This article doesn't have New York Times font, because I don't know how to scan the original in, but this is the text.
A remembrance:
Articles about Peter Serkin often mention his satisfying present life, now that he is acknowledged as a pianist unsurpassed in the wide-ranging repertory he embraces, and is happily married with a houseful of children.
His search for serenity, and the need to search, date to his boyhood. His father, the revered pianist Rudolf Serkin, was a legendary interpreter of the traditional literature. Serkin naturally wanted to guide his prodigiously gifted son, who made his concert debut at age 12, to practice this way, not that way, and to listen to this music, not that.
But the precocious youngster was curious about new works, and drawn to sounds of Asian and American music. For him, knowing how to play piano was a way into that world where the answers were, or the questions. It is easy to see him feeling torn and criticized, especially as a teenager at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where his father was among his eminent teachers.
Small wonder that in the dashiki-and-beads hippie culture of the 60's, he would turn on and drop out, till he understood he was too good to run away from himself any more, and that he had better come back from Mexico and be the superb pianist he already was.
The curiosity never left him, though he shies away from discussing it. Now a renowned, idiosyncratic artist of 51, Mr. Serkin can now look back as well as forward in study and performance. He pulls neglected concertos out of the closet, and is a persuasive proponent of new and difficult music.
Responsibly commissioning and championing contemporary works, he is also devoted to the heart of darkness--standard German works--and even picks up a few passage notes in Brahms that his father might have dropped. He has recorded the Bach Inventions and the enigmatic Duets, (for BMG) and going Glenn Gould one better, recorded the Goldberg Variations three times.
Mr. Serkin’s recitals compel a focused quiet that is almost Asian. His best interpretations are strikingly pristine, as if an immense intellect were illuminating notes from the bottom. With his hands, he creates a visible, quixotic vibrato, which he says continues the tone. To say he is lost in his playing does not give the right image. He is found in it.
He once put together an entire concert of commissioned works, which he now drops one by one, like depth charges, into his programs of traditional music. And some of the concertos he totes around are like large species found only in the Galapagos: Reger, Schoenberg, Hindemith, Stravinsky. He approaches them as meaty chamber works, rather than with external Teutonic force.
The span of his journey is reflected in this afternoon’s solo recital, to inaugurate a Classical-Music-In-The-Schools program in Greenport, where his brother and sister have homes. The recital, virtually sold out at press time, includes Mozart and Beethoven, (Classical masters) Chopin and Debussy and Messiaen (tracing French pianism) Schoenberg, from the Second Viennese School, and two of his musical descendents, György Kurtág and George Benjamin.
Though he is friendly or perhaps has family history with many composers whose work he performs, Mr. Serkin has not met Mr. Kurtag, an eccentric Hungarian who composes small, even fragmented pieces that are sometimes grouped together by his colleagues. From his “Games,” Mr. Serkin chose two he describes as extremely short and playful, about a minute long.
Mr. Benjamin’s short “Meditation on the Name of Haydn” is built on connections between notes and letters of Haydn’s name. Mr. Serkin has met the composer and sympathizes with his burden of having been a favorite pupil of Messiaen, whose stunning works Mr. Serkin performs with some frequency, considering how complex and difficult they are.
One composer visiting Tanglewood, where Mr. Serkin teaches in the summer, directed that her string quartet be performed the way Beethoven is played. “That’s not necessarily conceited, as long as one’s Beethoven is bold enough,” Mr. Serkin said in an interview there last year. “Schoenberg for some of us is like Beethoven, and he asked for his music to be played like Schubert. It’s the sense of treating it with the same respect and care.”
Some years ago, an eminent composer said that if audiences “won’t listen to Bartok, they have no right to listen to Beethoven.” “I’m not quite as doctrinaire as that,” Mr. Serkin said. “It’s only natural to be interested in music of our own time, music written now. But I’d never insist on a quota--it implies that it’s something unpleasant to be somehow swallowed. It’s a natural continuity from the boldness of older music. Beethoven was shunned as being crazy, and Bach was threatened for his wild improvisations. One can still be in touch with it. Conversely, the music of today requires a relatively spontaneous, open mind.”
Mr. Serkin’s biggest concern about performing new commissions is that he won’t see the music in time to learn it for the concert. Aside from that, he said, “I can’t account for players who avoid new music. I think people are hungry for it. I suspect that the public has a more open mind than it is generally credited with. All one can do is follow one’s own path.”
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