The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 054 Jerome Lowenthal: Developing Your Authentic Artistic Voice

Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to the Mind Over Finger Podcast, episode number 54. Welcome to the Mind Over Finger Podcast, discussions on mindful music making, efficient practice, and building a purposeful career. And now, your host, Dr. Renée-Paul Gaultier. Hi everyone, I hope you're doing great. Today I'm really excited to have legendary pianist Jerome Lowenthal for you on the show. Jerry's been a prominent presence in the international piano world for more than 60 years. A student of three legendary musicians, William Capelle, Edward Steuermann and Alfred Cortot,

Starting point is 00:00:51 he's performed a voluminous and varied repertoire that includes more than 63 different concerti with many of the world's greatest conductors. And he's appeared with major orchestras in the U.S., including Chicago, Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Los Angeles, Pittsburgh, San Francisco, National, Baltimore, Cleveland, St. Louis, and Minnesota. He's premiered solo music by Rockberg, Coppana, Reiss, and Roram's Piano Concerto No. 3. And he's played duo recitals with great artists, including Itzhak Perlman, Ranit Amir, and Ursula Oppens, whom you heard last week on the podcast. Jerry's been a Juilliard faculty member since 1991. He's a regular participant in chamber music festivals across the U.S., and he teaches at the renowned Music Academy of the West in Santa Barbara in the summer,

Starting point is 00:01:39 where I met him years ago when I was a student there. He's received prizes in international competitions in Brussels, Bolzano, and Darmstadt, and has made numerous recordings of solo concerto and chamber music repertoire. Jerry was in Chicago a few weeks ago, performing, speaking, and leading a masterclass at the Chicago Piano Fest at Roosevelt University, and he was incredibly gracious to take some time in his hectic schedule to sit down with me and answer some questions. Through his incredible story, Jerry talks to us about how the varied sources of influence he was exposed to as a young musician led him to search within himself and find his own artistic voice, how he helps students do the same today, And he gives out wonderful wisdom and advice for young musicians.

Starting point is 00:02:25 There's so much to learn and so much inspiration to be found in his journey. And I'm so happy I had the chance to chat with him. I hope you love this conversation with Jerome Lowenthal. Let's go to the show. jerome lowenthal i think that we can say that your career both as a solo artist and the pedagogue have shaped the pianistic landscape of today so if that's okay with you i'd love to hear in your own words how that artistic path has unfolded how has it unfolded well uh it began with childhood studies and i was very unfortunate or perhaps very fortunate

Starting point is 00:03:23 in having many different teachers. Certainly at the time I thought I was unfortunate. Somehow every time I came to a teacher something awful happened. The teacher died or was fired. And so that meant that I got many different points of view. And that was distressing to me

Starting point is 00:03:53 when I was growing up and into my 20s. But now, I have to say, it was really a great help. I wouldn't recommend it to people, but the fact is that it has given me a way of looking at things that are not limited by the single-teacher approach. um i started with a mrs sharp at the ornstein school of music in philadelphia and um after a half year i was four and a half when i started and after a half year my parents decided that i should be moved. And so I auditioned for Mr. Saberton, who was the head of the piano department

Starting point is 00:04:49 at the Curtis Institute. He said that I was too young for Curtis, but that he would be happy to have me study under his supervision with his assistant, Miss Bloom, and of course I couldn't go to public school and there should be tutors and so forth. Very ambitious program, not in any way possible, let alone desirable. There's a side history of Miss Bloom, whom I never met at the time. But many years later, well, I'll come back to this in a second. My parents told Mr. Sagerton that they couldn't afford such a program. And he said, well, in that case, he recommended a school where one could get a good education for very little money, the Settlement Music School in Philadelphia, which still exists, by the way. And so I went

Starting point is 00:05:50 there. And many years later, I gave a benefit recital for them. And the publicist, a woman named Kathy Sokoloff, asked me if I would write to her how I'd come to the Settlement School. And I emailed her the story, which I just told you, as I told you. And she answered saying she was very happy with that she said by the way do you know that Miss Bloom is my mother Eleanor Sokoloff Eleanor Sokoloff the very famous

Starting point is 00:06:30 piano teacher of the Curtis Institute who is now 105 and still teaching very anyway I went to the settlement school and there I had a wonderful teacher but

Starting point is 00:06:45 I was deemed too talented to remain with just an ordinary teacher. A brilliant European refugee named Joseph Schwarz was brought into the school, and I started studying with him. That was exciting, and he was a great friend of Albert Einstein. At that time, Einstein became honorary President of the Board of Directors. There was a concert for Einstein. I played for him, got his autograph, and so forth. People always liked to hear about Einstein. I was seven at that time. But then the head of the Settlement Music School decided that he had enough of Mr. Schwartz, and so he fired him and engaged another European refugee, Emil Bohm. And Monsieur

Starting point is 00:07:41 Dubon, from whom I learned how to count to six in French, but he lasted only a year, and then there was another French person named Mademoiselle Legault, or Madame Legault, and then Irma Volpe, who was the wife at the time of the rather celebrated composer, Stefan then things had happened my father had died and my mother decided to move and so my next teacher was a lovely lovely lady named dorothea ortman the daughter of a celebrated pedagogue named otto ortman um i loved miss ortman but uh my mother moved back to philadelphia and so and so i started to feel very unhappy with the whole situation and um and then i played as one does at a family party you know

Starting point is 00:08:48 i don't know what i played but a woman came to my mother and said would you like to meet a man who helps young pianists, young musicians? The answer was a very definite yes. And so I was introduced to my future patron, Mr. Frederick Mann. Mr. Mann, whose granddaughter came to the concert last night here in Chicago. So, Mr. Mann, I'm sure you don't know his name, but he was, he's been dead for some years now. He was a very famous figure in Philadelphia. Everybody knew his name, and not just in Philadelphia.

Starting point is 00:09:38 He was a businessman, but he was also a political figure, and he was a philanthropist. And the concert hall in Tel Aviv was named after him, the Frederick Mann Auditorium. It's now gone to somebody with more money, but it was for the first 50 years, the Frederick Mann Auditorium. And so I met Mr. Mann, and my life changed very much. Mr. Mann's style of living was quite different from the restricted even repressed

Starting point is 00:10:21 widow's household in which I was growing up in Mr. Mann's household was rather wild and the paintings on the wall were by Modigliani and Matisse

Starting point is 00:10:37 and Picasso and Soutine and Chagall and there were pictures of artists also Mr. Mann bounded into the room where my mother and I were sitting and he pointed to a picture on his piano of a young man

Starting point is 00:10:59 looking dreamily out and it was inscribed to Sylvia and Fred Mann and he said he had a very rough voice he said that's willie capel he's the best american pianist he's my protege i didn't know the name william capel he was indeed the best american pianist he was one of the great uh pianists of of the uh middle of the 20th century he died at 31 he did not come into my life at that time, but I have a reason for telling that story. Anyway, Mr. Mann took me to Isabella Vengerova, a famous teacher, who taught me how to produce sound with the drop of

Starting point is 00:11:46 a wrist, but very little else. I don't mean that she wasn't a wonderful musician, but that everything was concentrated on the method. And the method, of course, like all methods, was both limited and falsifying because if you think of making music in terms of a movement, you're already on the wrong track. That's my opinion. So I studied with her for a year,

Starting point is 00:12:16 but then Mr. Mann was dissatisfied and he called me up and asked me to come to the house And he'd invited Madame Samarov for dinner. Madame Samarov was perhaps the most famous piano pedagogue in the United States at the time. She was Samarov-Stokowski. She'd been married to Leopold Stokowski. And she was an angel, at least I thought so.

Starting point is 00:12:45 And she was very generous, and I became her student. and I was very happy and a new world opened to me and that lasted only less than half a year because she died. And then I studied with her former assistant for a while and I wasn't very happy. But then I met William Kappel, this young man, and he agreed to take me on as his student. Now, at this point, I was 18 years old. I was at the University of Pennsylvania as a student, majoring in French literature, by the way. And so I went to New York for lessons. Kapel was very busy touring,

Starting point is 00:13:50 but he managed to give me a great many lessons. He was a very inspiring, very scary teacher. Scary because he wanted things to be well played, And he wasn't generous if he didn't like it, but wonderfully generous if he did like it, and generally wonderfully generous. And so I studied with him for three years while I was continuing at the University of Pennsylvania. And then he was killed in an airplane crash. and then I thought about giving up music actually

Starting point is 00:14:36 giving up piano and I realized I couldn't so I put a few strings together and I moved to New York and I Capel had been hired to teach at the Juilliard School He never did, because that would have happened after his plane crash.

Starting point is 00:15:03 But I went to the Juilliard School, and there I studied with a very different man, a great musician, a Polish pianist from the Viennese school, Edward Steuermann. And Steuermann was actually marvelous, and I studied with him for three years. and then really I had enough of teachers but I needed a deferment from the United States Army because there was a draft at that time so I applied to the Fulbright Commission and I received a grant to study in Paris for a year

Starting point is 00:15:46 I was going to study with Marguerite Long the famous Marguerite Long and um but first i went to a um uh a competition the buzoni competition and um i won second prize the first prize winner was a 16 year old argentine girl named marta argarish and um And no one could have denied her the first prize. She is arguably the world's greatest pianist. However, on the jury, there was a man named Nikita Magalov who came to me and said he was interested in my playing.

Starting point is 00:16:34 He said, whom are you going to study with in Paris? I said, with Marguerite Long. He said, what do you want to work with that old bag for? He said, if you come to Geneva with me, I'll introduce you to Alfred Cortot. I couldn't turn that down, so I went and played for Cortot, and he welcomed me very generously as his student at the École Normale de Musique in Paris. He lived in Lausanne, but he came to Paris. So I spent a wonderful year, I mean wonderful, wonderful in retrospect,

Starting point is 00:17:21 because most of the time I was very unhappy, as people that age often are, I think. And I could have gotten a renewal of my fellowship, but I was planning to get married. my girlfriend whom I'd met at Juilliard had come to Paris and she'd then gone back to her native Haifa and I was planning to go to Israel get married and then go back to live in Paris for the rest of my life

Starting point is 00:17:54 so I went to Israel and I met her family and her very interesting mother who was a violinist hearing my plan said what are you going to live on well i didn't really know and i always remember this when i speak to young people i was by this time 26 years old and i had some vague possibilities but i really didn't have money to support us and then my future mother-in-law without telling me that she was doing it arranged for me to get a a position teaching in jerusalem

Starting point is 00:18:41 so i went to jerusalem and my my future wife did also and we we were married a year later but um i i in israel i played a great deal um mr man my patron i've left him out of the story for well but he he was very influential in everything i did and um and he had a lot of connections which helped me so um i immediately was soloist with the israel philharmonic and i played all over the place and um i was i was something new to uh jerusalem sensibilities and and be jerusalem in those days, in fact, today still, is a very stuffy, old-fashioned place. And I came with the spirit of a radical American, and it worked very well. so we were there for three years

Starting point is 00:19:55 the first year not married and then we were married and then we decided for various reasons to go back to the United States and meanwhile I'd made all sorts of connections playing and one of them was with the conductor Joseph Cripps with whom I had played the Bartok Second Concerto in

Starting point is 00:20:19 Israel and he engaged me to play the Bartok second in New York with the New York Philharmonic and that sort of launched me along with a recital that I gave and then thanks to my talent and my connections, both them working together, I played with myriad orchestras, and I always said yes to repertoire, so I ended up playing over 60

Starting point is 00:20:56 different concerti with orchestra. And to answer your question in a different way, pianistically, the different exposures that I'd had made it possible for me to ask myself, well how do I think one should play piano and how do I think one should make music

Starting point is 00:21:26 and this was very helpful to me and it's also very helpful as a teacher because I've thought about these things as well as doing them have I answered the question?

Starting point is 00:21:40 you've not only answered the question but you've also anticipated future questions I have in a previous of episode of the podcast I was talking with David Jalbert and he was telling us about how influential you were in helping him discover and explore his own authentic voice so my question one of my questions for you was going to be about that and how how can a young pianist or a young musician find these authentic voice because we go to teachers we try we try to please them we try to execute in ways that we think will either please the public or please the critics or sometimes we try to really achieve an outside goal but how can the young musician go about finding his or her own artistic voice? Well, I'll answer in a sideways

Starting point is 00:22:40 way. In a way, I'm answering a different question, but a related question. The question, how do you express yourself as an individual artistically and at the same time follow the score meticulously. So my answer is a story by Jorge Luis Borges. Do you know Borges? He was an Argentine writer who wrote short, densely philosophical fictions. And one of them is called Pierre Menard, the author of Don Quixote. And it's about a mythical, fictitious, of course, a French writer from the fin de siècle and the beginning of the 20th century.

Starting point is 00:23:44 and his culture is explored rather fully by Borges and he has a project. The project is to rewrite two chapters of Don Quixote, Cervantes' masterpiece. He's going to rewrite these chapters without changing anything.

Starting point is 00:24:11 Not even a dot of punctuation, but by being himself and not a 17th century Hidalgo, he's going to give a new meaning to every word. Now, this is a kind of a parable, of course, and I interpret it as a parable for performing also. Do we follow the instructions of the composer? With certain exceptions, yes. As closely as we can.

Starting point is 00:24:54 And we try to find ourselves in those instructions. Now, it's hard for me to answer your question, And how do I do something for other people? Because it's the other people who maybe could answer better. But what I do is to direct students' attention to the score, bringing with my suggestions cultural suggestions that they may or may not be conversant with. and some of them really don't know Western culture so well. They don't know European history so well.

Starting point is 00:25:54 Sometimes that matters. So, that's of course not true with David Chabert, but so I direct the student's attention to the score and I try to encourage them to have a way of understanding why the score is the way it is. Why does a composer use this harmony

Starting point is 00:26:27 and not that harmony? Why does Beethoven have a subito piano after a crescendo? What does that represent? What does that represent that one can identify with? So, to take that example, Beethoven's late crescendo followed by subito pianos, that's a stylistic mark.

Starting point is 00:26:56 You can always recognize that. And it's a kind of a temperamental thing. and we all can identify with that kind of temperament even if we don't normally have it it's the sudden eruption of excitement and then getting a hold of it and so in the process

Starting point is 00:27:30 of identifying with Beethoven we find out something about ourselves in the same way that a composer does. Beethoven's The Slow Movement for Op. 10 No. 3 is famously tragic. Adagio e Mesto. And it was composed around the same time as when he wrote the Heiligenstadt Testimony

Starting point is 00:28:02 in which he expressed his despair over losing his hearing and his desire to kill himself. And that comparison, that connection, is always made. But in making that connection, one has to mention that in the same sonata, he composed one of his most humorous compositions ever in the rondo so what does that mean does that mean that he wasn't unhappy well not at all but it means that he knew how to channel his his unhappiness into this adagio emesto and at the same time he knew how to channel a different mood

Starting point is 00:28:55 into his rondo and we as performers have to do the same thing and we do that through the markings of the uh of the composer so i think that's that's a kind of an answer to your to your question you find your own voice by identifying with the composer and taking what what he has expressed and finding its equivalent in your own psyche this is a great answer and it goes back to what you mentioned when you were talking about your journey that you were asking yourselves those questions that's right yes jerry what would be some advice that would you would give to young musicians out there well take the high road one thing which troubles some young people and not others is that they they don't feel like

Starting point is 00:30:03 practicing or they they don't feel in the mood and i would say try to find a routine for your practice and practice even if you're not in the mood in the routine because the mood may come upon you and if you're out doing something else it won't get into the into the piano when students as happens every once in a while suddenly burst into the into tears in a lesson i don't mean that it happens very often but it has happened you know and And I say, what's the trouble? Well, I broke up with my whatever, whatever gender you like. And without being unsympathetic, I say, look, there are always personal problems in life.

Starting point is 00:31:02 They just take different forms. And the important thing is just to continue with what you're doing at the piano. Whether you're unhappy or happy, find expression in your happiness, find release. But in any case, make your relationship to your instrument a stable part of your life. And what other advice can I give? well of course play as well as you can which means of course play as expressively as meaningfully as you can

Starting point is 00:31:45 I think that when one approaches a piece one should have immediately in mind what kind of sound one wants to produce and to find the technique which will will produce that sound rather than starting with a movement as I said before and trying to Procruste's bed like that movement onto the or that the music into the movement. More specifically, a lot of people play very well, but they make the same physical movement for every beat. It goes in, out, in, out, in, out. That affects

Starting point is 00:32:45 the phrasing. Start with the phrasing. Think, how do you want the phrase to be? And then, instead of going in out in out go in out in out in you see we were talking earlier one thing about flexibility if you're at the beginning of a career sometimes it's not always easy to know what directions to go so someone who's looking at a career ahead of them Right. Perseverance is my message, actually. I've known many, many wonderfully gifted young musicians who have thought, well, but maybe I should do this. they may be right people get drawn into cults of different sorts and their cults may be fine or they may be not but they keep you from practicing and if you can just always have this guiding light of seeking excellence in your playing then you will

Starting point is 00:34:02 you will become an artist you will be an artist professional questions they they have to be dealt with uh one by one and then you know everybody's circumstances are different money is not available to everybody but sometimes you can do things that you think you can't do that's how in my In my life story, I didn't really elaborate on this, but after Kapel was killed, I was wildly unhappy. And I was sort of stuck in Philadelphia. And I'd always felt I couldn't move because I had no money at all. And then I wanted to move sufficiently that I did something very simple. I went to my patron. I'd never done this, you see, and said, will you support me if I go to

Starting point is 00:35:02 New York? Now, he didn't throw money at me, you know, but he gave me enough that I was able to do that. And of course, tuition in those days at the Juilliard School was nothing. And I had a very large scholarship. But sometimes you can do things that you want to. Sometimes you can't. I mean, and everybody has to have a sense of him or herself, I guess. And if you want something badly enough, you ask for help. That's right. Sometimes it will show up. That's right, that's right.

Starting point is 00:35:34 Jerry, thank you so much for this gift of your time. I truly appreciate it. My pleasure to talk to you. Thank you guys so much for listening. I hope you enjoy this chat with Jerome Lowenthal. I think that what he said about developing our own inner voice through our personal interpretation of what is in the score and how it fits in the historical and cultural context is so important, crucial. Approaching things this way, I think, encourages us to develop some of the best qualities a musician could have.

Starting point is 00:36:15 curiosity for more knowledge and understanding reverence for our history and a fearless imagination and that's definitely something i'd like to discuss with him again and with future guests as well of course i also love what he says about developing a routine and not letting our practicing be influenced too much by our mood of the moment but rather to welcome the instrument as part of our life yes for sure we can channel our emotions through our instrument in our practice but we should not let them dictate our practice regimen. And that resonates with what Ursula Oppens was talking about last week. And if you've missed that episode, it's so full of incredible actionable wisdom,

Starting point is 00:36:56 and I strongly recommend you catch it now. If you enjoyed the episode, please consider sharing with a friend that you think might benefit from our conversation. And let me know what your favorite takeaways from the episode were by taking a screenshot, sharing on Instagram, and tagging me. I'm mind over finger. As always, you can find the show notes for this episode, more information about Ursula, and more resources on mindful and deliberate practice at mindoverfinger.com. You can also join my Facebook tribe at facebook.com slash groups slash mindoverfingertribe, where I pop in once a week for live videos answering your questions.

Starting point is 00:37:33 And if you're looking for the perfect tool to start applying more mindfulness and patience in your practice, sign up for my newsletter to get your free guide to a super productive practice using the metronome. You can find that at mindoverfinger.com or click the link in the show notes. This guide is the ideal entry point to help you learn faster and achieve more efficiency in your practice. It's filled with tips and tricks on how to use that wonderful tool better, and it's going to take your practicing and your playing to new heights. One more thing I want to mention, I have some exciting news about the website. Many of you contact me to ask about the many tools I use, the books I like, as well as all of those awesome books and resources mentioned by all the guests on the podcast.

Starting point is 00:38:19 So I've created a resource page on the website where you can find all of this, my favorite websites, books, CDs, as well as the other podcasts I like to listen to. And you can find this at mindoverfinger.com slash resources. So I really hope you check it out. I'll have a link in the show notes for you as well as on Instagram. Before I sign off, I want to thank Winston Choi, Associate Professor of Piano at Roosevelt University for facilitating my interviews with both Jerry Lowenthal and Ursula Oppens. Again, thank you and à bientôt. © transcript Emily Beynon

The Mind Over Finger Podcast - 054 Jerome Lowenthal: Developing Your Authentic Artistic Voice

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