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Personal problem with an artist

9K views 80 replies 35 participants last post by  Baron Scarpia 
#1 ·
Hi all. Is there an artist that is universally recognized, but that you don't like for purely personal reasons? In short, he/she bothers you somehow and you can't even try to be objective. I have this problem with pianist Lukas Vondracek. People around me and even music experts admire him (he won the Queen Elisabeth piano competition), but I only see a smug boy who tries to draw attention to himself without respect for the authors. I don't believe his emotions and can't enjoy his playing... Do you feel such a dislike of someone?


I was at this concert (but I didn't enjoy it). :)
 
#3 ·
I like to separate the artist from the art. Otherwise I would never listen to composers such as Wagner, Gesualdo, Lully, and others who seem to be deeply unlikable personalities.

However, there is one pianist who not only has a poor personality but is also an uninspired and tasteless player-this pianist is Valentina Lisitsa and I will gladly never listen to her ever again-her pitifully small repertoire has been played a dozen times over by far superior pianists.

Her racist and distasteful rhetoric is also well documented.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wa...015/04/09/my-bloody-valentina/?outputType=amp

http://euromaidanpress.com/2015/04/...certs-cancelled-for-racism-and-hate-speech-2/

http://www.juliadavisnews.com/artic...-vitriol-nazi-rhetoric-or-music-to-your-ears/
 
#55 ·
I like to separate the artist from the art. Otherwise I would never listen to composers such as Wagner, Gesualdo, Lully, and others who seem to be deeply unlikable personalities.
I just listen to the pre-murder Gesualdo.
 
#10 ·
This can work the other way around, too, with particular feelings of personal affinity toward an artist making one's experience of the artist's work more meaningful and pleasurable. I have been aware of this effect since I had the great good fortune of meeting virtuoso pianist John Browning in the middle 1970s. He gave performances quite regularly at my college and led some seminars for music students (not piano specifically). He was a beautiful, generous man and a deep and clear thinker about music, art, and the arts scene. My special admiration for Mr. Browning's music is certainly due in part to my personal affinity with him and my gratitude to him. I'm glad that I have never had a bad personal encounter with an artist, as I can easily imagine how that would turn me off from him/her regardless of strictly musical considerations.
 
#12 · (Edited)
Is there an artist that is universally recognized, but that you don't like for purely personal reasons?

Not for me; I try to judge the product, not the person.

I've found plenty of reasons to dislike some, however. Plenty of conductors whose music I've enjoyed, including Charles Dutoit and James Levine, have been implicated in sexual harassment situations.

One of my favorite conductors over the years was Johannes Somary who died 2011. I never knew this previously but the Internet is full of documentation from former students of a New York school he ran that for decades he sexually molested them.

Robert King, a mostly Baroque conductor from England, did a prison term for sex with underage children.

I have Jewish friends who never bought or listened to recordings by Karajan or Karl Bohm or others because or real or imagined links to Nazism.

I have admired the violin playing of the artist known variably as Nigel Kennedy or just plain Kennedy though many I knew eschew him for his extra-musical antics, his appearance, and his alleged syrupy or cloying style of playing.

I thought Bernstein and Mahler such a good pairing because they were both mixed up guys -- Bernstein because of his sexuality, Mahler because of his religion.

Bernstein, son of a shoemaker, was a self-taught musician who grew up traditionally as a husband and father. In mid-life he left that to become a gay man in New York with a partner. He later returned to the other role. I knew people in my life like that; their lives were tortured.

Mahler was a Jew and wrote a symphony about the act of Christian resurrection. Jews who practice religion don't believe in the New Testament or Christ. Unlike Mendelssohn, whose father left the Jewish faith and converted to Christianity, then taught it to Felix and Fanny, Mahler alwasy seemed to me unsure of much in his life.

I knew people like this in my life and, while not separating from them, was fairly exhausted by the drama of their lives. Mahler's music regularly exhausts me, especially with Bernstein conducting it.

I've performed and worked with conductors and musical artists of many types that I did not like personally, did not enjoy working with, and/or had extreme differences on artistic style but, if the final product was good, I forgave or put that aside. The object was producing a show, not feeling good about everything.

I've found in life it's what you make of opportunity that is more important than how you feel about it. Same with people.
 
#13 · (Edited)
Lukas Vondracek sounds good to me. I do have a problem with Daniel Barienboim's face, and with Alfred Brendel's raised eyebrows. That female, Uchida, does the eyebrow-raising thing as well.



 
#47 · (Edited)
Lukas Vondracek sounds good to me. I do have a problem with Daniel Barienboim's face, and with Alfred Brendel's raised eyebrows. That female, Uchida, does the eyebrow-raising thing as well.
I don't understand taking exception to someone's appearance, which mostly can't be helped.

If you don't like the way a musician looks, simply close your eyes.
 
#14 · (Edited)
Years ago we went to an afternoon party thrown by neighbors. Upper middle class families with kids were there. A girl who was about 13 gave a violin recital.

She was not your average kid musician, she was special. Other parents tried to hide their envy. She played like an adult with virtuoso skill and her trance-like face reflected the deep sensitivity her interpretation expressed.

A few weeks later we were dining out in our favorite Chinese restaurant. Who should be seated at the table next to us but this same girl and her family. I doubt they remembered us. We could hear their conversation and it was grating. She sounded like an entitled, spoiled child and with a sarcastic, arrogant, overindulging father. They mocked the restaurant as not being up to their standards. They mocked everything. I almost told them to shut up, or keep it down.

It's hard to reconcile the person who produced such beautiful music with the insufferable person in the restaurant. I never knew her name and wonder if she became a famous musician.
 
#16 · (Edited)
Frankly if we go by people we can like in the music profession or are morally upright then have very slim pickings indeed. Yes Karajan was a ruthless dictator in some ways but he made marvellous music. Nigel Kennedy annoys me greatly when he puts down his violin and starts talking in his fake working-class accent. It probably grates on me more because of my own working-class roots. Reading Bernsteins biography the last part of it does not make pleasant reading at least morally. But then you can go onto other musicians like Heifetz who Was certainly less than god-like when he put his violin down. But then among composers I wouldn't like to have been Beethoven's friend even though his music is absolutely wonderful. And as for Wagner, you would have to watch your wife and your wallet all the time. And awful lot of these guys were unfortunately far from the perfect human beings romance has tried to paint them. But then so are most of our heroes. The list is endless and probably includes us anyway
 
#30 ·
I don’t much care for Mitsuko Uchida’s facial expressions and pedantic “conducting” from the piano on her YouTube videos of Mozart concerti, but taken by itself her playing is stellar and she’s probably a top-5 pianist for me. I actually envy her for feeling so much visceral emotion from Mozart - I have no idea how the 20th Piano Concerto could inspire such a response in someone, but somehow it does. In all fairness I feel the exact same way as Ms. Uchida does about Bach’s Goldbergs and Art of Fugue, which other people see as “dry” and “intellectual” - something which I can’t possibly comprehend.
 
#32 ·
It is funny how watching a musician can influence what we hear. I've noted it a lot the other way - liking performers after watching them - and have been convinced that what I was hearing was playing/singing that I greatly liked ... only to later hear the same performance without vision and finding it rather ordinary!
 
#74 · (Edited)
Very good point. I wrote elsewhere how I had been bowled over by Prokofiev's Toccata played by Yuja Wang. I had never heard it before. To me she is an attractive person with awesome skills. But "attractive person" really has nothing to do with great music so I have been listening to her performance without the visuals and am still blown away.

I will say that the recording of her performance was very very good compared to many others which can sound somehow indistinct, like looking through 10 feet of water.

The other thing I noted was the interpretation. I was very surprised at the substantial variations between Horowitz, Argerich and Wang among others.

I may be crucified by the cognoscenti here, but I like Wang's best.
 
#39 ·
I tend to separate an artist's politics and personal behaviour from their performance. It can be hard sometimes, and it depends on what you think is important. Personally speaking, I have absolutely no problem with Thielemann, for example, but struggle to enjoy the music making of Pete Townsend anymore and Dutoit, who I was a big fan of and without naming them, a number of predatory people in powerful positions.
 
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#40 ·
For me, admiring someone's art does not mean I condone their personal life, beliefs or opinions in any way. They are entirely separate things. I have noticed that great artists often are not great people. In many cases, they focus their energy, talent, wisdom, integrity, courage, and their strengths and good qualities in general almost entirely on their art. What is left over often in no small part consists of vanity, selfishness, pettiness, naivete, cruelty or worse. Famous examples are too numerous to list, but great insight into the psyche of a great and celebrated artist, and a classic work of literature to boot, can be found in the Autobiography of Benvenuto Cellini.
 
#54 ·
I have a completely unwarranted bias against conductor Joseph Keilberth because of my parents' shrill, ear lacerating Telefunken L.P. of the Brahms third symphony I listened to as a kid. The problem was the recording-- not the conducting; but when I see his name it triggers the memory of that horrible sounding record. Probably not coincidentally the third is also my least favorite Brahms symphony.

 
#57 ·
Simon Rattle's my musical bête noire. I've never been able to reconcile myself to his constant insistence on "doing something with" music which needs no kind of assistance from him or anyone else, but simply loyalty to the score and a committed performance thereof. The one and (so far) only thing he's done which I do like is his set of the Beethoven concertos with Brendel providing a vital counterweight at the piano.
 
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