Frederick Moyer
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The piano was elbowed out of its pivotal position in the family’s affections with the advent of the broadcast media; radio wounded it, television provided the coup de grace. Today fewer and fewer children are dragged away from their Nintendos to put in a daily half hour of practice or to learn the meaning of stage fright in their teachers’ living-room recitals. Sales of pianos have been declining for decades, which is why the recent buyout of the Steinway company for over $1 million amazed industry observers, who found the price much too high given the low sales and the large supplies of good used pianos–they don’t, after all, wear out. For those who still insist on making their own music, various electronic devices deriving from the “toaster organ” of the 60s and 70s provide everything from a bass line to drums to chord changes to a trumpet descant to the silky sounds of 101 Strings. Any dolt can pick out a melody line, at least until the novelty of the toy wears off.
Yet paradoxically we have more outstanding pianists vying for our attention than ever. Technical perfection is no longer particularly rare, and there’s no shortage of flash in the herds of talented young pianists who emerge from musical competitions annually, each hoping to become the next Van Cliburn or Andre Watts, get a fat recording contract, and play on all the biggest piano series and with all the best orchestras. But true soul remains much more elusive.
That exhibition was a memorial retrospective of the paintings and theatrical and architectural sketches of the composer’s friend Victor Hartmann. Two of the pictures were on loan from Mussorgsky’s own collection, and Moyer attributed the jaunty spirit of the promenade immediately after the section named for them (“Samuel Goldenberg and Shmuyle”) to pride of ownership. The notoriously dilatory (and sodden) Mussorgsky found inspiration in the pictures, and finished this piano work in just under three weeks, though it wasn’t performed until several years after his death. It’s most familiar to us in the orchestration by Ravel (others later tried their own ideas of the proper orchestral colors), but piano renditions have never completely gone out of fashion.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Photo/KyuSun Rhee.
