Jorge Bolet Interview (1983)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 20 ต.ค. 2024
- A 1983 interview of pianist Jorge Bolet by Robin Ray.
Despite what the graphic says, the piece Bolet is playing at the beginning is the 12th of the "Studies on Chopin's Etudes" by Leopold Godowsky (one of Bolet's teachers).
Kudos to Robin Ray for giving Bolet the room to think and to talk without interrupting much. This is how you get the more in-depth interviews, yet many modern-day questioners don't seem to have that self-restraint.
they are often narcissists who really want the attention for themselves
I am a composer and I have had the experience of a performer playing the score better than I had imagined and bringing out things in my score that I myself didn't notice. That's why it pays to find the best most imaginative performer possible.
I totally agree with Bolet's idea that performers often know the music better than composers do. Performers spend 100 times more hours on the works than composers, so why shouldn't they? Many great composers are often not skilled at all in using metronomes and give very bad metronome suggestions. Yes, we should try to do our best to follow what's on the page, but there comes a time when one's judgment and intuition need to take over. I can't stand "Urtext freaks" who are afraid to take risks.
Here is one my idols of the piano. He had such an influence for me.
maxscriptguru He was a great man indeed.
what a wonderful interview by the very much missed Robin Ray.
This man is deep in every sense. He is definitely worth listening to!
I have been a fan of his playing for a long time (his performances of the Chopin preludes were the first I ever heard), but this is the first time I have ever heard him speak. He is a very intense man.
Rest in peace Jorge Bolet.
Another great musician, who was similarly criticised, Leopold Stokowski, said something like "we have lines and dots, but lines and dots are not music".
You are right. This is one of the paraphrases on the Chopin etudes by Leopold Godowsky, this paraphrase being based on Chopin's Etude in G-flat Major, the so-called "Black Key" etude.
Maybe a good illustration of what Bolet was saying is Rachmaninoff who not only composes but also plays his own music. He plays his music very different from how he wrote it. Not to really alter the whole meaning of the piece, but subtle changes that makes sense to him at the time he's playing it.
Jorge Bolet was not as well know internationally as he should have been in the early 1980s. A recital in the Queen Elizabeth Hall in the year of these TV broadcasts was reviewed in the Financial Times [20.9.83] by Dominic Gill. He refers to the BBC Scotland Rachmaninov third piano concerto masterclasses (which followed on from this introductory programme) and says, ‘Four television appearances can do for an artist what music critics fail to achieve in twice as many years'.
Bolet is a very great and true artist - LOVE IT !!!
WONDERFUL ! THANK YOU FOR POSTING 💓☺💚😊
Remarkably wise words
The interviewer is also a very fine person, extremely knowledgeable.... My dad recorded several of his programmes in the late 70s and early 80s off the BBC...
Bolet gives with few words, the point not to miss here, the performer has to grow and develop and with herhim the piece follows. Herein lies the value of a performance. The performer must be a creator too and can further the composer's intentions. The written piece shoud not become an enslaving cage. However, Bolet indicates the responsability of throughly absorving the composer musically when interpreting herhis music.
absolute sincerity .. rare! ... on top clarity + ability ..... example
Extraordinary performer...magic fingers!
Very well said, I agree 300%
Thank you, Mr. Bolet, for your insight. As an example, I could cite Rachmaninoff's own recording of his Third Concerto, which I love and respect. He gave that concerto to Horowitz, and basically stopped playing it until he recorded it with all his other concerti. Horowitz's lifetime spent with that concerto--even if you use the 1951 recording as an example, simply surpasses the insights that even Rachmaninoff himself gives to it, because he spent more time with it. Horowitz perhaps stoops to vulgarity at times in some of the live recordings available to us, but he basically gives us a greater insight into the piece than does Rachmaninoff. I agree with Mr. Bolet.
I think that your students are in very safe hands,Jorge Bolet ..:))
The wisdom of the master. No matter how many times I see this interview, it never fails to be mightily thought-provoking.
100th birthday, today! You are missed, George .
I agree completely. InBeethoven's time for example, the composer didn't have the time nor the intention of practise the same piece over and over. They had students to teach and work to do. I doubt that every composer learned to play their own piece as majestic as some interpreters do. And of course, there were improvisation, which was common practice (at least until the beggining of the 19th century)
The more I listen to Bolet, both playing and speaking, the more I am awestruck by him. This is a man who understands music.
Bolet is VERY correct on what he says. At least i agree with him and it comes natural to me to do the same thing as he does.
C'est très vrai ce que dit ce Monsieur. Un artiste d'une grande intelligence. Les commentaires ci-dessous de certains sont aussi très révélateurs: en combien de temps Chopin a-t-il écrit son prélude en la majeur? Et combien de temps un vrai musicien travaillera-t-il cette oeuvre d'à peine une minute? Tout est dit - respect du texte, mais liberté de l'interprète aussi!
This is precisely what I think when I am playing Bach on the organ, for over 50 years. How would Bach have played this piece..faster, slower, legato, detached, phrasing, accudentals, which stops..it is always a fascinating journey and try to play differently each time. Bolet was a humble, modest gent who just got on with what he loved, and was one of the giants of his time.
Those who adversely criticized Jorge were and remained clueless nobodies. I would love to have put each such critic at a piano on a stage and said to them: "Go ahead genius. Show us how it's done."
What a great moment.
I want to quote Picasso as an answer to your question;I hope that will clarify :
"When you want to draw a circle, do so as perfect as possible. That will inevitably be your own most personal statement". (As opposed to draw it as personally as possible)
Divino pianista!!!
I know where the confusion comes from.. The piece at the very end of the video is the Liszt Transcedental Etude 1..
Divina.
It's important because playing music, like all forms of art, is above all a communication with another mind, one of the most direct and powerful forms of communication. And it's a pity to distort it with wilful eccentricities. That said, you're absolutely right that sticking too close to the notes leads to abominable impersonality. There is no need why this should be the case, though. Discreet amount of leeway is not the same thing as wayward playing for the gallery.
@pastafantastica Yes. But to be honest, i really discovered him quite some time after my interest in classical music grew.
I do not understand, why it seems, that he is not one of the very famous ones...
Gilels called him once "one of the best piano players in the west"
Furtwangler, Arrau, were critized the same way, don't worry Mr Bolet, you are a great pianist.
I don't know who published the Godowsky Paraphrases and don't really know where you can get the score, but I do know they are among the most difficult things ever written for the piano. There are videos on TH-cam of Berezovsky playing many Chopin etudes, each of which is followed by Godowsky's paraphrases of that etude. You can hear many of the paraphrases here at TH-cam if you enter the name Berezovsky in the search engine. Greetings from Iceland.
Thank you for that information.
Since people are not bothering to read my description of the video, I have added an annotation correcting the identification of the etude.
What other performances were included in the full length interview? Thanks
This is the Sixth Version Godowsky made of Chopin's opus 10 number 5 (Black Key Etude).
In Godowsky's Studien uber die Etuden von CHOPIN it is number 12.
The right hand part is an INVERSION of the right hand part of Chopin's original etude.
The left hand two note melodic fragments are a counterpoint to the right hand part. They are a new figure added by Godowsky--not from any other Chopin Etude.
Godowsky titles this "Inversion, for the right hand" of the Black Key Etude.
Great insight from this unique artist. Love that this host doesn’t interrupt… 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻🙏🏻
I am very interested in it! Please can you send it to me? Regards!
brillant man
Most interesting!
Cuando supe de rste pisnista en disco y en videos no estaba mal presentado.
Toscanini, when asked what he thought the 1st mvnt.of Beethoven 'Eroica' signified, dismissed all this empty talk by replying: "To some it is Napolean, to others a philosophical struggle, bah, to me is allegro con brio!". So, let the music or this great pianist's playing speak for itself. sd goh (malaysia)
The beginning.... was one of the etudes by that man who turned all the Chopin etudes upside down (Godowski).... this was the black key 0p 10 No 5 ... reworked...
genau！
Well, it was transcendental, and an etude, and it was by Liszt's roommate ... :)
Music is not like painting: every performer has to re-create it, and there is no way to play it like anyone else (composer included) if it is to sound genuine and true. There is no music if the soul of the interpreter (a by extention, that of the listener) is absent. The undesrtanding is not in the words you read, but in what you grasp therefrom, wich may be more or less richly, imaginative and adequatede to the score or text, that in a last analisys, is just the backbone, the material and formal suport of your soul´s doing, not the thing itself. If you are not Franz Schubert, you will not know how it is to be Franz Schubert, no matter of how much of psychology, psychiatry, history or astrology you have ever studied. Those purist are like people that keep reading all the life long without ever once have reflected or reacted on any idea on behalf of their own personal experience. Empty forms do not live.
How did I miss this? I have honestly never heard of Jorge Bolet until today, and I feel I have certainly missed out on a fine musician. My loss until now is a delightful find today. I admire a fine pianist who is not so flamboyant (Lang Lang, sorry about that!) but plays with honesty and such seriousness. Not flamboyance.
He's great. I only knew of him because ae across some of his own editions of Liszt solo piano pieces.
this is an etude where one plays 2 chopin etudes, one on each hands, called badinage...one is the blak keys(op10 no5) and i guess op25 no.9...scary even to listen to!!how hard would it be to play? bolet rocks!!
jorge bolet is a wise man
he spoke so clare and musical as he played the piano
NO, you are not paying attention to what he is saying.
He talks about the time of the "process of creation" versus the time a performer can spend with the piece.
Big, big difference.
Maybe I am wrong but the Transcedental etude ,wich Bolet played, sounds a lot like the Chopin's etude Op.10 N.5.
Lol that's because it is Chopin's op 10 n.5! It's a revised version by Godowsky (and not a transcendental etude by Liszt, as wrongfully reported on the original video)
Badinage , Chopin variation by Leopold Godowsky
A composer spend most of his time composing other stuff and do not normally edit or study a piece he's written a while ago. A performer has to spend his life trying to make a piece really work and hence had to study and analyse it deeply.
This isn't Liszt , this is one of the Transcriptions von 5.Etude Chopin from Godowski.
im not gay but i love this man
I think the word he was looking for was refined. It has to be refined like in a refiner's fire.😊
I agree. Burn the dross away.
This is not Liszt. This is Godowski Chopin etude. (After Chopin "black keys" etude)
I think he means tempered
@chrish12345
Please click on "more" in the "About This Video" box at upper right.
his nephew is my Spanish teacher xD
CremeCrepe lilithia looool
I would love to get in touch with him. Bolet was one of my teachers at Indiana University.
THAT'S A GODOWSKY/CHOPIN BLACK KEY ETUDE that starts the video...NOT a liszt etude
🌟🎹🇮🇷
9:37
“I think you’re stupid”
What did that man say at the end? He was like "I think you're stupid, sort in safe hands Jorge Bolet?" Am I hearing that right?
I think YOUR STUDENTS are in very safe hands....
At 745 he means refined
Robin Ray looks like György Cziffra
I doubt Bolet was a poor lecturer. What happens is that he is Cuban, and spanish is his birth langiage. He certainly speaks English with a clear accent, and pauses a bit, but the mesage is there.
wtf is that piece he plays at the start? it cerainly ain'y ANY of the Liszt Transcendental etudes thank you very much
The piece at the end
@@ayhamshaheed7740 YES AND WHAT IS IT?
@@chrish12345 wow rly quick response for a comment from 12 years ago ngl 😂
At the end he plays liszt’s first transcendental Etude. At the beginning he plays something im not too sure but I think it’s a Godowsky Liszt transcription, or something by Godowsky
It's pretty clear he's talking about time spent. A year spent writing a piano sonata versus a lifetime playing it. This "big, big difference" is only yours and not Bolet's, from what I can tell.
OK, but I'm saying something different. All I'm saying is that if you take the total output of a performer and record it on CD, even at a max of one interpretation per piece, it's still way more than a composer's collected works. Especially for Bolet.
Most performers define knowing a piece as getting insight into the performer's intentions. By this definition, the presumption is absurd.
I love Bolet, etc., but this stuff is just pandering to personality-worship. (It's very forgivable.)
This DICTUM that "the composer is always right" is not true. Baroque composers were always changing works for a new situation---Bach reworked music continually. Beethoven reworked his compositions-even wrote different versions of the same piece. Brahms and Schumann changed their scores in order to get the music played. Please read detailed histories of these composers and see. Does Horowitz play Rachmaninoff´s works as Rach did----and Horowitz played for Rachmaninoff. A Jazz composer or jazz performer would never ever make such a statement!
You'll never get it.
This Short of Bolet is so great -> th-cam.com/users/shortsnOSJChuB1T8
Interviewer sounds like Richard Dawkins
what an awkward subtitle
He is indeed being presumptuous when he suggests he knows the piece better than the composer himself. The greatest pianists play many more masterpieces over the course of a career than composers compose. Do the math.
as brahms said - after you finished a work, it doesnt belong to you anymore. as we all know, rchmaninov could´t play his piano concertos as horowitz, ashkenazy, berman or surely... bolet. to be a great composer doesn´t necessarily mean to be a great interpreter. mozart wrote the most beatifull horn concertos, alltough he couldn´t blow a single tune out of a horn. people mix there many things up. this is a housewives claim , to believe that mozart plays the mozart sonatas at the best.
Recently, I sat through a performance of a dreadful work by Libby Larsen for French horn and kettle drum.. I think she is the worst composer ever.
I have no idea who is she 🤨
I want to quote Picasso as an answer to your question;I hope that will clarify :
"When you want to draw a circle, do so as perfect as possible. That will inevitably be your own most personal statement". (As opposed to draw it as personally as possible)