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Sakari Issakainen
Photo R. Miettinen
Author
6.5.1938
Domicile
Helsinki
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He knew he was in peak condition, but just before the performance his thoughts had begun to get out of control: as if he were looking from outside. Of course he tried to preserve the intensity he had established in his practice, to bring to the moment of performance that sense of drowning in the music, of a singing current moving powerfully and reliably, and to watch by looking at the page what kind of top-flight acrobatics were required: a combination of extreme physical relaxation and complete mastery, an accuracy of millimetres and thousandth parts, delicately motoric barely perceptible but delayed in a hair-raisingly complex series of movements, a tug-of-war-like ballet, a sort of comical tightrope-dance in which tragedy was never far way, as there was no self-respect in its movements, only in the sound, in the melodies, in the concatenations of thousands of of notes, with a list of demands placed on form, quality, and detail longer than all the centuries of music analyzed in minutes...
And it was of this, precisely this, that one could not be conscious at the moment of performance, one had to simply drown in the suction of the music.
It was easy to know that one could not know, but how was one to 'deceive' oneself?
An initial tension was natural even in the best performances and put solid technique into a shadow that followed like the crossing of threshold, a release and a growing intensity of playing. That was what it was like if one did not think: success, but probably only to those with childish minds.
An Ariadne's thread of childishness in the soloist's labyrinth...
A contradiction.
From Paratiisissa ei soi Paganini (Paganini Didn't Play In Paradise, Gummerus 1987)
Translated by David McDuff
Last updated 03/03/2010
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