How would you define a masterclass? As its title declares, it is usually given by an internationally acclaimed artist who is there to guide and inform, hopefully showing how a marked improvement can be achieved in the often all-too-brief allotted time. If, on the other hand, the so-called "master" shows scant respect and concern for the student’s welfare—his Olympian air of authority tempting him into grandstanding, expressed in a love of dismissal and negation (the reverse of a more humane and acceptable stance)—then he can hardly be described as a master.
Having given and attended a great many such classes over the years, I was made curious to hear how different pianists, be they celebrated or otherwise, approach a necessarily controversial form of instruction. I say controversial because, as Alicia de Larrocha once put it, successful teaching is a long-term investment, and a short, fleeting experience can only be useful in a limited sense; its brevity leaves the student arguably more confused than enlightened.
And so, I would like to expand upon some examples I gave earlier in my essay of both negative and positive occasions. Sadly, I have to say that the majority of these were more negative than positive. I don't, for example, think it is helpful to ask a student who has just played Chopin’s B minor Sonata, "Would you mind telling me what that piece was, because I didn't recognise it?" Abbey Simon may have been characteristically droll and mischievous and, for the audience, amusing at one level, but he could also be viewed as negative and damaging at another.
Maria Curcio was undoubtedly an exceptional teacher, but to tell a pianist already in possession of a, roughly speaking, professional equipment, "You see, darling, you have nothing," while pointing to her head, heart, arms, and fingers in succession, is surely simply wrong. Even when offering very little, nobody has nothing. Ilona Kabos considered her class ("I am the cold shower after the performance") a failure if it did not reduce her student to tears ("Now we are getting somewhere, now we can start"). Dmitri Bashkirov’s classes were often likened to public executions, and it is surely fundamentally and humanly wrong to expect a student to be armour-plated in order to survive.
Then there was Fou Tsong’s class on Chopin (his speciality) given at the Royal Academy of Music, which featured a gratingly sarcastic dismissal of each and every student. Jorge Bolet’s evident desire to intimidate ("My students are terrified of me") and his touch of self-conscious grandeur surely stemmed from personal insecurity—the desire to dominate by way of compensation. Menahem Pressler’s contempt for a clearly insecure student’s performance of Bach’s B-flat Partita provoked hostility from the audience during a largely failed, if lavish, educational experience in Chicago, where I was a faculty member.
Alfred Brendel, on the other hand, offered something altogether more serious and indeed, at its best, awe-inspiring: a treasure trove of information and possibility gleaned from his rich experience. Even so, I recall how it took strength to withstand his intimidating scrutiny, notably when it collapsed into total dismissal. "Your treble is too loud, your bass is too loud, and now your middle is too loud, and you have just ruined Schubert," he once remarked, prompting a colleague to whisper, "That’s all the doors closed now." Naturally, you took your life in your hands if you played Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, or Brahms (Brendel’s celebrated territory). On the other hand, offering the French repertoire or Rachmaninov (a composer he openly despised) would not have even aroused his interest. The options were narrow but, again, the rewards could be limitless.
Of course, you could counter that masterclasses are there for entertainment as well as enlightenment (though on rare occasions the two combine to produce something other than a Punch and Judy show). John Lill’s sudden distress in his outburst—"You must never do anything like that, that’s as musical as an overturned truck"—was not without its humorous value. Stephen Kovacevich took a more potent and oblique angle after a fleet-fingered pianist had just played Beethoven’s "Waldstein" Sonata: "I wish I had fingers like yours, but don't you think it would be nice if you were to think a bit about the music?" It was a perhaps unintentionally damning question.
Urbane and casting a novel light on everything he discussed, Anthony di Bonaventura listened to a performance of Falla’s Fantasia Baetica from a rhythmically insecure pianist (and rhythmic security is at the heart of the ‘Fantasia’) and commented, "Do you realise that if you were a body without a skeleton, you would just be a great blob?" The point was made from an entertaining but telling angle.
Turning momentarily from pianists to cellists, the infinitely charming Paul Tortelier, French to the very core, was clearly distressed by an English student’s remote and diffident performance of a Beethoven Sonata. "Beethoven is very passionate, and you are so English, so afternoon tea and twin beds. You are too virginal; I think you are a virgin, yes, no?" There was much hilarity all round.
Endlessly instructive and humane classes, always critical but always within a considerate context, came from less obviously famous names—most of all from Martino Tirimo, with his uncanny ability to demonstrate any work his student chose to play. There was also Sequeira Costa and his gentle, if mournful, response to one of my own students after an uncharacteristically glib and superficial reading of Albéniz's "Rondeña" from ‘Iberia:’ "Alice, Spanish music, not so happy."
I cannot resist adding that I came close to destruction myself when I was asked by my teacher, Alexander Uninsky, to play two Rachmaninov Études-Tableaux in a masterclass given by Vladimir Ashkenazy. Not in the best of moods, the always volatile Ashkenazy was so intent on his sweeping dismissal of all that he had heard that time ran out, and I was saved by the bell. My performance, while not lacking in temperament, was hardly immaculate, and I prefer not to think about what Ashkenazy’s all-too-predictable response would have been.
In conclusion, the masterclass has its place and, at its best, can cast a novel and refreshing slant on previously worked and honed ideas of both technique and musicianship. It can also be no less probing and thought-provoking for the audience. But the dangers are there. If my essay does not quite shine a red light on this glamorous and eagerly anticipated form of address, it certainly shines a yellow rather than a green one. The red light is reserved for those, still frequent, who assume the more savage the class, the better the teacher.
Bryce Morrison