You Don't Say!

A rant about Fazil the pianist

How do they let this guy get away with the stuff he does? He’s got nothing to say and he’s all vanity. I saw him play the Goldbergs at Park Avenue Armory last week. You would not BELIEVE the artifice. First of all he came onto the stage amid applause like he was about to sit down to play the Transcendental Etudes or Balakirev or some big Rachmaninoff piece; he practically bounded to the piano, bounded to the bench, and bounded his body (if one can do so, transitively), accelerating gravity (actually seeming to speed up the force of gravity) as he sat down on the bench. And while people were still clapping, he started the Aria. Can you imagine? Here, I’m going to tell you how you should start the Goldbergs: You walk on the stage very humbly and gentle and you pretend you don’t exist. Then you take a short half-bow and slowly sit down onto the bench. You pause. The audience stops clapping. You look up, maybe look at the piano, keep still, and appreciate the air and space and silence around you. You make space for the music. You make its bed. Then, out of that silence, a remarkable G floats in the air. Out of the SILENCE! It is a pearl. A pearl that you can hear. And you’re playing it, and you still don’t exist. But that’s not what he did. Nah. He went right into it like he knew what was what. Like he had something to say. Like he couldn’t just let Bach talk. Right. And let me tell you what else he did. Another thing is that he went attacca from movement to movement. Again, this bounding thing. Barreling through. I don’t think any movements had even a sliver of silence between them. He wasn’t even enjoying it, it seems. Flip the page, onto the next. ENJOY THE SOUND!! Didn’t Mozart say something about how the music is the silence between the notes? Also, not really any unique ornaments. I don’t know, I know he’s not András Schiff (the god), but come on, put a little sprinkle on it, sir. Heavy. So heavy, too. His left hand had some great melodic work, to be sure. Really strong phrases like a German beer hall with strong muscly men in the quodlibet. But his right hand was almost always harsh, at least when he was playing melodic phrases with it. His right hand was good in some toccata sections and and some variation that has a cascading descending sort of whatever bunch of notes. But I’m watching this guy and I’m like how can he be so famous? Cuz he is. The program notes talked about him like he’s the only remaining pianist-composer. The first one basically since Liszt. I don’t know. Are other pianists even playing Say’s compositions? Also, I mean this guy literally stomped his foot to keep the beat in certain sections. That’s like rule number one they teach you in high school jazz band. Remember? When the teacher taught you to tap with your toe instead of your heel? YEAH. HERE’s WHY. Well so you’ve got the stomping. But you’ve also got the singing. Now I know what you’re going to say: Glenn Gould sang and he was great. Yeah. He was great. But the singing stained all those recordings. The only time (that I can recall at this particular moment) I can’t hear Glenn singing is in those recordings of the Wagner transcriptions (which, by the way, are excellent; you don’t realize how great of a contrapuntist Wagner was until you hear Gould’s recordings of the transcriptions). But, no, it don’t matter. Because this guy Say was humming God-knows-what kind of things that didn’t seem to coincide with the musical matter at hand. And he did it with this mouth open like he was going to throw up. HUBABABABA: this is like the sound that his mouth makes while he’s singing. And then, oh, yeah: He’s CONDUCTing the piano. He’s got a hand out, say a right hand out, while the left hand is playing a solo line, and he’s motioning to the inside of the piano, like: PLAY FOR ME. It’s like the line in the Phantom of the Opera, sing for me angel of music. But he’s doing it with his hands. And nothing is happening. He’s not getting anything more out of it than practically if he tied his hands behind his back and banged the keys with his skull. And it wouldn’t have had to be a real Cowell piece either. Again, I ask: What is SAY trying to SAY? WHY is SAY trying to SAY something? It’s Bach who’s got something to say. And then, at that, it’s probably not even Bach, but the music that has something to say. And then, can music even communicate anything? It’s just a lullaby for the composer’s patron’s son (right?), after all. It’s almost as if Say wants the music to speak to HIM—just to him—the instrument to speak to him, and we watch like some peeping Toms. So, okay, we’ve got the stomping, the singing, the conducting, the too-strong left hand with melody and the weak right hand. But here’s what I’ll say about phrasing in general (and I said this to my friend as we were leaving the hall; I probably said it too loudly; I always say things too loudly and he reprimands me for it): I’ve never heard a pianist play so much LEGATO and achieve no CANTABILE whatsoever. I mean, you’d think playing all the notes connected, it would sound A LITTLE like singing, no? No. It sounded like heehollering goobling gobbling. I mean, there wasn’t even a leggiero for miles. I could hear it in the distance, seeing it come at me like a dove. Like a word on a wing. Hoping. In my imagination: Hoping for a light touch, for grace. But then it never came. No. Only bouncy big sound same dynamic maybe mezzoforte is the quietest he got. And we had some real loud fortissimos in there, too. I mean, like forbiddingly, prohibitingly loud. (As my friend reminded me, this wasn’t all Say’s fault: “I just don’t think Bach sounds good on piano.” Could be!) Thank God we left at intermission, before it got reeeeal bad: The second half was filled solely with his own compositions, one of which was a Paganini variations if I can recall. The problem with this guy is he (or maybe his PR team) is sticking to an outmoded idea of a pianist that they think is going to get people really hype. I mean, we’re still on Paganini? DA-dolootlelootleDA-dolootlelootleDA-dolootlelootleDA—da. But when you double down on that archetype, you lose the future of what that archetype could be, how it could develop in the modern world, what it truly means to be a pianist-composer in the 21st century (which, I think it means to be a collaborator; I really think that; and I don’t know, Say doesn’t seem like a guy who’s that much into compromising and playing with others, but I could be way off). I don’t know maybe some competition judge thought he was eccentric and audience members would think he was doing magic with his hands like they were actually enhancing the music which a lot of the old white upper west side people at the Armory probably actually thought as they smiled in their dresses and suits and looked from another century among wood paneling that at one point surrounded a bunch of artillery or so they’d have you think because maybe you wouldn’t otherwise. The one good thing he did… Ready? The one good thing: He carried over the G in the right hand from the last variation into the G in the same register that begins the final iteration of the Aria. Maybe a lot of pianists do that. I don’t know. But it was nice. Oh, actually two good things. Here. The last chord? The last chord of the piece, he added a note to it. I don’t have a good enough ear to know what he added but it sounded like if you played, say, a C major chord and then you added an A and it sounded like Ravel or Gershwin or something. (I used that chord over and over again in a string quartet movement I wrote in college cuz I wanted to sound like Georgey boy—my dad’s fav.) But mainly what I want to say is no one can get away with the shit that Say does anymore. And maybe more people should. Because anyone who can inspire so much rage in a reviewer such as myself has to be doing something…effective—in a literal I-am-affecting-you-and-the-evidence-is-that-your-blood-pressure-is-sky-high sort of way. Right? I just think he’s not meant to play Bach. That’s probably the most charitable reading of this whole thing. Another voice writing this would probably say, “Fazil Say is known for interpretations of warhorse piano works—interpretations full of passion, and, truth be told, entertainment value. And so, as when any musician chooses to perform a work uncharacteristic of his or her own repertoire, it is a curious choice that Say chose the Goldbergs. They are not his strong-suit (he tends to try to infuse them with the pedaling and consequent emotional logic you’d employ in Brahms or Scriabin), but his own compositions never fail to impress. Their traditional harmonic language belies their technical inventiveness and emotional depth. The Paganinis especially showed that the pianist-composer is no longer a thing of the past; he is living with us right here, and he is better than ever.” That’s maybe what a guy who isn’t me would say if he had stayed after intermission. So, yeah, that’s what I think about Fazil Say. Send to everyone now.