Prokofiev - Piano Pieces from "Romeo and Juliet"; "Cinderella" and "The Love for Three Oranges"

Sergei PROKOFIEV (1891-1953)

"Romeo and Juliet", Ten Pieces, Op.75
"Cinderella", Ten Pieces, Op.97
From "The Love for Three Oranges"

Tedd Joselson (Piano)

Recorded at Pick-Staiger Concert Hall,
Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, December 1991




No Review Available

Tedd Joselson Made It Without Contests
By ALLAN KOZINN

January 8, 1978, Page 17
The New York Times Archives

So far, Tedd Joselson has had everything a young pianist could hope for. While in his teens, he struck up a friendship with Arthur Judson, the influential concert promoter, under whose tutelage he prepared a dozen recital programs. By the time he was 20, and still a student of Adele Marcus at Jui'Hard, Mr. Joselson had already given solo and concerto performances across the country. At 21, when he made his Philadelphia Orchestra debut, conductor Eugene Ormandy called Mr. Joselson “a rare and exciting talent” and advised RCA to offer him a recording contract. In the four years since then, the critics have been so enthusiastic about Mr. Joselson's playing that a few have gone on record saying that he “could be the next Horowitz.”

As if all that were not enough, Mr. Joselson has carved a niche for himself in an area of the piano repertory where there is little competition: the Prokofiev keyboard works. This Saturday, at the 92d Street YM‐YWHA, Mr. Joselson will perform Prokofiev's Seventh Sonata, along with works of Bach, Beethoven and Mussorgsky. Later this season, the pianist will present a special series, in the same hall, featuring all nine Prokofiev sonatas, a cycle he hopes to finish recording during the summer..

“Prokofiev has always interested me,” he says. “When I was very young, I heard Malcolm Frager play the Second Concerto. It was like an electric shock to me. I had never heard the piano played that way, and I didn't know it was possible. You know, when you're a child and you hear all those notes, it sounds very dissonant..I doesn't seem dissonant to me now, though, and I think I have developed a special feeling for Prokofiev.

“I was once told, by a very great pianist, that Prokofiev's music is old fashioned. In the sense that the sonata form is a throwback to the 19th century; he was right. Yet, you have that marvelous Prokofiev mood and the sense of a personalized style that could only be that particular throwback. Recording and performing his works have become very important to me.”

The idea of recording all the Prokofiev sonatas developed soon after the release of Mr. Joselson's debut recording, a disk that coupled Tchaikovsky's First and Prokofiev's Second piano concertos. Nevertheless, Mr. Joselson has opted to take his time recording and releasing the set in order to avoid too strong an association with the works of a single composer. It was not until he released his second LP (Chopin, and Liszt sonatas) that Mr. Joselson began work on the Prokofiev project, and he has alternated the release of the sonatas with recordings of other works. But it is the first installment of the sonata series that has earned him the greatest critical praise to date.

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“I decided to start with the Eighth Sonata,” he says, “even before I owned the music. I had no idea what to expect from it, except that I had heard Sviatoslav Richter play it several years earlier. I was so bowled over by it that I was afraid to look at the music. I figured, ‘as long as he can do it, as long as it can exist for posterity, that's enough for me.’ But when my producer, Peter Dellheim, asked which of the sonatas I wanted to record first, I spontaneously said, ‘the Eighth,’ bought the music, and fell in love with it.”

Mr. Joselson spent six months working on the piece before performing it in public and another six months of public performance before recording it. He calls the recording sessions for the Eighth Sonata “a titanic experience. The first movement,” he explains, “is a slope that takes about 15 minutes to build. And to make it interesting—to make it move, to make it work— almost killed me.”

Tracing his interest in the piano to kindergarten, where he heard his teacher accompany classroom songs on the large instrument, Mr. Joselson says that he had never given any, thought to a career as a concert pianist—it just happened.

“I was always preoccupied with making music, and I suppose I always knew that‐one way or another‐I could make a living from music. But a career is something that must evolve. How can someone at 15, 16 or 17, know that he or she has the stamina, the repertory, the endurance and the nerves of steel required for this kind of career? How can you know whether you can deal with the fact that you are in London one day and California the next and you have to give a concert in the middle of the night? It takes time to build a philosophy for this kind of life.”

As the press‐release version of the story goes, young Tedd Joselson, frustrated with his own piano, went to a neighbor's house to ask if he could play their concert grand. “Unable to reach the pedals and not knowing any pieces,” the back cover of his debut album reports, “he bagan to improvise‐and played on and on rapturously,” until the owner of the piano, the late Arthur Judson, the great concert manager, came in and told the pianist to come back in 10 years. Mr. Joselson's own story is a bit less mythical.

“We didn't have a piano yet,” he recalls, “and I had heard that the Judsons had a very impressive one. I was curious. So I asked Mrs. Judson if I could play her piano, and she said ‘yes, by all means.’ I didn't know anything‐I was trying to figure out why the keys made noise when you press them down and why nothing happened when you pulled them up.

“Of course, I did eventually become more advanced, and over the years the Judsons and I became close friends. Mr. Judson would frequently call me up and say ‘come over’—not hello or goodbye, just ‘come over’—and by the time I'd say ‘okay,’ he'd have hung up.

“The thing that Mr. Judson was most concerned with was program building; where to put the major work, why I shouldn't play a particular work before it or after it—that sort of thing. We put together quite a few programs, with works ranging from the Baroque to the contemporary.”

Sufficiently impressed with the quality of those programs, Mr. Judson arranged a few orchestral appearances for the young keyboard wizard. When those engagements were successful, earning the praise of both the critics and the conductors with whom Mr. Joselson worked, his mentor decided that the time was right to call on Eugene Ormandy. That was the turning point.

“I'll never forget that day,” Mr. Joselson says. “When I walked out on the stage, Mr. Ormandy—great man that he is—made me feel at home. The rapport is wonderful, and I owe him a great, great deal. We played the Prokofiev Second Concerto, and I have to admit, I didn't know what I was getting myself into. But when we walked off the stage, Mr. Ormandy said, point blank, ‘you're re‐engaged. Now, go out and take a bciw.’ It was one of the great moments of my life.”

Eugene Ormandy, like Arthur Judson, was so impressed with Mr. Joselson's abilities that he decided to use his considerable influence to further the pianist's career. Mr. Ormandy invited RCA's Peter Deliheim and Tom Shepard to Philadelphia to hear Mr. Joselson, whom they signed immediately.

With all this going for him, Mr. Joselson was able to bypass the rigorous competition route by which so many young pianists establish themselves. Instead, he has been able to devote his time to developing as wide a repertory as possible, learning the works that hold a personal fascination for him rather than those required by competition juries.

Saturday's program, for example, includes Mussorgsky's “Pictures at an Exhibition,” a piece that is more frequently heard in its Ravel orchestration than in its original piano version, and Bach's “Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue,” which is heard more frequently at harpsichord recitals than at piano concerts.

“I realize that musicologists don't like it much, but I happen to like the sound of Bach on the piano. I love the ‘Chromatic Fantasy,’ and I'm playing it all over the country this year. Bach was quite a guy—what he did with music is fascinating. And after all, you hear Bach transcriptions on other instruments all the time. Why should I refrain from playing his music on the piano?”

On the other end of the scale, Mr. Joselson's interest in performing contemporary music begins to dwindle beyond Prokofiev.

“I have worked on some fairly recent

‘I happen to like the sound of Bach on the piano.’ pieces,” he says. “I've played the Barber Piano Concerto, and I've worked on John Corigliano's Piano Concerto as well. But as far as the more avant‐garde composers go, my feeling is that there are some people who were born to play Stockhausen and Messiaen, and I'm not one of them. That's not to say that if Peter Serkin were giving a Messiaen concert I wouldn't be interested. I'd probably run to hear it.

“I suppose it's just a question of what you're used to,” Mr. ‘Joselson goes on. “And there is so much music of the past that I have not yet learned. Beethoven, for example: I play maybe five Beethoven sonatas. Big deal—there are 32, and I want to study them all.”

Despite a hectic touring schedule, Mr. Joselson manages to practice four hours a day, spending some of the time working up new pieces (right now it's Prokofiev's Fifth Concerto, Beethoven's Op. 110 sonata and lots of Scriabin) and some of the time working on concertos that he has done in the past, “in case,” as he says, “something comes up and I don't have the time to prepare.” He also likes to spend some of his practice time improvising in the styles of various composers.

Now 25, Mr. Joselson still looks up to the pianists he revered as a child, particularly Vladimir Horowitz and Rudolf Serkin. When asked how he feels about critical pronouncements comparing him to the former, Mr. Joselson would only say that “it's very flattering, especially since I happen to admire Horowitz so very much. But of course, it's just not so. You have to be your own artist, and as Heifetz once said, ‘you're only as good as your last concert.”’

Mr. Joselson's one regret, it seems, is that he no longer has as much time to listen to recordings as he did before he jumped into the concert world. “The only time I get to hear a record,” he complains, “is when I'm about to begin work on a new piece.

“When I start to work on a piece of musk.,” ;Le say3, “I get every recording of that work I can find. And I don't care what anybody says, I want to see what other artists have done with that music. Sure, it must influence me to an extent. But that doesn't prevent me from making my own decisions.

“Basically, my philosophy is to let the music speak for itself. Whatever I have to do to achieve that is my own responsibility. I don't feel I should let anyone else know about it. If you have an audience sitting out there, they don't care whether you practice eight or 28 hours a day: They only want to be entertained on the highest possible artistic level. That's my responsibility, that's what I believe in, and that's what I work towards.”