How do you go about preparing a student for a piano competition? According to Lev Naumov, you don't, at least not in the conventional sense.
"Of course you have to take certain things into account," he says, "such as the makeup of the jury or peculiarities of the competition itself. At the same time, music is music, and every pupil going into a competition has his own music inside his soul. Then the role of a pedagogue is basically not to interfere too much - if it is there, it is a gift of God."Naumov should know. As a senior member of the piano faculty at Moscow's Tchaikovsky Conservatory, he has perhaps produced more major competition winners in recent years than any other teacher in the world. At present that list includes two Van Cliburn gold medalists, Vladimir Viardo (1973) and Alexei Sultanov (1989); a Cliburn silver medalist, Alexander Toradze (1977); and the 1974 Tchaikovsky first-prize winner, Andrei Gavrilov.
In addition, at this writing he and his Moscow Conservatory colleague Lev Vlassenko are the only members of this year's Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition jury to have pupils in the semifinals, Naumov's being 21-year-old Violetta Egorova and the second-place winner in last year's William Kapell Competition, 24-year-old Ilia Itin. (See page C2 for announcement of finalists.)
Nonetheless this is Naumov's first time in this country, indeed his first time judging an international piano competition. "How did you ever get him?" competition director Paul C. Pollei recalls someone asking in amazement when he disclosed Naumov would be on this year's jury. "We just called him up and asked him," Pollei says, grinning broadly.
So far, the two Soviet judges report, the trip has been something of a reunion. At a stopover in Dallas, Naumov and his wife, herself a respected teacher of piano, were able to visit at the airport with Viardo and Itin, both of whom are currently based in this country. Then since arriving in Utah they have renewed their acquaintance with old friends Mikhail and Nina Boguslavsky, who slipped backstage between rounds last week to see them. ("I didn't know he spoke such good English," Boguslavsky says of Vlassenko. "At home we only talked in Russian.") Then there are the marathon phone conversations with Toradze, reportedly two and three hours at a stretch between here and New Jersey, where he now makes his home.
"Pure genius," is how Toradze describes Naumov, with whom he spent some critical months preparing for the Cliburn following the suicide of his previous teacher, Boris Zemliansky. "He himself is such an extraordinary pianist, and an outstanding music theorist. He knows everything. But it is one thing to know something and to be able to do it yourself. It is entirely another to be able to put that knowledge and ability into your students.
"After Zemliansky's death I felt completely lost, so I went to him and said, `I need your help. I know you were a close friend of Zemliansky's. Please let us finish what he started.' "
Despite his own grief, Naumov got to work. For nearly three months he and Toradze secluded themselves in a dacha where every day the latter went through his Cliburn repertoire. "He was so sensitive," Toradze recalls. "He has such a great musical mind he could have shoveled out everything and put his own things in. Instead he worried about what would help me, so that what I had that was good wouldn't be lost."
Toradze sees that as being in the tradition of Naumov's mentor, the great Heinrich Neuhaus, whose principal assistant he was. Indeed, Naumov and his wife acknowledge with a laugh, that's where they met and were married, as students in Neuhaus' class. That was in 1953, five years before the first Tchaikovksy International Competition would name Van Cliburn its winner and change the face of competitions worldwide.
Vlassenko remembers it well. That year he came in second to Cliburn, and the following year visited the United States as part of a delegation of Soviet artists that included, besides himself, composers Dmitri Shostakovich and Dmitri Kabalevsky.
"It was a cultural delegation," he remarks with a smile, "but we were also sent to see what the impact on the American public had been from the visit of Khrushchev just before."
In some ways, he reflects, those early exchanges represented something of a golden age for the Soviet musical public, with Western artists finally filtering in after so many years when such things were forbidden. "For a long time even the last compositions of Rachmaninoff, the things he wrote in America, could not be performed. Then at the end of the '50s we had all those musicians, violinists and pianists come to Russia."
I point out the same thing happened over here. Finally we were able to hear people like Oistrakh, Gilels, Richter and Rostropovich, whom previously, apart from their recordings, we had only heard about. Despite the large influx following the revolution, that's when many of my generation got our first firsthand exposure to the so-called Russian school. And I still hear some of that in many of the Soviet competitors in this year's Bachauer.
Vlassenko is not so certain. "Of course we have some features in common. But nowadays with the lines of communication so open, everything is merging. The best features of the Russian school are being absorbed by the Japanese and French. Also, the Russian school is absorbing influences from outside." For example, among the Soviet pianists taking part in this week's competition, he feels "the playing could be more poetic. But that might be not just the school but the general influence of the time. These days we tend to favor more intellectual, more cerebral playing, with not so much heart in it."
Nor is cross-pollination in the Soviet Union these days confined to music.
"It should have happened long ago," Naumov says of the upheaval in his homeland. "Of course we are experiencing economic difficulties, but it will not be that way forever. Russia will live like it should live economically and in all other respects. The important thing is the curtain has been raised and we are coming into the world like a part of civilization."
Vlassenko is not sure the improvements will take place so rapidly. "Even now when Americans come to our country," he says, "they are so happy and see only the bright side. Also when we are coming here we are seeing only the beauties and are thinking life here is a paradise. But you have your problems, of course, and we have ours.
"But with all the promises of help, I think we must be very realistic and must try to help ourselves. Even in music, as I am reminded on my travels, the Moscow Conservatory is perhaps the poorest conservatory in the world. We do not even have a good record player in the conservatory. I am ashamed of that. But if the government allowed us to, we could earn money by giving master classes to people from outside. But we are not allowed to because the tax percentage - around 80 percent - is too high."
Nonetheless, he reports, this summer for the first time the Moscow Conservatory is opening its classes to students from abroad - "just a small break, but it is something. We know they want to come, and we want them. Here Lev and I agree - if that could happen, it would be a ray of sun breaking through the clouds."