“Omerta” in Classical Music
“As long as this woman continues to perform we cannot hope to make a career. She can play everything and plays them all very well.”
-Alfred Brendel to Jean-Bernard Pommier in the early 1960’s
These were reportedly Alfred Brendel’s words about Idil Biret to a pianist colleague nearly six decades ago.[1] Brendel was not yet well known. He recorded extensively for VOX records, a budget label in the days of the LP, just as Naxos three decades later became the budget label of the CD.
In 1959, after a concert of Idil Biret in Paris, Marc Pincherle, at that time the dean of French critics and musicologists, wrote, “We are in the presence of one of the greatest virtuosos of our times. I do not see in her generation another pianist who possesses a similar mastery of the keyboard in the service of a mind so mature in thought and so rich of imagination.”[2]
Richard Dyer, the chief music critic of the Boston Globe, remembering those days, wrote in 2000, “When I was a struggling piano student in Paris in 1961-1962, Biret was a brightly blazing star, already generating the kind of excitement that would surround her contemporary Martha Argerich after the Chopin Competition in 1965. I still have a vivid memory of the tiny Biret, tearing into Bartok's 2nd Piano Concerto with a ferocity and accuracy I had never seen paralleled.”[3]
In 1988, after he attended a concert of Idil’s[4], Brendel told me, personally, “Idil can play everything and plays everything so well. That is why her colleagues are afraid of her.” This was the same observation he made to Jean-Bernard Pommier in the early 1960s.
I always wondered who the “colleagues” referred to by Brendel could be. Were some of them Biret’s contemporaries of great fame, stars of EMI, DGG, and DECCA, such as Martha Argerich, Daniel Barenboim, Maurizio Pollini, Vladimir Ashkenazy or, later, Maria Joao Pires (who did not come to collect her prize at the Grand Prix du Disque Chopin ceremony in Warsaw in 1995 when Idil Biret also received a prize and performed there) or Rudolf Buchbinder (who was terrified when he learned that Idil was in the audience after he gave a rather indifferent performance of Beethoven sonatas in front of an audience of airline chief executives at the Schönbrunn Palace in Vienna),[5] or perhaps Anatol Ugorski and Andrei Gavrilov—the two both canceled their recitals at the Schwetzingen Festival in Germany in 1999 when Idil was also engaged to perform there. Biret replaced Ugorski with five hours’ notice, coming by plane and helicopter from Brussels, and played his exact program.
Then there’s Pavel Gililov, who frowned unhappily upon learning that Idil would give a recital after him in Cuernavaca Mexico in 2006, saying “But why? She is blacklisted” (more later on this).[6]
No, we don’t know who Brendel had in mind, and he certainly would never tell.
But that’s not all. We could also query why Peter Alward of EMI intervened to stop Idil Biret from recording the nine Beethoven Symphonies in Liszt’s transcriptions while EMI’s International Division headed by Andreas von Imhoff had already endorsed the project for the Liszt Centennial in 1986. Was it, perhaps, that he feared that Biret would outshine the star pianists of EMI with this first-ever complete recording of the symphony transcriptions?
Or again, why is it that negative reviews of Biret’s Chopin performances in concert and on CD were initiated (yes, they were initiated) suddenly in England, France, and Germany in 1991 when Biret began recordings of the complete piano works of the composer for Naxos?[7] Was it again to stop her from challenging the established stars of EMI, DGG, DECCA cutting into the sales of their Chopin recordings which dominated the market?
This effort failed when eminent critics like Ivan March and Tully Potter in England, Igor Kipnis in the USA, Henry Louis de la Grange in France, Joachim Kaiser in Germany and others wrote outstanding reviews of Biret’s Chopin recordings. The fears of the major labels were well-founded as the sales of Biret’s Chopin CDs exceeded one million copies by 2004.
And again, why did DGG couple the recording of Chopin’s F Minor Concerto recording of Maria Joao Pires, released in 1994, with a solo work--the 24 Preludes--instead of one of the four short pieces for piano and orchestra, as is customary; and why did DGG not release the Chopin's E Minor Concerto Mme Pires had recorded in 1991? It was finally released thirty years later, in 2021.
Were their release tactics devised to insure Mme Pires received the Polish Grand Prix du Disque Chopin in 1995 in both categories--concerto and solo? DGG had strong economic motivation to prevent Idil Biret--who had recorded the complete works for piano, solo and with orchestra, on 15 CDs for Naxos--from getting either of the prizes.
Consider, too, the quality of the E Minor by Mme Pires. Did DGG fear the Pires recording was not up to the level of Idil Biret’s recording of the same concerto released by Naxos the same year, in 1991? Tully Potter, the doyen of British critics, praised Biret's recording, writing “The distinguished Turkish pianist Idil Biret, a pupil of Cortot, Kempff and Nadia Boulanger, shows herself to be one of the finest exponents of Chopin’s concertos in the world today. In fact I cannot think of any competitor at any price, who can offer better performances than these”. DGG probably had second thoughts about releasing the Pires recording of the E Minor after Tully Potter’s unreserved praise of the Biret recording in the February 1992 issue of the Classic CD magazine in England. What other reason for shelving a concerto recording made in 1991 that would have cost around £20,000 plus the fees of Previn and Pires?
If DGG intended to smother Biret's career in order to give an advantage to a musician under DGG contract, they failed. Yes, the Polish jury, as expected by DGG, gave both solo and orchestral prizes to Mme Pires. However, in a gesture reflecting the extraordinary quality or Biret's recordings, the jury presented a Grand Prix du Disque Chopin also to Idil Biret for her Complete Chopin Edition.
We will never know the facts about the blacklisting and all these damaging acts of the labels unless EMI directors of the 1980s Peter Alward and Andreas von Imhoff, DGG executives of the 1990s, or pianists like Alfred Brendel, Anatol Ugorski, Pavel Gillilov speak. Don't hold your breath, because to speak up would seriously tarnish their reputations.
Thus does silence obscure truth. An “Omerta” code dominates the classical music industry. Consequences are dire for those who dare to speak out.
One thing is certain though: most colleagues who feared Idil Biret were “stars” contracted to major labels. The labels benefit from the income generated from sales of their recordings and also from considerable concert income. For example, reportedly, a famous Japanese pianist was paying 100,000 German marks a month to a major label in 1998 to cover the costs of her recordings, publicity, marketing, etc.[8] So, the major labels had all the reason to try to stop Biret from rising to fame, recording, and performing.
Putting commercial interests aside, why would her pianist colleagues fear Idil Biret artistically? What did she do that made them so afraid? Perhaps we can look into that briefly here on the occasion of her 80th birthday and 75th year on the stage.
As Marc Pincherle and Richard Dyer remarked, Idil Biret is a pianist like no other of her generation in the second half of the last century. She was trained by three of the greatest musicians of the 20th Century; Nadia Boulanger, Wilhelm Kempff and Alfred Cortot. The breadth and depth of her repertoire is immense with more than one hundred concertos and almost all the important solo works of the piano literature.
In 1982 she played all 32 Sonatas of Beethoven in seven recitals. In 1986 she performed all the nine symphonies of Beethoven in Liszt’s transcription from memory in four recitals during one week at the Montpellier Festival in France. In 1995 she won a Grand Prix du Disque Frederic Chopin in Poland for her recordings of the complete works of the composer and the same year she won a Diapason d’Or of the Year in France for her recording of the complete piano sonatas of Pïerre Boulez – two composers at opposite extremes of the pianistic repertory.
She then went on to record and perform all the solo piano works and the two concertos of Brahms in 1997, during his centennial. These are just a few examples. The major labels who started building careers of artists they contracted to turn them into so called “stars”, initially shunned Biret hoping that she would somehow disappear. They wanted marketable products, each in his/her own niche of specialty, preferably coming from countries with large populations of music lovers, like Germany, France, England, Italy, Spain and, when possible, specializing in music of their land; French pianists playing Debussy, Ravel, Saint-Saens etc., Germans and Austrians playing Beethoven, Brahms, Schubert, Schumann and pianists from the Soviet Union playing Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninov, Prokofiev, etc. South American pianists, especially from Argentina and Brazil, were exceptions and they could play whatever best suited them.
Idil Biret, from mostly Moslem Turkey, with no mentionable tradition of classical music and a negligible market for the classics in her home country, refused to be boxed into a corner playing only a few composers’ carefully selected works. This is a problem for major labels. How could they market a Turk with no home market who played everything, even though she played them all so well? Even worse, how could they also avoid comparisons between her and their “stars” and explain why she was not one of them?
After initially avoiding Biret they had to grudgingly recognize her after she recorded all the nine Beethoven Symphonies in the transcriptions by Liszt in less than a year, released in a box set of 6LPs by EMI in 1986 (despite the objections of a senior director of EMI, Peter Alward, who wanted to stop the project approved by EMI’s own Andreas von Imhoff but was overruled, reportedly, by the chairman of Thorn-EMI).
So, she had many engagements all over the world after 1986. But, the major labels became sour when Idil accepted the proposal of Klaus Heymann in 1989, the founder of Naxos, to record the complete piano works of Chopin followed by the complete works for piano solos and the concertos of Brahms and Rachmaninov, still later all the piano sonatas of Boulez, the etudes of Ligeti and the Firebird transcription of Stravinsky – a total of 40 CDs over a decade which sold over two million copies by 2004. All this made the major labels furious and they put Idil Biret on a blacklist in the 1990s. A letter from Germany informed her that she had been blacklisted because of her recording for Naxos.
René Heinersdorff, a well-known concert agent in Düsseldorf, stated privately that concert organizers, festival organizers, and orchestras were being told by a major label not to engage Biret. The threat was, if you engage her, artists with contracts to the label will not accept engagements from the organizer and will cancel if already engaged. This explained the cancellations by the two pianists who were scheduled to play before and after Biret at the Schwetzingen Festival and why the festival never again invited her despite the unheard of performance of another artist’s program at such short notice. Biret’s natural ability to absorb music quickly and perform at a very high level is daunting to artists who must work with a limited repertoire to stay at performance level.
Such perhaps criminal threats by the labels were confirmed when Gerhard Abel, who organized Biret’s tours in Mexico, told her about his discussion with pianist Pavel Gililov. Gililov, a naturalised German, was engaged to give a recital in Cuernavaca before Idil. Mr. Gillilov asked Mr. Abel who would play in the recital series after himself and when Mr. Abel said that it would be Idil Biret, Pavel Gililov had frowned and said, “But, she is blacklisted.” Mr. Abel had then asked why, to which Mr. Gililov had replied “Because she is recording for Naxos and they sell CDs cheaply.” Mr. Abel then said to him that here it was Mexico and not Germany.
Another odd event occurred a few years back. The Swedish Radio sent two staff members to Idil Biret’s Brussels home to interview her for a program on Nadia Boulanger. They also asked if she would accept to perform with the Swedish Radio Orchestra and Biret said she would be glad to. Later came a message from one of these radio staff who, with great embarrassment, informed her that the music director of the orchestra had said he could not conduct her concert. Obviously, the blacklisting information had reached him and put fear in his heart.
A blacklist also explains a message from her agent in Holland, who said that she could easily get engagements for all her artists—except for Idil Biret, and given her great career she did not understand why. Pavel Gililov provided the answer in Mexico.[9] While, as in the German press Die Welt and Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung reported,[10] Biret could not play in the main concert halls of Germany. Presenters and orchestras in Europe and the rest of the world not controlled by major labels invited Biret to perform.[11] She also continued recording and releasing under her own label, IBA, distributed worldwide by Naxos, a 130 CD box set of all her studio recordings since 1959 and many live concert recordings.
This box set weighs 6.5 kilos (14.5 pounds) and includes almost all of the great works of the solo piano literature and sixty-one piano concertos. When many pianists go through major careers playing a handful of well-selected concertos and a few recital programs, Idil Biret performing and recording nearly seventy concertos (by 2020) has definitely set a record that is the fear and, I have to say, the envy of her colleagues. It is not without reason that Richard Dyer of the Boston Globe concluded the review of Biret’s recital in Boston in 2005 by saying, “This is the kind of playing that makes reservations irrelevant; there is no one like her, which is what defines a unique artist.”[12]
A new forthcoming box set of 12 DVDs containing about forty hours of film is being released in celebration of Idil’s 80th birthday. All the concerto performances and solo recitals are live footage from her concerts. When financing was available, which was rare, some of them were made with professional crews and multiple cameras such as the Beethoven concertos at Bilkent University in Ankara and the Hindemith and Liszt concertos at Yale University in New Haven. Others were single video cameras that covered the keyboard and made Idil’s hands visible. The latter would be of invaluable help to young pianists who can see her performing style and fingering in many difficult pieces such as Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit and Stravinsky’s Petrouchka among others.
As the sound is good in all of them, we decided to include these single camera videos in the set. Some of the concert recordings are of historic value like the first ever piano recital at the two thousand year old Roman Aspendos theatre near Antalya and the St. Irene Church (now museum) in Istanbul that dates to the time of Justinian in the 6th Century AD. Then there is a documentary film on Idil’s life, work on which was started in 2008 and finished in 2015. It was done just in time since, sadly, we lost many of those who had worked with and knew Idil intimately that were interviewed there – Claude Samuel, Rémy Stricker, Irene Kempff, Nevit Kodalli, Michel Devos. They were all beloved friends and colleagues of Idil and are sadly missed.
There are other valuable mini documentaries on the making of the Beethoven recordings in Brussels and Ankara and the Hindemith recordings at Yale University in New Haven. A most interesting document is the interview with Gottfried Wagner, the great-grandson of Wagner and Liszt. When I first met him in Brussels some twenty-five years ago, I heard him speak against women pianists saying they could not reach the levels of the male ones. I waited for him to finish speaking and asked if he had heard Idil Biret. He said he had not. Then, when he did hear her perform, he changed his opinion, as witnessed in this fascinating interview.
Another film of great interest is her performance of the “Ode to Joy” passage from Beethoven’s 9th Symphony in Liszt’s piano transcription—during an eerie day of lockdown due to the Covid pandemic—in the exact center of Istanbul’s Bosphorus Bridge joining Europe and Asia. Films of her playing on Liszt’s Bechstein piano at his museum home in Weimar and Chopin’s Pleyel piano at the Cobbe Collection in England will fascinate. Finally, there is the compelling short, silent, black-and-white fragment footage from 1948 with six-year-old Idil playing Bach’s D minor Concerto for keyboard with a string quartet in Ankara. The film was dubbed with sound from her performance of Bach’s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue recorded at the RTF studio in Paris in 1953.
I’ve heard a story that back in history, in the dark middle ages, a village in Russia once existed where inhabitants were happy with the existing order and feared change. When a newborn child showed signs of high intelligence they killed and buried him, thinking the child, if allowed to live, would disturb the peace and order of the village.
Similarly, from the mid-1960s onward, the forces that controlled major labels of the classical music industry tried to bury Biret and get rid of her so that the stars they promoted from the 1960s onward—who were no match for Idil Biret—could prosper unchallenged. They failed to obliterate her career thanks to one man, Klaus Heymann. Initially, he helped Idil make a large number of recordings for Naxos and then supported her own label Idil Biret Archive (IBA) by distributing its products all over the world. With more than 150 LPs and CDs, she recorded from 1959 onwards now all on CD and available also digitally (nearly two hundred hours of music). Now the 12 DVDs in this box set with nearly forty hours of live concert takes on film, Biret’s legacy will remain to guide the pianists of today and tomorrow who admire her, and haunt those who feared and envied her.
As Richard Dyer said, Idil Biret is unparalleled. Her extraordinary talent defines what it means to be a unique artist. You can listen to her music here.
© 2023 Şefik Büyükyüksel
[1] This anecdote was told to conductor Ibrahim Yazici by pianist Jean-Bermard Pommier.
[2] Nouvel Observateur, September, 1959.
[3] Richard Dyer, Boston Globe September 24, 2000, p. M2.
[4] Idil Biret performed the last movements of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony in Liszt’s transcription, Brussels 1988
[5] The Presidents Assembly of the Association of European Airlines, Vienna 1999.
[6] As told to Idil Biret later, by Gerfhard Abel, the organizer of the events in Mexico.
[7] Similar articles appeared almost simultaneously in the Süddeutsche Zeitung in Germany, Diapason in France, and Penguin Guide in England.
[8] As told to me by Irene Kempff in 1998.
[9] A legal file was prepared with all the evidence available and submitted to the Competition Directorate of the European Commission. The reply was that they only dealt with unfair practices against companies, not individuals. So much for the Commission! When an eminent law firm in Hamburg was then consulted for individual action, they said that they thought Biret had a strong case, but then went on to state: “However, due to our experience, we do not believe that we can convince the music labels to terminate their behavior. We are aware of the problem of the "black list", but so far nobody has been able to prove the existence of such non-written black list. The labels usually cite bad performances of the artists included in the list, a fact that they are able to "prove" by citing the critics they used to initiate in the newspapers.”
[10] Die Welt 20.5.2003, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung 31.5.2003.
[11] In one typical year, 1998, Biret performed eighteen concertos in concerts, recording most of them.
[12] Boston Globe, November 30, 2005, p. F4.
