[Sound effect]

 

Terrance McKnight: This is the Open Ears Project

 

[MUSIC PLAYING: Rameau’s Le Rappel des Oiseaux]

 

Vikingur Olafsson: There's one thing that strikes me about Rameau and that is that he seems to have never written a formulaic, predictable measure of music. He seems to have been unable to. He was so fiercely individual and independent in his musical thinking, and that's what I love in this piece as well. I mean, you don't know what's happening in the next measure. You don't know what's around the next corner in the woods. 

 

I'm Vikingur Olaffson and I am a pianist. The piece that we're listening to now is  Rameau’s “Le Rappel des Oiseaux” or dialogue of the birds.

 

So my first musical memory goes back quite far. It's almost Freudian that I play the piano because my mother, when she was about five or six months pregnant, she played her soloist recital exam. She was playing Chopin and all sorts of things and I-I was quite close to the keys from the beginning. I mean, I was literally inches away if you think about it was only in the womb, but then there were the keys. So I was almost closer to the keys than she was.

 

Umm, but then, you know, she taught music - piano - at home and I would listen to these lessons every day, more or less, and wait for the, for the students to be gone, so the piano would be all mine. This is maybe when I'm two or three years old that I probably have my first musical memory. That's when I started to play the piano really and-and to try out things. I remember a specific piece of music in a music book, I had just learned to read the notes and it was called The Frog. There was a big frog that I had sort of colored green.

 

And I remember part of the frog, this piece was the low E, you know, in-in bass clef, sort of below like five lines or stems. So basically, I could not ever memorize, you know, that E and it caused me such pain and I always associate, you know, this E with frogs. Umm, so maybe that's really the very first memory I have. It's the frog.

 

My parents moved from West Berlin just in time for me to be born in Iceland and I was raised there and lived there really until I was 18 when I moved to New York.

 

If you come from a place like Iceland, it's such a strange place. You know, it's, it's an island. It's, it's quite a big island, if you consider that there are only 350,000 people who live there, and it's in constant state of flux. It's always changing, this island. It's still being born, almost. It's, it's a very young country, geographically speaking and also culturally speaking. We've only been on that island for about 1000 years now.

 

And, you know, every year, uh, something changes, you know, you have a volcanic eruption, something appears, you know, out of nowhere, and, and so there's no stability in Iceland and that translate into, into the weather and, and certainly into the society. It's very, it's very much alive.

 

I mean, there are places in Iceland where you can just sort of go up on a hill and see about a quarter of the country.

 

It's like you can just go up and then you have this incredible overview and you see that there-there are so few houses. This beautiful sort of open nature that you find in very few other places, you know, in the world, I think that's the great appeal of Iceland - that you can be alone there. And you can really hear the-the silence and you can, you can sort of find yourself or, of course, lose yourself. 

 

It's a harsh type of beauty and it, it, it's, it’s, it's a punishing, kind of, kind of, kind of nature.

 

I remember so many, so many memories from my childhood going around the country, we would drive that sort of cycle of Iceland. And I just remember every, [sigh] you know, 100 miles you drive, you have like a different country. That's, that's the strangeness of it. You never know what's going to be around the next corner.

 

I got to know quite a lot of music while on those family holidays with my Sony Walkman and, and, and those things of the nineties. Some of my best musical memories I've actually been in the car, you know, with my two sisters in the back seat, uhh, driving and-and watching landscapes in, in motion. That's when I first heard the music of Philip Glass, for instance, it was on the, on the highway and we were driving quite fast, you know, and my father, sick of me and my sisters, just - we were arguing and quarreling in the back and he was having none of it, so he handed us this new album at the time. And that was the first time I heard glass, I would have been 12 or 13 years old and just a new, new world was revealed. So very often when I go and 

play glass, I somehow feel like I'm on the highway.

The piece I have chosen, um, as my, as my chosen piece for today is the first piece, the very first piece, that I heard by Jean Philippe Rameau: “Le Rappel des Oiseaux” or dialogue of the Birds or Recall of the Birds, written for the, for the keyboard or for the harpsichord at the time, and it's from the Suite and E minor. And I remember when I first heard this,

 

[MUSIC PLAYING: ]

 

I would have been either 22 or 23 years old, so not so young anymore, and I heard this in the Juilliard Library and it was a recording by one of my all time favorite pianists, Emil Gilels, the great, great Russian pianist. The recording he made, I believe, in early nineteen fifties. And I was absolutely awestruck by the power of the music, by the fantasy of it and, and the uniqueness - I mean, nothing in the world sounds like this music. And first of all, the title is so poetic. So, I would say, ahead of its time. 

 

We often think about those pieces with those kinds of titles, you know, “the Dialogue of The Birds,” as belonging to a much later period, romantic period, But Rameau was very much a futurist in this regard and many others. And then the way that Rameau captures those two birds, because it's very distinctly two birds. It's very, it's very much a two part piece and one bird is in the right hand and the other bird is in the left hand. And they imitate each other, they have recalls and they have a way of even stopping time at a certain point and everything just comes to a halt and, and the, the thrills just sort of stop, and the birds are listening, and then they keep going. They're listening to the silence. It's astonishing.

 

[MUSIC PLAYING: ]

 

It’s so nice, the two birds, a little bit anxious… listening to each other as well. 

 

These trills - how brilliant to do this in the early 18th century - to be able to paint, so vividly, these birds and their trills as this obvious bird song. How ahead of its time. 

 

The two birds are like the right and the left hand of the pianist and you have to differentiate, they're not the same bird.

 

And you know, it's in one harmony, only here changing the harmony. Staying in one chord - listen to it.

 

New chord

 

It's almost like what the impressionists did, like Debussy did much later: going into one chord, one sonority and just staying there and exploring it and seeing what can be done within a chord. You don't have to leave the chord too soon.

 

And here we go into the second part of the piece where time stops.

 

There [laughs]. It's amazing, the birds just, both of them stop and they listen to the silence, and then they go on and they continue having this recall - this dialogue. It's incredible.

 

Here he goes into the cycle of fifths which always works in music, I think, because it gives us, us a sense of the inevitability of it all. The cycle of fifths is like time: it goes in one direction, it doesn't bend.

 

A little more time and the bird took a much longer trill because you, you shouldn't repeat yourself in music. If it's the same object, you should still find a new perspective.

 

So here I'm drawing out the left hand, obviously. I did the right hand before, of course. And the music changes. The cycle of fifths, the inevitability of life, beauty and tragedy of every day.

 

And the birds wake up again and now they're further away higher up and lower down in the registers of the piano and then they finally agree to go to sleep.

 

So this is the piece that sort of changed my, my life a little bit, and it led me to, you know, much later now, to really go into this kind of Rameau period where I just basically learned more or less every single piece that he wrote for the keyboard, because it's simply one of the best collections of keyboard music that has ever been written. And certainly in the baroque, I mean, it's, it's up there with Johann Sebastian Bach, and it lends itself so well, in my opinion, to the modern piano. And I keep asking myself why so few people play Rameau on the modern piano. It also works great on the harpsichord, it's just very different to music.

 

[MUSIC PLAYING: Rameau’s Le Rappel des Oiseaux played on harpsichord]

 

But what you can do on the piano opens yet further possibilities, in my opinion.

 

[MUSIC PLAYING: Rameau’s Le Rappel des Oiseaux played on piano]

 

I personally have this feeling that everything I do is contemporary, and that it’s the same for when I play, let's say John Adams, and then when I play the music of Jean Philippe  Rameau. These are two to me, contemporary composers, and I would say certainly the same about Bach and Mozart, they're contemporary because we are playing them today and their music is alive today. It's part of our society and it's part of us. And if you're a great composer, I think, you know that the music transcends you. It's bigger than you.

  

So in a way, if Bach were alive today and we would get the chance to hear him play the Goldberg variations (of course, I would give my right kidney for this), but I would still not believe that to be the answer to anything, because things change constantly.

   

And I feel that's how we should approach music, we should play music as if it's new. And we should not necessarily force it to be new, we should not try to do something just for the sake of, you know, doing something that hasn't been done. But I do believe if you go deeply enough into music and with enough, you know, freedom and at the same time enough discipline you will come to something that's entirely you, and in that respect it's new.

 

Terrance McKnight: Pianist Víkingur Ólafsson has a special place in his heart for Jean-Philippe Rameau’s “Dialogue of the Birds.” Stick around, it’s coming up just after the break. 

 

[MUSIC PLAYING: Rameau’s Le Rappel des Oiseaux]

 

Terrance McKnight: This is The Open Ears Project. 

 

Join us next week. We’ve got another Bach fan … this time it’s Anne-Sophie Mutter.

 

ANNE-SOPHIE MUTTER: Music is always a prayer to me, but it's not a religious prayer. It's a prayer which really embraces everybody. … It is the only moment in life for so many people of different religious heritage and cultural background to feel the same things.

 

Terrance McKnight: The Open Ears project was conceived and created by Clemency Burton Hill. I’m Terrance McKnight and I'm so pleased to present season two of this podcast to you.

 

If you like what you hear, please leave us a rating and a review on your favorite podcast platform and, if you’ve got a story about a piece of classical music, we want to know. Email us at openears@wqxr.org. You can also head to our website, wqxr.org, to check out our other podcasts about classical music and playlists for this and past seasons.

 

Season two of The Open Ears Project was produced by Clemency Burton-Hill and Rosa Gollan. Our technical director is Sapir Rosenblatt, and our project manager is Natalia Ramirez. Elizabeth Nonemaker is the executive producer of podcasts at WQXR, and Ed Yim is our chief content officer. I’m Terrance McKnight. Thanks so much for listening.

 

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