Press Reviews
Alain Lompech - Le Monde - Meeting with a pianist
A few weeks ago, the pianist, Vlado Perlemuter celebrated his eighty-ninth birthday and decided to bid farewell to the stage in Geneva, the city where at seventeen in the Victoria Hall he had started his professional career. A career of seventy years that took him to North America, Australia, Europe and Japan.
Vlado Perlemuter is a case apart where French piano is concerned. Admired as a performer of Ravel, he was one of the first pianists to play the complete works in a concert, adored in Chopin, he has also linked his artistic fate with Debussy, Fauré, Schumann and something rare amongst French pianists of his generation, with the works of Beethoven. He recorded the Mozart sonatas forty years ago. In all probability the best but poorly recorded. In the middle of the seventies Vlado Perlemuter signed a recording contract with the British recording company Nimbus. At an age when many of his colleagues were slowing down their activities, little by little, Vlado Perlemuter, discovered a new lease of life with this small recording company. Several years before, Sir William Glock, the head of the BBC music services had decided to record the quasi-totality of Chopin's music in the studio. These performances were presented on the British radio. A student of Arthur Schnabel, the man behind the nomination of Pierre Boulez as director of the BBC Symphony Orchestra, William Glock affirmed that Perlemuter was to Chopin that which Schnabel was to Beethoven. Vlado Perlemuter suddenly spread his wings late in life, and resigned from his class at the Paris Conservatoire in 1977. Free of this responsibility, which he had always carried out with great seriousness, he was at last, able to think about himself. Nimbus has paid tribute to him by producing a box set of all his Chopin performances and a record of some of the most outstanding Mazurkas of the French-Polish composer. The opportunity to visit an admirable musician, known for his dislike of publicity and interviews.” We agree this is not going to be an interview! Do a portrait of me if you want but not an interview.” Let’s go for the portrait. In his class at the Conservatoire, at the Menuhin school in London and at his home,Vlado Perlemuter_ his students call him affectionately “Vlado Pourlemoteur” ( of the motor ), _ has taught some of todays most talked about pianists: Jean-François Heisser, Christian Zacharias, Michel Dalberto, Gisèle Magnan,François Kerdoncuff, Michael Levinas rank amongst his disciples. Others, on the other hand, have not the happiest of memories of their time with him. At his worst Perlemuter could be severe and unsettling. Those who survived succeeded. They all testify their affection intensified by the fact that he was incapable of anything other than the truth. “ When I passed the Diemer prize, which was open to those who had obtained, within the last ten years, the First Prize of the Conservatoire, Gabriel Fauré, who was still Director of the Conservatoire, said to me that I had been chosen in preference to Jeane-Marie Darré, because Paul Dukas, who was a jury member, had preferred my performance. After having won this prestigious prize I went to meet Dukas. I took the risk of telling him what Fauré had said. Dukas replied: It was you who played the least badly.” “Tough for a sixteen year old boy”.Perlemuter has never forgotten. Those who have heard him, after a concert declare that he was satisfied, make yourselves known. This pianist is genuinely modest, a perfectionist who has purposely put to one side a large repertoire to concentrate on piano works he has found the secret to. Has he any regrets? Confiding one day, he admitted to being sad not to have played Brhams more, the Berg Sonata and certain works of Schoenberg. His taste for contemporary music manifested itself early on. When he was young Perlemuter spent time with Fauré: “He was already very old and I always pretended to lose when we played chess.” A composer that he performs like Yvonne Lefébure, with passion and a sound that comes from the depth of the piano. Perlemuter has also played Prokofiev. He was the first to perform his Third Concerto, just a short time after Prokofiev composed it: “Alfred Cortot was to conduct the orchestra, but Horowitz was in Paris, and he preferred to accompany him, very badly in fact, in Brahms’s Second Concerto. Horowitz was most displeased. He didn’t like Cortot.” Cortot, the ‘maître’ both admired and detested: “This horrendous Ministry for Jewish Affairs had the kindness, to put me on the list of Jewish intellectuals to arrest. Cortot was the representative for music in the Vichy Governement and he did nothing to help me. The Gestapo were looking for me. I managed to pass in to the Free Zone. Fortunately, I’d renewed my identity card just before the Jews were being rounded up, and as I wasn’t called Levy or Dreyfus I was able to pass between the raids. But I almost starved in the Free Zone as I didn’t have any food coupons. I finally managed to get to Switzerland where I was put in a refugee camp. I became ill and spent several months in a sanatorium where Cortot’s wife was also being looked after. The war was finished. She said that Cortot wanted to see me. He had sold his Paris residence and was living in Lausanne. Cortot, who had never used the familiar ‘tu’, welcomed me with a “Vlado, you (tu) are a hero! «Me, a hero! I had only tried to save my skin. Of course, I asked him why he had treated me that way during the war: He replied in an enigmatic way. «My friends didn’t inform me.”Clara Haskil, who was Jewish and who had also been Cortot’s student, and who had suffered so much, said, “And you didn’t smash his face in?” Clara never forgave me for that visit. ”Clarendon wrote a book to rehabilitate Cortot. And yet Cortot wanted to be the Gauletier of French music. A few years ago, his son asked me to give a recital on the hundred anniversary of his birth. I played really badly. I never play well on such occasions.’ In spite of the drama that separated them, Perlemuter admired Cortot, the pianist. He remembers his teaching, his magic touch and his staggering imagination at the keyboard. But the confreres who have impressed him most remain Wilheim Backhaus and Serge Rachmaninov. Of course he admires others, Horowitz, for example and the legendary Busoni whom he heard in two recitals. Perlemuter has never missed Backhaus’s Beethoven recitals given in Paris. Once, with Yvonne Lefébure he went to listen to him playing the Diabelli Variations. One of Perlemuter’s great regrets is not to have met this pianist more often. Too excessive and too conceited for him. At the end of the famous Beethoven recital, Perlemuter congratulated him on the sensational performance that he had just heard. “ Come on Vlado, haven’t you heard my recording?” Incorrigible, Lefébure, like him, had been another of Cortot’s students.” Actually Vlado, Cortot’s real students, are us: me and you!”
She had forgiven Cortot’s collaboration with the Vichy Governement and his concerts with Furtwangler in Germany even although she had been in the resistance and her husband, Fred Gladberg tracked down. Sometimes her difficult character had a good side to it. Perlemuter remembers that as a jury member of the Ecole Normale exam she walked out slamming the door after Cortot’s remark that women were incapable of playing Beethoven’s sonatas. To say that to a woman whose artistic motto was “Beethoven? He’s my man!” As he grew older Cortot became hard and excessively severe with his colleagues and students, treating them harshly even in public. Wasn’t he responsible for Horowitz’s Parisian failure when he returned to Paris in the fifties? “Perhaps I myself have become more severe with age? I often lose patience. “The ‘old’ pianists often accuse the younger ones of playing too fast. Vlado Perlemuter is no exception to the rule, but isn’t wrong: “I say that too just like the others, but it’s perhaps that I just can’t play as fast as before…” Perlemuter could have been jealous of the success of other better known pianists. He was and admitted to it: “I was jealous of Richter when he played the complete collection of the Well Tempered Clavier in two recitals in Paris. How could he play so much by heart and so well!
That jealousy, is admiration Even though his career took him to many countries, and earned him real admiration from illustrious colleagues Vlado Perlemuter owes his late success in France to his records_ the British having made him one of their heroes long before. He is no way flattered and is surprised that so many young pianists come from so far to see him. “I’m waiting for a young Japanese who has come specially from Tokyo for a lesson. What a strange idea, to make such a long journey to see me. I give too many classes. I’m tired. I should be like the dentists, get up when it’s finished and hold out my hand. Instead of that the classes go over the time. I lose all notion of time. I don’t even have time for my own work. Look, on my piano, I’ve Bach’s Well Tempered Clavier in, of course, the Urtext edition. But I’ve been going round in circles for three months now with a prelude and a fugue. I can’t help it, I change the fingering all the time, and can’t seem to find a way out. I hope I’m not going mad.” Ah, Perlemuter’s piano, for a long time he played on a Pleyel, disdaining the Steinway that faces him in his large lounge. And now he has at last decided to work on the German piano. A real antiquity, this Pleyel. Tired, its mechanics worn out. Scratched by his nails, the keyboard lid completely void of varnish. Worn to the wood, the hammers strick the cords directly. No matter who played, nothing would come out of it. But Perlemuter loved his old friend:” Sometimes I speak to it, I caress it and I hit it, we fight hard.” But he’s given up the ghost, the soundboard is cracked and it’s become impossible to tune. For such an elderly man and one who has faced so much hardship, Vlado Perlemuter astonishes with his strength of character, his refusal to lie and his determination to transmit his knowledge. He has nevertheless works that he doesn’t want to teach, the mazurkas_” Too intimate, too personal”_and Chopin’s Barcarolle. Vlado Perlemuter gets up, stands in front of his Steinway and plays, without the pedal, the first phrase of one of Chopin’s masterpieces. Indeed, a sound like that is a mystery impossible to teach. Does the honourable ‘Maître’. himself know how he achieved it? A pianist’s tone is like the timbre of his voice, he’s born with it.
Alain Lompech. Le Monde, 5th August 1993. Reproduced with kind permission of the author.
