MUSIC AND DANCE : Concert Pianist: Is Teaching More Important?

Pianist Grant Johannesen takes master classes very seriously.

“I feel that any musician worth his salt will take the time to give master classes and perform, to get close to young artists so that they have knowledge of what the profession is about,” Johannesen, 66, said in a recent phone interview from New York.

Johannesen will give two master classes later this week at Chapman College in Orange. He also will play Beethoven’s “Emperor” Concerto with the Chapman Symphony at 4 p.m. on Sunday.

“If we don’t go out and make ourselves available where there are struggling artists, who’s going to train them properly?” Johannesen wondered.

“Young people who are just coming out of practicing hermetically in a studio need help in learning what it is to share that playing with an audience and how it sits with an audience, getting a favorable reaction or indifferent one. It’s a calling, as I see it.”

Johannesen is no stranger to teaching. In addition to extensive concertizing around the world, he was also director of the Cleveland Institute of Music for eight years, ending in 1985.

Although master classes allow a teacher to spend only a short time with a student, Johannesen said: “It’s a step along the way, a window on the scene they might not have had otherwise.

“I can remember one class, where a boy came in to play a Brahms sonata. His teacher said, ‘But it’s fixed now.’ That’s a marvelous expression. It gives you insight. My only reply was, ‘I don’t think I have anything fixed.’ ”

Johannesen, who has been closely identified with French and U.S. music, said he believes that many professionals and students, too, are hampered by limited repertory.

“Many of the successful performers in the world today carry a very small piano baggage with them,” he said. “These are all pieces that are tried and true and made famous by other people. Mostly, it’s a kind of success pattern that they feel they must follow out of fear that the public won’t respond to something that is esoteric. I found that that is not the case. I have been able to make my career with my own repertory.”

Johannesen is especially disappointed by young pianists who limit their repertory.

“There are young people today who hear more music than we ever heard growing up,” he said. “They can hear all this marvelous repertory that’s been recorded and can now find what suits them best. But I’m not so sure that they do. They hear someone who plays the Liszt Sonata and say, ‘I must do that.’ If they bring it to you, and you ask them why, they say the obvious answer, ‘I love it.’

“And my answer is, ‘But why doesn’t it love back?’ ”

Johannesen also said teachers are often the reason that students don’t investigate beyond what the teachers themselves have learned.

“We need to break that sound barrier,” he said. “The piano repertory is a vast, vast thing. You have to try to encourage students to use their own minds where music is concerned.”

Johannesen has mixed feelings about the usefulness of competitions, however.

“Artists don’t like them, don’t recommend them and think they’re terrible things for young artists to go through, in addition to the claims that there’s corruption in them.

“And winning doesn’t necessarily tell you anything. I’ve been on the jury of the Queen Elisabeth competition in Brussels, which is the oldest. Recently, I looked at the list of the 12 winners (each year, every three years) from 1932 on. The funny thing is, maybe a number 12 or six in one year is still playing concerts. There are not so many first-place winners who emerged as performers.”

Johannesen generally doesn’t encourage his students to listen to recordings, either.

“Recordings have confused audiences,” he said. “If you have a recording of a piece and you’ve heard it many times and then go hear an artist play it quite differently, unfortunately you may think that the artist maybe did not read the piece right, which is nonsense. Viva la difference!

“I’m pretty much in favor of young people who study with me maybe just listening to operas and chamber music. That doesn’t hurt. If a young person can spend a lot of time listening to the voice, he might be able to do the same on the piano. A piano is struck, after all, but what you want to do is make it sound like it is bowed or sung. That’s the great miracle of the piano: It can be made to do that in spite of the fact that it is a percussion instrument.

“But so many performers obviously have listened to someone so carefully and reproduced their interpretation in the shadow of that performance, and it’s never convincing. Some outer trappings are OK. But music is so honest, if you try to manipulate your feelings onto someone else’s, you’re in big trouble.”

Grant Johannesen’s master classes will be from 1 to 3:30 p.m. Friday and from 10:30 a.m to 12:30 p.m Saturday in Salmon Recital Hall at Chapman College in Orange. Johannesen’s concert with the Chapman Symphony will be at 4 p.m. Sunday in the Chapman Auditorium, also on campus. For information on attending any of these events, call (714) 997-6811.