The second thing this meeting taught me was that authors are
not always the best readers of their own work.
Beyond this occasion, I have heard poets on the radio deliver their
lines in a totally impersonal and unconvincing manner, as well as authors
stumble awkwardly over their own syntax.
Simply put, once the job of creation is done, the author’s
involvement in the work is finished and the work is only enriched by subsequent
interpretations made from a range of personal standpoints. From what I can gather, that seems a pretty
widespread view in the literary arts. So
why is it not the same in music?
There is, of course, one basic difference. Unlike in literature, where the consumer (in
this case the reader) is the interpreter, in music, because the language is
inaccessible to the majority of consumers, the interpreter effectively adds a
middle layer to the process. Perhaps we
can best see the role of the interpreter in music (the performer) as akin to
that of a translator, bound by the original text, but free to communicate it in
a way perceived to be most readily accessible to the consumer. Certainly there is no parallel in the arts
for the creator to be the ideal interpreter?
It is historically interesting to hear old recordings of, say, Rachmaninov
performing his own music or Elgar directing his own scores, but does it in any
way help us understand the music better?
I fervently believe that one of the things which makes art (or
classical) music so infinitely rewarding to the listener is the very
multi-layered path between creation and consumption. By allowing the composer to perform his own
music, we are missing out on a whole world of nuances introduced by the various
interpreters of the original truth.
Which begs the question; Is there any artistic value in a
composer performing his own music on disc?
A lot of them do it and, I have to admit, in many cases if the composer
were not to record his own music, nobody else would. There are instances where composers perform
music which is neither published nor available to any other performer, while
some use the CD to promote their music by suggesting that, if we like what we
hear, we can purchase a download of the music from the composer’s own
website. Beyond that, however, some established
composers devote much of their life to performing their own music on disc. Sent
for review this week has been just such a disc, bearing the title “Hakim plays
Hakim” and featuring some seven recent works by the Lebanese/Parisian
organist/composer Naji Hakim. (Strangely, this is the third disc released on
the Signum Classics label so entitled, yet this third one bears the suffix
“Vol.1”. Never mind; I’m sure there’s a
logical explanation.) My personal
collection includes 14 CDs containing music by Hakim and performed by different
organists, and I doubt there is anyone even loosely connected with the world of
organ music who would argue that Hakim’s music is not of the very finest
quality and deserving of interpretation by a wide variety of organists.
Naji Hakim is a brilliant organist, and his performances of
music by others reveal an intense and searching interpretative mind supported
by a superb technique. But when it comes
to his own music, I find his performances create a barrier rather than open a
door to his musical intentions. That
barrier is part psychological; does he record it so much because he feels he cannot
trust others to interpret it? If so,
surely that diminishes the artistic value of his music. But it is also part physical; he is such a
brilliant player that it is difficult to imagine anyone else performing his music
so well, which rather negates the value of those who do.
I am very exercised in these thoughts because, were it
anyone else playing these works, I would find fault in what sounds often like
poorly controlled articulation and a tendency to let speed override technical
constraints. In some of the passagework,
I detect uneven rhythmic articulation and smudgy detail; and were it any other
player I would not be afraid to suggest this.
But because it is the composer, we tend to assume this is what he
intended and, therefore, we cannot criticise the performance without implicitly
criticising the music which, despite the fact that this disc inhabits an
undiluted territory of fast and jolly music, I would not wish to do. How better it would have been to hear someone
else play this music so that we could the more easily distinguish between
compositional weakness and performance weakness. It strikes me Hakim is in danger of
over-exposing himself on two fronts, and the result might be to diminish his
stature on both.
Among my favourite historical recordings are several of Rachmaninov
performing his own music. But when I
heard a young player attempt to emulate the lurching rubato and heart-stopping
pauses the composer added to his playing (but not to his written-out scores), I
was horrified and said so; to which the young pianist replied; “I was only doing
what the composer himself did, and surely he knows what he wanted and we cannot
argue with that?” We can argue with
it. When it comes to performing their
own music, composers no longer have exclusive interpretative rights and we
should regard their performances as no more legitimate than anyone else’s.
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