BD:    When you come to a concert and play a piece for the first time in a year or two, do you approach it fresh with a clean score?

Laredo:    You never really start over again if it’s been in your mind before, but it takes on a new freshness because you’re not the same person you were when you started it.  You can’t really start it again at grade one.  You start somewhere else but you have the past to draw upon.  It’s always changing.  Nothing really stays the same if you’re a musician.

BD:    So then every concert grows and builds for you?

Laredo:    One hopes so, sure!

BD:    This brings us to the question of recordings.  Once you’ve made the record, it’s embedded in plastic and it’s exactly the same every time.

Laredo:    Every time.  Yes, I know.

BD:    You say that with a little trepidation.

Laredo:    It’s just a fact of life.  Of course, everybody who makes a record always says this.  We always have to do it at that time, and we listen to it and sometimes feel, “Oh, if only we had done it this way or that way.”  But there’s no help for that.  We just have to do it.  I also think that there are benefits from listening to recordings and learning from what you’ve done, or learning from what other people have done, but always knowing there’s another way to do it.  That’s not the only way.  A lot of people listen to records and feel that since it sounds so “perfect,” it means that it has been sanitized.  There are no obvious errors, but does that mean the standards go up in performance?  I don’t really know if that’s so.  I think it means that people learn to expect no mistakes, and that’s an inhuman expectation.  As one recording producer once said to me, “It’s like if you leave a wonderful take which has some note-errors in a recording, it’s like seeing a piece of dirt on somebody’s face.  You just see it every time, and you learn to expect it every time you listen to the record.  We just have to clean everything up.”  I agree, but you also have to understand when you go to a concert that people make mistakes.  People are human, and when you play a concert in public it should not have to be the way it sounds on the record.  But I think the expectation is there for it to be.

BD:    So the expectation has changed?

Laredo:    I’m sure, because of the recordings.  It’s changed the way people listen to others who play in public.

BD:    Is there no way to make a recording straight through three or four times, and just take the sections which are not perfect but they still have the sweep of the movement?

Laredo:    Hmm.  Well, theoretically, I suppose so, but I don’t know if that’s really what can happen.  It’s an art and a science combined.

BD:    Do you play differently when you are facing a microphone instead of an audience?

Laredo:    You’re damn right I do.  Sure.

BD:    How so?

Laredo:    In public it’s once and it’s over, assuming there aren’t microphones hiding all over the place.  That’s usually what happens nowadays.  There’s almost no such thing as a concert without a microphone, and I deeply dislike this practice, I must tell you.  I really, really would like for a concert to be a concert and a recording to be a recording, because I think they’re two different sciences or arts.  But assuming there are no microphones at a concert, it’s once in a lifetime.  It’s an event with a beginning and an end, and one is more — I don’t know

BD:    We talked a little bit about your playing on different pianos.  Does your playing change at all if you’re in a very small, intimate hall, or a great big barn of a hall, or even outdoors, as you are here at Grant Park?

Laredo:    I’m sure it must, subtly.  I was talking about that this morning at the master class, because I think you have to learn how to scale your playing for the amount of space that’s between you and the audience.  You have to know when it’s necessary to really expand your playing.  It’s like being an actor.  If you’re an actor on the stage, you do a different kind of acting than if you do screen acting or television acting.  Although I’m not an actor, I know that’s what they talk about.

BD:    Yet you’re still playing the same notes in each location.

Laredo:    It’s the same notes, but the length of time it takes to get from one note to the other changes.  It has to do with articulation and projection and timing.  You have to know that if you’re playing in Grant Park, it’s going to be a little bit longer distance between you and the people way, way, way out there in that huge audience than if you were to play in a chamber music hall.  So you have to think about sound all the time.

BD:    How do you divide your career now between solo performances, orchestral concerts and chamber music?

Laredo:    Like that.  [Both laugh]

BD:    Some of this, some of that, like a Chinese menu?

Laredo:    Yes, that’s right.  I have a little of everything, and I like that very much.

BD:    Is there ever an over-balance of one or another, and do you try to adjust it, or do you just take what comes?

Laredo:    No.  I just take it as it comes because you never know from one year to the next.  I seem to have managed to do some of each every year, and I like it that way.

BD:    Each brings its own particular pleasures?

Laredo:    Oh, absolutely, yes.  I would be very, very unhappy if I just played solo all the time.  I love to play chamber music, and I have such interesting colleagues who are chamber music players in string quartets, and I love the challenge of playing with different people all the time.

BD:    Is playing in front of an orchestra a different challenge from playing behind a string quartet?

Laredo:    It is a real leveler if you play chamber music with a string quartet.  That’s the way of keeping honest, if you’re a pianist, because if you play with a really good string quartet, they express themselves freely and openly and talk about everything very honestly.  You can’t be a musician and not accept the criticisms of your colleagues.  That’s why I really love and welcome the process of chamber music.  There’s no ego involved with string players, the way I find it may have to be with other forms of music-making.  There’s not a power struggle.  There’s none of that.  Everybody is in the trench together, and you try very hard to tell the truth about each other’s playing, and I like that very much.

BD:    You don’t get that so much with a conductor waving a stick?

Laredo:    It depends on the conductor, I’m sure, but it is possible that you must relinquish some kind of power.  It’s not necessary to have a power struggle whatsoever, but I think it may be seen as such by some.  It should be an equal partnership between an orchestra, a conductor, and a soloist.  It’s just very nice when that can happen.

BD:    Then it becomes chamber music once again?

Laredo:    Yes, that’s the ideal.  If you can play with a big orchestra and make it sound like a big chamber group, then you’re in good shape.  That’s what I like.

BD:    May we delve a little bit into Rachmaninoff?  You’ve made a special study of his music.

Laredo:    I love to talk about him!

BD:    What is it about Rachmaninoff that grabs you?

Laredo:    Everybody loves Rachmaninoff who loves melody, passion and romance.  Those are the obvious externals of his music.  His music was not expected to last.  That’s what it said in Grove’s Dictionary many years ago, but it has lasted, and it’s more popular now than it’s ever been.  [See my Interview with Stanley Sadie, Editor of The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.]  Those few concertos and certain pieces of his are played constantly!  Had I not embarked upon the process of doing the complete piano solo works on recording, I would not have known that there is such a wealth of music that he has left us!  There is so much music by Rachmaninoff besides the famous C Sharp Minor Prelude, the Second Piano Concerto, the Third Piano Concerto and the Rhapsody.  There’s so much more than that.  He really was an extraordinary musician!  There are ten CDs that have just come out on RCA, The Complete Recorded Works of Rachmaninoff, including a lot of works that he played of other composers, plus, of course, some of his own music.  There are all the sonatas that he played with Fritz Kreisler.  There’s the piece that he plays with a gypsy named Nadezhda Plevitskaya and it’s really cool.  It’s wonderful!  I just love those records, and it gives some hint of his depth as a musician.  He did everything.

BD:    Do you learn as much or more from his recordings as you do from his notes on the page?

Laredo:    I think both.  I think it’s one and the same.  To hear him play is really an education, and it’s very interesting because there is more than one version of several pieces on these recordings.  You hear him play the same thing twice or three times.

BD:    Over different years?

Laredo:    Yes, and that’s what’s really interesting because he doesn’t play it the same way!  It’s always super-human.  Everything he does is spectacular and unlike anyone else, but he varies it and he creates something new each time.  When he plays something like the Chopin Funeral March Sonata, the B Flat Minor, he does not observe the markings that Chopin wrote.  He, being a composer, puts his own special stamp on the music, and that’s very interesting!

BD:    Does that, then, encourage you to put your stamp on his music?

Laredo:    If I can, yes.  That doesn’t mean that I don’t want to follow what he put on the paper.  He left a blueprint besides the notes. 

the complete Sonatas and a bunch of Etudes and Preludes, but there’s still much more.  Do you know that he wrote several volumes of Mazurkas?

BD:    No, but I always enjoy the ones by Chopin.

Laredo:    He was very intrigued with Chopin as a young man.  He did lots of early mazurkas, and there are late ones, too.  There

This interview was recorded in Chicago on June 21, 1993.  Portions (along with recordings) were used on WNIB the following year, and again in 1997.  This transcription was made and posted on this website in 2011.

To see a full list (with links) of interviews which have been transcribed and posted on this website, click here.  To read my thoughts on editing these interviews for print, as well as a few other interesting observations, click here.

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Award - winning broadcaster Bruce Duffie was with WNIB, Classical 97 in Chicago from 1975 until its final moment as a classical station in February of 2001.  His interviews have also appeared in various magazines and journals since 1980, and he now continues his broadcast series on WNUR-FM, as well as on Contemporary Classical Internet Radio.