are in the same boat. (NB: The link doesn't always work, but keep trying; it's worth it.)

The best one -- and one we all need to remember -- is not to practice faster than you can comfortably play perfectly. This is one of the hardest for me. I have been panicking ever since I heard what Pezzo Capriccioso sounds like when played too slowly that I won't be able to play it fast enough, and I've been trying to prepare by practicing it fast, which I am doing too much, I know. OTOH, once I warm up I can play it much faster than when I try to play it cold.

Related to this, I'm finding that I simply cannot play the 32nd-note passages up to tempo before I warm up and practice them slowly for about 45 minutes. I started worrying about this because I was thinking about the logistics of the concert in June and realized that there is no backstage at all in this church. The space where we used to play was also a church, but it was a huge old building with a rabbit warren of rooms and hallways behind the altar where you could warm up in complete privacy. Here, there's a little space off to the side of the altar that is in full view of the audience and that's it. There are a couple of small rooms at the back of the altar, but we really aren't supposed to use them.

I'm pretty sure I'll be playing immediately after intermission, so I guess I'll just have to practice thoroughly before the concert and then sit off to the side and noodle as best I can before the second half.

The link above doesn't have any really helpful suggestions for this problem, but I also found a discussion here by pianists about this very issue:

Performing without warming up

Pianists have to deal with this all the time because they can't touch their instrument until they walk out on stage.

The following suggestion was intriguing, and I will try it this evening and report back:

The Percy Grainger warmup: sit down in any regular, straight-back chair. Smack your knees with your hands, repeatedly, hard and fast, for 5 minutes. If it doesn't hurt you're not doing it hard enough. It's actually quite hard to keep going for 5 minutes but it certainly gets the blood flowing.

(Seems like you could end up with bruised knees, though.)

Maybe this helped

While I was at work yesterday, I plugged into YouTube with my headphones and pulled up a bunch of versions of Pezzo Capriccioso, ranging from sublime (Steve Isserlis playing a sprightly rendition; an entrant to the 2011 Tchaikovsky competition playing a conservative reading; etc.) to horrible (wobbly virtuoso wannabes, etc.). I don't know how many I heard, but given that the piece is 7 minutes long and I was listening for over an hour, at least ten. I heard things I wanted to do (beautiful tone, nice phrasing, steady rhythms) and things I didn't (bad intonation, scratching and scraping), but I have to say, all of them pulled it off to some extent. The piece isn't a "master" piece, and in fact, I felt a little like I'd had too much candy after hearing it that many times, but I did get to know it much better and to hear all the ways it could be played.

I also found a "Capriccioso" Tchaikovsky wrote for piano solo, as part of a suite of six pieces  (Op. 19) that is almost identical in structure to the cello piece, though it's about half the length and does not have the emotional punch. It's somewhat inverted moodwise because the lyrical sections are in happy B flat major and the virtuosic middle section (in this piece, marked Allegro vivacissimo -- instead of keeping the same pulse but with faster note values as in the cello piece, Tchaikovsky marks a tempo that ends up being about double, so it's the same idea),  is in D minor. Here's a version by Richter:



Then when I got home, I found the cello parts for all of the next concert's music in my mailbox, including the part for Pezzo. Somehow, seeing the accompaniment and imagining being in the orchestra playing it with a soloist put it in more perspective for me, on top of the listening I had done, so when I was practicing last night it felt much better. When I checked my speed with the metronome, I found I was playing it easily at 69 = quarter note (my original goal was 60).

So if I can build on this, and keep polishing and getting a good sound, I will be happy with it.

Frustrations

Despite the compliments from my friends I described in my previous post, I feel so unsatisfied with the Tchaikovsky. Perhaps it's one of those situations where the closer you get to the ideal, the farther away it seems; smaller and smaller problems grow bigger and bigger by comparison. Considering that when I started working on this in January I couldn't play it, and now I can, apparently something has been happening. But every day when I put my cello away after an hour or so of practicing it, I wonder if I am spending the time wisely. Every day that goes by feels like leap of faith that I am.

The fact that the piece is only 7 minutes long almost makes it more difficult, more like an etude, where every note is a test and each stands out. Okay, I have heard some sloppy awful performances of this from good cellists who probably barely practiced it, or maybe they did but tossed it off as bon bon to lighten a longer program. I heard one extremely talented and well-known person play it on a recital and have a major crash (he either looped back or jumped ahead to the wrong place at one point where there is a pattern repetition -- IIRC, the pianist managed to limp along after him and they kept going without having to start over). But because this is all I'm playing, it is important to me to make it better than that. At the same time, I don't want to make too much of it because that's not the spirit of the thing.

I have about a month now until the first rehearsal with the orchestra. I console myself with the fact that I will still have several weeks after that to fix anything really glaringly bad.

Yay for positive affirmations!