Masterclass with Mitsuko Uchida

Yesterday I went to a master class given by Mitsuko Uchida to four performance students of the Music Faculty. The students presented pieces by Schubert, Schumann, Bach, and Beethoven. It was fascinating to see how much emotion and contrast she was able to percieve in those pieces and how well she could communicate it. She used a variety of ways to do it: obviously by playing herself on the piano, and by singing and screaming, but also with her body, directing with her hands and dancing, jumping around really, but also through more indirect ways. She used metaphors, she talked about a "dry sunny day, when it hasn't rained yet and you can smell the warm sand" and so on. She also resorted to musical analysis, for instance she explained how Bach was moving between the tonic, the dominant, and the sub-dominant---in fact, she apologized for having to sound so technical but it was just a way for her to express how she felt the piece should be played, what was at stake, what psychological tensions and what resolutions.

The precious moments when Mitsuko was playing for more than two seconds revealed the depth of her concentration and total involvement into the music. It was amazing---also certainly completely unavoidable to any great performer---how she was never playing lightly, but always mobilizing her full life's experience, all her pains, all her joys, all her emotions and sensations, her entire mind and body focused on the musicality.

She had something of a yoga teacher trying to encourage her students to stretch their bodies. She has probed the extremities of the various human emotions. One advice that struck me particularly and that she repeated to almost every performer of the day (at least the girls) was not to play "too beautifully". She encouraged them not to iron the peculiarities, the oddities of the compositions, but on the contrary to make the strangeness emerge, accentuate the dissonance, show how bizarre reality is. (It is something I think about a lot these days, bringing out the surreal...)

So you had for example this nice little American blonde playing as beautifully as she could, and hirsute Mitsuko shouting to her to play it uglier. At some point she told her "Play with your biggest pain!"

She also got mad when one of the students told her that the reason she was playing in a certain way was because of the influence of some famous pianist (although I think she misunderstood what the student meant). She said that every interpret makes mistake and so it is pointless to copy them, one should create her/his own mistakes :)

Mitsuko has recently become a 'Dame' and

today she was receiving and honorary doctorate at Oxford's Encaenia Ceremony (the word apparently meaning "festival of renewal"). Since she lives in London I was looking forward to her next concert, but according to her agenda, she will have sooner toured the planet several times than perform again in the UK. Farewell Mitsuko!