‘Hello to Music’

On the Salzburg Festival and one of its leading lights: the pianist Grigory Sokolov

Salzburg, Austria

‘S ay hello to music for me!” That’s what Bill Buckley once said to me, as I was heading off to the Salzburg Festival. I think of it every time I head back here. No one loved music more. You would just sit and listen to a recording with him, in silence. And every now and then he’d turn to you and say, “Isn’t it marvelous?” (Yes.)

Many of us were not able to say hello to Salzburg last summer — when the pandemic was roaring. But the show went on — the festival went on — though with fewer performances and fewer patrons. Last year was a lousy year for a pandemic, if you were the Salzburg Festival. Could there be a good year? No, but I will explain.

The year 2020 was a “Beethoven year” — the 250th anniversary of that composer’s birth. More important, if you’re Salzburg, it was the centennial year of the festival. The first performance took place on August 22, 1920. Onstage was Jedermann, the play by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, one of the festival’s founders. (Jedermann is his version of Everyman, the English morality play.)

I knew a man who attended that performance: George Sgalitzer, a Viennese-born gent who became an American and a U.S. Army doctor. He made his home in Seattle. George was seven years old in that summer of 1920. He was taken to the play — the new festival — by his grandparents. They weren’t crazy about music, but they loved theater. Their grandson became a devourer of both. He attended the Salzburg Festival every year — except for the war years — until he passed away in 2006.

This year, concert halls are full, pretty much, but the streets are less crowded than usual. The pandemic lingers on. (Far better to have a melody lingering on, as in the Irving Berlin song.) There are very few Chinese and Japanese, and very few Americans. “Yours is the first American accent I’ve heard here in two years,” a French colleague tells me.

Hang on, I have an accent?

To get into a hall, you have to show a vaccination card. Failing that, you have to show proof of a negative test (a very recent test, of course). Then too, you have to wear a mask — not just any mask, but an FFP2. I had brought surgical masks — the light-blue kind — and N95s. I had never heard of FFP2s.

Mine are white, and I keep getting chocolate on them. (Chocolatey fingers reach into my pocket for the mask.) One night, a courteous young woman, ushering, said, “Sir, you have blood on your mask. Perhaps you had a nose bleed. May I show you to the men’s room?” Thanks, but it was just the usual chocolate.

On another night — a morning, actually — the French soprano Sabine Devieilhe walked onstage wearing a mask. She took it off before she sang. (Isn’t there a popular TV show, The Masked Singer?) And, walking back offstage, put it on again. A little odd.

If you’re a patron, in the audience, you do not remove your mask. The halls are hot, as usual, here in Salzburg. (AC is an American fixation.) And with those FFP2s, they’re all the hotter. I can see men and women suffer, in their suits and gowns.

In the opera productions, there’s plenty of nudity, which is de rigueur here. When I first started coming to the festival, almost 20 years ago, I observed, “Salzburg is a place where the people in the audience are overdressed and the people onstage are underdressed.”

There have always been giants — heroes, headliners — at the Salzburg Festival. Among conductors, you had Arturo Toscanini and Herbert von Karajan. Among singers, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf and Leontyne Price. Among pianists, Wilhelm Backhaus and Alfred Brendel.

Can Brendel be counted historic? I think so. He retired in 2008 and turned 90 last January. I have seen him in Salzburg, since his retirement, just attending — a nice sight. As for Backhaus (1884–1969), there is a little street named after him, just outside of town: Wilhelm-Backhaus-Weg. It says something about a locality that it honors a pianist.

Today, the big conductors are Riccardo Muti and Daniel Barenboim — at least those are two of them. Singers? I nominate Anna Netrebko and Elīna Garanča. And pianists? Here are three: Grigory Sokolov, Arcadi Volodos, and Igor Levit. All of those are Russian-born, as it happens (though none has lived in Russia in a very long time).

The festival’s artistic director, Markus Hinterhäuser, is a pianist himself. He has good taste. When I said this to him once, he replied, “You know, that’s what it comes down to, doesn’t it? Taste.”

Grigory Sokolov is an odd duck — I say that with considerable admiration. He is his own man, going his own way. He is unconventional, idiosyncratic — you might even say eccentric. He won the gold medal at the Tchaikovsky Competition when he was 16. (The year was 1966.) He is the youngest person ever to win that medal.

Early on, he toured Great Britain, the United States, and the rest of the world. Now he stays in Europe. He doesn’t play concertos, either — no engagements with orchestra. Just recitals. He plays about 70 of those a year, and they are all devoted to a single program: a single slate of pieces. (The slate changes each year, I should say.)

Typically, he walks onto a stage rather grim-faced and bows solemnly. Then he begins. He maintains his demeanor all through an evening. A Sokolov recital is like a religious rite. The pianist plays as though he were doing the most important thing in all the world — and his audience listens in hushed wonder.

Please be advised that musicians’ bios in programs are practically useless. They seldom give you biographical information: where the person was born, what his nationality is, who his teachers were, etc. It’s a lot of PR puff.

This is how Sokolov’s bio begins:

Grigory Sokolov is widely recognized as one of today’s greatest pianists, an artist universally admired for his visionary insight, spellbinding spontaneity and uncompromising devotion to music. His masterful interpretations of compelling intensity and expressive beauty arise from profound knowledge of the works in his vast repertoire.

All of that PR blather just happens to be true.

Sokolov’s program in Salzburg consisted of Chopin on the first half and Rachmaninoff on the second. I was nervous. Would Sokolov be “on”? That was the question. No one can be on every night; that is asking too much. When I was a youth, I heard two Horowitz recitals, a couple of years apart — 1978 and 1980. I was nervous before each one. The first was bad, or mediocre; the second was fantastic.

I have never heard Sokolov bad or mediocre. But, naturally, he has more inspired nights and less inspired nights. This time — August 5, 2021 — he was inspired indeed. On, pretty much.

In that first half, he played four of Chopin’s polonaises, ending with the most famous one — or one of the two most famous: that in A flat, Op. 53, the “Heroic.” (The other, which Sokolov did not play, is the “Military,” which is in A major, Op. 40, No. 1.)

All of Chopin’s polonaises go beyond a mere folk dance. They have invention, swagger, songfulness — many qualities. Sokolov knows how to bring everything out. I will cite some of his strengths.

He listens to himself very carefully — “voicing” each note the way he wants. At the same time, he does not fall into preciousness. He continues to serve the composer and his music. Sokolov never — ever — makes an ugly sound (unless he wants to, as when Prokofiev, for example, calls for it). The piano is barely a percussion instrument in his hands.

He has no end of virtuosity — yet a live performance has mistakes, which distinguishes it from a studio performance, doctored. Thank heaven for live. The mistakes are “plums in the pudding,” as David Pryce-Jones says (in an expression he got from his friend Peter Levi).

Above all, maybe, Sokolov has soulfulness. He has everything implied in that somewhat mysterious, though certainly useful, word “musicality.”

Sokolov played all four of his polonaises without pause — allowing for no applause — as though the pieces were connected, which they are not. This is a conceit that I wish performers would drop, but it is fashionable right now (and has been for a long time — too long).

I have one major criticism, and it concerns the last polonaise, the “Heroic.” It was a little sleepy, a little bland. That piece has to be played with more panache, more dash, more flair — even a dose of showmanship. No doubt, Chopin played it that way. If you won’t lend it fire, you should leave it alone, contenting yourself with other repertoire.

The Rachmaninoff on the second half of the program was his Op. 23 — the ten preludes that are grouped under that opus number. There is a great variety in this group. As Tim Parry pointed out in his program notes for the evening — excellent — Rachmaninoff was a versatile composer. He contained musical multitudes, looking back at the Baroque, even. Yet everything he wrote is Rachmaninoff-like. It bears his general touch.

To play the Op. 23 preludes, you have to sing. “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that sing.” Irving Mills — Duke Ellington’s lyricist — did not quite write that, but close enough. Rachmaninoff is known as a piano composer, and he was one of the greatest pianists of his age (or any). But he wrote a lot of vocal music — songs, choral works, and operas — and he put singing into virtually everything else, too.

In any case, Grigory Sokolov got the “sing.”

As he was playing the final prelude — in G flat — I was struck by something: Sokolov was expressing what I can only call “complete balance of mind.” He may be idiosyncratic — but I never heard greater balance of mind.

I have a complaint, similar to my earlier one. Almost identical to it, in fact. The big, fast, rhapsodic preludes — the one in B flat, the one in C minor — Sokolov used to play with thunder and lightning. I once wrote a piece about this, titled “When Sokolov Was Lit.” These days, he plays them rather more sedately — which I believe is inadmissible. Those pieces need their fire, dash, speed. Rachmaninoff wrote them that way. You can impose autumnality on a lot of music — but some pieces, no.

A thought occurred to me, as I was sitting in Salzburg’s Great Festival Hall, listening to Sokolov: Rubinstein and Horowitz — and Cherkassky and others we could name — never got autumnal. Even into their 80s. Sure, they played autumnal pieces autumnally. But when fire was called for? They called it down, or summoned it up.

As Sokolov played Rachmaninoff’s Prelude in D major — a slow, songful, dreamy piece — something terrible occurred. A person in the audience suffered physical distress, evidently. When others tried to help him or her — I couldn’t quite tell — the person cried out, in great agitation. There was palpable anxiety in the hall. Yet Sokolov played on, seemingly oblivious to it all.

I recalled his recital in 2018 — his recital here in Salzburg. Let me excerpt a portion of my review:

As Sokolov was nearing the end of his first half, something remarkable happened (aside from the playing). A rainstorm broke out in Salzburg, and the roof of the Great Festival Hall sprang a leak. Rain was pouring in from a light fixture, dousing the patrons in the second row or so. Some stood up, trying to leave or otherwise wondering what to do. You can imagine the commotion. Sokolov kept playing, unperturbed. That was professionalism.

On the other hand, I’m not 100 percent sure that Sokolov was even aware of the problem. Typically, he’s in his own private Idaho.

This year, he played his usual “second concert,” as the old saying goes: a slew of encores, into the night. He played pieces he likes to turn to, at encore time: a Brahms intermezzo; another Brahms piece; a Chopin mazurka; then a Chopin prelude; some Scriabin; and, finally Bach (Bach-Busoni). The recital had begun at 9 o’clock — almost bedtime, for some of us — and the printed program had ended about 11. The encores went until 11:40 or so. The audience got thinner, but not much. Most patrons, I wager, would have stayed till 6 a.m., if Sokolov had been willing. I’d have stayed till noon.

Oh, is he good, and so is music — “Say hello to music for me!” — and so is the Salzburg Festival. If it has another hundred years, it will be too few.