Paul Jacobs (pianist)


Paul Jacobs was an American pianist. He was best known for his performances of twentieth-century music but also gained wide recognition for his work with early keyboards, performing frequently with Baroque ensembles.

Biography

Education

Paul Jacobs was born in New York City and attended PS 95 and DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx and studied at the Juilliard School, where his teacher was Ernest Hutcheson. He became a soloist with Robert Craft's Chamber Arts Society and played with the Composer's Forum. He made his official New York debut in 1951. Reviewing that concert, Ross Parmenter described him in The New York Times as 'a young man of individual tastes with an experimental approach to the keyboard that he already has mastered.'

Europe in the 1950s

He moved to France after his graduation in 1951. There he began his long association with Pierre Boulez, playing frequently in his Domaine musical concerts, which introduced many of the key works of the early twentieth-century to post-war Paris. At a single concert in 1954, which must have lasted close to five hours and also included works by Stravinsky, Debussy and Varèse, Jacobs contributed chamber music by Berg, Webern and Bartók and gave the première of a new work by Michel Philippot. In a 1958 Domaine concert he played a work written for him by the 21-year-old Richard Rodney Bennett, his Cycle 2 for Paul Jacobs.
He acted as rehearsal pianist for the incidental music which Boulez wrote for Jean-Louis Barrault's production of the Oresteia in 1955. Jacobs later said that meeting Boulez had put an end to his own composing ambitions: 'I just gave it up. I wouldn't have dared show anything of mine to Boulez.'
During his time in Europe he appeared as soloist with the Orchestre National de Paris and the Cologne Orchestra and made many radio broadcasts. He played for the International Society for Contemporary Music in Italy and at the International Vacation Courses for new music at Darmstadt. For the 1957 course, Wolfgang Steinecke invited him to give the European première of Stockhausen's Klavierstück XI, a key work in the development of 'controlled chance' and this may have been at the composer's suggestion.
Like many musicians with a commitment to new music, his existence was frugal. For broadcasts he would be paid as little as $5, which went up to $25 when he played the premiere of the Henze Piano Concerto 'because of the special difficulty of the piece'. He lived in a hotel 'with a window facing a wall so that I had to go outside to see what the weather was. There was room only for a bed and a piano and a little alcohol burner to make stew on.' Around this time he became a close friend of the French painter, whom he described as an important influence.

New York 1960-83

Tired of trying to live on $500 a year, he returned to New York in 1960 with the assistance of Aaron Copland who arranged for some teaching work at Tanglewood. In November and December 1961 he gave a pair of Town Hall recitals, mixing Boulez and Copland, Stockhausen and Debussy. The New York Times described them as 'just about overwhelming... make no mistake, Mr Jacobs is a virtuoso even in the traditional sense'. He made his recital debut as a harpsichordist at Carnegie Hall in February 1966 with a programme which included Bach, Haydn and the Falla Harpsichord Concerto.
During the 1960s and 1970s he continued to give solo recitals and played frequently for the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He performed with the Fromm Fellowship Players at Tanglewood, Gunther Schuller's Contemporary Innovations and Arthur Weisberg's Contemporary Chamber Ensemble. He taught at Tanglewood and at the Mannes and Manhattan music schools in New York. For the last fifteen years of his life he was Associate Professor of Music at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York.
Jacobs was the New York Philharmonic's official pianist and harpsichordist until his death. He held the post during the tenure of three music directors. He can be heard as soloist in Bernstein's recording of Messiaen's Trois petites liturgies and both Boulez's and Mehta's recordings of Stravinsky's Petrushka. He is the pianist in the NYPO recording of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue used by Woody Allen in the opening of his film Manhattan.
He had a long collaboration with the American composer Elliott Carter, recording most of Carter's solo piano music and ensemble works with keyboard, including the Double Concerto for Harpsichord and Piano, With Two Chamber Orchestras, the Cello Sonata and the Sonata for Flute, Oboe, Cello and Harpsichord. He was one of the four American pianists who commissioned Carter's large-scale solo piano work Night Fantasies, the others being Charles Rosen, Gilbert Kalish and Ursula Oppens. It was Jacobs who organised the consortium after he and Oppens realised that Carter's previous reluctance to accept a commission for a new solo piano work from one pianist might have been born out of a desire not to offend others. He gave the New York premiere of the work in November 1981. All of Jacobs's Carter recordings were re-issued by Nonesuch in 2009 as part of a Carter retrospective set.
He also gave first performances of music by George Crumb, Berio, Henze, Messiaen and Sessions and commissioned Frederic Rzewski's Four North American Ballads in 1979. Aaron Copland called him 'more than a pianist. He brings to his piano a passion for the contemporary and a breadth of musical and general culture such as is rare.'

Death

He died of an AIDS-related illness in 1983, one of the first prominent artists to succumb to the disease. At his funeral on September 27, 1983, Elliott Carter delivered a eulogy, recalling his friendship and collaboration with Jacobs dating back to the mid-1950s. A memorial concert held at New York's Symphony Space on February 24, 1984 was attended by some of America's most eminent composers and interpreters. The music ranged from Josquin to two new compositions dedicated to Jacobs. Pierre Boulez wrote in the programme: 'twentieth-century music owes him thanks for all the talent he generously put at its disposal.'
Bolcom included a lament for Jacobs as the slow movement of his 1983 Violin Concerto and dedicated his Pulitzer Prize-winning 12 New Etudes to him. He had begun to compose them for Jacobs in 1977 and completed them after his death. Jacobs was also one of the friends and colleagues commemorated by John Corigliano in his Symphony No. 1.

Repertoire and style

Although Jacobs was associated with some of the most challenging music of the modernist tradition, his colleague Gilbert Kalish stressed that 'far from being an "intellectual performer", Paul was the most intuitive and spontaneous kind of musician. Few who heard him play will ever forget the splashing brilliance of his runs, the glitter of his attacks, his aristocratic sense of rhythm and phrasing... I have never seen anyone play the piano with such feline grace and alertness.'
Of his commitment to contemporary music, Jacobs himself said this: 'I feel absolutely perplexed at times why performers don't feel at home with the music of their own century. The music that hit me first when I was an adolescent was the music of the beginning of the century, all the way up through Stravinsky, even in his later years. It just doesn't pose any stylistic problems, it's as easy to speak as if you were reading the newspaper, I just know what to do with it.'
Perhaps the composer with whom he is now most closely associated is Debussy, most of whose major piano works he recorded, including the Préludes, Etudes, Images and Estampes. His was one of the first recordings of Debussy's three 1894 Images, which had only recently been published. Writing of a reissue of one of these recordings in 2002, the Gramophone commented: 'Hearing Paul Jacobs... is a sharp and salutary reminder of a novel‚ vigorous and superbly uncluttered view of Debussy... one which stresses the composer’s revolutionary fervour. The power and focus of these performances remain astonishing with opalescent mists and hazes burnt away to reveal a corruscating wit and vitality. There is absolutely nothing here of the decadent and lethargic man of popular imagination. Throughout‚ Jacobs' commitment to every note of Debussy’s phantasmagoric visions is total. All his recordings should be reissued.'

Discography

Early recordings

Jacobs began his recording career in Europe in the 1950s. One of his first records was of Beethoven's Second Piano Concerto with the Paris Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by René Leibowitz, coupled with Leibowitz's own realisation of Beethoven's Piano Concerto in E flat major of 1784, written when Beethoven was 14 and of which only the piano part survives. In Paris in 1956 he gave the first complete cycle in a single concert of the Schoenberg piano music, going on to record it for the Véga label. He also acted as producer on recordings conducted by René Leibowitz, including the first LP recording of Schoenberg's Gurrelieder. He was the harpsichord soloist in the 1968 Columbia recording of the Carter Double Concerto with Charles Rosen and the English Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Frederick Prausnitz. and played on the 1970 CRI recording of Morton Feldman's The Viola in My Life.

Nonesuch LPs

His reputation as a recording artist rests largely on a series of LPs he made for the American Nonesuch label, for most of which he wrote a wide-ranging accompanying essay. Beginning in 1968 and 1973 with chamber and concertante works by Carter, from 1976 onwards he concentrated on the solo and duet repertoire. Most have remained available over the years thanks to CD reissues by Nonesuch and, later, by Warner. The small American label has also done much to keep Jacobs' recorded legacy before the public. In 2008 Arbiter released a two-CD set of the Stravinsky two piano / four-hand repertoire, coupled with some previously unpublished live recordings by Jacobs. They have also reissued his recordings of the piano music of Busoni, whom Jacobs considered 'the great underrated master of the twentieth century'.
The list of the Nonesuch LPs is in chronological order, with CD reissues under each entry.