>newground
Arnaldo Choen (left) and Andre Watts (right).
From jet lag to stage fright to fame and fortune, have you ever wondered what life as a great performer is like?
This fall, two of the greatest living pianists, Arnaldo Cohen and Andre Watts, joined the faculty at the IU School of Music. And as piano department chair Evelyne Brancart observes, they add an exciting new element to the School: “Cohen and Watts are both in the midst of thriving concert careers playing with the world’s great orchestras. It’s exciting to have people like this here, who can help students realize what that life is like.”
Arnaldo Cohen: Personality as the Stamp
Brazilian-born pianist Arnaldo Cohen, who has played in the major concert halls of Europe and South America, moved to Bloomington from London where he taught at the Royal Academy of Music. He became a prominent figure in the European music world soon after winning first prize in the 1972 Busoni International Piano Competition in Italy. In the U.S., word of Cohen’s powerful and poetic playing is spreading as his career continues to grow. Legendary violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin called him “one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard.”
Cohen describes the almost superhuman mental strength it takes to perform: “The pressure is like nothing else. You must put your most intimate emotions on display before the public and the critics. You have only one chance. The inspiration must be there.”
Cohen sees his role as a teacher as helping to prepare students for these realities. He also tries to help each one to become an artist in his or her own right.
“My obligation,” he says, “is to guide without imposing, to make sure that each student keeps his or her own personality. That personality becomes the filter through which the music, technique, and academic training pass. It is a stamp that makes each rendition of a piece different.”
Andre Watts: A Lesson in Possibility
The name Andre Watts falls into that superstar category of people you expect to be less mortal than the rest of us. But in person Watts punctures any such illusions with his candid and down-to-earth attitude.
Watts was 16 when he arrived on the classical music scene in 1963 with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic’s Young People’s Concert. He has since played to sold-out audiences around the world and makes frequent television appearances. He now holds the Jack I. and Dora B. Hamlin Endowed Chair in Music at the IU School of Music.
To Watts, one of the difficulties of life as a performer is that you must fluctuate between two states: extreme confidence and extreme doubt, the belief in yourself you must have on stage and the doubts you inevitably have the next day.
Watts sees teaching as a kind of dialogue. “As the teacher, I come up with the possibilities that I see in you as a musician. Then you respond with others. You go home and adjust these ideas, make them better.”
Watts does not believe in time limits. “I have the luxury of giving each student the time they need. I try to impart everything I’ve learned without drowning the person.”
From Stage to Studio
It’s hard not to feel some envy of the students who will meet with Cohen and Watts in private lessons and master classes. But emotions, as Cohen insisted, are what music is all about. And all emotions, it seems, have their place in what he calls “this alternative language” that is music.
“Music is one of the great inventions of humanity,” says Cohen. “Everything human beings can feel, any emotion can be conveyed in music.”
And the emotion at the School of Music is great pride and excitement as it successfully brings a new generation of top-flight performers into its studios.
>Liz Rosdeitcher
Listen to Arnaldo Cohen playing Francisco Gonzaga's “Gaucho-Tango Brasileiro.”
Listen to Andre Watts playing Franz Liszt's “Appassionata” from études d'exécution transcendante, No. 10, S139.
Find out more about the IU School of Music.