纽约时报这篇文章批评钢琴新星们有多动症。在板凳坐不住，又厥屁股又135度后仰，脸部表情嘶牙咧嘴惨不忍睹。 这让我想起来多年前看过郎郎的演出，哎哟，真的把眼睛闭上。
When Histrionics Undermine the Music and the Pianist
By BERNARD HOLLAND
Published: February 6, 2008
Wandering from one television channel to the next the other day, I came across young people playing the piano. One man, bearded and a little hefty, rippled through a Beethoven sonata, sharing with the camera complicit smiles, exultant grimaces, gazes to the right and left, and a gentle swaying from side to side.
The next, a young woman, sat down to Schumann, bending her back, lifting her head and gazing straight up. Maybe God was sitting in the rafters just above her, and she was using the opportunity to say hello. Both pianists were perfectly fluent. They kept time, played the right notes and sounded expressive when they were supposed to.
I had to turn away. I could listen, but I couldn’t watch. Two performers, four glazed eyes and four waving arms were too much for my stomach. And if someone with a lifelong love for the piano repertory has this kind of reaction, what about those coming to classical music from the outside? Think of the smart young people ready to believe, filled with curiosity and good thoughts, and imagine with what astonishment and amusement they must come away from such scenes.
It’s another reason classical music is not reaching more young people: not because of how it sounds, but because of how it looks. Even worse, lugubrious gymnastics like these advertise the feelings of performers, not of Beethoven or Schumann. Music is asked to stand in line and wait its turn.
Our two pianists might simply have been talking themselves into playing well and sharing the conversation with us. Maybe they didn’t trust their own ability to make music without a little theater to juice up the proceedings. Elaborate arm waving and heaven-bound gazes, at any rate, seem to have become part of the conservatory curriculum, like accurate scales and counterpoint.
Some, I am sure, watch the wrong people and engage in monkey see, monkey do. More often, I suspect, performers just want everyone to know how wonderful they are, right down to their virtuoso fingertips. There are bad examples out there. Liszt evidently jumped around when he was a young touring virtuoso, but he is said to have sat at the piano like a stone later in life. Glenn Gould, who acted out his musical eccentricities with remarkable finesse, looked like the music he was making.
Serious theater in the wrong hands turns unintentionally into physical comedy. I have always wanted to make athletically inclined students sit in a chair away from the piano, writhe to their heart’s content and then ask themselves what they just heard. Some music does bear watching, like the slow ballet of Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians.” Most of it doesn’t. Vision, the dominant of our five senses, gets in the way.
Responsible teachers ought to be beating these kinds of histrionics out of their students but are too often perpetrators themselves. One answer might be for conservatories to hire time-and-motion experts, professionals who could point out that the flailing arm, the bulging eye and the balletic upper torso are extraneous work in a business best devoted to doing the most with the least.
Technique is not about muscle building but about optimal allocation of resources. More happens faster and more clearly with the minimum of gesture. Weight and relaxation, not force, make big sound. So much energy is squandered on these melodramas for the eye ― and so much attention diverted ― that it is a wonder our pianistic thespians can hear themselves at all.
If the teacher won’t do the job, what about tying offenders to a post and running films of Arthur Rubinstein at work? They should note the dignity, the rectitude, the stillness of the upper body and, above all, the quality of the music that results. My colleague Alex Ross once described a filmed Beethoven sonata performance as Wilhelm Kempff watching Wilhelm Kempff play the piano.
And a note to the larger ego: playing the discreet middleman does not sacrifice the spotlight. It is neither meekness nor submission nor self-effacement. At the end of the day, whom do we take more seriously, Rubinstein or Lang Lang?
The television program I happened to come across was produced by or for (probably both) a major American piano competition, and the young people I saw on it were part of that process. The program also offered commentary by an eminent conductor talking about the differences between Apollonian and Dionysian approaches to art. The Apollonian refers (and I paraphrase) to symmetry, invention and elegance; the Dionysian, to art more from the gut, more spontaneous.
More personal too. Dionysus had the stage when I was watching: two ambitious young people were taking part in a system that asks them to use Beethoven and Schumann as ways to sell themselves. Maybe our eminent conductor could have added another distinction to his two-sided debate: that Dionysian pianists care about Dionysian pianists, whereas Apollonian pianists care about music
