What makes an appropriate encore? And when should they be performed? Michael Henderson on the art of finishing well
After a recital at Wigmore Hall earlier this year András Schiff performed an encore, as pianists often do. Normally a Bach prelude or a Schubert impromptu will round the evening off. It is part of the unspoken contract between performer and listener, to prove that both parties have been paying attention.
On this occasion, however, Schiff played the arietta that closes Beethoven’s last — and greatest — sonata, the Op. 111 — all 18 minutes of it! It made thematic sense, because he had devoted the concert to sets of variations by five composers. So, he clearly thought, I shall conclude matters with the most famous variations of them all. Still, the Op. 111 is a feast in itself, not some scrap off the table. It was a remarkable decision.
What makes an appropriate encore? And when should they be performed? Clearly there are some works that stand alone. Had Schiff ended his programme with the Op. 111, which is the last word in piano literature, he would not have dared to play an encore, for that work is complete. In an ideal world it would be received in silence, and members of the audience would file out respectfully, alone with their thoughts.
One might say as much of Schubert’s great song cycles, which bare the souls of singer and pianist. In a performance that does justice to Schubert’s genius, the kind that Paul Lewis and Mark Padmore supplied recently at Wigmore Hall of Die schöne Müllerin, it almost feels intrusive to listen. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau thought that Winterreise was such a private journey that it should not be recorded. Not that it stopped him recording it, seven times.
In symphonic music there are greater opportunities to play encores, particularly at the Proms or when an orchestra is on tour. In such circumstances an encore is considered part of the deal, whether the musicians have played well or not. A symphony by Brahms or Beethoven (except the ninth) gives a conductor the chance to throw in one of Dvorak’s Slavonic dances or that old warhorse, the prelude to the third act of Lohengrin — a party piece of Mariss Jansons.
Popular music is different, because an encore, or a set of encores, is part of the show. When he was called back, Frank Sinatra used to perform ‘New York, New York’, which was not his greatest hit by a million miles. But he knew that people wanted to hear it, so he sent them out humming.
There are lollipops in classical music, too, but there are some symphonies that can never be followed by a bit of froth. Imagine playing an encore after exploring the lofty heights of Bruckner 9! Bruckner 7, on the other hand, offers some scope. When the Wiener Philharmoniker visited the Proms for the first time in 1984, with Claudio Abbado on the podium, they followed that mighty symphony with the overture to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. It sounded logical, even inevitable.
Ten years later, when he was the music director of the Berliner Philharmoniker, Abbado was responsible for one of the greatest of all Proms occasions; in the memories of those who were present, perhaps the very greatest. After the final bars of Mahler’s ninth symphony evaporated into silence the audience held its collective breath for fully 57 seconds before the applause broke like a tidal wave. There can be no encore after Mahler 9, nor Mahler 10, nor Das Lied von der Erde, which represent the last reflections of a dying man.
There are only two rules where an encore is concerned: try to ensure it deepens the mood of the occasion (a Brahms Hungarian dance is always jolly, Valse Triste by Sibelius winds things down nicely), and never outstay your welcome. Evgeny Kissin, the brilliant if glacial Russian pianist, has been known to give a series of encores that last almost as long as the original programme, which is absurd.
At a Prom in 1999 he followed an unexceptional performance of an ordinary piece, Chopin’s first piano concerto, with three encores while Zubin Mehta and the Bavarian State Orchestra, who would rather have been preparing for the second half, and Bruckner’s eighth symphony, were obliged to sit there, looking pleased while steam came out of their ears. That was a lapse of etiquette by a man who imagined he was bigger than the event.
An element of surprise is important. In 1991 Abbado brought the Berliners to the Proms for the first time. Alfred Brendel played Brahms’s second piano concerto, and Cheryl Studer was the soprano soloist in Mahler’s fourth symphony. Then band and conductor changed the mood, plunging into the William Tell overture by Rossini, to the delight of the Prommers, who bobbed up and down. It was a bold gesture, and it worked superbly.
The boldest gesture, though, surely belongs to Daniel Barenboim. His Proms concert in 2005 with the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, made up of young Israelis and Palestinians, was always going to arouse interest for reasons that went beyond music. After conducting Mahler’s first symphony he told the audience that the musicians had that afternoon discussed the possibility of finishing the Prom with the prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde. Given the difficulty Barenboim has had in playing Wagner’s music in Israel it was a kind of liberation to hear these young people perform it in London before an audience which gave its approval. That was another great Proms occasion.
Then there is the encore as last word. Brendel gave his final concert on 18 December 2008, naturally enough in Vienna, in the golden hall of the Musikverein. He was accompanied by the Wiener Philharmoniker and that superb Mozartian Sir Charles Mackerras, in the composer’s ‘Jeunnehomme’ concerto. Then, to bring down the curtain on six decades of music-making, he played the barcarolle from Liszt’s Les Années de Pèlerinage, extended both palms to the audience as if to say ‘the rest is silence’, and walked into retirement.
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