Ian Crisp wrote:

>In my long experience of concert-going, the fact that a performer has a
>score in front of him/her is no guarantee that he/she will not get lost
>somewhere along the line!

There is, of course, a much larger issue beyond "getting lost" -- the
quality of playing.  How is that effected by playing from the score? I used
to think that playing from memory is "better" until Janos Starker gave me
this point of view when I asked him at La Jolla last summer why he uses the
score for music he's been performing for a half a century --

   "Contrary to the mores of concert life today, I use music to play
   Bach.  It's not because I don't know the notes or I am worried about
   a memory lapse.

   "I will never forget what Fritz Reiner told me when I was first
   cellist of the Chicago Symphony, and he was conducting the `Eroica.'
   He had a phenomenal memory, conducted rehearsals of just about
   everything from his head, but came the evening, and the performance,
   he put the score up and he was turning pages.  It didn't make sense
   to me at the time, in the era when the memory wizards came around,
   careers being made from conducting the `Rite of Spring' from memory
   -- and I asked Reiner why he is using the score.  He said: `When I
   look at the music, it gives me new ideas.'

   "This is precisely what I am doing today.  When I look at the music,
   I keep changing the performance.  Instead of making an echo-effect
   in one bar, I play it in two bars.  "I differentiate when I repeat
   something from the second time.  Let's now do the more Germanesque
   version of the Gigue instead of the light one like at the beginning
   of the suite.  This depends on acoustics, for example, if there is
   a reverberation in the hall -- it's the split personality of the
   performer: one who says what to do and the other who listens.

   "One reason I am against playing without music in a group [switching
   from the topic of the Bach suite] is that sometimes you begin to play
   in a linear fashion [Starker might have meant "mechanically"], your
   part, not the totality of the work.  My attitude has always been that
   I am one member of the community, I am the protagonist when I am
   playing a concerto, but I have only one part of the whole.  Composers
   seldom write for the cello -- they write a concerto (unless it's
   Boccherini who was a cellist), they hear either vocal sounds or
   [generic] instrumental sounds.

   "Now, as to the Gigue last night, I sometimes joke about the last
   movement getting faster because you're hoping to get to the Scotch
   bottle.  You say it sounded more `free' than the rest, and that's
   where the music [the score] helps in that you can `improvise' more,
   you can take greater chances, you have greater freedom of varying
   your performance.  "You're right, it was totally different from any
   of my recordings...  and that's what one hopes, that after playing
   it hundreds and hundreds of times, you can still find new ideas --
   that's why Bach is a treasure hunt in a whole lifetime.  You look
   for hidden treasures, and sometimes in the middle of the concert,
   you say: `How come I never thought of that?!'

   "Mind you: you have to reach a certain age, a certain experience,
   a stage that you can afford the luxury of looking for new things.
   But then that's what keeps one alive musically, artistically."

Hmmm. Makes one think.

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