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Food, Lies and Audiotape
…But isn't it…um... like immoral?” the young lawyer asked.
“Immoral?” I enjoyed the slinky all-in-black waiter pouring New York City tap water into each glass with the exaggerated reverence appropriate to the decanting of a great vintage wine.
“You know,” the lawyer went on, “like ... dishonest. You're tampering with what's a …basically a document of an event.”
“Wbat I'm doing is editing out some of my most distracting finger failures.”
“Finger failures?”
“Glitches. Wrong notes.”
“But that's like…a cover-up. Basically it's not a live concert anymore if you put in the right notes from another…you know time and place.”
“Same place and the day before. I was 'live' then, too, by the way.”
“But that was just a recording session,” said the lawyer.
“A run-through,” I corrected.
“Whatever.” He went on, “Not a…you know...like a concert. Basically, you're misleading the publu=ic if you call the CD 'Fennimore in Concert.' Like you want them to...like... think you're better than you are.”
“You mean more accurate. I'm not humble enough to want to be thought better than I am. Besides, there were three people present during the recording session. What's quorum for a concert?”
A ninja with a long pony-tail brought fatless appetizers. A green puree looking like what comes out of a squashed caterpillar was encircled by ribbons and bows of perfectly browned pastry. Another plate held condoms of steamed dough stuffed with varieties of sprouts. Fungus covering soy mock-meat was a third. Each plate looked as if it had been designed by I.M. Pei. After politely picking, I was free to observe diners at other tables.
These prosperous young New Yorkers evinced the gaiety of morticians working a wake. Expensive dark baggy clothes, with just a touch of tacky, obscured gym-bodies. The total absence of any even slightly pudgy people boded ill. Sipping my alcohol-free beer, I yearned for a forbidden cigarette and an unavailable glass of booze.
“Have you ever heard the Chopin recordings of Alfred Cortot? Wonderful imagination. Rafts of wrong notes. I love him for the wildness which causes all those wrong notes. But I never listen to those recordings because I find myself dreading his smudges minutes before they occur. Yet, he played like that in recital - as he probably did - I'd be one of the first on my feet cheering.”
Gregorian Chant replaced New Age drivel over the restaurant's sound system.
“Repetition diminishes marvels and amplifies faults.” I went on, “You think a public performance is harder than a recording session?”
“Well... um.. basically... yes, like I guess I do.”
“ Before a concert is harder than before a recording session, but getting on is much easier in a concert and getting on is what it's all about.”
“Getting 'on'?”
“In the groove, hitting your stride, riding the wind. What do vou call it?”
“Call what?”
The entrees arrived. My youthful table companions tucked in.
The lawyer's wife, a conservatory-trained pianist, asked what was on the CD.
“It will start with Granados' Maidenand the Nightingale.”
“Trash.”
“You don't like things Spanish?”
She smiled. “I always think of illegal immigrants.”
I described my first visit to Barcelona for a small international competition back in the dark ages. The locals were so kind that the experience remains a happy memory despite my difficulties adjusting to the Iberian time table. No problem with late afternoon performances - of the Granados among other solos - in the first two rounds. But my circadian rhythms were quite out of whack in the finals when, at one AM, I sat down to play a Liszt concerto unrehearsed with not the best of orchestras. The results were announced at almost four. Flabbergasted at winning first prize, I was told by a jury member that my solo rounds - especially the Granados - had won it for me. Scoring was cumulative.
“What else?” she asked.
“Two of my ditties: a sonata from my hormone period and a lullaby for adults.”
“Hormone period?”
“Manic youth.”
“Then?”
“Seven Brahms pieces.”
“Finally some meat and potatoes.”
“Followed by three Bach Sinfonias and a Chopin Ballade.”
“How eccentric. Why those particular works?”
“Some were new to me. Others I wanted to revisit. I'm old enough to know I may never play any of them again.”
“You have no major work, no big sonata, not even a complete opus in the Brahms.”
“Is a Chopin Ballade a 'major work?”
She pursed her lips.
“I'm not an encyclopedist. I've no ambition to play the complete this or that. I even have trouble loving every movement of most sonatas.”
The table was cleared. Anticipating a reward for such dietary pennance, I asked if they had great desserts. Negative. Good Japanese green tea? Bags.
When the bill was brought, she snatched it unfurling a sheaf of credit cards. Regarding me with a look of infinite pity, she said, “You sound like an amateur to me.”
“Wait until you hear me play.”
Curiculum Vitae: My Fun House Mirror
Most pianists' bios are depressingly similar. Pre-natal study, debut at two, the Shangri-la of conservatories, a list of competition triumphs, galactic appearances, carefully selected blurbs, all calculated to imply the subject will become a household name any moment now. Just waiting for that lucky break...
An American myth. Things don't work that way anymore - if they ever did.
Who wants to be a household name anyway? Not me. I want to be a special thing for a special few. A few more, that is.
Well then, what's important? Genes, an upbringing we don't choose and the life which leads us.
Born April 16th, 1940 in New York City of a Polish mother and an English father, I am too old to die young. My parents separated during the big war. I spent my childhood in a Polish-speaking prole household in the provinces. The only Polish I remember is one blessing and a string of curses.
From the first, my musical life was blighted by prophecies of a great future. (The hinterlands still foster such enthusiasms but things are changing.) Advanced studies and encouragement from big-name ambitious piano teachers furthered great expectations of a brilliant career. And early on, I won a few competitions and awards, garnered some favorable notices for my compositions and my playing and toured for a while.
As a pianist, I lacked the one talent without which all others paled: being a team player. I could not fit into the dominant corporate structure of “the business” in order to make enough money to tempt me to persevere. Management was already geared toward concerto appearances with a sporadic solo recital. I would have had it the other way round. Anyway, the gangrene already had started to show; 57th Street was dying.
A year in England on a Fulbright induced an attack of chauvinism. Upon my return, I founded an aesthetically non-partisan NYC concert series demonstrating my belief in the supremacy of American music, particularly contemporary American music. Five years of running it proved this belief parochial though it's certainly true of Pop.
Worked on Broadway, taught, jobbed around. Pseudonymously I wrote music criticism for a music magazine now long-defunct. The best was reviewing one of my own concerts. You see why the magazine is no more.
By the late 70's, retiring from the fray to cultivate my garden appeared a worthy objective. My education seemed complete. I had offended everyone worth offending, sometimes inadvertently. Writing, playing my piano, teaching to eke out a living, it's quite enough.
“Take care of your career. Your art will take care of itself,” a sage once told me. Wrong. Careers wither while art flowers and vice-versa. Everyone wants a guide but there is none. We must make it up as we go along. Besides, frays are everywhere now.
Joseph Fennimore
Photo Credit: Stephen Speliotis
Produced by Bedford Pace III
Recorded in Kiggins Hall, Emma Willard School, Troy, New York, Sept. 6,1992 by Rob
Turchick, Cotton Hill Studios; Sept. 7, by Wesley Frank. Calibrated, edited and mastered
by Tom Lazarus, Classic Sound Inc., New York City.
Music of Fenniniore on Albany Records
Joseph Fennimore in Concert I (TROY102)
Fennimore's playing belongs to the Romantic traditions of the early Century, combining depth o fpersona lexpression with a high regard for the composer's wishes... This is some of the finest piano playing I have ever heard from anyone, anywhere.
-Heuwell Tircuit, InTune
MUSIC BY JOSEPH FENNIMORE
Selected Vocal Works (TROY023)
Great skill and feeling.. puts me in mind of what I love in Barber's music.
-William Wians, Fanfare
Chamber Music Featuring Cello (TROY065)
... Beautiful, thoughtful, filled to bursting with sentiment and gesture that avoid sentimentality.
-Mike Silverton, Fanfare
Selected Piano Music (TROY113)
A composer with a real imagination; an original thinker in the authentic American romantic tradition of Samuel Barber and Charles Ives…The compositions on this disc are melodic, witty, pithy, whimsical and most important, never dull.
-Linkowski, American Record Guide
ALBANY RECORDS U.S.
P.O. Box 5011, Albany, NY 12205
Tel: 518.453.2203 FAX: 518.453.2205
ALBANY RECORDS U.K.
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WARNING: COPYRIGHT SUBSISTS IN ALL RECORDINGS ISSUED UNDER THIS LABEL.
© 1995 ALBANY RECORDS
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