My Favorite Pianist Has Vanished

Some time a decade or more ago, when my family went on vacation for a few weeks and left me behind to work, I kept the radio on all night long (to the station I still listen to, WQXR) for musical companionship, and I was jolted from somnolence by some Haydn playing unlike any I had ever heard—by a pianistic inventiveness and freedom such as I had never, literally never, heard any classical musician exercise. The piece was Haydn’s F-sharp minor Trio for piano, violin, and cello; like most of Haydn’s trios, it’s among his later works. The key is a special one for the composer (it’s also that of the stormy “Farewell” symphony, which ends with a stunning drama of an adagio of increasing quiet as the musicians leave the stage, and of his string quartet, Op. 50, no. 4, with its fierce motivic compression and its jolting transitions from ferocity to soul-balm) but, once again, I was astonished by the performance, which was unlike any I had heard.

The pianist, the announcer said at the end, was Patrick Cohen. It was a name unknown to me, but I bought the disk and resolved to get hold of any other recordings of his that I could get my hands on—and am I glad I did. The first thing that characterizes most performances of classical music is a certain rhythmic stability—a consistent pulse that may vary from section to section but that rarely leaves a listener unaware of the beat, the foot-tap. Historical recordings—such as those of the conductors Wilhelm Furtwängler and Willem Mengelberg, the violinist Toscha Seidel, and the pianists Vladimir de Pachmann, Harold Bauer, and Irene Scharrer—suggest that there was another tradition of rhythmic pliability, one based in a romantically subjective approach to the music (though, at least with Furtwängler, I think there were other analytical elements in play).

With Cohen, something was different—the phrasing and the emphases didn’t seem romanticized, but X-rayed. His performance of that Haydn trio (and other recordings I heard) seemed to put a musical score into analytically high relief, thrusting small phrases into isolated prominence, opening deep and sudden darknesses from instantaneous shifts and silences, turning glimmering runs into precarious leaps and bounds. The effect was at once vertiginously alienating and gloriously, exhilaratingly revealing. In his five volumes of Haydn trios (recorded with the violinist Erich Höbarth and the cellist Christophe Coin), Cohen—who, I learned, is French—plays on historical pianos or copies thereof. The smaller, more silvery and percussive, more finger-sensitive sound may account for some of the performance’s exceptional intimacy, but the playing is still as different from that of other period-instrument pianists as it is from, say, the playing of Menachem Pressler (the superb pianist of the classic Beaux Arts Trio).

January 27th is Mozart’s birthday, and, after citing a few favorite pieces by Mozart, I tweeted out a link to Cohen’s recordings of Mozart piano sonatas, from the mid-nineties. It’s the most distinctive and original classical-music performance I’ve heard (and that includes Glenn Gould’s Bach and Artur Schnabel’s Beethoven). That’s how radically different Cohen’s performances are from those of his predecessors—and, for that matter, from pianists who have come later. A scholarly essay in the booklet that accompanies one of the disks trotted out some fascinating theories that the pianist may have been applying, regarding the eighteenth-century connection between music and rhetoric. The idea is that certain kinds of musical phrases, certain harmonic relationships, came pre-loaded (for connoisseurs who knew these things) with affective associations similar to turns of verbal phrase. The abstractions of rhythm and harmony, of theme and variation, were in a constant tension with the—well, with the meaning of the musical content. And that’s why emphasizing the beat would seem, in music, as odd, even as silly, as reciting a Shakespeare soliloquy with a metronomic insistence on iambic pentameter. (One added fillip is that, with the rise of the concert hall and the relative democratization of musical culture, this element of connoisseurship fell away and music’s abstract relations came to the fore.)

I can’t evaluate the musicological or historical claims, but my ears exult in the results. Not just Cohen’s Mozart sonata recordings, but also his three disks of Haydn sonatas (made on modern pianos) are among the desert-island treasures of modern recording. His Chopin mazurkas (which I mentioned here a few years ago) have an exquisite drawing-room intimacy. For all the intellectual substance behind his performances, his touch is exquisite, his emotional world almost unbearably tender and vulnerable. He restores the mystery to familiar sounds; he plays with love.

But here’s the rub: Cohen seems to have vanished. At least, he has vanished from recording studios, having put out—as far as I know—no new recordings for a decade. (The most recent, I think, is this 1999 recording of two Mozart piano concertos, with Coin conducting.) He has made a bunch of other recordings—Beethoven trios and cello sonatas, pieces by Erik Satie, Boccherini quintets, sonatas by the eighteenth-century composer Antonio Soler, nineteenth-century Spanish piano music. But why hasn’t he recorded in the new millennium. Why does he not seem to be giving concerts—or, at least, why has he never come to New York to perform?

All I’ve got is this little biography that says, most saliently:

Born in Mulhouse [France], he won the Royaume de la Musique competition at the age of eleven. He won the First Prize at the Mulhouse Conservatory and has been appearing as a concert artist since the age of fifteen with various symphony orchestras, and continued his studies in Basel with Klaus Linder.

That’s from the Web site for the Geneva concert series Amarcordes, which lists him as one of its artists but announces no concerts by him for the 2012-13 season. I hope for the best—above all, for Cohen personally, and also, for us melomaniacs and for the world and future of music, for his continued or resumed career.