Classical: An off-key exploration of the giants of the piano

On The Air

THE PIANO hardly needed Jane Campion's film to promote it, even if sales are down and fewer people take lessons than ever before. Neither of which justifies the easygoing approach of Radio 3's series of the same name on Thursday afternoons devoted to the incomparable repertoire of the most important instrument in Western Classical music during the course of the past two centuries.

Over eight summer weeks, Andrew Green asked some prominent pianists to talk about other players' interpretations of a particular composer. Last week, Hamish Milne talked about Franz Liszt's music, which was played by pianists from Egon Petri to Alfred Brendel. Milne is not only a very fine pianist himself but also has a considerable reputation as a teacher, so he might have been expected to express himself clearly. Up to a point he did, though he was rather dry. Poor man. Green either goaded him without asking a precise question ("What is important to you as a pianist?") or pre-empted his response to one of the recordings that they had just listened to by first making his own comment, so that Milne only needed to add "Yes, that's right."

At one point Milne mentioned the need for imagining different orchestral instruments when playing Liszt's piano music, and the way different players may vary their touch to achieve, say, the roundness of a French horn, with fingers relatively flat, or the acute attack of an oboe, with a more vertical action. He needn't have apologised for mentioning how it was done - this was just the thing that we needed more of.

At its worst, the programme is frightened of scaring away listeners with any talk that is precise, and perpetuates mock-critical flim-flam, like the woolliest of Milne's observations, that "if Claudio Arrau was the philosopher among Liszt pianists, Alfred Brendel is the psychiatrist". Which would have been fair enough comment had it been explained in more detail, not just with a general reference to Liszt's conflict between sensuality and spirituality - as if that were anything unusual in a major composer.

Yet Milne said some necessary things too, pointing out, for instance, that in the Grand galop chromatique, Gyorgy Cziffra sacrificed certain details to keep the momentum going and edited the composer's text to suit his very individual way of generating excitement at the keyboard. It's a fair guess that Liszt, if asked, wouldn't have minded.

On Sunday afternoon, also on Radio 3, Charles Rosen gave the first of three talks about Frederic Chopin, playing his own examples in a rather weary manner. He began by demolishing the old preconception of Chopin as a mere miniaturist - though I hope he wasn't assuming that long pieces of music are essentially better than short ones. Rosen pointed out that Chopin's Ballades and Scherzos, for instance, are each longer than an average movement by Beethoven, and to make their time-scale even more impressive, they do not follow received forms, but are "completely original". Just how complete can originality be?

Moreover, Rosen averred, Chopin "never wrote an unsuccessful large-scale piece" after the age of 21, confident that his listeners would not worry about what "unsuccessful" meant here.

Clever people - and Charles Rosen is very clever indeed - can also make surprisingly crude assumptions, and the more he said, the more Rosen appeared to value what can be measured or counted. Adding a precautionary "As far as I know" each time, he was fond of proposing curious facts, like answers to a brainy party quiz. Thus we were told that the Ricercar from Bach's A Musical Offering was the earliest piano music; the Italian word "sfogato" only appears once as a musical direction - in Chopin's Barcarolle.

Simplicity is evidently not high on Charles Rosen's list of musical virtues, which is why the composers he most admires in our own time are Pierre Boulez and Elliot Carter.

According to Rosen, as Chopin grew older (though he was only 39 when he died 150 years ago this year), his music got better because its contrapuntal richness increased. To be fair, he did say, just once, that he valued this complexity because of "the emotion that came with it", yet this prompted the unspoken question as to how, or even whether, emotion and musical complexity are connected, and left it dangling.