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27 апреля 2023 21:52

The Truth About a Legend

By Leonard Bernstein

One day in 1962, I received a call from Glenn in Toronto. He was to play Brahms' D Minor Concerto with me and the New York Philharmonic the following week in Carnegie Hall. He said, "Oh boy, have I got some surprises for you; I have made such discoveries about this piece." I thought, "Well, wonderful." Any discovery of Glenn's was welcomed by me because I worshipped the way he played: I admired his intellectual approach, his "guts" approach, his complete dedication to whatever he was doing, his constant inquiry into a new angle or a new possibility of the truth of a score. That's why he made so many experimental changes of tempi. He would play the same Mozart sonata-movement adagio one time and presto the next, when actually it's supposed to be neither. He was not trying to attract attention, but looking for the truth. I loved that in him.

A week before he was to come to New York, he made that call to announce that he had some really new ideas about the Brahms, and to prepare me for them. I said, "Along what order? You're not making a big cut? You're not taking a huge repeat that Brahms didn't write?" Because he had made it sound so extraordinary I didn't know what to expect. He said, "No, it's just a matter of tempo here and there, but I just want to warn you because you might be a little shocked." I told him nothing he could do would shock me because I knew him too well by now, and I was almost unshockable.

He arrived and set forth three unbelievable tempi for the three movements. In the first place, they were so slow that the first movement alone took about as much time as it should take to play the whole concerto. It was all in six—the whole first movement had to be beaten in six. There was no sense of alla breve, which, of course, is the point of the movement—or, rather, there was no sense of that fine line between 6/4 in two and 6/4 in six. It's a kind of tightrope which you walk so that at any moment you can veer toward one side or the other—be more flowing, or be more sostenuto, whatever—according to the needs of the music. This, however, was no tightrope. This was having fallen off the tightrope into the safety net called adagissimo—and this for an allegro, mind you. I said I was perfectly willing to go along with it, pour le sport, so to speak, as maybe he had something there. .

I also said that I thought we'd have an empty house before we got to the slow movement. Glenn laughed. "Wait till you hear how the slow movement goes, which is also in 6/4. It's exactly the same as the first movement's 6/4. It's just like repeating!" That was his major discovery: the two movements were really both aspects of the same movement, and therefore both—6/4's had to be the same. After an hour of this, we finally got to the finale, which is a 2/4 Hungarian thing, and no matter how much you hold back in the Hungarian manner, you can't possibly do it in four. It's a 2/4 thing, and you can subdivide or hold back all you want, but you can go only so far.

I did forewarn the orchestra a little about this. I said, "Now, don't give up, because this is a great man, whom we have to take very seriously." There were some very odd looks when we began the rehearsal, but they were wonderfully cooperative and went right along with it. Of course, they did get tired: it was very tiring. After the rehearsal I asked him, "Are you sure you're still convinced about the 'slowth' of this piece ?" And he said, "Oh, more than ever; did you hear how wonderfully the tension built?"

In those days, we had our first concert of each weekly series on Thursday night, which was a kind of dress rehearsal in which I talked to the audience. It was a chic night, the night to be there. You could never get a ticket for Thursday night. I sometimes had a piano, and illustrated points about the music being played as I do on a television show, all in order to bring the audience closer to the music.