Interview, Schubert on Tape

In an age where images and recordings can be tweaked, polished, edited and assembled as composites from many different versions, the pursuit of perfection in the studio is perhaps easier than it's ever been.

Pianist Edna Stern, though, begs to differ. Finding this approach lacking precisely because the results are too perfect, in her latest album she's chosen to use an all-analogue recording setup and to record entire movements in a single take - recapturing something of the feeling of a live performance, with all the risks that this brings of letting unwanted sounds slip through the net.

I spoke to Edna about how the idea for this album came to her, and how she approached recording it.

This is an innovative and thought-provoking project; is there any particular reason you chose Schubert’s Impromptus and Moments Musicaux to showcase your new approach?

Thanks. It happened to be the repertoire I was working on and that I wanted to record. The idea of using no editing at all has been on my mind for the past ten years and I’ve used the bare minimum of editing since my Bach “Me-Su-Bach” and Beethoven Sonatas recordings that appeared in 2014-2015. The jump to “no editing at all” while a relatively small one, was still very significant.

You refer to restoring a sense of “danger” to the music in this recording, by deliberately allowing occasional blemishes to go uncorrected. How different was the sensation while you were recording – was it closer to the experience of giving a live concert?

One can play a live concert and avoid all sense of danger by focusing on playing the correct notes and not focusing much on what’s the music really about. In that sense, a live concert can sound like a very sterile and edited recording too. The greatest difference was to adjust my frame of mind during the preparation. It is the frame of mind that had drastically changed as I had to be much more aware of the fluidity of the piece’s movement, letting myself be swept by the fluidity, not trying to always control it, and especially not caring too much when wrong notes happened. In a way, it was important to me to push myself to let go, if I wanted to achieve the level of interpretation of the pianists I admire.

In fact, if you go to concerts these days, you will rarely hear wrong notes, while listening to old recordings of great pianists you will hear plenty. What happened? Are today’s pianists simply much better? Or has the focus shifted?

With the move towards all-digital recordings over the past couple of decades, one can imagine that merely finding professional-level analogue recording equipment might be tricky. How straightforward was this?

It was very tricky indeed, and was several years in the making. I met Peter Qvortrup, founder of Audionote who specializes in musically beautiful high-end analogue listening audio systems. I was interested in recording in analogue and he was interested in creating high quality and musical recordings. He was the one who organized the practical side of recording in analogue.

To play Devil’s Advocate for a moment: Technology now means we can achieve perfection (even if an unnatural perfection) for the first time. Isn’t it therefore our duty to the music that we do so, at least in recordings – reserving “danger” and “freedom” for live performance?

That’s a great question and it goes directly to the point - what is perfection in music. Schubert wrote notes and certain directions. If we take a robot to play these notes in the tempi and volumes described, would that be the perfect performance we seek? What is it that makes an interpretation a great one, or a perfect one? Say I have two recorded tracks, one with a wrong note and one with the right one. It could seem that taking a fraction of a second from one track and replacing it by a fraction from the other track that we are improving - we now have the right note - but this is always both a loss and a gain, and the question is what do you think is most important. Is the most important thing to hit the right note, or is there a movement and a sensation that is more important, and that is where the perfection you seek lies, and you are in fact detracting from the interpretation by replacing it.

The issue is that wrong notes are easy to notice while missing a momentary important tension that was created between the voices is easy to miss, so people focus on what is easier to hear.

Art, in general, is not a place of perfection. You can have a perfect line, a perfect kilogram, but what makes an art piece moving is never perfection.

Given the ubiquity and inescapability of touching-up (visual or audio) in how we present ourselves to the world, do you worry that society’s bar for an acceptable “appearance” has now been set so high that nothing un-edited (a recording, a face, a body) stands a chance of success?

Has the bar been set so high or perhaps low? Have we simply been given many perfectly cut glass stones in lieu of diamonds?

As for the audience, I do not worry about that at all. I strongly believe that the audience’s heart is in the right place and it cares for the emotional impact rather than a certain perfection of notes. I do believe it could be an issue with critics and perhaps musicians who are so used to a certain perfection of notes that they may listen more with their brain than with their hearts. And frankly, I can’t say the imperfections don’t bother me as well. It was hard for me not to edit certain errors, not just notes but perfecting timing and other such stuff. But would I be improving the whole interpretation, or harming it?

Ultimately, I decided to go through with my choice, as I believe this fullness and reality in capturing the original precise motion and musical gesture, makes the interpretation stronger and more impactful.

Are you aware of anyone else taking a similar approach in recording projects to what you’ve done for this one?

No, I’m not aware of any living musician who has made such a choice as mine. Only those long-gone musicians of the past.

Do you intend to make the “analogue, long takes, no edits” approach your own new normal – and would you like to see it become once again the default for performers in general?

Throughout the years I have made some very nice recordings using editing, and I am very attached to these little monsters I created in the past. Every musician should do what feels artistically right for them, and I’m happy that this recording brings to the table an alternative approach for other musicians to consider. As for now, it feels more right to me not to use editing, and yes, it may become my “new normal” but one never knows. Also, when recording with orchestras and other instrumentalists one has to respect their desires as well.