Welcome back to another episode of the PianoPod.
I am your host, Yukimi Song.
So today for my audience exclusively, I'm going to take you on a quick trip to New York
City's famous Lincoln Center, and more specifically, the backstage of the David H. Koch Theater,
home to one of the most renowned ballet companies in the world.
So for this episode, I got to interview Dr. Alan Moverman, piano soloist at New York City
Ballet.
For his 20-year career at the company, he has performed concerti and solo repertoire
in prominent concert venues worldwide and worked closely with the most celebrated choreographers,
such as Alexey Ratmansky, Jerome Robbins, who was actually the choreographer of the
original West Side Story, and Justin Peck.
And more.
Before getting started, I want to welcome everyone listening or watching the PianoPod
for the first time.
I'm a classical pianist and educator from New York City, passionate about creating a
thriving and meaningful community of the classical music industry through this podcast.
Please visit yukimisongstudio.com to find out more about my work.
In each episode of the PianoPod, I interview a guest speaker who has been breaking exciting
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So here we go.
Are you ready, dear friends?
Please enjoy the show.
You are listening to the PianoPod, where we talk to the brightest minds in the industry
about how they are bringing the piano into the 21st century.
I am honored to welcome Dr. Alan Moverman, a piano soloist at New York City Ballet.
So Alan, welcome to the PianoPod and thanks for being here today.
I appreciate the opportunity.
That's great.
I'm so excited to get to know the world of ballet today by talking to you as I'm not
familiar with what really goes into the production of ballet programs.
And I enjoy listening to ballet music and attending shows.
And to be honest, I did a few years of ballet lessons as a kid for five years or so.
And my experience and knowledge of what it takes to put together a ballet program stops
right there.
So I can't wait for you to take us to the backstage of David H. Koch's theater, which
is home to New York City Ballet and to be exposed to the ballet world and hear what's
like to work with the most celebrated dancers and choreographers and what it takes to be
a solo pianist at one of the most celebrated ballet companies in the world.
So Alan, I want to start with this question.
Oh, by the way, where are you tuning in from today?
Oh, this is the Koch Theater at Lincoln Center.
You can see there's a ballet bar behind me.
I know.
And then there's a piano next to me.
Oh, wonderful.
This is a very small rehearsal room.
The ballet company is really lucky because we have rehearsal rooms in the Rose Building,
which is where Julliard is.
Also, huge, huge rehearsal rooms.
When I do gigs with some modern companies on occasion, they'll come into the studios
and they'll just be like, I can't believe this.
You know, it's like the most beautiful studios with also gorgeous light and huge 15 feet
windows throughout the...
It's really gorgeous.
But the dancers really deserve it because it's, as you know, it's an incredibly difficult
career for them.
And you know, they've made it a long way to be here.
You know, we want them to have the best possible conditions to work in.
Well, thank you for showing me the room.
It's gorgeous.
I mean, it's such an exciting...
Exciting happens in that room.
So that's incredible.
What is the job description of ballet pianist of this major ballet company?
What are the responsibilities?
Well, we have a really large repertoire here and a lot of it is quite complex.
We have 30 active Stravinsky ballets in the repertoire.
Oh my goodness.
So obviously, Stravinsky can be complicated and we play them all or virtually all of them
in rehearsals for the dancers on the piano.
So I would say one of the primary job descriptions is to be able to realize piano reductions
and hopefully imitate the orchestra sound.
Also you need to have or develop kind of sophisticated sense of rhythm because the dancers are very
sensitive to the speed of music and there are other parameters in music also.
Well, just talking about the rhythmic parameter, they need a lot of steadiness, a kind of steadiness
that is a kind of default position.
And as we all know as pianists, rhythm is one of the things we study.
Rhythm is a living thing.
It's flexible.
It's rooted in dance.
It's rooted in our bodies.
It's something we always need to work on, but it's something dancers need a sense of
predictability in the rhythm.
How are you going to be able to match the orchestra?
Because after the rehearsal with pianists like yourself, then they're moving into orchestra.
So what's the transition like?
That's one of the pedagogical problems with rehearsal with piano versus orchestra.
And I think it's important for people who do this job to constantly listen as much as
possible to the orchestra version of the piece they're playing because in specific ways,
like what instrument is prominent, but also in subtle ways like the type of rhythm an
orchestra plays.
Like I can give you a good example.
It might be fun to play a little bit.
So this is from one of Tchaikovsky's well-known pieces.
It's called Serenade for Strings.
So that piece I was practicing the other day.
And I realized that the way I play it, it sounds nice.
It's like a Chopin nocturne almost.
But orchestras have a broader kind of sound.
So then I think a little more careful, not really careful, but play on the more subdivided
way.
But orchestras have to line up vertically, so you can't do like as much.
They would do this kind of thing.
So instead of playing with fluidity, you want to be more metronomical.
I don't want to say that term.
It's not physical, but a kind of more classical rhythm in a way.
And also, orchestra music is by definition has a public sound.
So when you're dealing with a public sound, you're going to be dealing with things that
are easier to understand, that everyone can understand in a nice way.
So if you play this, it's very beautiful, but it's intimate.
The public might want...
You hear the difference?
It's very hard when you play ballet, piano, not to get caught up in...
If I played it the first way, they might say, oh, that's beautiful.
That's great.
Or they might say, it feels a little too fast.
So it's important not to get caught up in the fact that I did something wrong.
I just didn't do it in the best possible way for them at the moment.
Because once you get into...
It's very easy to get into self-criticism of your rhythm in ballet.
So it's better to forthrightly play what you feel and then adjust than to always be like,
what do they need?
What do they need?
Another thing I was practicing, there's a beautiful...
And the other morning I was listening to the orchestra version, I was saying, well, maybe
better.
It's different.
Speaking of that, how about playing...
Those are orchestra reductions.
So during rehearsals, you're playing orchestra reductions most of the time, such as...
Most of the time in rehearsals, yeah.
So that must be really challenging.
I've done accompanying for violin concerto and everything.
Playing the entire score.
I left out a lot of notes, but it is a little different than playing accompanying a violinist
or a singer because you tend to pick...
The melody is generally being carried by another instrument.
You have to play the melody and you have to indicate as much of the sense of the orchestration
as possible.
Which is wonderful if you accompany people too, but doesn't always happen and isn't even
always desirable, partly because it almost requires you to play the piece as if you're
a soloist.
Wow, you're right.
But what's the secret to playing them well?
There are a lot of different ones, different elements.
Listen a lot to orchestras, try to think about what the emotional effect is of hearing an
orchestra, which is very different than hearing a solo pianist.
Although there's a lot of overlap, of course.
Also I learned there are very few books on the subject, but there's a very good book
on accompanying by Martin Katz, who was a famous vocal accompanist for Friedrich von
Stad and lots of Marilyn Horn.
He was great, great.
I studied with him a little bit and he wrote a book about accompanying men.
I can't quite remember the name of the book, but he did have a chapter on playing orchestra
reductions.
I've never seen any other book.
I think there's a Robert Spillman book also that has a chapter on playing orchestra reductions.
He taught at Eastman for many years and was also a spectacular vocal accompanist.
I actually studied with him as well, but they both wrote good books.
Probably Bob Spillman's book is out of print, unfortunately, and it was an amazing book.
I'll have to look on one of the websites and pay $300 to buy the out of print book, which
to be honest with you, I almost would because that's how good it was.
Do you come up with your own piano track transcriptions as well?
Well, I can show you what I was just playing off.
For most of music history, there weren't recordings, so almost everything written up to about 1950
has a piano version, which is kind of fun to know if you like orchestra music and you're
a pianist.
You can really find online or IMSLIP, you can find almost any of your favorite Beethoven
symphonies or Brahms symphonies in piano arrangements or at least in four-hand arrangements.
That's where we get our reductions for the most part.
If it's a contemporary piece, someone has to make one.
It could be another pianist or we could hire it out to someone who does that thing.
I've done some myself.
I probably have played close to 100 ballets here.
Most of them are about between 35 and 60 pages long.
I could probably get through pretty well 50 ballets, just sit at the piano and play cover
to cover.
What does your day as a solo pianist for a major ballet company look like?
How does your day start?
Are you with dancers at the piano all day long?
I rehearse between, generally between three hours and five hours a day.
Usually it comes in about four.
I start usually at 11.30 or 12 and there's a schedule that comes out two days in advance.
It says who is rehearsing what, who the pianist is, who the rehearsal director is and also
all the dancers that have to be in the rehearsal.
The schedule, it shows one of six or seven studios, or I think five or six studios that
we can rehearse in.
Different pieces.
Today I have to rehearse a piece called Camer Music by Hindemith, which is a piano concerto.
It's from 12 to 12.30.
Then I have to rehearse this piece, which is Serenade, the piece I was just playing,
Serenade for Strings, from 1 to 2.30.
That rehearsal is actually with the core because in ballet we have different categories of
dancers.
As you see on stage, there's a soloist, principal dancer often.
The core generally is more the background, for want of a better word.
Then you've got the people that are leading the troupe.
Those are more principles.
You, they don't always rehearse together.
At one o'clock for Serenade, it will be a core rehearsal.
Even though it has principal dancers in it, I'll just be rehearsing with the core for
an hour and a half.
They'll be going through it.
It's a lot of responsibility because we're going to Madrid next week.
This piece hasn't been touched by anyone for, I don't know, four months.
There's going to be two of these rehearsals.
Then tomorrow I'm playing what we call a complete, where the entire company will be there.
The conductor will be there.
The directors, Wendy Willen and Jonathan Stafford will be there.
All the dancers in the ballet will play the ballet from beginning to end, which is the
hardest thing we do.
Playing with the conductor also is different than playing by yourself.
It's a bit of an art form unto itself.
What are the advantage, not to mention having a full-time paid job as a pianist, which is
sort of rare, right?
Because pianists don't usually, unless if you're teaching, you don't get to have that
luxury.
Now, what are the advantage of being part of this company and maybe you have more performance
opportunities?
Well, it is a reliable job.
At different kind of levels of the job.
I mean, just as with any part of the music business, there are different places you find
yourself in.
You can be a pianist who plays for ballet class.
Around New York, there are probably 100 ballet classes every day in New York.
I've done that before, yes.
They need pianists.
Oh, so you know about that.
I also play class.
I know how to do that.
Then you can play with a company.
That's maybe you'll be paid more money and you'll have more regular work.
Then you can play, hopefully if you like doing that sort of thing, you can play with a major
company and then you get a more full-time kind of job that resembles a regular job.
Right.
With benefits and insurance and the...
Yeah, sure.
I understand that part of full-time job, but more to do with, more than that, what are
the opportunities as a pianist that comes with this?
Because we have such a large repertoire and because the music we work with is so complicated,
we can do any of the range of music at all.
We have a fourth concerto, fifth concerto, we do the two Shostakovich concertos, all
three Tchaikovsky concertos, Beethoven first.
We do Ligeti etudes.
We do at least three hours of Chopin music that we perform on stage.
We do the Ravel sonatine.
We do miroir.
Wow.
So, you get to really perform, not just the rehearsal.
Oh, no.
We play plenty of stuff on stage with the dancers.
Wow.
And then dancers are being, of course, choreographed with that music.
That is really fascinating.
I never knew that part of your job description.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
It's the great part of...
Well, all these other parts are also great parts.
We do get opportunities to play big pieces that all pianists enjoy playing.
And we play with a very fine orchestra and very fine conductors.
It's kind of an unbelievable privilege.
It is.
That is fascinating.
Yeah.
I played...the last really big piece I played was in the spring last year.
I played a piece called Piano Pieces by Jerry Robbins.
And it's a 40-minute piece of solo Tchaikovsky piano music, ranging from children's pieces
that are, of course, always a little more difficult than people think to very hard virtuoso
pieces that are recorded by...well, everything's recorded now, but virtuoso piano pieces.
And that was really great.
And generally, we play on the apron, they call it, which is on the side of the stage.
The pianist comes out and takes a bow for the audience.
That's how the piece always starts.
Then the lights kind of go down, and then they open the curtain, and then you play.
And that piece has, I think, 13 pieces in it.
I try to make a little story.
It helps me, and it makes it more fun.
Every music piece or choreography piece, generally there's some sort of structure, some sort
of subtext or story, and that helps you kind of organize all these pieces and have fun
telling the story that you think should be told with this music.
And it also helps you get the tempos.
That's really, really important, because like I was saying about the serenade, you have
to be able to get kind of specific.
You can't just go, it's not all about you.
I mean, if you're, I don't know, Polini, you can sit and you can play.
You can play whatever you want.
But maybe the choreographer, maybe the story of this dance is a little more neutral.
Even though it's Chopin, you might play...
You might play something a little more broad, so you can make a picture.
So the listener can make a picture.
Instead of being involved with your emotion, maybe you want the listener to be able to
dream.
So that's the kind of thing.
But if you say it is a kind of intimate communication with the dancer, and so that changes the tempo.
You might play...
Which is Poco Robato.
So Poco Robato is something you can remember.
Or you might do the broad moonlit thing, the picture.
Which you might write semplice.
Those are different tempos.
The intimate one is slower and more in eighths.
As I found in the second measure, as I was thinking about it, the moonlit one is more
in two and has a slight larger rhythm that moves.
And every possible variation.
And I mean, these are the things we think about.
We're privileged as pianists to play complete pieces.
We're the only musicians that play so many complete pieces.
Violinists only play half the music.
And so we have a lot of fun, but we have a lot of responsibility to make decisions about
characterization.
And dance forces you to.
It's not just anything you feel.
It is important to realize that all the things you feel have validity.
But you have to eventually decide what is it?
Is it agitated?
Or is it defiant?
You know, what is it?
And it's fine if you're playing by yourself.
It's not even fine, really.
Because you really have to have this, I feel strongly you have to have this language of
emotion in your mind.
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I had wonderful teachers.
I had Richard Good for many years.
And also the son of Schnabel I studied with, Karl-Erik Schnabel.
And he taught me, he said, to begin a piece, you should play it in many different characters.
Like every character you can think of so you can get this language that connects the head
and the heart or the body.
And it's very useful in dance because then you can remember a tempo in more than just
an abstract, an intellectual way.
Although you do, dance pianists do get a good sense of metronomic exactness.
Like 63, 63 is different than 66.
I don't want to test myself and embarrass myself.
You know, one thing that helps sometimes is some pieces you just sort of know the tempo.
And so like I know I could be wrong, but this little Scott Joplin waltz.
I believe it's 96.
One, two, three, actually I think that was too fast.
So you remember that.
So maybe I have to play some other piece that I decide is 96.
You know, you remember a piece you know the tempo of, oh, that was 72.
So yeah, develop this metronome in your body.
I'm sure especially with, you know, playing with dancers forces you to be more aware of
those things, right?
Oh yeah.
Yeah.
And it's fun.
You have to look at it as fun.
If you look at it as terrible and you know, how dare you play, you know, my sonata, you
know, at 50 when I wrote 54.
I mean, you're not going to do that.
And then I think it's interesting.
The two approaches to tempo in the studio, you can play the tempo that you think the
orchestra will play all the time.
That's one approach.
That's a good approach for some people.
Also you can look at the dancer and the situation.
Where are they in their preparation?
Are they remembering the piece that they've played a long time ago?
Are they amazing dancers?
And they, if you don't give them something to chew on, meaning a really healthy tempo,
they're going to fall asleep.
They're going to, they're going to not, it's too uninteresting for them.
You know, you have to get into the personalities of working with.
And that doesn't even just involve rhythm.
It can involve sound also.
You know, say I'm working with Tyler Peck, who's a complete virtuoso.
She probably has the greatest ballet technique of our time.
You know, so, and she's played Dancerinade a million times and say we're doing like
a rehearsal right before, she's totally on it.
She knows it.
You know, if I play like, for her, which is Serenade for Strings, that's more of a tempo
you would play when a dancer is trying to remember something.
They're in the room and you don't want to impose too much.
You want to remind them, remember this, you knew this last year.
So they have space.
So you know, you knew this last year.
So just remember, you know, jog your memory a little bit.
And you might have a dancer who's very tall.
So they need the characterization, but they also need maybe a slower tempo.
That's a bigger body.
And so all these things, also these are words like characterizations of a Beethoven sonata.
Is it aggressive?
Is it stately?
Is it what's the difference?
I mean, there was a big long Schnabel article in the beginning of Opus 111.
What's the difference between maestoso and larghetto?
There is a difference.
It doesn't mean you're locked in to this terrible odious pedanticism, but you want to project
some specific, in order for an audience to read your music or for a dancer to read your
tempo, it has to be specific.
Wow.
All these things are very fascinating.
But what attracted you to start this career, and especially as a full-time soloist at a
ballet company?
Did you start as like, like internship or apprenticeship?
No, not really.
They kind of throw it all at you at once.
It's sort of a little sink or swim.
They're kinder now.
But when you come in, when I came in, I think I had to play Suite 3 by Tchaikovsky, which
is a big orchestra piece, complete, on stage with the conductor, the entire company, and
within a couple weeks.
And then I played the second act of Midsummer Night's Dream, which is about 40 minutes long,
on stage with the whole company.
And that's the way it used to be.
It used to be a really, really challenging, to say the least.
You went Juilliard for Masters, right?
And then for Doctorate, you went to Stony Brook, the great schools.
Now, did they prepare you to be the ballet pianist?
No, not really.
I mean, I think one of the main things that helps me is that I started as a jazz pianist.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
And I was very good.
I studied with very famous jazz teachers.
I was New York State in high school, the first, I don't know what they call it, all-state
pianist, jazz pianist, two years in a row, New York State, which is a lot of jazz pianists
are in New York.
You know, my sense of music is very, in a sense, it's kind of conceptual.
Like the piano is just a part of what I do.
It's just the expression of what I do.
But I just play music.
And when I see music, because I was a jazz pianist, I just see harmony.
So when you're playing reductions, there's a kind of quick analysis of what's going on
in the music.
I mean, this is not only true of jazz pianists by any means, but it helped me to be less
orthodox.
Like, you know, I'm not like, what finger am I going to put on the note?
I'm like, OK, you know, this is serenade, so it's slow, it's 6-8, it's A minor, it's
moving to the dominant.
You know, like these little almost like cue cards, you know, what you know in the music.
Now it's changing tempo.
Now this phrase is eight measures, this phrase is six measures.
So I studied composition with Howard Boatwright, who's a wonderful composer and a pupil of
Hindemith.
So I had really good composition training.
And you know, really, I mean, my musical life, I mean, the main thing I do is play the piano,
but I mean, it's like all day.
It's listening, thinking about structures, thinking about reading about music history.
Yeah, wow.
But that's very different from traditional way of learning piano, because you have this
background of jazz and also the training of composition.
So you see music differently.
So I think, yeah, then obviously playing for dancers also give you a different perspectives
about playing piano, right?
Yeah, and also I'm, well, you mean playing itself.
For example, you know, compared to I've done ton of work collaboration with singers and
instrumentalists, right?
So as opposed to that playing for dancers, right?
Well, you have to give them the structure more because they're going to be dancing to
people actually for one thing, they're going to be dancing to people that can't really
see them while they're playing.
So obviously, they're dancing to the music.
So you can't follow them in the same way that you follow a singer.
I want to say that with a caveat, you can follow them also, but as a rule, you have
to keep in mind that they need structure.
You can't see them.
So that is so you can't really like, you know, connect in that way.
So that's why what you do has to be involved with them, but defined.
Kind of very definite, you know, like this is what it is.
So they know where the music is.
They need to know where the music is.
That's in a way, your primary responsibility is a structural responsibility.
Now when you're playing for singers, you know, I studied with Gil Kalish also, who was a
great vocal accompanist.
And he always said the pianist provides the structure in that too.
So I, my career is not a vocal accompanist.
Maybe you do more than I do.
I used to do a lot when I was in school, but when I was accompanying voice, a lot of it
was in the studio and a lot of it was about a kind of following or connecting, which is
what made it so enjoyable.
But I have to say that, you know, Gil, who was a great vocal accompanist, always talked
about providing the structure.
Right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I think it's more so for dancers.
I guess they have to really keep the beat, right?
They keep a beat and they need to know where they are in the piece.
In the piece, yes.
And it's impossible to sort of feeling each other, although you may, but because they're
on a different, you know, you can't see them.
It has to happen after.
I mean, it's when you play a solo piano piece, like the Robbins piece, I talked about the
Tchaikovsky or Dances at a Gathering is an hour long Chopin piece by Robbins with hard
pieces like the B minor scherzo and all sorts of crazy stuff.
You know, when you play those things, you can connect more.
But still, there's something that's agreed upon prior, really.
Right, right, right.
That's why there's you spend so much time on rehearsals and you spend time in rehearsals,
like the things I was showing before different ways.
And then once that way is established, you can connect, you know, that's the wonderful
thing.
But until that is established, and I suppose there are some dancers that are just, you
know, spontaneous and maybe you just throw the book out the window and just connect.
And you know, that's great if you can see them.
If you can see them.
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Let's continue with the episode.
I just love dance because dance is another way that music can reach people because some
people are more visual.
Like they say, there are seven types of learning, right?
Some people are more, they learn with their eyes and it's friendlier for them to hear
a piece of music with choreography.
It helps their imagination.
They connect with the, seeing someone move makes you feel your own body.
Seeing a stage set evokes, stimulates your imagination.
You were talking about reaching people before we started the conversation and one of the
things that I feel really strongly about, you know, you're asking what is the relevance
of music and society and stuff.
Music and all art, it's a much more, in a way it's a more specific language than the
words we use because it combines ideas and emotions in a way that's much more sophisticated
than we're able to, I mean maybe if you're Shakespeare or something, you know, you can
communicate those ideas and words.
But people in the world have problems, people have problems, but they go to see a dance
performance and it puts them back in themselves in a way that's tremendously healthy, even
practical.
We really need that in the world and art, people say, oh you shouldn't be an artist
because you know, how are you going to make money and stuff, but it would be a terrible
world if, just terrible if no one tried to do it.
It is very, very hard, but it would be terrible.
We would have more wars and we would have, you know, we would have more, probably more
diseases, maybe even, you know, because the scientists wouldn't be as good because they
would be unhappy people.
Absolutely.
Art is just wonderful, it's like the best medicine.
So that concludes the first half of this fun episode of the Piano Pod with Dr. Alan Moverman,
piano soloist at New York City Ballet.
Tune in next Tuesday, April 4th at 8pm Eastern to hear the rest of Alan's stories from the
backstage of the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center, which is home to one of the
most celebrated ballet companies in the world.
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