Jon Johanning's interesting post directed us to Anthony Tommasini's
excellent recent NY TIMES piece on memorization as a sine qua non for
recitalists and concerto soloists.

I'd like to expand the discussion from my standpoint as a conductor-noting
that concerto repertoire which was perceived as too complex (in the
orchestra/solo dialog, I assume) to play from memory at mid-century is
frequently memorized nowadays.  In this category I would put the Bartok,
Berg and Schoenberg violin concerti, for instance.

Piano concerti which were played from score in the 1960s and even the
mid1970s included Bartok 1 and 2, and the Schoenberg concerto.  Alfred
Brendel, a distinguished exponent of the latter was playing it from score
thirty years back, having recorded it (twice?) already.  I even remember
turning pages for Leon Kirchner in a performance of his First Piano
Concerto at Aspen in 1961.  If the composer himself couldn't play it from
memory.....

There are those for whom the act of learning the work must be the same
as the act of memorizing; Rostropovich, for instance, in his glory days
as a cellist played virtually all, if not the entire repertoire of his
London/Moscow/New York concerto marathons from memory, new works and old,
and seemed, from my standpoint in the audience both at concerts and
rehearsals, to have the orchestral parts memorized as well.  Paradoxically,
his conducting, as seen over his seventeen-year tenure with the National
Symphony Orchestra, however idiomatic and impassioned it was in some
literature, never seemed to rest on anything like this depth of
assimilation, even with the score before him (see below).

I suspect that the public and some professional colleagues would be
surprised if a soloist played a relatively unfamiliar Mozart piano concerto
from score--yet the Mozart two- and three-piano concerti, and the two
Sinfonie Concertante are virtually always played from the music (as of
course they were in Mozart's day).

The issue of conducting without a score is even messier.  The acid test, it
seems to me, is if the conductor is able to rehearse without a score (the
only valid analogy to an instrumentalist or singer practicing from memory),
then he/she is entitled to conduct the performance without score.  I note
with some amusement that Sir Georg Solti seemed always to use a score,
while Carlo Maria Giulini rarely did except when collaborating in a
contemporary concerto.

Living up to the old rule about having "the score in your head, not your
head in the score" doesn't mean that there should be no score in front of
you.

Joel Lazar
Conductor, Bethesda MD
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