David, thank you for taking the time to speak with Occhi Magazine. When you think back to your earliest memories of music, what do you remember first: a sound, a feeling, or a person? How did that first “spark” shape you?
Growing up in a musical family, music was present everywhere all the time. I do remember the first time I was deeply emotionally moved in a concert, hearing the Mendelssohn violin concerto. I must have been around 3 or 4 years old. At around the same time, I would have been plunking out notes on the piano we had at home, just getting used to its sound and trying to pick out melodies I might have heard.
The piano has been called an entire orchestra in one instrument. What was it about the piano, specifically, that made you choose it as your primary voice?
This orchestral aspect of the piano is precisely what drew me to it, and what has kept me interested in exploring it for all these years. I always tell myself, and my students, “don’t just play the piano when you play the piano,” which reflects my desire always to find orchestral colors hidden in the black and white of the keyboard. I love to also imagine the different fingers and voices in my hands as members of an ensemble — individuals each playing in their own way, and not always perfectly together!
Was there a moment when the piano stopped being an activity and became an identity—when you realised, this is what I do? What triggered that shift?
With the delusion only a child can have, I’m sure I already identified as a pianist well before I could actually play it. I entertained the notion of doing something else with my life professionally, especially during some less than fully motivated years during my teens, but eventually it became clear I had “no choice” but to do this one thing I really loved doing.
Discipline is a word musicians hear constantly, but it can mean very different things. What does “discipline” look like in your daily life now, and how has that definition changed since your student years?
Now that I have a pretty busy life filled with a university teaching post, performing quite a lot, and involvement with two non-profit organizations I’m very passionate about, discipline means practicing efficiently and with clear objectives. I just can’t take for granted having hours and hours at a time to meander through repertoire. This is hard for me — I’m fairly certain that were I born more recently than the early 80’s, I would have been diagnosed with some form of ADHD — so it’s much more natural for me to toggle between unrelated tasks than to bear down and focus at the keyboard. But now, I have no choice but to do just that!
When you’re learning a new work, what’s your process from first read-through to performance-ready—and where do you allow yourself to be messy before you become precise?
I am very much an architectural learner: I start with trying to understand the blueprint, laying a foundation, and eventually, I get to polishing door handles. I zoom in to attend to details and precision as needed, but this process means that a fair amount of imprecision remains in the mix for me at very late stages of learning. I also have to say that while professionalism is very important to me, I find perfectionism highly dubious as an artistic goal. I try to play as well as I can, but so much music making today fetishizes precision and sounds to my taste overly planned — we have gotten too far away from the improvisational side of performance.
You studied with Claude Frank, Walter Ponce, and Miyoko Lotto. What did each of them give you that still shows up in your hands today—and what did they challenge in you that you didn’t want to face at the time?
I was fortunate to work with each of these teachers for long stretches of time, and so I don’t exactly know where the influence of each one begins and ends. All three of them are deeply integral to my thinking, listening, and playing. I have to credit Miyoko with everything foundational about the way I approach the instrument, and for having the desire always to make the piano sing. Walter taught me to do my homework but also to trust my instincts, and a great deal about loyalty and decency as a human being. And Claude Frank taught me to seek rhythmic eloquence — how to rhyme phrases in a way that I didn’t quite understand before. More fundamentally, he also taught me to care only about music and people, and not to worry at all about career.
Mentors like Anton Kuerti, Richard Goode, and Emanuel Ax are known for very different kinds of musical intelligence. Was there a piece of advice you received that sounded simple, but took years to actually understand?
I’m never sure I understand anything, even after many years of supposedly “knowing” something, but of course each of these incredible pianists has said things to me that continue to resonate, and shift in their meaning. It occurs to me that Kuerti, Goode, and Ax all share the traits of radical humility and endless curiosity — all three are people who never feel they have the answers, even when they probably do.
Your programmes often interweave classical, contemporary, and newly commissioned works. What are you trying to prove, or perhaps disprove, when you place those worlds side by side?
A chef should first of all like the food they serve, and so these mixed programs are just the sort of concerts that interest me most. I recognize that some audience members love exclusively new music, and some prefer well-trodden, familiar, classics. Personally, however, I find that I don’t engage as deeply with a new work if I hear it as part of a procession of such pieces; and similarly, I tend to find repetitions of the same standard repertoire (no matter how “great”) a little tedious. On the other hand, I feel that thoughtful juxtaposition of new and old music allows each to illuminate and enliven the other.
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In projects like Quasi una Fantasia, you explore the grey area between composition and improvisation. What does improvisation teach you about interpretation, and what does interpretation teach you about freedom?
Improvisation has been a part of my practice since day one, and so I frankly can’t imagine what my process of interpretation would be like without it. Improvisation teaches me constantly to suppose what a composer “might have done instead,” and perhaps to recognize what elements in a written-out score are fundamental to its structure, as opposed what elements are part of a more limpid and malleable surface. The incredible paradox is to grapple with how these two sides of a composition are intertwined — one example of this would be the “written out improvised prelude” at the beginning of Chopin’s Ballade no. 4, which worms its way into the architecture, while remaining incidental relative to the main tune, the main stuff of the piece. Beethoven also blurs this boundary between structure and surface, improvisation and composition, in the most beguiling way, and the Romantics all followed in his footsteps. The Op. 101 Sonata is a fantastic example, and perhaps for this reason it was one of Wagner’s favorite pieces.
“New Dances of the League of David” is both a concept and a statement. What did that project cost you—time, doubt, risk—and what did it give back that a more conventional path wouldn’t have?
This project, integrating the Davidsbündlertänze of Schumann with music by a dozen or so of my contemporaries, gave me so much more than I can articulate here. The most cherished aspect I suppose has been the opportunity to work with some of the most interesting and wonderful composers I know. I started thinking about the project in the early 2010s, and I still perform the pieces today; so while it has occupied a long period in my life, I would not say it has cost me much. I also did not consider there to be much risk in the project, though I of course realized that it might not result in something aesthetically coherent, and I knew that many people would not appreciate it. But the project made intuitive sense to me at the time, and while it’s far from perfect as a musical structure, it still makes sense to me now. Schumann’s music is all about fragmentation, palimpsest, and the illusion of multiple authorship — so my project of expanding one of his scores with music by others felt like a logical extension.
Musicians’ lives are full of peaks and private valleys. What has been your lowest moment as an artist—not necessarily professionally, but internally, and what practices (or people) helped you rebuild?
I remember the point of pursuing conducting studies as being a particularly difficult moment, of entertaining the prospect of what I might have had to give up in order to pursue that path properly. I also would have to cite the COVID pandemic, but of course, that affected all of us in existential ways.
On the other side, what milestone felt the most surreal: a debut at a major hall, a rave review, a premiere, a recording nomination—and why that one?
Every performance is equally challenging, and most are extremely rewarding, so I have to say very honestly that I am grateful for every opportunity to perform. In the moment, each concert feels like the first, last, and most important one, so I try hard not to sift them into a hierarchy, or chart my “career” across them like dots on a graph. I will say that one concert jumps to mind because it was so different from the usual — the opportunity to play Glass’ epic Music in 12 Parts with an incredible group of musicians organized by the organist James McVinnie, which was presented by the Barbican in 2017.
The nature of this piece is that you don’t really fully play it till the performance — it’s just too long and indeterminate to be thoroughly rehearsed. So the experience of actually playing this piece, melding with this unique group of intensely focused musicians and communing with a rapt audience for hours on end, was utterly transcendent. Certain long-term collaborations have also been very meaningful to develop over many years. These include my ongoing collaboration with the conductor Anthony Parnther, who is one of the most consummate musicians I know, or my two decades playing with the composer-pianist Timo Andres, who is sort of a once-in-a-generation musical mind. I also have cherished the opportunity to play chamber music with all my colleagues in Decoda, the affiliate ensemble of Carnegie Hall, which is a mixed instrumentation collective that devotes equal energy to community engagement of various kinds. One of these musicians in Decoda happens to be my wife, the flutist Catherine Gregory, who every day inspires me as we collaborate on various recitals and other projects.
Your new album of Brahms Violin Sonatas (Nos. 1–3) with your father, Mark Kaplan, is your first full-length recording together. Why did now feel like the right time, artistically and personally, to document that relationship in such a monumental repertoire?
These Brahms sonatas are a high point of the repertoire, because they reimagine what two instruments can accomplish together, texturally, structurally, rhetorically, dramatically, and poetically. We had been playing these pieces on and off for many years, and so it felt right to try and make this record together. Frankly, we just hadn’t had the opportunity to make a proper recording together till now, but it feels as if it were overdue.
In the studio, did you find yourselves relating more as father and son, or as equal collaborators—and was there a moment where those roles collided surprisingly?
I played a lot with my dad as a child and adolescent performer, and even then, he always treated me as if I had been an equal collaborator. Now, as two adults, we certainly approach one another as equal collaborators, but with perhaps the added dimension of love, trust, and occasionally the constructive and safe tension that only family can share.
Brahms wrote these sonatas with an intimate, conversational kind of intensity. What did recording them with your father reveal about listening—about trust, timing, and the unspoken history between two musicians who share a life as well as a score?
The process of preparing and recording these special works taught me to let go of any predeterminations I might have been holding — about phrasing, sonority, and even the underlying spirit of the music. I have always been inspired by how attentive to the moment Dad is when playing chamber music, and playing with him means embracing the challenge and intensity of that level of listening. I certainly hope that comes across in our recording.
For further information on the artist, please visit the following links:
davidkaplanpiano.com | orchidclassics.com
Photography by Dario Acosta provided, courtesy of Jenson Artists
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