MUSIC: Our Smith of Smiths
Ronald Smith’s 80th Birthday concert, QEH, 16th December 2002
The first impression, overwhelmingly, is of elongation. Immensely tall, deceptively spare, and clad in white-tie and tails — indisputably, in its suave anonymity, the appropriate garb for a musical spirit-guide — Ronald Smith summons initially the image of a stork or praying mantis. The dolicocephalic head needs only a monocle, instead of the pair of spectacles, to suggest a White Russian general of the intellectual-ascetic variety — and, indeed, if only Smith bore a name which was Slavic and polysyllabic the wide renown which has shamelessly and disgracefully eluded him over a sixty-year career might well have been his from his debut (under the baton of Sir Henry Wood).
The question which immediately arises in the spectator/listener is, how is this body to be accommodated at a grand piano? The solution is itself striking; crouched low, the piano stool well back with the coat-tails flipped behind it, his spine inclined towards the instrument and head nodding over it, Smith becomes Kafka’s Gregor Samsa (after his metamorphosis) at the keyboard — his extraordinarily long arms, wrists and fingers virtually all that moves in the exploration he undertakes. Throughout a challenging programme, the only sign of personal indulgence is when, at odd passages where the music dissolves to a simple line of melody, instead of sharing the notes amongst the hand, Smith will lift his head to the vertical and watch with attention a single finger carrying the burden.
For his eightieth birthday recital, Ronald Smith chose items from the core of his repertoire, dating from the period of thirty years when pianism as it has remained ever since was defined by a small number of great geniuses — Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin and Liszt. Liszt however was replaced in the recital by one for whose burgeoning revival Smith may carry the lion’s share of the credit — the remarkable Charles-Valentin Alkan, of whom more below.
The Alkan pieces, together with Chopin’s Op. 25 études, Schubert’s ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy and Beethoven’s magisterial last sonata op. 111, made a programme which would have defeated many musicians of a fraction of his age; but whilst Smith walked onto stage an elderly gentleman, there was no doubt, from the first notes of the Schubert, that he sat down at the piano as a timeless, and peerless, musician. Any residual stiffness in the initial moments had completely evaporated by the time we reached the adagio section, with the ‘Wanderer’ theme recreated for us with a most powerful intensity. Smith is a composer as well as a pianist, and here as throughout the concert he conveyed to us with his artistry, not just the moments of harmony and passages of melody, but through both of them the structure of the piece as a whole. As a consequence he gripped his entire audience, compelling us to follow his narratives with our full attention until he could dismiss us satisfied. Having so fully mastered the intricate technical and musical machinery which Chopin has packed in to the op. 25 études, Smith was able to relay them to us as if direct from the master; I have never heard a live performance of these pieces so confident, engaging and authoritative, and rarely seen a standing ovation so well earned.
The second half of the concert was no less exciting. After 180 years, it is still not easy to come to grips with Beethoven’s last piano sonata. It could be said that this is the first example of neo-classicism (Beethoven as ever ahead of his time). The first movement indeed has the contours, after its introduction, of sonata-form, but is almost more of a fugal fantasy shot through with vertical shafts of romantic harmonisation. The second (and final) movement is in the favourite early and pre-classical form of an air with variations. In both of these Beethoven is re-inventing, in some ways, the music of twenty and more years before his own birth, but in a piano-style which remains astonishingly prophetic. (Fats Waller could have learned some useful lessons on rhythmic ragging from the second movement). Smith conveyed the grandeur and the wonder and dissolved music, time and the audience in the final passages of trills. It was almost an affront to break the following silence with applause.
And so to the final and , as Smith announced only half-jokingly from the stage, ‘the most important part of the concert’, the music of Alkan. Alkan (1813-1883) has only himself to blame if he is all but forgotten. In the Paris of the 1830s and 1840s, he was a lion to be mentioned in the same breath as his friends and colleagues, Liszt and Chopin. Indeed the latter bequeathed him his pupils and his uncompleted piano method for publication. His extraordinary music for the piano earned him the admiration through the ages of von Bulow, Busoni and Egon Petri. But he felt perhaps the sentiments of Horace which he chose as the title for one of his piano miniatures, ‘Odi profanum vulgus et arceo’ — the virtuoso retreated into a life of a hermit, concentrating on his determination to retranslate the Bible. He was still indeed writing and sometimes publishing his extraordinary music, but disappeared from the concert stage for some 25 years, emerging in 1873 to give recitals which were eagerly attended by the cognoscenti. According to a legend which the experts have some difficulty in dislodging, he died when, reaching for a copy of the Talmud, his bookcase collapsed and crushed him.
Smith discovered the music of Alkan at a time when it had virtually vanished from musical history. He found it to be exciting, audacious in harmony, rhythm and construction, taxing indeed to play but exhilarating and enriching to audience and player alike. He wrote the first - and still the standard — biography of this enigmatic character, of whom the only photograph existing shows him from the rear. He made some of the first extensive recordings of his music; and it was listening to Smith’s LP performance of Alkan’s ‘Sonatine’, one of the composer’s greatest achievements, that turned your reviewer on to Alkan some thirty-odd years ago. (Happily this recording has just been re-released by EMI on a double CD of Smith’s Alkan; others of his recordings, including Alkan and a recent disc of Schubert, are available on the APR label). Ronald Smith is, appropriately, President of the Alkan Society, which continues Smith’s work in actively spreading the word about this phenomenon with talks, concerts and events. As a piece of graffiti, quoted in the concert programme, has put it: ‘I thought Alkan was just a kitchen foil, until I discovered Ronald Smith’.
The three short pieces in the programme, all introduced from the stage by the soloist, were naturally insufficient to give a full conspectus of Alkan’s genius (if only because some of his works develop their power though their immense length) but must have encouraged all but the most incorrigibly incurious to discover more. ‘Le tambour bat aux champs’ (1859) is a Mahleresque tableau of a deserted battlefield. ‘La chanson de la folle au bord de la mer’ (1847) uses the extremes of the keyboard to suggest both the roaring and rumbling of the surf in the bass below the stave, and the plaintive chant of the madwoman, climaxing and dying away, in the third octave above middle C. Finally came the spectacular ‘octave study’ from opus 35 (1847), which Smith informed us he had been forbidden to play by his wife ñ which announcement of course immediately encouraged a raucous demand from the audience. In the key of C sharp minor and with the extraordinary time signature of 10/16, the tempo indication specifying 440 semiquavers to the minute, this unrelenting and terrifying torrent was mildly characterised by Smith as ‘like juggling with ten balls at a time’ — he might have added, ‘whilst walking a tightrope across Niagara Falls’. We were all agog with amazement and enthusiasm when he reached the other side with all his paraphernalia intact. A further appeal to the audience as to whether we wanted Chopin or Alkan for an encore resulted in us getting one of each, the Alkan being his ‘Ancienne mélodie de la synagogue’ reminding us of the composer’s origins.
In every way, then, a significant and memorable evening — which brings me to the meat of this review; why is there no official recognition of any sort of this truly great Englishman? Ronald Smith is an artist, teacher and composer of genius and stature of whom we can all be proud - an example of the best of British. If in the nineteenth century the preacher and wit Sydney Smith was, as Lord Macaulay stated, ‘the Smith of Smiths’‚ then that title should descend today to Ronald Smith — surely something in the upper echelons of the British Empire orders has been more than deserved by him? I urge all those reading this account to write today to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, which I understand deals with these matters. So outstanding is Ronald Smith that I believe even Mr. Prescott can be made to understand.
Ronald Smith's Alkan: the Man and the Music is available from Kahn & Averill
Allen Buchler, December 17, 2002 08:39 AM