<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: Overall a disappointment
Review: Absorbing, illuminating: Lehmann and Faber's biography of Rudolf Serkin is a remarkable achievement - it's also a great read. The book is a lively combination of narrative and interview. The first half of the book tells the story of Serkin's life (his time in Europe and his move to America), and the second half, based on interviews, examines Serkin's career as a pianist. What most impressed me was the authors' deep understanding of Serkin, his place in the world of music and the world in which he lived. The authors share with the reader their rich knowledge of piano repertoire and 20th Century performance, but without resorting to the sort of technical language that can exclude all but the professionally trained musician. Crucially, Lehmann and Faber help the reader to understand what was at stake for Serkin. Through a thorough examination of Serkin's life and choices, this biography, like all great biographies, ends up being about the big issues. Ultimately, this is a book that invites you to examine your own life. Intelligently designed (for example, photographs are next to the relevant passages) and beautifully produced (the CD of previously unreleased performances is exquisite). In short: a great book.
Rating: 
Summary: A Wonderful Book
Review: Absorbing, illuminating: Lehmann and Faber's biography of Rudolf Serkin is a remarkable achievement - it's also a great read. The book is a lively combination of narrative and interview. The first half of the book tells the story of Serkin's life (his time in Europe and his move to America), and the second half, based on interviews, examines Serkin's career as a pianist. What most impressed me was the authors' deep understanding of Serkin, his place in the world of music and the world in which he lived. The authors share with the reader their rich knowledge of piano repertoire and 20th Century performance, but without resorting to the sort of technical language that can exclude all but the professionally trained musician. Crucially, Lehmann and Faber help the reader to understand what was at stake for Serkin. Through a thorough examination of Serkin's life and choices, this biography, like all great biographies, ends up being about the big issues. Ultimately, this is a book that invites you to examine your own life. Intelligently designed (for example, photographs are next to the relevant passages) and beautifully produced (the CD of previously unreleased performances is exquisite). In short: a great book.
Rating:
Summary: 'You do it like THIS'
Review: He is my favourite piano player of all. To mark the centenary of his birth here is what I would call a brilliant illuminating and very readable account of his life, character and service to music. As well as the book we get a CD of previously unreleased live performances of Bach's 4th French suite, six Mendelssohn numbers and Chopin's op25 etudes. What a pleasure it is to read an account of a major executant musician, in this age of groupies and supporters' associations, that is actually intelligent. You will not find here any attempts to rank Serkin, nor any talk of expressiveness or inevitable organic unity in his or anyone else's playing. What the authors have done is to provide first a brief sketch of his life. He was born in the Sudetenland to an ethnically Jewish but atheistical father and a mother whom he overheard telling a neighbour that he was an unwanted pregnancy. His talent was recognised early as being not just outstanding but as of an unusual type. He was particularly lucky in attracting the notice of Adolf Busch, reform-minded as a musician and vehemently anti-nazi, and also, in a very different way, in being taught by Schoenberg. Throughout his life Serkin remembered Schoenberg with affection as well as reverence, but he disliked his music and said so once he had safely got Schoenberg's commendation. Schoenberg never forgave this apostasy, but the bellicose and revolutionary imagery that Schoenberg used ('you must decide which side of the barricades you are on' and so forth) clearly displeased Serkin and helped cool any early revolutionary ideas he might have acquired from his father, Karl Popper and others. It looks as if he was always on the liberal side of the political argument, e.g. he fund-raised for Stevenson against Eisenhower, but he knew he was a textbook example of the American self-view as a land of opportunity. Oddly, the puritanical exclusiveness that he objected to in Schoenberg was a striking characteristic of his own. On the one hand he was indifferent to the sexual peccadilloes of his friends: on the other he could break friends completely with someone who gave an unworthy performance of Mozart, Beethoven etc, and he reacted with spinsterish horror when someone told him (rightly I would say) that the end of Beethoven's 5th symphony is naff. The rest of the book is reflexions on him by associates, and most illuminating they are. Behind all his interpersonal skills, astuteness, genuine humility and not infrequent deviousness, Serkin was a man possessed. If anyone ever embodied Stapledon's grim maxim 'find your calling...or be damned' it was Serkin. As a teacher he instilled a fierce work ethic but never taught by demonstration. As a performer he was wayward and vulnerable to nerves, a bit like Richter. I remember him starting Beethoven's op31/1 in a flurry of wrong notes. Technically the passage is dead easy, but to allow any music to be easy was anathema to him. His great sausages of fingers were odd in a man of medium height and slight build, but they can't have been more of an impediment than to big men like Rachmaninov and Richter, on whom huge hands were in proportion. He could turn out virtuosity equal to any, as some of the Mendelssohn and Chopin pieces on the disc attest. His tone gets some comment, as he is often said to be indifferent to tone-colour, at least in his prime, which is interesting as Serkin's tone-production is near-impossible to mistake, like Michelangeli's or Gould's in that respect if in no other. One contributor puts his finger on the point by saying that Serkin was not 'a smoothie'. He is not alone in that -- Horowitz and Cziffra were not smoothies either. The trouble set in with Michelangeli and Gould. They spawned, unintentionally, a whole generation of players for whom absolute evenness was a basic requirement like perfectly straightened teeth, and Michelangeli himself expressed disgust at this result. There is nobody quite like Serkin when his demon is in the right mood. His command of rhythm and timing surpasses anyone else's. His discography is far more varied than I had realised, and I have to get hold of his Liszt and Debussy performances. On the disc with this book is a complete set of the Chopin op25 etudes, and despite the recorded sound this is terrific Chopin-playing. It is not like Pollini (an admirer of his) nor Ashkenazy but very like Cziffra. Of his other Chopin readings the A flat polonaise does not seem to be on record (I bet he was memorable in that), but the Barcarolle is and I shall find it or die in the attempt. 'Serkin says "You do it like THIS"' was how he was described to me by a friend whom I introduced to his playing. Serkin's mighty Waldstein, the greatest I have ever heard, is not his studio recording but a live performance owned by the BBC. His Appassionata is in the same bracket -- but where do we go from there? Players can't go on doing it 'like this' forever, but attempts at novelty, however distinguished their perpetrators, strike me as travesties of Beethoven. It's a real problem. I can't solve it, but at least there a lot of his recordings I hadn't known of, and the photo on p145 of the figure I came to know so well and who taught me so much about music is one I would have bought this book for by itself.
Rating:
Summary: Overall a disappointment
Review: I found the first half of the book dull. I mean DULL!! Rudolf Serkin has been my favorite pianist since I was 18 years old and I would have expected some of the passion of his playing to leak into the writing about his life, although he didn't live life in as intense a way as his playing would suggest. The second half of the book gained somewhat in interest but I expected more, especially considering the subject. I think the authors did an acceptable job but there were times while I was reading that I thought I was going to fall asleep because the writing was so monochromatic. I expected more.
Rating: 
Summary: Good Biography of a Great Pianist and a Great Man
Review: Rudolf Serkin, one of the most cerebral of pianists, was a giant among pianists, although far fewer people would recognize his name than, say, Horowitz or Rubinstein's. The authors, while clearly Serkin fans, give a balanced look at his life and his music. I would prefer that the book had been considerably longer, and that the additional length had been used to discuss things like his choice of repertoire. For example, the authors, in refuting the claim that Serkin didn't play much besides Beethoven and Brahms, note that he played a good deal of Chopin's music in recital. The list of Carnegie Hall performances in the book bears them out. The list of Serkin's recordings, however, shows very little Chopin, and it would have been interesting to find out why the disparity existed. The fact that I wish that the book had been longer is also, though, testament to how well-written it is. The short pieces in the second half of the book by his colleagues and students add interest, as well.
Rating:
Summary: Good Biography of a Great Pianist and a Great Man
Review: Rudolf Serkin, one of the most cerebral of pianists, was a giant among pianists, although far fewer people would recognize his name than, say, Horowitz or Rubinstein's. The authors, while clearly Serkin fans, give a balanced look at his life and his music. I would prefer that the book had been considerably longer, and that the additional length had been used to discuss things like his choice of repertoire. For example, the authors, in refuting the claim that Serkin didn't play much besides Beethoven and Brahms, note that he played a good deal of Chopin's music in recital. The list of Carnegie Hall performances in the book bears them out. The list of Serkin's recordings, however, shows very little Chopin, and it would have been interesting to find out why the disparity existed. The fact that I wish that the book had been longer is also, though, testament to how well-written it is. The short pieces in the second half of the book by his colleagues and students add interest, as well.
<< 1 >>
| 
