Anton Kuerti: My Way
This article originally appeared in the July/August 2004 issue of International Piano magazine.
by Colin Eatock
It is a fine July evening in Parry Sound, a small Canadian town on the rocky shore of Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay, 225 kilometres north of Toronto. Perched on the edge of a piano bench in a white dinner jacket sits Anton Kuerti, deep in concentration as he plays Beethoven’s Sonata in A-flat Major, Op. 110.
From the shoulders down, Kuerti’s movements are economical, and the rest of his body barely moves at all as his fingers ripple evenly over the keys. The listeners – about 400 people in the town’s new concert hall – sit enthralled, sharing in the intensity of his performance and leaping to their feet as the final chord rings out. Kuerti has a special relationship with Parry Sound: 24 years ago, he founded its “Festival of the Sound,” a summer concert series far from any large city. Although Kuerti hasn’t actually run the festival for the last 19 years, he owns a summer cottage in the area and appears as a guest artist frequently. After the recital, as he receives compliments and signs autographs, it’s apparent that he knows many audience members personally. On this evening, Kuerti simultaneously occupies two worlds dear to him: the rugged Canadian hinterland and the classicism of Beethoven’s Vienna.
The connection to Vienna is his by right of birth: he was born in the Austrian capital in 1938, to parents who were professional scientists and also amateur musicians. But he didn’t stay long: later that year, Hitler’s Anschluss forced the Jewish Kuerti family to flee to England. From there, the Kuertis went in different directions, in search of a place to rebuild their lives: mother and child traveled to Turkey, the father to the United States. When prospects seemed brighter in the US, the infant Anton and his mother made the long voyage to America, shortly before the Second World War broke out. His father secured a position as a research assistant at the University of Rochester, in New York State.
In the US, the prodigious Kuerti studied with many teachers: Edward Goldman, Erwin Bodky, Gregory Tucker, Ernö Balogh, Arthur Loesser, Beryl Rubinstein, Rudolf Serkin and Mieczyslaw Horszowski. He made his concert debut at the age of nine, playing with the Boston Pops Orchestra, and in his teens played recitals at Boston’s Gardner Museum, Washington’s Philips Gallery and at the Marlboro Festival in Vermont. In 1957, at the age of 19, he won the Philadelphia Orchestra Youth Prize, the National Music League Award and the Leventritt Award – which included concert engagements with the orchestras of New York, Cleveland, Detroit and Pittsburgh. The New York Times praised him for the “strength and accuracy of his technique”; and the Herald Tribune glowingly reported that “the moment Anton Kuerti touches the keyboard, he unerringly unlocks the esprit of the music he performs.” By all appearances, the young pianist was a rising star on the American stage.
But that is not quite how things turned out – at least, not the “American” part. Kuerti gave his first concert in Canada in 1961 with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, filling in on short notice for Dame Myra Hess. But it was politics, not music, that ultimately led him to pack his bags and head north. A conscientious objector to the War in Vietnam, he moved to Canada in 1965, and has lived in Toronto ever since – nowadays inhabiting a modest brick townhouse in the centre of the city with his wife, cellist Kristine Bogyo. That’s where I met with him last May, to talk about his far-ranging career and interests.
“Canada has a very healthy atmosphere for good music,” he said, explaining his attachment to the country. “At the time when I came here, the United States had nothing corresponding to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It still doesn’t, because there’s no money available to speak of for public radio in the US. In Canada, the CBC contributed very much to the living of musicians. It made a determining difference in survival.”
After almost four decades in Toronto, Kuerti is in some respects more Canadian than most Canadians. This manifests itself in his love of the great outdoors, but also in other ways. He maintains an active interest in political and social affairs, often expressing his views in letters to newspapers, and he is concerned that “the sovereignty of Canada is being totally overwhelmed by US interests.” He supports such causes as Amnesty International, Oxfam and Greenpeace, and he helped create a book about whales – Whales: a Celebration – in 1983. Kuerti solicited short “whale-themed” works from various composers – receiving contributions from Leonard Bernstein, Toru Takemitsu and Rodion Shchedrin, among others, which were included in the book. (Kuerti is himself a composer: “It’s curious to be a musician and not compose,” he muses. “That’s the most creative aspect of music, to do something that is really your own – if for no other reason than to increase your admiration for the great composers!”)
Wishing to become more directly involved in politics, in 1988 Kuerti stood for Canada's parliament, representing the socialist New Democratic Party in a Toronto constituency the NDP had never won. “I got 14.7 per cent of the vote,” he recalls with a wry smile. “If you get 15 per cent, the government chips in half your expenses!” His latest foray into politics was in support of a candidate for the leadership of Canada’s right-of-centre Progressive Conservative party. His man lost the nomination.
If his politics sometimes lack winning appeal, Kuerti the musician has been well received in Canada. Upon his arrival, he began to teach piano at the University of Toronto – a position he held until 1989 – and has appeared often with the country’s major orchestras: in Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, Winnipeg and elsewhere. In addition to big-city engagements, Kuerti built a reputation for charging low fees to small-town concert societies: as a result, he has played in many small halls from the Atlantic to the Pacific. At the peak of his career, in the 1980s, he was giving about 80 recitals and concerts a year, driving his piano in a truck across the great distances that separate Canada’s isolated communities. He fondly recalls playing in Flin Flon, Manitoba, a remote mining town with a population of about 15,000, where 750 people attended his recital. And he once played in the Queen Charlotte Islands (off the coast of British Columbia) because an elderly woman wrote to him, saying how much she enjoyed his recordings on the radio and asking him to come to her town.
However, he has certainly not restricted his career to Canada. He has performed in 31 countries around the world, including most European nations and the countries of the Pacific Rim. Last year he gave a series of concerts in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. And despite his distaste for American politics, he has not shunned the US artistically. He maintains dual Canadian-American citizenship, and has appeared as a soloist with the orchestras of New York, Washington, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Denver, Detroit, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Houston and San Francisco.
Kuerti’s repertoire is firmly grounded in Viennese classicism. “For me,” he states, “it’s the greatest music that exists.” His extensive discography is dominated by a complete set of the Beethoven sonatas plus the Diabelli Variations that he recorded in 1974-75 for the now-defunct Aquitaine Records in Toronto. (The set is currently available on digitally re-mastered compact discs from the Montreal-based Analekta label.) Ten years later, he recorded all the Beethoven concertos with Sir Andrew Davis and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra for the CBC. In addition to Beethoven, he has recorded all the Schubert sonatas, as well as works by Mozart, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Scriabin and others, not to mention several Canadian composers.
CD Review magazine called him “one of the truly great pianists of this century,” and Fanfare dubbed him “the best pianist currently playing.” Yet he remains on the fringes of the pantheon. If this is not exactly by design, it’s certainly understandable, given his contrarian stance towards the classical music industry. “I don’t think classical musicians need to compete with rock and pop stars, hockey and football players,” he explains. “We claim that we’re not in it for the money, it’s not a business, it’s a spiritually enriching thing. It’s nice if we can earn a decent living – but I would find it difficult if I were getting $75,000 for a performance, to look into the eyes of the members of the violin section, who earn less than that in a year. It’s causing music to be put into halls that are far too large. And it’s emphasizing the “star” business – you go to see Ashkenazy play, you go to see Yo-Yo Ma. The biggest circus, of course, has been the Three Tenors.”
His anti-establishment inclinations were apparent back in 1975, when an article in Performing Arts in Canada magazine appeared under the headline, “Anton Kuerti’s Fight Against Fame.” Today, it’s a fight he has won hands down: no matter what praises the critics heap upon him, he has no contract with a major record label, and it seems he would rather play at a small festival in Canada’s North than at the Proms or Salzburg.
Indeed, his individualism sometimes crosses the border of eccentricity. Two years ago, during a recital in Ottawa, he suddenly stop playing in mid-movement and left the stage, returning seconds later with a screwdriver in hand. Complaining of a rattle in the piano’s action, he deftly removed the key-bed, made an adjustment to the hammers and put the instrument back together – all in about two minutes flat – resuming his performance where he left off. In the opinion of the late Canadian music critic Urjo Kareda, his attitudes and behaviour, on stage and off, have done little to enhance his professional image. “He is regarded as too unconventional,” Kareda wrote in 1988, “without having had his eccentricities beatified as a manifestation of his genius, as Glenn Gould’s, by contrast, were.”
Kuerti’s latest unconventional enthusiasm is for the music of Carl Czerny. Sandwiched historically between Beethoven (who taught him) and Liszt (whom he taught) Czerny is largely known today as the composer of The Art of Finger Dexterity. But to Kuerti he is much more. “I was looking for something that was different from the repertoire I was playing – 12 great composers or so,” he says, warming to the subject. “So I decided to spend a little time looking for things that are not known. Some years before that I had picked up some music at a music store that was going out of business. I saw this Piano Sonata No. 1 by Czerny, and I thought, ‘Oh, so Czerny wrote a piano sonata.’ I thought it might be interesting to see what he came up with. Then when I got around to it, three years later, I read through pieces by 20 different composers: Raff, Dussek, Clementi and Ries – and quite a few others. I found that this Czerny sonata was by far the most impressive, the most original, of the works I looked at.”
In 1997, Kuerti wrote a lengthy article on Czerny for Queen’s Quarterly, a Canadian academic journal, fleshing out the neglected composer’s biography and commenting on his oeuvre. In his article, Kuerti readily admits that Czerny wrote “countless shallow potboilers,” which did little to enhance his stature. But where Czerny’s best works are concerned, Kuerti holds him up as a precursor of Schubert and Mendelssohn, and describes him as “a genius of musical and pianistic creativity who should not be despised or forgotten.”
Always willing to back up his ideas with action, Kuerti has gone to considerable effort to bring Czerny’s works before the public. He often includes Czerny in his recitals, and in 1997 recorded a disc of his Piano Sonatas Nos. 1 and 3, and also his Marche funèbre sur la mort de Beethoven (Analekta FL 2 3141). In 2002, he followed this solo piano recording with a second Czerny disc, in collaboration with the Canadian violinist Erika Raum (CBC Records MVCD 1150), featuring the Grand Sonata for Pianoforte and Violin in A Major and Twenty Concert Variations in D Major for Piano and Violin on a Theme by Krumpholz.
But by far Kuerti’s biggest Czerny project to date was a festival he put together last June. Billed as “the world’s first Carl Czerny music festival,” the event took place over four days in Edmonton, Alberta. (This may seem like an unusual place for such a festival, but the University of Alberta is home to a new Austrian government-sponsored Centre for Austrian and Central European Studies, which helped to organize the event.) An impressive selection of compositions was presented: songs and choral works; organ works; piano music for two, four and six hands; three string quartets; and a Symphony in G Minor, played by the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. Kuerti believes that several of the performances were world premieres.
Is Czerny just another one of Kuerti’s non-conformist fascinations? Does he really think the world is ready to forgive the composer of all those piano exercises? “I would like to see his music known, published, played and recorded,” he says, when asked about his goals. “I would like see him resorted to his rightful place, according to his best works.” It remains to be seen whether or not Czerny can be prodded into the canon – but it’s interesting to note that the imposed work in the 1999 Queen Elisabeth Competition was Czerny’s Variations sur la Valse du Désir. His day may yet come.
Kuerti turned 65 last summer – an age when many people think of retirement. But to him it was just another birthday, and he has every intention of carrying on with his life’s work: performing, composing and studying music. And although he has no immediate plans to re-enter politics, he maintains a keen interest in the affairs of the world: he was active in the struggle to free Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli jailed for exposing that country’s nuclear-weapons program. “Einstein said that it’s not the evil people in the world who are such a danger,” observes Kuerti, summing up his philosophy, “but the majority who don’t do anything about it.”
© Colin Eatock 2004
by Colin Eatock
It is a fine July evening in Parry Sound, a small Canadian town on the rocky shore of Lake Huron’s Georgian Bay, 225 kilometres north of Toronto. Perched on the edge of a piano bench in a white dinner jacket sits Anton Kuerti, deep in concentration as he plays Beethoven’s Sonata in A-flat Major, Op. 110.
From the shoulders down, Kuerti’s movements are economical, and the rest of his body barely moves at all as his fingers ripple evenly over the keys. The listeners – about 400 people in the town’s new concert hall – sit enthralled, sharing in the intensity of his performance and leaping to their feet as the final chord rings out. Kuerti has a special relationship with Parry Sound: 24 years ago, he founded its “Festival of the Sound,” a summer concert series far from any large city. Although Kuerti hasn’t actually run the festival for the last 19 years, he owns a summer cottage in the area and appears as a guest artist frequently. After the recital, as he receives compliments and signs autographs, it’s apparent that he knows many audience members personally. On this evening, Kuerti simultaneously occupies two worlds dear to him: the rugged Canadian hinterland and the classicism of Beethoven’s Vienna.
The connection to Vienna is his by right of birth: he was born in the Austrian capital in 1938, to parents who were professional scientists and also amateur musicians. But he didn’t stay long: later that year, Hitler’s Anschluss forced the Jewish Kuerti family to flee to England. From there, the Kuertis went in different directions, in search of a place to rebuild their lives: mother and child traveled to Turkey, the father to the United States. When prospects seemed brighter in the US, the infant Anton and his mother made the long voyage to America, shortly before the Second World War broke out. His father secured a position as a research assistant at the University of Rochester, in New York State.
In the US, the prodigious Kuerti studied with many teachers: Edward Goldman, Erwin Bodky, Gregory Tucker, Ernö Balogh, Arthur Loesser, Beryl Rubinstein, Rudolf Serkin and Mieczyslaw Horszowski. He made his concert debut at the age of nine, playing with the Boston Pops Orchestra, and in his teens played recitals at Boston’s Gardner Museum, Washington’s Philips Gallery and at the Marlboro Festival in Vermont. In 1957, at the age of 19, he won the Philadelphia Orchestra Youth Prize, the National Music League Award and the Leventritt Award – which included concert engagements with the orchestras of New York, Cleveland, Detroit and Pittsburgh. The New York Times praised him for the “strength and accuracy of his technique”; and the Herald Tribune glowingly reported that “the moment Anton Kuerti touches the keyboard, he unerringly unlocks the esprit of the music he performs.” By all appearances, the young pianist was a rising star on the American stage.
But that is not quite how things turned out – at least, not the “American” part. Kuerti gave his first concert in Canada in 1961 with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, filling in on short notice for Dame Myra Hess. But it was politics, not music, that ultimately led him to pack his bags and head north. A conscientious objector to the War in Vietnam, he moved to Canada in 1965, and has lived in Toronto ever since – nowadays inhabiting a modest brick townhouse in the centre of the city with his wife, cellist Kristine Bogyo. That’s where I met with him last May, to talk about his far-ranging career and interests.
“Canada has a very healthy atmosphere for good music,” he said, explaining his attachment to the country. “At the time when I came here, the United States had nothing corresponding to the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. It still doesn’t, because there’s no money available to speak of for public radio in the US. In Canada, the CBC contributed very much to the living of musicians. It made a determining difference in survival.”
After almost four decades in Toronto, Kuerti is in some respects more Canadian than most Canadians. This manifests itself in his love of the great outdoors, but also in other ways. He maintains an active interest in political and social affairs, often expressing his views in letters to newspapers, and he is concerned that “the sovereignty of Canada is being totally overwhelmed by US interests.” He supports such causes as Amnesty International, Oxfam and Greenpeace, and he helped create a book about whales – Whales: a Celebration – in 1983. Kuerti solicited short “whale-themed” works from various composers – receiving contributions from Leonard Bernstein, Toru Takemitsu and Rodion Shchedrin, among others, which were included in the book. (Kuerti is himself a composer: “It’s curious to be a musician and not compose,” he muses. “That’s the most creative aspect of music, to do something that is really your own – if for no other reason than to increase your admiration for the great composers!”)
Wishing to become more directly involved in politics, in 1988 Kuerti stood for Canada's parliament, representing the socialist New Democratic Party in a Toronto constituency the NDP had never won. “I got 14.7 per cent of the vote,” he recalls with a wry smile. “If you get 15 per cent, the government chips in half your expenses!” His latest foray into politics was in support of a candidate for the leadership of Canada’s right-of-centre Progressive Conservative party. His man lost the nomination.
If his politics sometimes lack winning appeal, Kuerti the musician has been well received in Canada. Upon his arrival, he began to teach piano at the University of Toronto – a position he held until 1989 – and has appeared often with the country’s major orchestras: in Montreal, Vancouver, Ottawa, Winnipeg and elsewhere. In addition to big-city engagements, Kuerti built a reputation for charging low fees to small-town concert societies: as a result, he has played in many small halls from the Atlantic to the Pacific. At the peak of his career, in the 1980s, he was giving about 80 recitals and concerts a year, driving his piano in a truck across the great distances that separate Canada’s isolated communities. He fondly recalls playing in Flin Flon, Manitoba, a remote mining town with a population of about 15,000, where 750 people attended his recital. And he once played in the Queen Charlotte Islands (off the coast of British Columbia) because an elderly woman wrote to him, saying how much she enjoyed his recordings on the radio and asking him to come to her town.
However, he has certainly not restricted his career to Canada. He has performed in 31 countries around the world, including most European nations and the countries of the Pacific Rim. Last year he gave a series of concerts in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. And despite his distaste for American politics, he has not shunned the US artistically. He maintains dual Canadian-American citizenship, and has appeared as a soloist with the orchestras of New York, Washington, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Atlanta, Denver, Detroit, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, Houston and San Francisco.
Kuerti’s repertoire is firmly grounded in Viennese classicism. “For me,” he states, “it’s the greatest music that exists.” His extensive discography is dominated by a complete set of the Beethoven sonatas plus the Diabelli Variations that he recorded in 1974-75 for the now-defunct Aquitaine Records in Toronto. (The set is currently available on digitally re-mastered compact discs from the Montreal-based Analekta label.) Ten years later, he recorded all the Beethoven concertos with Sir Andrew Davis and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra for the CBC. In addition to Beethoven, he has recorded all the Schubert sonatas, as well as works by Mozart, Brahms, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Chopin, Liszt, Scriabin and others, not to mention several Canadian composers.
CD Review magazine called him “one of the truly great pianists of this century,” and Fanfare dubbed him “the best pianist currently playing.” Yet he remains on the fringes of the pantheon. If this is not exactly by design, it’s certainly understandable, given his contrarian stance towards the classical music industry. “I don’t think classical musicians need to compete with rock and pop stars, hockey and football players,” he explains. “We claim that we’re not in it for the money, it’s not a business, it’s a spiritually enriching thing. It’s nice if we can earn a decent living – but I would find it difficult if I were getting $75,000 for a performance, to look into the eyes of the members of the violin section, who earn less than that in a year. It’s causing music to be put into halls that are far too large. And it’s emphasizing the “star” business – you go to see Ashkenazy play, you go to see Yo-Yo Ma. The biggest circus, of course, has been the Three Tenors.”
His anti-establishment inclinations were apparent back in 1975, when an article in Performing Arts in Canada magazine appeared under the headline, “Anton Kuerti’s Fight Against Fame.” Today, it’s a fight he has won hands down: no matter what praises the critics heap upon him, he has no contract with a major record label, and it seems he would rather play at a small festival in Canada’s North than at the Proms or Salzburg.
Indeed, his individualism sometimes crosses the border of eccentricity. Two years ago, during a recital in Ottawa, he suddenly stop playing in mid-movement and left the stage, returning seconds later with a screwdriver in hand. Complaining of a rattle in the piano’s action, he deftly removed the key-bed, made an adjustment to the hammers and put the instrument back together – all in about two minutes flat – resuming his performance where he left off. In the opinion of the late Canadian music critic Urjo Kareda, his attitudes and behaviour, on stage and off, have done little to enhance his professional image. “He is regarded as too unconventional,” Kareda wrote in 1988, “without having had his eccentricities beatified as a manifestation of his genius, as Glenn Gould’s, by contrast, were.”
Kuerti’s latest unconventional enthusiasm is for the music of Carl Czerny. Sandwiched historically between Beethoven (who taught him) and Liszt (whom he taught) Czerny is largely known today as the composer of The Art of Finger Dexterity. But to Kuerti he is much more. “I was looking for something that was different from the repertoire I was playing – 12 great composers or so,” he says, warming to the subject. “So I decided to spend a little time looking for things that are not known. Some years before that I had picked up some music at a music store that was going out of business. I saw this Piano Sonata No. 1 by Czerny, and I thought, ‘Oh, so Czerny wrote a piano sonata.’ I thought it might be interesting to see what he came up with. Then when I got around to it, three years later, I read through pieces by 20 different composers: Raff, Dussek, Clementi and Ries – and quite a few others. I found that this Czerny sonata was by far the most impressive, the most original, of the works I looked at.”
In 1997, Kuerti wrote a lengthy article on Czerny for Queen’s Quarterly, a Canadian academic journal, fleshing out the neglected composer’s biography and commenting on his oeuvre. In his article, Kuerti readily admits that Czerny wrote “countless shallow potboilers,” which did little to enhance his stature. But where Czerny’s best works are concerned, Kuerti holds him up as a precursor of Schubert and Mendelssohn, and describes him as “a genius of musical and pianistic creativity who should not be despised or forgotten.”
Always willing to back up his ideas with action, Kuerti has gone to considerable effort to bring Czerny’s works before the public. He often includes Czerny in his recitals, and in 1997 recorded a disc of his Piano Sonatas Nos. 1 and 3, and also his Marche funèbre sur la mort de Beethoven (Analekta FL 2 3141). In 2002, he followed this solo piano recording with a second Czerny disc, in collaboration with the Canadian violinist Erika Raum (CBC Records MVCD 1150), featuring the Grand Sonata for Pianoforte and Violin in A Major and Twenty Concert Variations in D Major for Piano and Violin on a Theme by Krumpholz.
But by far Kuerti’s biggest Czerny project to date was a festival he put together last June. Billed as “the world’s first Carl Czerny music festival,” the event took place over four days in Edmonton, Alberta. (This may seem like an unusual place for such a festival, but the University of Alberta is home to a new Austrian government-sponsored Centre for Austrian and Central European Studies, which helped to organize the event.) An impressive selection of compositions was presented: songs and choral works; organ works; piano music for two, four and six hands; three string quartets; and a Symphony in G Minor, played by the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra. Kuerti believes that several of the performances were world premieres.
Is Czerny just another one of Kuerti’s non-conformist fascinations? Does he really think the world is ready to forgive the composer of all those piano exercises? “I would like to see his music known, published, played and recorded,” he says, when asked about his goals. “I would like see him resorted to his rightful place, according to his best works.” It remains to be seen whether or not Czerny can be prodded into the canon – but it’s interesting to note that the imposed work in the 1999 Queen Elisabeth Competition was Czerny’s Variations sur la Valse du Désir. His day may yet come.
Kuerti turned 65 last summer – an age when many people think of retirement. But to him it was just another birthday, and he has every intention of carrying on with his life’s work: performing, composing and studying music. And although he has no immediate plans to re-enter politics, he maintains a keen interest in the affairs of the world: he was active in the struggle to free Mordechai Vanunu, an Israeli jailed for exposing that country’s nuclear-weapons program. “Einstein said that it’s not the evil people in the world who are such a danger,” observes Kuerti, summing up his philosophy, “but the majority who don’t do anything about it.”
© Colin Eatock 2004
