To give a piano concert of Mozart can feel like walking a tightrope with no clothes on. Without experience of the latter, of course, I’m speculating, but I was reminded of the exposure Mozart inflicts on his performers recently as I watched a recording of pianist Menahem Pressler from a few years ago. He was playing piano concerto no. 23 with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, a piece whose quintessentially classical form — the thin lines of music, relentless scales, lack of excess — leaves the performer nowhere to hide. As I watched his fingers run, nimble and precise, up and down the keyboard, I marvelled with some envy at someone three times my age making such a flawless premiere. In fact, the trickier the passage, the more Pressler appeared to smile.
At the age of 90, Pressler was the oldest performer ever to make their debut with Berlin’s acclaimed philharmonic. He had enjoyed a life-long career as a member of the famed Beaux Art Trio and made a smattering of solo recordings, but it took until his last decade to restyle as a solo concert pianist. It was a timely act. Pressler died last year, a few months before his 100th birthday.
A new recording from American pianist Ruth Slenczynska further piqued my interest. Slenczynska began a long concert career in 1929, aged four, and recorded several albums in the 1950s and 1960s. In 2022, she re-entered the classical recording world with her first album for Decca Records in nearly 50 years, the multi-composer disc My Life In Music. The life in question, by the disc’s release date, had spanned 97 years.
In the 1990s, when I was a child taking piano lessons, the currency of the musical world, at least as told through the media, was youth. The wunderkind, the child prodigy, was fetishised as an enviable phenomenon, a kind of unspoken North Star for young musicians to follow. It was only later, when stories of abuse or burnout started to emerge, that we understood the cost of such a status, one that guarantees neither real creative expression nor a successful career in adulthood.
What time and age actually do to music — to those who write it as much as those who perform it — is latently understood by the many listeners who adore late works but curiously underexamined. Less a maturing of sound or style, final compositions or performances often appear more as a reduction, the feeling of being left with the most essential expression of a person’s musical ideas. There are countless historical precedents for those who found greatest invention in their later years: Beethoven, Goethe, Monet are just a few.
It was while listening to Slenczynska’s album, uninhibited and elemental as it is, that I was struck by what has changed. It’s not just the fact that people are living, and working, for longer that has caused a shift in the classical music world, but also the long overdue broadening of the identities and figures we appreciate. If the past few decades of classical music were an era that fetishised the wunderkind, we have entered, in recent years, the era of the wunderalten, the older prodigy.
When I first speak to Nicola LeFanu on the phone from her home in York, she is a few months away from the release of a new record which is expected to be her most important. Featuring compositions spanning more than 40 years, the disc will feature a variety of string ensembles, a piano trio and a recent work for voice composed in 2020.
The British composer, now 76, began her career in the late 1960s, when the angular, stark, brightly coloured music of British Modernism was at its tail-end. Although the kind of ensembles and constellations of instruments she has composed for varies, to listen to her oeuvre chronologically is to hear an increasing focus on voice and opera, as well as the first forays into instruments outside the western canon.
“In 2014, I wrote ‘Tokaido Road’, which combined Japanese instruments with western ones, inspired by the artist Hiroshige,” she says. “I had to learn to write for Japanese instruments, working with a player to ask what their instrument can and can’t do. This kind of thing has been very important to me as I’ve gotten older. It’s a chance to do something new.”
Looking at the history of classical music, one can see a composite arc stretching from JS Bach in the early 1700s to LeFanu and her contemporaries. Each era of composition was eventually broken and remade by the bravest of its proponents. Baroque became Classical, Classical morphed into Romantic, Romantic recast as Contemporary, each of them different from the last but unmistakably part of the same whole.
It would not be an overstatement to say that the past 200 years of musical history would have taken a different course had Beethoven not lived and, crucially, aged and died. It was in the years before he died, deaf and diseased, at the age of 56, that he wrote a series of works so strange and radical that they almost single-handedly wrenched the Classical era into the Romantic.
By writing them, Beethoven broke from the conventions that formed him and created something no one had ever heard before. His cultural descendants — Brahms, then Wagner, later Shostakovich and, eventually, LeFanu herself — are in his debt for making their work possible.
The tendency to view age and conservatism as interlinked trajectories might be convincing in the realm of politics, but they often have an inverse relationship in art. A desire to avoid repetition, receding fear of how the work will be received and an increased awareness of time make for later work that can tend towards the radical or bold.
Listening to the Chopin etude op. 10 no. 3 on Slenczynska’s last album — a piece she has previously recorded three times, in 1957, 1978 and a live recording in 1997 — I notice a change from her older interpretations that finds parallel with Beethoven’s final sonatas. In both, it is not only music that is of value, but the silence in between. No longer a void to be filled, the quiet has become a space in its own right. There is no rush to fill it, but rather a new awareness of the silence’s potential is met by a desire to elevate it, to let it be. It is the invisible frame that makes the music make sense.
Perhaps both Beethoven and Slenczynska came to learn that experience does not only show us what we can do, but also what we could do but should leave undone.
Technical limitations might often become the quiet roadblocks that precipitate the end of a career, but they don’t have to be. A changed physicality can be generative: the source of new musical ideas.
This is something which Marilyn Richardson is now reckoning with. Having spent most of her life as an opera singer, the Australian soprano returned to the stage with the Sydney Theatre Company last year just before her 87th birthday, only this time as an actress in the Patricia Cornelius play Do Not Go Gentle. In her role as Maria, an aged Serbian émigré, Richardson sang short fragments of Grieg and Verdi arias.
Despite having given her last professional performance in 1997, when the Sydney Theatre asked Richardson to return in an acting-singing role, she didn’t equivocate. “Being on stage always felt like home. I simply went and practised for a few weeks to try to get back into a ‘singing mode’ again,” Richardson told me on the phone from her home in Queensland, Australia. “You see, I don’t think a singer ever stops.”
But it has still proved “an absolute challenge”, Richardson says. “On the one hand it’s difficult because it’s a different kind of presentation — acting rather than singing — but also because I’m not young any more, so one doesn’t know exactly what one can do.”
What she did know was that “I couldn’t sing with a young voice any more. Comfortingly, that was part of the character”. Ageing, confused and struggling to adapt to her new environs, Richardson’s role suited the sporadic songs, which came and went, beautiful but ephemeral. “It was only my sense of pride that suffered a bit because I couldn’t sing the way I did 20 years ago,” she says.
When I returned to the piano a few years ago after a decade’s hiatus, I noticed, even at the age of 30, that much of the technique I’d developed as a teenaged piano student had disappeared and, despite rigorous practice since, it has only partially returned. It was something I recognised while talking to Richardson, that it was exactly this limitation which forced me to look more closely at the music, understand what it is in its entirety, in order to find new ways to express it. Reduced technique has, in part, become a source of imagination.
“Things evolve,” LeFanu says when I ask her whether she notices if anything has been lost over time. “I don’t think things progress. It’s like life. I don’t think things get better or worse, but they do change. It’s a case of evolution.”
It is perhaps this tension — between the technical limitations of age and the creative boldness that age engenders — that makes late-stage art so beguiling and emotionally precise. When I listen to the pieces on Slenczynska’s last album that she had previously recorded at various points throughout her life, I hear music at a slower or more expanded tempo that in different ways, reveals more of the essential character of the music. The question of which came first — a new awareness of the music and the attendant will to finer articulate it, or the need to slow down — makes little sense when one understands the mutual dependence of awareness and tempo. It’s precisely speed, or its absence, that offers the possibility to see detail.
A sensitivity to the artistic potential of change might be the greatest knowledge the wunderalten possess, the idea that the hierarchy of good and bad is less instructive than seeing, in the inevitability of evolution, an opportunity to create. “My earlier work was more complex than my later work,” LeFanu tells me. I can hear what she means. As I listened recently to one of her latest works from 2020, The Moth Ghost, I was rapt as the voice of the singer undulated, cleanly, above the piano. The pared-down architecture of the music made the abstraction clearer, the development at once powerful and surprising. LeFanu packed in so much music, but somehow there was an abundance of space, I thought to myself. How well she hears the silence now.
Follow @FTMag to find out about our latest stories first
