Blog

“Composers will confirm that there is nothing more difficult than finding performers willing to carry out the noble task of learning and premiering their works with enthusiasm, and in a sympathetic and meticulous manner. In the performance of the compositions of many young composers David Kaplan has shown to be that kind of pianist.”

- Walter Ponce

Ravinia :: 7.21.2008

So the past few weeks have been wonderful, as I've been at the Ravinia festival... doing lots of playing, thinking, relaxing, and playing. Did I mention playing? The level of playing from my colleagues, a collection of young artists (read: slaves), is astoundingly high. To say that playing with and listening to people here is inspiring would be an horrible understatement. It goes without saying that everyone plays their instruments with ease and aplomb... but what is truly unique is the overall commitment to music making shared among everyone.
If you're in Chicago during the summer time, I think it's a must to come and hear what's happening at the Ravinia festival.
Last night was a Lang Lang extravaganza, complete with giant video screens to ensure that all could see as much as possible of his dynamism. I'm not sure that there is any other pianist in the world who can play as reliably as often as Lang Lang does, and there is nobody who is introducing more people around the world to classical music. I have been eager to hear him play live, as he has created so much buzz both within the bizz and amidst the general public. It was great to finally be able to react to his playing first hand.
It was very exciting to see the big crowds there (he outsold the beachboys), and to hear people who might not otherwise be going to see a concert of the Chicago Symphony talking about the event weeks in advance. For instance, the 20something guy helping me at lenscrafters a few weeks before had talked about getting his tickets a month earlier.
Some people argue that Lang Lang is attracting people not to classical music, but to himself. This may be true... in any case, its hard to demonstrate one way or the other. From my perspective: if Lang Lang attracts 10 people to his concert who have never attended a classical concert before, it only takes 1 of those people to go to another concert, of another artist, for Lang Lang to have done a truly great thing.

1 comments

:: 4.05.2008

This has been my last few months at Yale, and I'm trying to soak up the maximum. Recently, I'm engaged with organ playing, composition, conducting, and writing a thesis, and I feel as if the only thing I'm NOT doing is playing the piano. I mean, of course I exaggerate, but that's how it feels at the moment. I get to conduct the Yale Symphony Orchestra next week, even if it's just for 5 or 6 glorious minutes! That will be a big rush, and I'm sure to be very nervous. It will be useful practice though, because my actual debut as a conductor comes very soon after that, when I conduct a chamber orchestra in a performance of Mozart's Piano Concerto K. 414. And yes, I'll play as well.
Timothy Andres, the fantastic young composer who has just been commissioned by the Green Umbrellas Series of the LA Phil, and who has just won yet another ASCAP award for something we premiered together last May, is providing the companion piece for the program: a thoroughly modern chamber concerto for the same orchestration (plus a real bassoon part) called Home Stretch. The original idea was to conduct both from the keyboard, but his score won't allow for that, at least with only a month before the show.
The highlight is that Katia and I will perform a suite by Rachamaninov for two pianos. We were nervous, I think, to start working together, but we began playing together "for real" recently, and it really works great! That concert will be in New Haven, on April 30th.
This weekend has been spent rehearsing with some old friends for a concert in Maryland (4/15), playing Beethoven, Debussy and Brahms, and it should be wonderful music making!
Looking forward to telling you more!

0 comments

Granola :: 1.25.2008

The opening just wasn’t sounding right. Not enough staccato, not enough energy popping out of each note, and yet, not soft enough, never pianissimo enough. It would never be good enough, even though it would always get better, he told himself. His teachers had always emphasized the special power of time to gradually improve a piece. Though out of direct control, the piece would age like wine. Without a minute of practicing, a piece would soak in a rich marinade, so that when practiced again, it would allow the player to inch just a little closer to it. Performing a piece provides a similar enrichment—one teacher had hyperbolized that simply playing a work in public is equivalent to years of practicing it.
In any case, Alex was looking for a faster solution, and easy improvement in the difficult opening of this Sonata by Beethoven wasn’t making itself obvious. This artichoke wasn’t going to peel itself. Before another intensely concentrated dive into the nuts and bolts of the work, the best thing in such a moment was to step outside the practice room, and see about a productive distraction. John, the security guard who often monitored traffic out of the conservatory building, opened the door, and tossed a granola bar across the room to the young man on the piano bench, who did his best to catch it.
“Here, Alex, it’s already past 7, and I was gettin’ worried about you… and better you eat it than me, I put on at least 15 pounds over the holidays…”
The only response Alex could muster was an earnest smile before the door closed modestly behind the middle aged ex-marine. The man had an impossibly kind face… the kind that you can believe. If the man looked at the sky and said it would rain, best trust that you should wear a coat. He generally passed the time reading—sometimes, but not always, a bible—and who made a sporadic project of learning Russian—always to the muted strains of a small boom-box playing Iron Maiden and Ozzy Osborne with the volume turned paradoxically low.
He and Alex frequently spoke as the young pianist came and left the conservatory. Alex, at one time, had convinced him that one could ‘learn’ perfect pitch as one memorizes the names of colors…slowly but surely, John began to develop a sense of pitch in this way; by memorizing the names of familiar timbres of sound. In kind, John often spoke to Alex about his experiences.
“Thanks for the granola bar, man.”
John smiled and shrugged off the gesture.
“you know, I gotta say,” John started, “I gotta tell you, there’s one thing that bothers me about people… and you know, I try to have positive thoughts all the time, not to judge anyone, not to jump to conclusions…” he searched for the words he needed… “but there is one thing that forces me to judgment.”
“Well, sure it’s easy to judge on first impression… assessing superficial traits, whether looks or actions doesn’t matter much, I think, is all we have…”
“Yeah, sure, and that’s what I’m trying to say, I try to separate between how someone really is, you know, how they are inside, from how they appear to me, from what they say… but some people, what really aggravates me—and it’s just one type of person, as it boils down—it’s that guy who tries to be what he isn’t. It’s the guy who doesn’t know how to be, who doesn’t know himself, and so he imitates the image of what he thinks he should be…you know? So look at this: I mean, look at me, I look like Dennis the menace, I mean, I was the only Irish guy in an Italian neighborhood, and I had to fight my way to the corner store, every time… I mean, if I walked down the street with an ugly girl, sure nobody would bother me, but say my girlfriend is nice looking, guys are just hittin on her right in front of me, like they expect I can’t do anything about it, and I just have to stand back and laugh inside—if I don’t want to get in a fight every day of my life!—because they don’t know… they can’t know I was in the marine corps, and that I can hold my own. See what I can’t stand is the need to act tough, the whole look—you know what I mean, the Harley Davidson logo on the pickup truck, the chain wallet with the Harley logo on it, the whole deal, like acting a certain way, talking a certain way… when really, they haven’t actually served their country, haven’t actually put themselves to something with meaning… and they look at me, with my Dennis the menace looks… well, yeah! You don’t think so, but I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard…”
“I get told all the time I look like Harry Potter, I guess that’s about the same…” (Alex did, in fact, bear an uncanny similarity to the adolescent wizard)
“But see, that’s just how it is, and it’s up to me to show restraint, and not to let my own strength get the better of me… I mean, when the cops get there, you don’t want to have provoked anything! Let the other guy be culpable. I was just minding my own business, I say. Like take the other day: I go into my friend’s bar, where he works, and I’m just minding my own business, eating my boneless chicken wings, and drinking coke… you know, not the manliest of drinks, I mean, I don’t drink, and that’s just the way I am…but it gives off this impression… So, this guy, he’s there with a friend, he comes to me and says,” John deepens his voice and sinks his head deep into his neck and shoulders, with arms akimbo, “ ‘Yo, how bout Indy 08?!’ and I look up, like, what is this guy talking about? and I say, ‘Sorry, what was that?’ and he looks at me like I’m from Mars and says, ‘INDY 08, man!’ and I ask him again, quietly, what he’s talking about. He’s getting more and more agitated, and he says, ‘IND-I-AN-AP-OL-IS, man! The COLTS! FUCK yeah.’ At this point, I just lose it, and I look at him square and say, ‘I don’t know what the fuck you are talking about.” And he steps back, looking at me worse than ever, saying, ‘man, you don’t need to get a fuckin ATTitude about it!’ strutting back to his table talking mumbling. So I just go back to my wings, and he’s quiet for a bit, but finally he says again, ‘man, I don’t know why you got to have a big fuckin attitude about it.’ Really testing my patience. I mean, thankfully, my friend is behind the bar, and he calls the guy out: he says, ‘Look, my friend is minding his own business eating his food, and you have no business bothering him. I’m gonna explain to you right now, so that he doesn’t have to, that he’s tougher than anyone you ever met before, and you don’t want to find that out yourself. My friends need to be able to come in here and mind their own business without people like you messin’ with ‘em. So now, it’s time for you and your friend to leave. And let me emphasize the now aspect of that statement.’”
“Wow, well it’s good your friend was there.”
“Yeah, cause I didn’t need to say anything myself… not that I would, I mean what’s the use, but seriously, he just said what I would hope anybody would say in that situation.”
“Sure, cause, he saved you from yourself, I guess. He saved you from feeling the temptation of needing to assert yourself, so you didn’t even have to deal with the question of what the right thing to do was versus what you probably wanted to do deep down.”
“Right… but you see, it’s people like that that just drive me to the edge… like they don’t know how to act themselves, so they take the idea of manhood from what they think it should be, like some idea of toughness… not even toughness, but aggression, really, and play it up, even if there’s nothing behind it.”
“Yeah it’s true.” The young pianist went back into his cave, thinking again of staccato and pianissimo and Beethoven, and how to lick that opening, how to get it out of himself the way he heard it somewhere in the horizons of his imagination... now an abstraction, a collection of shapes, feelings, instruments, thoughts, pulses and long lost energies, relics of times long past and flashes of moments still yet to come. “Thanks again for the granola bar, John, it should tie me over till I’m done just fine!”
“No problem… hey, see you later.”

0 comments

Model-T (as in Toyota) :: 12.07.2007

A great deal has changed since Henry Ford upped production of the Model-T in 1915, selling over half a million copies for $350 each. He quipped that you could have it any color, "so long's it's black."
The protean cars were just what most people needed at the time, whereas most other extravagant offerings on the market were exactly what most people didn't need.
It's almost a hundred years since the Model-T hit the streets, and Toyota is now the world's largest auto-maker, by volume of cars sold. The Camry is its top seller, its bread and butter, but the hybrid models leaving showrooms from both Toyota and its luxury brand Lexus have garnered fame and treasure for the Japanese automaker (which despite corporate offices in Japan outsources production of several models to the US).
Maybe it's just that I live in a University town, but the Prius, Toyota's least expensive hybrid offering, ubiquitously inhabits the teeming metropolis of New Haven. It is not uncommon to see three or four parked adjacently, and with their crisp but modest styling, muted color tones, and near silent operation, they could just be the automotive incarnations of Tibetan monks meditating at curbs and slowly pardoning their way through traffic. Did I mention they are slow? My dad bought one a couple of years ago, and my brother and I decided to drive it briefly with the aim of achieving the worst possible mileage. To no avail. With its conical (one gear) transmission, certainly a great engineering achievement (something Buick and Saab both tried decades ago) it "couldn't pull the wings off a fly." No amount of stomping on the throttle could get it to misbehave. The automotive equivalent of a Macintosh, it shrouds its technical wizardry under a gloss of urban chic: the interior features high quality materials far superior to that of most cars in its price category (Toyota rightly anticipated that socially conscious people with money would be cross shopping the car with cars twice its price), and to induce the computer-like "whir" of a startup, you need only depress a shallow round power button. Nothing mechanical here.
The Prius is not a terribly expensive car, by US standards. Accessible to most, and appealing to the Apollonian side of most, it strongly resonates with the appeal of the original T. Toyota has revolutionized many aspects of car production, just as Henry Ford did a century ago, and the Prius and T embody the same sort of optimism, egalitarianism, and just plain modesty.

0 comments

Reading :: 11.03.2007

There are those who read, and those who do not read.
There are those who only read road-signs, and only if necessary.
There are those who read only their email.
There are those who read the same books twice, at least.
There are those who read one book after another, and never again, often with the aid of a list to maintain order in their task.
There are those who read on planes, trains, and occasionally in waiting rooms of doctors’ offices — but never while standing.
There are those who, when reading in public, laugh out loud, and even sigh.
There are those who open books in public, but don’t read but a line, but instead look up, look down, look to the left, look ahead, read a line (generally the same one), adjust their legs, push their hair over their ears, look to the right, yawn, read another three lines, check their cell phone…
There are those who do read while standing.
There are those who do not read at all, but who look at the pictures.
There are those who move their lips while reading, and those who read in their head.
There are those who imagine accents and tones of voice for different characters.
There are those who read celebrity magazines, and who take the quizzes, although they do not record the results with a pen, while there are also those who take the quizzes and do write down the answers, calculate the scores, and ponder the results.
There are those who read while eating, or while on hold with the phone company.
There are those who read as part of a book club.
There are those who read plays, and those who do not read plays.
There are those who read biographies of scientists.
There are those who only buy used books.
There are those who own multiple editions of the same book, so as to compare editorial influence, quality of translation where applicable, type-face, etc.
There are those who read while on vacation.
There are those who reread paragraphs because they were actually thinking about their dry-cleaning, and where that blue sweater could possibly be.
There are those who make up names and places when encountering _______ in certain Nineteenth Century masterpieces by authors such as Mr. _______ and Madame de_______, and especially in the works coming from a certain B_______.
There are those who read Dostoyevsky, and those who do not read Dostoyevsky.
There are those who read the entirety (more or less) of the works of a single author before so much as glancing at another printed edition of anything.
There are those who cannot finish a book.
There are those who see films based on books and speak authoritatively about their authors.
There are those who forget the titles of the books they have read, though they can remember the most intricate details of characterization, setting, tone, and theme.
There are those who grasp not an inkling of characterization, setting, tone, and theme, but who remember the every name of every character of every author’s every book.
There are those who read self-help books.
There are those who read license plates.

And then, there are those who go to concerts…

3 comments