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2000s as a fellow at RSMI (under Fried’s
leadership). Winner of a prestigious Av-
ery Fisher Career Grant, Barnatan has
a thriving international career, last year
concluding a three-year appointment as
the New York Philharmonic’s first Artist
in Association. “You hear it so much,
but as soon as I started playing it, I real-
ized how different it was from the image
I had in my head.”
“The image is this overblown, very
bombastic piece,” Barnatan contin-
ues. “Actually, it’s really an elegant and
beautiful and graceful piece. It has more
in common with
Swan Lake
than the
1812
Overture.” (A comparison that can
be confirmed in person, as the July 21
concert opens with excerpts from
Swan
Lake
—one of Tchaikovsky’s three major
ballet scores along with
The Sleeping
Beauty
and
The Nutcracker
—and of
course finishes with the explosive
1812
.)
Barnatan discovered surprising as-
pects of the concerto during a deep-dive
analysis of the score. “Sometimes people
in our business forget to look at the
score,” he says. “They go by how they’ve
heard the piece before or a recording. I
think that’s what happened. Somehow
it took a wrong turn and was seen as a
vehicle for pianists to show off. Over the
years it became more extroverted, like a
kind of compounding interest.”
Now 39, Barnatan admits to pound-
ing the keyboard himself while learning
the piece as a teenager in Israel. (He
moved to the US in 2006 after several
years of study at London’s Royal Acade-
my of Music.) “I remember that I loved
playing it,” he says, “partly because you
very much feel like a pianist when you
play this particular concerto. When you
play a Mozart or a Beethoven concerto,
you’re as much a vocalist or a string
quartet player as a pianist. When you
play the [first] Tchaikovsky concerto,
you’re a pianist. Certainly there are
moments, especially in the gorgeous
second movement, when there’s a lot of
vocal writing. But primarily it’s a very
instrumentally driven piece; it’s very
tactile and fun to play.”
As the years went by, however,
Barnatan took a different approach.
He remembered lessons with his
Russian-born teachers in Israel who
emphasized Tchaikovsky’s subtlety.
“It was looking at the score,” reiter-
ates Barnatan about his shift in focus.
“Tchaikovsky writes so beautifully and
so precisely. All the clues are there.
The more I played it, the more I really
started to relish the musical aspects of it,
the less pianistic aspects. I really enjoy
it more every time I play it now. It’s the
opposite of what you’d think. Every time
I play it I delight in it and find new ways
to make it sparkle.”
It’s hard to believe, but the im-
mensely popular First Piano Concerto
had a very rocky rollout. In early 1875,
a few days after finishing the score,
Tchaikovsky played it for a few distin-
guished associates. They were fero-
ciously critical, calling it “worthless and
unplayable.” It fared better with audi-
ences later that year, but Tchaikovsky
revised the concerto during the next
decade, and most orchestras perform his
final version, from 1888. Barnatan has
found inspiration, however, in the 1875
score. “In Tchaikovsky’s first version,”
he says, “the famous crashing chords at
the beginning were actually rolled gently
and elegantly. Whether you do that or
not, the idea is the same. This concerto
is as much charming and lyrical as it is
virtuosic and exciting.”
Lyricism attracted Barnatan
to another composer, Franz Schubert,
not always a favorite of pianists who
revel in Tchaikovsky. “Schubert is one of
my great loves,” he says. “One thing that
really draws me to him is how much he
can do with very little. He can imply a
whole world of meaning and emotion
and depth with so few notes and such
simple means; so much said with so
little. That’s such an incredible thing to
deal with as a performer and a listener.”
The distinguished pianist and
teacher Leon Fleisher, who worked
with Barnatan at RSMI, helped him
explore Schubert’s depths. “I first met
Leon Fleisher at Ravinia,” says Barnatan,
“and the Steans Institute was really my
gateway to coming to the United States
in the first place.”
Later, in 2004, Barnatan was one
of four young pianists participating in
a two-week workshop on Schubert’s
final four piano sonatas with Fleisher
at Carnegie Hall. (Yuja Wang, also an
RSMI alum, who appears at Ravinia
July 18 with the CSO and Gustavo Du-
damel, was among the four.) Barnatan
worked with Fleisher on Schubert’s final,
B-flat-major sonata and calls it “one of
the most special musical experiences
I ever had or, I think, ever will have.”
At the concert closing the workshop,
the
New Yorker
’s Alex Ross described
Barnatan as “the most naturally poetic
of the four pianists; he has an instinc-
tive understanding of Schubert’s fragile,
deep world.”
Typically, says Barnatan, master
teachers like Fleisher listen to a student
play a piece once or twice. They impart
their wisdom, and everybody moves on
to something else. At Carnegie, each of
the pianists spent two weeks intensively
studying their assigned Schubert sonata.
“It was one of the most revelatory musi-
cal experiences of my life,” says Barna-
tan. “I went on to record the piece and,
in some ways, it started my obsession
with Schubert, to realize the infinite
depth of this music. But also I think
about some of the things Leon Fleisher
said to me both then and thereafter
every day.
“He didn’t necessarily speak about
how to play a specific thing. It was
mostly about how to deal with this or
that type of material. When one thing
happens, what does it mean? It’s about
deciphering the clues in the score. He
used to say, ‘The notes on the page are
the tips of an iceberg. Their placement
and shape are determined by what you
can’t see under the water.’ Isn’t that beau-
tiful? It’s an idea you can apply to any
piece of music.”
Barnatan appLies that idea
to
works by contemporary composers as
well as such old masters as Tchaikovsky
and Schubert. The pianist has given sev-
eral world premieres, and contemporary
music is a regular part of his repertoire.
“I like good music,” he states simply.
“It doesn’t really matter to me when it’s
written. I don’t have a specific agenda. If
there’s a piece that excites me, I want to
play it.
“One of the things I enjoy doing, as
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