He may have cried as he liked to quip all the way to the bank but he is poor Liberace if his legacy must be reduced to the pathetic bitchy superficial desperate for attention queen portrayed by Michael Douglas in Behind the Candelabra. Steven Soderbergh's trashy biopic about the pianist and his relationship with his young chauffeur had its premiere Sunday on HBO.
Perhaps I should refer to Liberace the way everyone else does as an entertainer rather than as a pianist. Even The Times obituary in 1987 began by noting critics were more impressed by his wardrobe than by his piano technique. Not this critic.
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As a kid I was taken by my mother who loved the pianist as much as the next mother to see Liberace's show and thought it idiotic. But the piano playing indeed impressed.
Years later I happened to meet him and found Liberace to be no idiot. We had a brief and surprisingly illuminating conversation about the piano and specifically about Paderewski's technique and interpretations. Intrigued I asked Liberace whether he would consider doing an interview about Paderewski and he beamed at the prospect of being taken seriously by a critic.
For the Record An article about Liberace's legacy misidentified the HBO film Behind the Candelabra as Beyond the Candelabra. In addition violinist Amad us Leopold was formerly known as Hahn Bin not Ha Bin.Then again Liberace beamed at anyone who showed any interest in him for any reason whatsoever. The interview never took place. His suspicious handlers weren't nearly as accommodating as the star. They couldn't be sure this wasn't some kind of set up. It was painfully obvious that under all the bling and warm smiles Liberace was fragile. His flamboyant wardrobe was his emotional armor.
This was the sensitive place behind the candelabra into which I had hoped the new film might more productively peek. Especially since classical music as with much else in show business happens to have entered a new era of bling.
For a recent recital in staid Carnegie Hall Yuja Wang wore the little orange dress that caused commotion at the Hollywood Bowl two years ago. Organist Cameron Carpenter and violinist Amad us Leopold come across in their bejeweled fashion statements as 21st century Liberacistes. Even the sober violinist Hilary Hahn showed up this month for a Walt Disney Concert Hall recital in a gown with practically a bikini top.
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Liberace hardly invented showmanship. Maybe the ancient Babylonians did. Or the cavemen. And although traditional concert dress may be formal and conservative there have always been outliers. In the '60s Seiji Ozawa exchanged white tie and tails for a white turtleneck and beads when he conducted and everyone thought that groovy. In the '70s the Kronos Quartet made the once stodgy string quartet stylish enough that David Bowie could feel at home sitting in with the string players. In the '80s violinist Nigel Kennedy sported such a punk look that he was once turned away at the backstage door of a London concerts hall where he was supposed to be soloist with a major orchestra. He got a lot of gleeful mileage out of that.
But when Liberace came onstage wearing a 135 pound ermine coat with a rhinestone lining and a 16 foot train that did take things a bit far. In Beyond the Candelabra he says he had his eureka moment when he was about to make his Hollywood Bowl debut. Looking at the black piano and the cavernous black shell he thought no one would see him garbed in concert black. But that's absurd. The traditional Bowl dress is a white jacket and the shell is lighted. His Bowl debut was in 1953 and he continued to wear normal formal concert dress throughout the '50s although he had the candelabra. Nor would Liberace ever mistake a nearly 20 000 seat venue which he sold out for a 10 000 seat one as he does in the film.
What really happened to Liberace was that in the '40s he realized he could make more money and get more attention by charming audiences and popularizing the classics than by playing them straight. He was always on the extreme side. In his early reviews he was accused of playing too fast and too slow too loud and too soft. He showed off and played to please romanticizing everything. He sounds a lot like the Lang Lang of his time.
Gradually Liberace found a way to sell himself on image and charm. It worked spectacularly well. He was for a period the highest paid entertainer on television. The clothes and lifestyle became his form of artistic expression. But he got caught in what he ultimately called an unending trap of continually having to outdo himself forced to become more and more extreme to renew his act.
That doesn't have to happen to Wang Lang Lang Carpenter Leopold (who used to be Hahn Bin if you haven't been keeping up with the Korean American violinist's Madonna approved career) or any other young fashion plates on the concert circuit. The Kronos has been annually changing its look for 40 years and has remained the most vital ensemble anywhere by commissioning hundreds of new string quartets from composers around the world.
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Still concert dress is an inescapable signifier. It creates a first if not necessarily lasting impression. There is no greater stage magic for instance than when an overweight appallingly dressed aging soprano convinces you she is Juliet. Nor would you believe just how fast Kennedy's punk peels away when his rapturous tone begins to evoke the pathos of Elgar's lost Edwardian England.
The fact is every performer is different. There are no rules. Carpenter incorporates the best of Liberace in his concert appearances. He takes style and entertainment seriously. But he also takes the organ seriously. With his new Mohawk haircut and intense playing he was an incomparable soloist in Copland's Organ Symphony with the L.A. Philharmonic last month. At the work's premiere in 1925 Walter Damrosch said that any composer who could write a symphony like this at 23 would be ready to commit murder in five years. Carpenter looked and sounded the part.
Leopold represents the worst of look at me Liberace banality. He lacks charm and has already in his early 20s gone too far letting ostentatious fashion gaudily color his musicianship. With Liberace you never really knew who he was you still don't even after all the sex lies and toupees in Beyond the Candelabra. Boastful Leopold wants you to know everything.
In Wang's case she has gotten flashier and less mechanical at the keyboard as she has grown increasingly comfortable sashaying onstage in sexy gowns. So far at least that hasn't been a bad thing.
Orchestra players suffer inevitable psychic tolls as artists always expected to blend in. The women of the L.A. Phil who got to wear designer Azzedine Ala a gowns during the orchestra's recent production of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro however seemed to have a pleased glow about them and there seemed something contagious about that in some particularly gorgeous playing. The orchestra had an aura that sure beat Casual Fridays.
Whether Liberace died content to have brightened the lives of a lot of people or angst ridden about having wasted a great musical talent is a question that Soderbergh doesn't ask. But today's musicians recognizing that there is no business like show business need to ask themselves whether crying all the way to the bank is still crying.
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