|
Composer and pianist ROBERT
HELPS is currently Professor of Music at the
University of South Florida, Tampa. He has been a
recipient of awards in composition from the National
Endowment for the Arts, the Guggenheim, Ford and many
other foundations. His most recent works are Trio No. 2
for Piano, Violin and Cello (1996), commissioned by the
University of South Florida, with help from the Copland
Fund, for the Lions Gate Trio and Quartet for Piano,
Violin, Viola and Cello (1996), commissioned by the
Koussevitzky Music Foundation for the San Francisco-based
Dunsmuir Quartet. Among his major works are the Symphony
No. 1 (1955) and Gossamer Noons for soprano and orchestra
(1974) both of which are available on a CRI American
Masters retrospective CD of his works.
Helps has been professor of piano at the New England
Conservatory, the San Francisco Conservatory, Princeton
University, Stanford University, the University of
California at Berkeley and the Manhattan School of Music.
He has toured extensively performing with sopranos
Bethany Beardslee and Phyllis Curtin, violinists Jorja
Fleezanis, Isidore Cohen and Rudolf Kolisch, and
composer/pianist Aaron Copland. His CRI CD recordings
include music of Aaron Kernis, David Del Tredici, Vivian
Fine, Leo Kraft, Arthur Berger, and Robert Helps.
"His name is Robert Helps and he seems to be about
20 years old, and he is one of the most amazing young
pianists to come forward in this community. He has a
fantastic technique, incredible rhythmic power, a superb
tone, and that general stamp of vitality and positiveness
that makes for a walloping, authoritative performance. In
the first part of the program he did his best to conceal
his capacities beneath a dull fantasia by Wilhelm
Friedemann Bach, but he came out from under with Roger
Sessions' colossal, craggy, intensely exciting second
sonata and with the richly contrasted group of sketches
by the same musician entitled "Pages from My
Diary" (sic). At the end, the audience gave Helps a
tremendous hand, but they should have been standing on
their chairs and cheering, perhaps as much for the
composer as for his exponent."
— Alfred Frankenstein,
San Francisco Chronicle, September 7, 1950
"Its execution by Robert Helps was a dream of loving
care."
— Virgil Thomson, New York Herald Tribune, February
24, 1948
(review of Helps' performance of Sessions' Piano Sonata
No. 2
on an ISCM concert at the Museum of Modern Art)
In 1943 and 1944, the heavens smiled on me beneficently
and I met and began working with the two most determining
musical influences in my life — Abby Whiteside, my
piano teacher, and Roger Sessions, my
theory and composition teacher. It's hard to imagine how
my life might have gone without them.
Both people, in their own ways, believed in rhythm,
movement, and the sensing out of form as being the most
important, primary elements in music. The exact melody,
harmony, or notes took a follow-through position to
contacting the energized feeling of movement, shape,
progression, and timing.
I studied with Sessions privately (not through any
university or conservatory) on and off from 1944 to 1957
in New York, Berkeley, Princeton and Florence. In his
composition classes, we students closely followed Roger's
critiques of our new pieces to see how he would spot,
with his highly sensitive ear and rhythm-sensing
equipment, just where something didn't work or went off
the tracK in both gesture and detail. This process was
indeed as terrific a learning experience for all of us
students as was the actual critique of our own music.
"Style" played virtually no role in this.
Sessions seemed capable of entering the students'
stylistic sensibilities and often primitive artistic
palette to criticize from within.
It was in 1946 when Sessions presented me with a
manuscript copy of Pages from a Diary which was the
original title and the one he preferred to From
My Diary. The four short pieces, written between
1937 and 1940, were each dedicated to one of his
students. (The dedicatees are Milton Babbitt, Edward T.
Cone, Carter Harman and Vivian Fine. Three of these, of
course, became well known composers while Carter Harman
later became, for quite some time, Executive Director of
CRI.) Thus began my first real contact with performing
and really hearing advanced, vital 20th century music.
And thus began my involvement with Sessions' piano music
as a whole. Within two years I was performing the Sonata
No. 2, several years later I circled back to
pick up the Sonata No. 1, and I started
performing the Sonata No. 3 shortly
after it was finished in 1965.
It has been fifty years now since I began performing the Sonata
No. 2 and I have gone back to it often. After
recent performances, I have been quoted (accurately) as
saying "If I don't know it by this time, I'd better
give up." It was written in Berkeley, California in
one month — white hot speed for Sessions. The piece
is also white hot. All of the qualities of Sessions'
music are in full evidence: the long lines, high tension,
complexity but clarity of the textures, bass line
awareness, seriousness of "message." And all of
this demands high concentration by performer and listener
alike.
A quality that I love about all of these pieces is that
they are wonderfully pianistic and exploitive of
stretching the capabilities of the piano to its seeming
limits. They truly need a 9-foot concert grand piano (and
a large space) to do them justice. This is not so much
for the intensity of the loud sections, but more for the
real hearing of passages like those in the first movement
of the Sonata No. 3, where four-part
polyphony is going on in primarily soft areas with most
of the notes lying below middle C. Such writing tends to
sound dreadful and muddy on a studio upright (what
doesn't?) and not much better on a small grand — but
quite wonderful on a good Steinway 9-footer.
As time has gone by, I have become more and more partial
to live recordings and less and less to studio
recordings. In studio recordings, you may get all the
notes. But in good live recordings, you get a
performance. Not only is it in one swoop (the Sessionian
long line?), but projection of the piece to an audience
adds an indispensable expressive factor. Three of the
four pieces on this CD come from live performances.
Each of these sonatas occupy a very important position in
the Sessions catalogue, and each one plays a part in
ushering in the beginning, or close to the beginning, of
a somewhat "new" period in his compositional
development. In fact, the dates of the Sonatas correspond
roughly with those of three of his most important
Symphonies: Sonata No. 1 (1927-30) and Symphony
No. 1 (1927); Sonata No. 2
(1946) with Symphony No. 2 (1944-46),
and Sonata No. 3 (1964-65) with Symphony
No. 5 (1964).
Roger voiced to me the importance of the piano in his
compositional life, and that these three pieces are, to
an extent, cornerstone works in his creative output.
Although not a public solo pianist, Roger was fully
acquainted with the difficulties and possibilities of the
piano and indeed went so far as to perform on more than a
few occasions his Duo for Violin and Piano
with Rudolf Kolisch as well as all of the Beethoven Cello
Sonatas with his friend and colleague composer George
Barati.
It is interesting to note differences in Sessions' three
sonatas which cover more than thirty-five years. For
example, there are the "tonality" aspects of
the Sonata No. 1 (1930). It even has key
signatures — a practice that came to an end soon
after the first Diary piece (1939) which, oddly enough,
has always seemed to me to be the wrong signature. (But
this never seemed important enough to discuss with
Sessions.) The Sonata No. 2 has an
increase in rhythmic complexities and dissonance, and Sonata
No. 3 has the really large increase in rhythmic
difficulties, the use of his version of 12-tone
technique, and the larger scope and length. Yet in the
large scale form of all three sonatas, the problems of
the "sonata," are worked out with the same
sense of dedication to the materials of music. In a
sense, "time" is the same, it's just that the
times have changed. (These topics are the subjects of
articles and books on Sessions, often by Sessions.)
On the lighter side, I was always amused (as was
Sessions) by his story concerning the program listing for
a performance of From My Diary in
France. Before they got the title right, it went through
two stages — "From My Dearie," and then
perhaps even more alarming, "From My Dairy."
Listeners to music not only have to try to receive, or be
open to the composer's emotional message (or whatever one
wishes to call it) but this "message" also has
to get through via another mechanism which is the
performer (in this case, me). And it is the performer
whose abilities or limitations for such communication,
and whose technical adroitness for handling such a task,
are always a condition that the listener is forced to
contend with. How many times have I heard a performance,
especially of music new to me, where my reactions and
assessment have been blocked by a less than adequate
performance? How many times has it been hard to know
whether these inadequacies have been those of the
composer, the performer or indeed me?
Often I have been amazed at reading a newspaper criticism
or talking with someone who has been at the same musical
event that I have and wondered whether we could possibly
have been at the same event, or even on the same planet.
It is equally as amazing and wonderful that seemingly
whole audiences can be thrilled in what appears much the
right, it went through two stages — "From My
Dearie," and then perhaps even more alarming,
"From My Dairy."
Listeners to music not only have to try to receive, or be
open to the composer's emotional message (or whatever one
wishes to call it) but this "message" also has
to get through via another mechanism which is the
performer (in this case, me). And it is the performer
whose abilities or limitations for such communication,
and whose technical adroitness for handling such a task,
are always a condition that the listener is forced to
contend with. How many times have I heard a performance,
especially of music new to me, where my reactions and
assessment have been blocked by a less than adequate
performance? How many times has it been hard to know
whether these inadequacies have been those of the
composer, the performer or indeed me?
Often I have been amazed at reading a newspaper criticism
or talking with someone who has been at the same musical
event that I have and wondered whether we could possibly
have been at the same event, or even on the same planet.
It is equally as amazing and wonderful that seemingly
whole audiences can be thrilled in what appears much the
hand notes together with right hand notes. This was the
vogue at the time, especially among concert pianists
playing Chopin, and he felt later that his directions
were in too whole-hearted response to that.
I'll close this topic and these notes with a comment made
by Igor Stravinsky's composer/pianist son, Soulima, who
visited us here at the University of South Florida a few
years ago. At a question-and-answer session, he was asked
what his father felt about his own metronome markings
— were they to be taken as inexorably exact? He
answered quite simply, "My father always told me he
wished people would play his music more like
Chopin."
— Robert Helps
|
