Pianists: The Boy Who Hates Circuses

For Pianist Peter Serkin, musical nirvana is being scrooched up in a recording studio retaping and re-retaping portions of some concerto. Like Glenn Gould, Serkin, 19, is one of the new strain of virtuosos who play beautiful music but in few other ways resemble the traditional concert soloist. He is totally indifferent to audiences, abhors the personality cult, is convinced that performers get in the way of the music, and that the only way to play is in the quiet privacy of the recording studio, where perfection is the only reality. “Listening to music,” he says, “should be the most intimate and personal experience. The mass excitement generated in the circus atmosphere of today’s concert halls is superficial at best, based on something that is not really essential to music.”

Peter is Pianist Rudolf Serkin’s son, but he is out to make it on his own. Since he likes to eat, he does force himself to play a public concert now and then. His recent recital at Manhattan’s Philharmonic Hall was, typically, a study in reluctance. Even his posture seemed vaguely discontented. Creeping up on the piano keyboard, he curled his bulky 6-ft. 1-in. frame into a question mark, repeatedly dipped his head as if he were literally going to play the music by ear.

His program was ambitious, a no-compromise mixture of the new, the old and the damnably difficult. In Schoenberg’s slow, brooding Five Piano Pieces, he stretched and examined each phrase with all the intense care and concentration of a surgeon. In Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations, an awesome challenge to pianists twice his age, he impetuously jiggered tempos and juggled rhythms without catching the full depth and breadth of the music. In Mozart’s Sonata in F Major, he was all lucidity and logic, rippling through the trickiest passages with an almost playful ease. His interpretations were introspective and often compellingly original; his technique was dazzling, his involvement total.

Unbearable Teas. At first glance, Serkin looks more like a folk-rocker than he does like a concert pianist. His hair is modishly shaggy, his dress casually disheveled, his talk typically teen. “It’s difficult to be an American these days,” he sighs, “especially a young one. There’s a whole generation running things who lived through the most terrible times in history—wars, the bomb, tensions, heading for disaster. I think everybody’s pressing down on us—on the young people—as a substitute for solving problems, as a release from tensions.”

Though Serkin talks like a sorrowful rebel, he is a shy, reserved lad whose most burning concern at the moment is simply growing up. It has not been easy. His father, aware of the rigors of the concert life, never encouraged him to become a musician. But in a family that rewarded the children with a nickel if they could sing a pitch-perfect F sharp first thing each morning, Peter’s future was certainly predictable.* “I first thought of being a composer,” he says. “Then I thought about conducting. Then, gradually, I became resigned to being a pianist.” At the age of eleven, he entered Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute and studied with his father in a “depersonalized relationship.” He made his formal debut at twelve, five years later began concertizing abroad—and hated every minute of it. “All those tea parties,” he shudders, “the interviews, the bouncing from one hotel room to another, the pressures—unbearable.”

Shock-Rock. Today Peter lives alone in a Manhattan apartment, which he describes as a “cave”; it is cluttered with books, 3,000 recordings, hi-fi equipment, and huge pop posters of Frankenstein and the Beatles. He has lately developed a passion for the “rugged primitivism” of rock ‘n’ roll, recently turned up at an avant-garde concert to play his Bachian treatment of the Beatles’ song Yesterday. Attired in the accepted uniform of Hans Brinker cap and rumpled corduroy jacket, he goes to Greenwich Village to hear shockrock, stays up half the night in the coffeehouses discussing philosophy and the merits of LSD. “The only reason I’m not an acidhead right now,” he says, “is that I have to play these damn concerts.”

Recordings, of course, are something else. Peter has already produced Bach’s Goldberg Variations, Schubert’s Sonata in G and Bartok’s first and third piano concertos for RCA Victor. Beginning this fall, he plans to give up concertizing altogether for at least a year so that he can devote more time to recording and study. Says his father: “Peter is developing by himself—certainly intellectually. I have no fears for his future. He has guts.”

* He is the fourth of six children. His older brother John is a French horn player with the Orlando, Fla., symphony; his four sisters are amateur musicians.