Fanfare
September/October 1997 , Volume: 21 , # 1
His bio makes you think that Jon Kimura Parker is a perfectly ordinary, respectable pianist. The Vancouver-born musician did, after all, win the prestigious 1984 Leeds International Piano Competition. But do a little digging, and you start to wonder about the guy. Parker has trekked to the Canadian Arctic to play an Alanis Morissette song on an electronic keyboard for Inuit students. He says that if he ever writes another piece of music, it may well be for a rock band. (A friend described his first and so far only composition as "a combination of Ravel, the theme from Mission:Impossible, and Earth, Wind and Fire.) In Australia, he once worked the theme from The X-Files into the cadenza of a Mozart concerto. Not only does he eschew a jacket on stage, but he has even performed a very few times in a Star Trek uniform. So I called him at his New York apartment and, forgetting what little I once knew about tact, demanded, "Are you kind of weird, or what?"
"I try very hard to be normal!" Parker laughed. "I think that if some people find me a bit eccentric, that's mostly because I have a sense of fun. I try very hard to make concerts at least a welcoming, joyful experience. Well, I don't think a concert should always be a joyful experience; that depends on the music. But if I had to pigeonhole myself, I'd have to say that my absolute number one priority over the years is that I've invited people into a musical experience with everything I've got. I want there to be a sense of excitement about the music. A concert should not be a stiff experience in any way. I always try to keep my father in mind; he's a nonmusician who absolutely loves music. He can be very critical, but I always want to experience music through his ears. I have perfect pitch, and training up to the doctoral level (at Juilliard, under Adele Marcus), and I know too much. My father experiences music on a very emotional basic level, which is, I think, how music should be experienced.
"But you shouldn't take it off the deep end, either. I constantly find myself in a state of debate about my role as a performer: am I an educator or an entertainer or something in between? I think a lot of musicians, for example in Europe, are much more `serious' in their intent. They want to convince the few educated connoisseurs in the audience that this type of phrasing is most appropriate to this time of Beethoven's life or something. Now, those matters are important to me, too, but privately. Onstage I don't feel that emphasizing all that is communicative. There are better ways to get the point across. Mozart absolutely was some kind of a practical jokester, and he used the popular songs of his day in some of his performances, so I think it's stylistically correct now to put something like The X-Files into a Mozart cadenza."
Parker is merely pretending to be a naughty boy; after all, he insinuated TV music into Mozart only once. And he has performed in those Starfleet uniforms--the man actually owns two--only on special, rather loopy occasions. His usual concert attire is only slightly unconventional, yet elegant: no tailcoat, but a handsome vest worn over a white shirt with loose-fitting sleeves. "I do that for two reasons," he says. "First, it's inhuman to expect anyone to play a piano concerto wearing a jacket. I'm so heated up and uncomfortable that after ten minutes I think it starts to affect my playing. I don't want to feel encumbered with physical things like that. It's also part of my wanting to make the concert experience less formal. But I don't think it's right to play in T-shirts and jeans. There's something special about having clothes that you wear just for a concert, but having a sense of occasion doesn't mean it has to be formal and stiff."
None of this--the dress, the pop-culture references--even begins to reveal what sort of musician Jon Kimura Parker really is. His Leeds achievement tells the more important part of the story. Leeds laureates tend to be the most musically intelligent of competition winners; Murray Perahia and Radu Lupu are two of the most notable pianists in this company. "I never entered the Tchaikovsky and I never entered the Cliburn," said Parker of the competitions he didn't bother with, "and I felt uncomfortable about going to Warsaw because I didn't feel I did that one thing [Chopin] really well, and I've never been able to play a polonaise properly. So I went to Leeds, because I felt that if I was going to be a gladiator and enter an arena--and competing is essentially an unmusical act--I felt that's where I wanted to do it. I had this instinct that I would be judged the way I wanted to be, with musical matters before all else."
And yet, as you'd gather from his dismissive remark about "serious" European musicians, Parker never comes off as densely cerebral. This past winter, a thirteen-city American tour with the Warsaw Philharmonic found Parker in top form with the Rachmaninov Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini; the performance I heard was technically brilliant yet often feather-light, witty as well as lyrical, mercurial without seeming eccentric. For his latest Telarc recording, Parker has applied similar qualities -- except for the wit; this can be dour and steely stuff--to Samuel Barber's Piano Concerto with Yoel Levi and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. The all-Barber disc also includes the Violin Concerto with Robert McDuffie, and Souvenirs. Barber wrote the Piano Concerto specifically for John Browning, who has recorded it twice in the past thirty-five years. I asked Parker whether, while preparing the work, he didn't sometimes glance over his shoulder to see whether Browning was looming there.
"Well, not really," he said. "I decided not to try to contact (Browning). I probably could have somehow arranged to talk about it with him, but I thought I'd rather do this on my own. I had heard his original recording with the Cleveland Orchestra years ago, but I haven't heard his more recent one. It would be so easy to get overly influenced by it. What amazes me is that so few pianists other than Browning have gone after the Barber. Unless I'm missing something, this is the great American piano concerto of the century. I've talked to some orchestra managers and conductors about why it isn't played more often, and the answer usually has to do with how difficult it is. One manager said it's hard to market, which I find strange. Maybe some pianists have felt that this is one of those instances where another pianist owns it, so it's best to keep your distance. John Browning has championed the piece, and he's recorded it twice, so certainly there's that history with him behind the piece, but that doesn't mean no one else should play it."
This is Parker's fourth Telarc recording. The only other one currently
in print is Two Pianos Are Better Than One, a P.D.Q. Bach album in which
Parker joins Professor Peter Schickele in the Concerto for Two Pianos vs.
Orchestra. Before that came a Chopin recital, and, about ten years ago,
Parker's debut release: Prokofiev's Third and Tchaikovsky's First concertos.
"For a first record it couldn't have been more badly timed," Parker
lamented. "That year there were Tchaikovsky Firsts from Barry Douglas,
Andras Schiff, Ivo Pogorelich, and a couple of others. That was an odd
experience. It was my first recording experience. Basically I feel unbelievably
comfortable onstage, I love the feeling of the immediacy of contact with
my audience, but getting into the recording studio has been really difficult.
My Canadian colleagues point out the irony that the most famous Canadian
classical pianist (Glenn Gould) just lived for the studio and claimed that
`the concert is dead.' I'm the opposite. But with the Barber I finally
felt comfortable in the studio. With the Tchaikovsky and Prokofiev, I felt
unsure of myself; I felt unprepared for the limited recording time. That's
still a problem; in this country, in a recording session a symphony orchestra
has to have twenty minutes of break per hour.So in a three-hour session,
to record the Barber--which turns out to be a concerto that most orchestras
don't know very well--we had two hours of recording time. I found it a
bit of a panic.
I felt even worse about the Tchaikovsky, but a lot of that had to do with my attitude toward the piece. I feel more comfortable with it now; I'm taking faster tempos and playing the piece for what it is. At that time I was caught up in making the piece more of a musical meal than it is, and the effect was that I made it too slow. So it's taken me a while to find my recording chops.
"I've talked with Telarc about a number of other projects. I'd felt torn about recording for a number of years because I didn't really want to record, but everybody told me I should. At one point they asked if I wanted to record the Grieg and Schumann concertos, which I'd love to do, but there would be a problem because the market is saturated with them. I will always feel comfortable going out onstage and performing a warhorse, because a live performance will always be different. People will respond to it and feel connected to it and enjoy it. When I started with Telarc, I wanted to record the Prokofiev Third, and the Tchaikovsky was suggested as something to make a good pairing and help sell the CD. But I felt funny about recording the Tchaikovsky because it had been done so well by so many people. I felt like the only reason to record that was for me, and not for the piece. Which is why I felt so good about the Barber, because it hasn't been overrepresented. In the future, I may do the premiere recording of a piece, and I may do something with Jerry Hadley, some contemporary American songs, fairly soon."
Recordings may have been little debacles, but live performances of any sort have long provided Parker some of his greatest pleasures. "I can't imagine anything that is more sheerly enjoyable than working with other musicians," he said. "I devote a lot of time in the summer to chamber-music festivals, and the rest of the year I've come to enjoy concerto performances more than recitals. In a concerto situation, in some passages I'm able to work with individual musicians in the orchestra. I like to feel a personal rapport and personal contact with them. I also feel so strongly about an orchestra having as good a time as I am that I have never had any interest in playing the Chopin concertos. I just feel I'd be putting the orchestra through something they wouldn't enjoy. Whereas if I play Rachmaninov or Beethoven or Brahms, they're having a great time, too.
"That's what I tried to do on the Warsaw Philharmonic tour, too." Parker was recruited on short notice to replace another soloist. "I only had two weeks to prepare for that tour, but the only hard part was nonmusical issues. I'd just moved into a new apartment and I was looking forward to January as my only month off this year. But I had played the Rachmaninov within the previous season, and the Mozart concerto I had played two years previously. With Rachmaninov, if a year's gone by, it's very easy to come back to a concerto and remember how you did it the last time. It can get too businesslike. There are times when being efficient like that is helpful, but it's good to be open to new things, so this year I finally started to experiment with the Rachmaninov. Kazimierz Kord (the conductor) was totally cooperative and helpful and not afraid to try something different.
"In the solo repertoire I'm always looking for new things, but in concertos it's largely a matter of what you're asked to do. Both Brahms concertos I played when I was in my early twenties, and I had just enough maturity to realize I didn't have enough maturity to find everything I wanted to there, so I put them away for eight seasons. So I have that sort of negative control over my concerto repertoire, but otherwise you get to play what you're invited to play and not much else."
Parker's most unusual invitations have had more to do with geography than repertoire. Last year he ventured to the Arctic circle as part of Piano Six, a project started by Janina Fialkowska. To quote some background information from Parker's home page (www.kimura.com), "The six Canadian pianists of Piano Six (Fialkowska, Parker, Angela Hewitt, Angela Cheng, Marc-André Hamelin, and André LaPlante) each give recitals, master classes and school presentations in remote communities across Canada for a ten-day period each year. The entire project is coordinated by Colwell Arts Management. Jon Kimura Parker's Piano Six Tour (last) season (included) concerts in Fort St. John and Fort Nelson, B.C.; and Yellowknife and Iqaluit in the Northwest Territories. If you would like any information about Piano Six, if you or your corporation are interested in supporting this extraordinary project, or if you are a concert promoter in a small Canadian community, please contact Jane Colwell at (519) 662-3499."
"Piano Six was born of a conversation we had six or seven years ago," Parker said. "We were talking nostalgically about the early days of our careers, playing recitals in small towns in Canada. Many of us were raised on those; we played for low fees, but we met with interesting people and all that. And Janina suddenly had this idea to make it happen again. So six of us agreed in principle to spend a couple of weeks a year doing this for basically no fee, and we set about getting funding. Most of the concerts take place in small communities, mostly in southern Canada, but I've wanted to go up north for years, after reading and hearing Glenn Gould's pieces about it. So that's where I decided to go. But getting a real piano up there and getting it maintained was so prohibitive that it looked like it wasn't going to happen. So, instead, I went up with a Roland FP-1 and a Fender amp, and I toured around wherever I could find a place to plug them in. Part of the Piano Six mandate, which turns out to be my favorite part by far, is going into schools and talking about music. I wanted to establish a rapport right away with the high-school students. Whatever you do, the young kids eat it up, but the high-school kids, if they get the feeling that you're going to do something uncool, they turn off right away.
So I ended up demonstrating some elements of classical music--and this is not an original thing-- basically using popular songs like Alanis Morissette's Hand in My Pocket. I used that to demonstrate strophic form, because it was a song that they all knew, and I happen to really like her albums. Then I played the theme from The Simpsons to show jagged rhythms, and by the time I played Chopin and other classical things they were won over. And I loved it. I get an unreal amount of satisfaction out of having one kid's eyes light up and show a real interest in music."
Parker's own interest was sparked largely by pianists outside the classical realm, even though he appeared with the Vancouver Youth Orchestra at the age of five and early on had serious training from his uncle, Edward Parker, and coaching from his mother, Keiko Parker, which led to study at the Victoria Conservatory, Banff Centre for the Arts, Vancouver Academy of Music, and Juilliard. Despite all this, Parker's greatest idol has long been the phenomenal jazzman Oscar Peterson.
"I first heard him on records and I thought there had to be overdubbing," Parker recalled. "Then in 1980 I went down to hear him at the Blue Note in New York. I brought down several musicians, including four of my fellow piano students who'd never heard him at all. We sat in a corner and listened and watched, and there were six jaws dropping in that corner for the next two hours. We couldn't believe all this was happening. I had other idols in school, including Elton John, but I was so impressed by Oscar Peterson, not only by his complete facility for every type of jazz style, but also by his understanding of tone and color and how to make the piano sing and how to get different effects. He has a really creative use of the damper pedal, which not many other jazz pianists have. It was a very moving experience that I'll never forget. This past fall I finally had a chance to meet him and speak to him and tell him which of his pieces I butcher as encores. I also admire him because he has always stood for a lot of great humanitarian things, and his being Canadian has always remained very important to him. I think maybe because he's a jazz pianist and I'm a classical pianist my admiration for him is uncluttered with all the usual complications. For example, Rubinstein has always been a great idol for me, since I was a kid, but as I got older I learned so much about music and interpretation that I would question his interpretations and his responsibility to the music, and it just got too complicated. As a kid I'd loved Rubinstein's great joy in music, and there was nothing more to it than that. Elton John was another idol when I was in high school. How could a pianist become such an icon? It seemed impossible to me. I finally got to meet him, too, and I felt like a nerd. I said, `Because of you I maintained some popularity in school, because I learned your music.' He just laughed."
There wasn't much laughing at Parker's performance on New Year's Eve, 1995. Under the auspices of the philanthropic organization AmeriCares, Parker accompanied an airlift of food and medical supplies to Bosnia, where he gave a pair of concerts with the Sarajevo Philharmonic. The New Year's Eve concert was televised live in fifty-nine countries, and attracted the attention of CNN.
"Conditions were primitive, as you would expect," said Parker. "We actually did put on flak jackets, and flew in on one of these C-130 Hercules planes.
It was a very bizarre experience. It happened basically because the president of AmeriCares is a wonderful man who happens to be on the board of a number of symphonies; he heard me play, and thought I might be interested in going to Bosnia. I stayed in the Hotel Bosnia in downtown Sarajevo, which had no amenities at all. The concert hall was damaged; it had no running water and no heat, but they had just gotten it hooked up to the electrical grid. I said it was a bizarre experience, and it was, but it was also an incredible experience, one of those times when you give a performance that has no ... there's nothing attached to it except the love of music and wanting to have a joyful occasion, particularly in light of what's happened there. We were given a tour of Sarajevo, and we walked through a very large soccer stadium that was converted into a cemetery in 1992. Everyone there knows people or has family who were killed. It's so numbing, so foreign to somebody who's grown up on this continent. So we rehearsed in this hall in scarves and wrapped up in coats, and the whole thing was surreal. At the concert, we played the `Emperor' Concerto, and afterwards, an old Muslim woman came backstage and told me through a translator that during the concerto, for less than a minute, she got so wrapped up in the music that for the first time the war went right out of her head. She said the effect didn't last very long, but it was the first time, and she wanted to thank me for that. I can't think of anything that's made music more important to me than that."
