Word: weissenberger
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Dates: during 1968-1968
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Free and Faithful. Alexis Sigismund Weissenberg realizes now that his problem was not the critics who switched from cooing to carping. Nor was it the managers who booked him into that deadly round of whistle-stop tours called Community Concerts. His problem was the quandary of every young performer: "He must perform early for an audience to develop his personality. On the other hand, the inner gifts need development privately. If these are developed in front of the public, many things are exaggerated, experimental, uncertain...
...Weissenberg's way out of this quandary was to take a sabbatical. Freed from financial worries by an inherited income, he moved to France, determined to "read more, live more, and rethink everything." His playing became "freer," he says. "I mean free in the sense that you are absolutely at one with yourself, and whatever you do is faithful to a single intuitive interpretation, whereas at earlier stages we are all so influenced by different interpreters that our playing is a patchwork...
...time passed, Weissenberg's sabbatical threatened to stretch on indefinitely. Then, in 1966, Conductor Herbert von Karaj an re-established him in Europe overnight by choosing him to open the season with the Berlin Philharmonic. Last year the comeback was completed in the U.S. when Weissenberg dashed off an exhilarating version of Rachmaninoff's Piano Concerto No. 3 with the New York Philharmonic. As his performance of Chopin's Concerto No. 2 last week showed, his playing nowadays bristles with the strength of a new maturity...
...Seasickness. The interpretation reflected Weissenberg's desire to "take Chopin out of the salon, make him not old-maidish but masculine." In making the piece surge ahead with a calculated tensile force and precise gradations of color, he sacrificed some of the spontaneity and relaxation that Chopin's score invites. Weissenberg shrugs off the criticism that he is "an ice-cold interpreter, even an IBM machine," arguing that his emotionally objective approach is much sounder than that of pianists "who would nearly vomit on the keyboard to show that they are so sentimental and inspired. They have...
...short, Weissenberg is playing exactly the way he wants to play, and he is "convinced that it is better than it was before." Others agree. Two record companies have signed him on to make a total of 20 albums in the next two years. He has solid bookings through 1970, including a tour of the Soviet Union and Japan. In fact, he is busy enough to start thinking ahead about the next sabbatical. That one, however, will not last ten years...