Concerto on the fly: Can classical musicians learn to improvise?
It shouldn’t be, of course. Improvisation is an integral part of many kinds of music, including, for years, Western classical music. The tradition of great musicians being great improvisers lasted well into the 19th century (think Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin). But as the Western classical canon became, well, canonical, the emphasis gradually shifted: It was more important to strive for perfection in playing existing works than to add one’s own contributions.
But Hahn’s exploration is not unique, either; today, more and more artists are searching to incorporate more interpretive freedom, more creativity, into their musical lives. The status quo of classical music “produces consistency, but not necessarily creativity,” the pianist and musicologist Robert Levin said in an interview a few years ago. Levin has spent his career working to restore improvisation to performances of classical music, improvising cadenzas in Mozart concertos as would have been routine in Mozart’s day.
(Courtesy of The Birchmere) - Hilary Hahn and Hauschka.
(Freiburg Baroque Orchestra/Stefan Lippert/Freiburg Baroque Orchestra) - Conductor René Jacobs and violinist Gottfried von der Goltz rehearsing at the Freiburg Concert Hall in November 2008.
One reason for a renewed focus on improvisation is the ongoing interest in performance traditions of the past: If you want to play a Handel opera the way Handel intended it, you’ll want to include the spontaneous embellishments that singers were expected to add to the repeated section of each aria. Early-music interpretation requires a certain amount of creative freedom in any case, since the scores generally don’t have the dynamic markings or expressive instructions you find in music by 19th-century composers.
“You have to look through the notation” as if it were a window, says the baroque violin virtuoso Gottfried von der Goltz, “to discover the content of the music.” The score is a signpost, pointing toward spontaneous interpretation; composers of this era fully expected that performers would take creative license (such as can be heard when Germany’s Freiburger Barockorchester, where von der Goltz is concertmaster, records Handel and Mozart operas with the maverick early-music conductor Rene Jacobs). “Improvisation is part of the essence of baroque music,” von der Goltz says.
“Improvisation” can mean different things in different kinds of music. When von der Goltz improvises a cadenza in a Bach violin concerto (his next recording comes out this fall), he is riffing on an established structure and basing his playing on a wealth of knowledge about period styles. Indeed, some early-music improvisers are not unlike jazz musicians, internalizing big chunks of the tradition and style in order to improvise freely when called for. Jazz, in fact, has some useful lessons for baroque improvisers. “When we play a French program with many chaconnes,” says von der Goltz, whose brother is a jazz pianist, “you notice how much more natural it sounds when the rhythm is slightly irregular . . . when it swings a little.”
For some other musicians, improvisation means striking out completely on your own. Gabriela Montero, a classical pianist who has made improvisation her calling card, likens it to jumping off a cliff into the unknown, “like an extreme sport.”
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