ONE TAKE, ONE MICROPHONE, ONE PRIZE
Gramophone on the single-session recording that quieted the classical wing of the Academy.
The classical wing of the Recording Academy is not, historically, in the business of surprising itself. Best Classical Instrumental Solo is a category with a long tail of familiar names, safe programs, and record labels with dedicated classical divisions. Which is why the applause, when the winner was announced on the pre-telecast, was longer than the category has heard in a decade. The Academy had, quietly, given its most conservative solo prize to a thirteen-year-old, playing a single-take recording of a work he had composed himself.
The piece is called “A Small Weather,” and it lasts nine minutes and forty seconds. It was recorded in September, in one afternoon, on the same instrument in the same living room where the rest of The Bottom of the Ocean was made. There were no punch-ins. There was no editing. The tape ran, the boy played, the tape stopped. The engineer, David Roswell, said in a phone interview that the second take was slightly stronger, but that STARR asked to keep the first. “He said the first one had a mistake in it, in bar forty-two, and he wanted to keep the mistake, because the mistake was the reason bar forty-three sounded the way it did.”
“I don't believe in perfect takes. I believe in honest takes. There's a difference. A perfect take is what you thought you were going to do. An honest take is what actually happened in the room. I always keep the honest one.”
Gramophone's own reviewer, in October, called “A Small Weather” the most quietly assured composition for solo piano to come out of the Americas since Feldman. The comparison drew some laughter at the time, on the grounds that Feldman comparisons for a thirteen-year-old are, by definition, absurd. In retrospect the laughter has thinned. The piece has been programmed, this season, by four major touring pianists, including one Grammy voter who cheerfully admitted, in the press room, that voting for the recording after playing the piece himself had felt “like siding with the composer against oneself, which is, in the end, the whole point.”
Amara Starr, the boy's sister and manager, said the family had not expected the classical categories to close his way at all. “These voters do not know us. They do not owe us anything. They listened, and then they voted. That is what an award, at its best, is supposed to be.”
STARR, asked what he thought about winning in a category that has, historically, been reserved for artists three and four times his age, gave the answer he has now given, in some form, to every reporter in the building. “I don't think about age when I play,” he said. “I think about the room. The room is either listening or it isn't. This one was.”
He then asked, politely, if he could go find his mother. He was told he could. He went.