PIANIST GARRICK OHLSSON: "In this profession you seem to travel too much or not enough" by GLADYS SAXON
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INTERNATIONAL piano competitions are in some ways like big international tennis tournaments. But though winning a major tournament may be a climax in the career of a professional tennis player, taking first prize in a prestigious competition is only the beginning for a young pianist.
Garrick Ohlsson, who in 1970 became the only American ever to win the Chopin International Piano Competition in Warsaw, Poland, says, "It's a stepping stone, a way of letting people know about you." A first prize puts a seal of approval on a young pianist, certifying that he has reached a certain level of professional attainment, and this is useful in getting him engagements. "Orchestra managers get so many brochures from pianists every day they don't even have time to read them, let alone listen to audition tapes or to the pianist himself," Ohlsson continued. "But if someone is a first-prize winner in the Chopin, they can say, 'We don't have to think about this guy-just hire him.' Once you arrive at those places, of course, you still have to play well enough so they'll like you and want you back. Winning the competition doesn't make it for you--it just paves the way." When Ohlsson returned to the Unit ed States from Poland, he was immediately invited to play with the Philadelphia Orchestra at Avery Fisher Hall in New York and to perform at the White House. Over the next few years the number of his engagements in creased as he toured America and Europe, and he signed an exclusive con tract with Angel Records.
ANOTHER kind of seal of approval was put on the young pianist's career in 1975 by Harold C. Schonberg, the powerful critic of the New York Times. Re viewing one of Ohlsson's recitals, Schonberg said, "This was not merely a good piano recital; it was also an important one, and it put Mr. Ohlsson right up in the rank of major pianists." He praised Ohlsson's warm piano sound and his phenomenal technique and commented that everything he played was full of personality. Schonberg ended the review by saying, "Physically this young man is a giant, and if he continues to play and develop this way, he can also be a musical giant." Interviewed recently at his New York City apartment, Ohlsson said, "I'm so obsessed with the idea of playing the piano and--I hope--getting better at it, that if I had a nine-to-five job doing something else, I'd still manage to practice a few hours a day anyway.
Being a pianist, which really means having a job that permits one to work at the piano full time, is like icing on the cake."
FOR Ohlsson it all started in White Plains, New York, where he grew up and where he faced his first piano keys at the age of eight. "My parents felt that every kid should have piano les sons. After two weeks I was addict ed," he said. "As soon as I started thinking about what I wanted to do with my life, it was definitely music.
There was no choice involved-it was kind of inevitable." He studied first with Thomas Lish man in Westchester County, New York, later with Sascha Gorodnitsky at the Juilliard School in New York City, and he says with pride that he also had a bit of coaching with the late Rosina Lhevinne. "But my most important teacher was Olga Barabini, the lady I studied with privately in Westchester from the age of eighteen on. I worked with her while I was at Juilliard, and the moonlighting trick of having two teachers was highly unusual-but very valuable to me." He doesn't work regularly with a teacher now, but his career he occasionally wants the opinion of a coach. "Singers are al ways coaching, even some of the very greatest ones, and string players are al ways playing for each other. It's easy to become isolated if you're a pianist.
It's a much lonelier existence. I have a few people I coach with, people who are a bit severe and who know me, including Olga. You need people listening, people who can help you." On the subject of what motivates a person to become a concert pianist, he said, "When you're young, you don't even know. If you are talented, people encourage you to do things that get you a lot of attention, and you think of fame. You go on working, and then you get competitive about it. You realize there are a lot of good people in the field, and you want to be able to say, ‘Well, I'm really better than most of them.' You have to come to terms with that at some time.
"When I was about seventeen, I went to concerts every day for a couple of weeks as an experiment, and at the end I thought to myself, 'Well, I've heard a good selection of pianists now, and if I'm not better than half of them, I can be in very short order. That's good enough for me. At least if I enter the field, I won't be in the bottom half." Unlike some pianists, Ohlsson has no obsession about his hands. "You can get awfully neurotic about it," he said. "Lots of pianists go around with their hands in their pockets and won't shake hands. But the real danger to one's playing doesn't come from immediate little things you do with your hands. Any physical problem beyond a cold will affect it.
"I don't happen to be especially interested in woodworking or anything like that, but if I were, I'd go ahead and do it. I'm careful. I don't do stupid things. I play tennis, but at the beginning of the season I don't go out on the court for two hours immediately and come back with an arm I can't move. I go out the first day for ten minutes, the next day for fifteen, then twenty, and in a week I am able to play just as long as I want." Ohlsson is on the road giving concerts seven or eight months of the year, which he thinks is a little too much.
("In this profession you seem to travel too much or not enough.") But he says if he ever gets to the point that he doesn't know which town he's in, he'll quit touring for a while.
The French, German, and Spanish he learned in high school are useful in his travels. "I also speak Italian pretty well," he says. "I learned it because I wanted to-from operas and from my mother, who's Italian. I know a little Swedish-my father's Swedish. Languages are a kind of mini-hobby of mine. I'm not really fantastic at it like some musicians, but I can get along pretty much anywhere in Europe with ease. Every season I spend two or three months there. My mother is a travel agent, and I'm her best client.
She figures up the mileage each year and it's colossal." "I want to be influenced; everybody has been.
Pianists have always stolen ideas from each other, and that's as it should be."
Because of his "race-horse nerves," Ohlsson has never been bothered by stage fright. "As far as nerves go, it's very easy to give two recitals a week.
It's much more difficult to give one a month. And to give one a year, as conservatory students do, is holy hell. And yet to give five a week is inhuman. A well-balanced life would probably be about one concert a week, or maybe three in a week and then two weeks off." ACCORDING to Ohlsson, piano groupies are "mostly ladies over seventy five," and ladies' committees are part of every recitalist's life. "It's understandable. A concert is an event, after all. I complain that they all ask the same things: how many hours a day I practice and where I'm going. But if I'm at a party and I see Alicia de Larrocha, for example, I say, 'Where have you been, where are you going, what are you working on?' And I realize I'm as bad as the rest of them.
Alicia de Larrocha is a pianist he says he admires immensely. "She's al ways been very encouraging to me.
Whenever we're both in New York we spend an evening together." There are other modern pianists he admires but tactfully prefers not to discuss. He hasn't met Horowitz or Rubinstein, but would like to. Ohlsson is not afraid of being influenced by other pianists' interpretations of music he is adding to his repertoire. "If it is in the standard repertoire, I've already heard it, so I can't say that I'm starting with a clean slate because I've already been influenced. Besides, I want to be influenced; everybody has been. Pianists have always stolen ideas from each other, and that's as it should be.
"When I listen to records it's mostly those of Golden Age pianists: Josef Hofmann, Rachmaninoff, Ignaz Fried man. After I won the Chopin prize, an important critic in Poland took me aside and said, 'Now that you're going to be playing Chopin as an expert, you really ought to know how it's done.' I spent about four hours listening to his recordings of Hofmann, Friedman, and others, and my mind was bent back wards. I heard people play Chopin with conceptions I'd never dreamed of, and I realized there's more to this than just doing a nice job in a contest. This could be a whole style of life. Now that I'm out of my purist phase, one thing that will begin to show up in my work is ideas from those Golden Age pianists.
If some striking conception really appeals to you, there's no reason not to try to adapt some of it--if it's true to your own way of musical thinking." Although Ohlsson admits to an "on going affair" with the music of Chopin, he does not consider himself a special ist in the works of any single composer.
Most of his repertoire is drawn from the standard piano literature of the nineteenth century. "It's what I was trained on at school. If I'd studied with a Mozart or Bach specialist, I would probably play more of that today." Eventually, he would like to do some teaching himself ("transmitting, passing it on, that's important"), but he does not want to be a conductor. "So much of any musical career has little or nothing to do with actually making mu sic, but when I see what conductors have to go through, I'm very happy to be playing the piano." Does he still go to other pianists' concerts? "I loved what Leontyne Price said in the STEREO REVIEW inter view [January 1976] about being unable to go to the opera because she knows all the craziness that's going on back stage, and it makes her too uncomfortable," he said. "A concert isn't nearly as involved as an opera, but nonetheless, I know too much about it, and I almost can't enjoy piano recitals played by other people. I also know symphonic music too well. So my first choice, if I'm in New York, is always the opera. It's such a spectacle, and there's always the chance one of the many things that can go wrong will go right." He also enjoys chamber music and would like to play more of it. "I love playing with people. Other repertoire.
Just doing other things in my life. I don't have time to learn Chinese at the rate I'm going, and that's one of my big goals. And astronomy--I haven't done anything with that yet."
WHILE waiting for the Chinese and astronomy lessons, what does he do between concerts? "I play tennis, swim, eat, cook, drink, go to the opera, run around, see people, take naps, pay bills-all the normal things. Food, mu sic, and sex-in no particular order. They're all so nice. Those things are what most musicians are interested in. It's only the music that makes us unique."
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GARRICK OHLSSON: SELECTED RECORDINGS
OHLSSON'S performances at the 1970 Chopin competition in Warsaw, where he was the first-prize winner, are preserved on the two Connoisseur Society albums listed below. Also listed are recommended albums among his recent releases on the Angel label, for which he now re cords exclusively.
CHOPIN: Sonata No. 3, in B Minor, Op. 58; Etude in A-fiat Major, Op. 10, No. 10; Polonaise in F-sharp Minor, Op. 44; Scherzo in F Major, Op. 54. CONNOISSEUR SOCIETY CS 2029.
CHOPIN: Piano Concerto No. I. in F Minor, Op. 11; Nocturne in E-flat Major, Op. 55, No. 2; Mazurkas in C-sharp Minor, E Minor, and A-flat Major, Op. 41, Nos. 1, 2, 4.
With the Warsaw National Philharmonic Orchestra, Witold Rowicki cond. (in concerto). CONNOISSEUR SOCIETY CS 2030.
CHOPIN: Seventeen Polonaises. ANGEL SB 3794 two discs.
LISZT: Piano Concerto No. 1, in E-flat Major; Piano Concerto No. 2, in A Major. With the New Philharmonia Orchestra, Moshe Atzmon cond. ANGEL SQ 37145.
LISZT: Mephisto Waltz No. 1; Benediction de Dien dans la Solitude; Funerailles; Liebestraume, Nos. 1-3. ANGEL. S 37125.
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Also see:
BEST RECORDINGS OF THE MONTH: Opera: Bartok's Bluebeard's Castle Vocal: Joan Baez's "Gulf Winds" and Frederica von Stade's French-aria recital Instrumental: the Tokyo Quartet in Haydn's Op. 50 and the ELO in "A New World Record" Jazz: Bucky Pizzarelli and Bud Freeman
FIEDLER OF BOSTON: A profile of the builder of America's musical bridges, by IRVING KOLODIN
Source: Stereo Review (USA magazine)