MAKE HIS MODERN

PIANIST JAMES TOCCO, CONTEMPORARY CHAMPION

By Joseph McLellan (The Washington Post)

February 22, 1993 at 7:00 p.m. EST

"I didn't become a pianist because I want to sell tickets," says James Tocco. "I became a pianist because I want to express myself through piano music, including the music of my own country and my own time."

Perhaps this attitude explains why Tocco, at 49 one of the most critically acclaimed pianists of his generation, is playing piano music of Leonard Bernstein and Aaron Copland tonight in the Kennedy Center's Terrace Theater, which holds 500 people, rather than Chopin, Liszt and Rachmaninoff in the Concert Hall, which can hold five times as many. He believes audiences can and should be won for contemporary American music, even if they are not as big as the audiences for long-dead foreigners. Tocco also plays the piano music of Roger Sessions, George Rochberg, John Corigliano and Ned Rorem -- music that is modern but in touch with tradition, easy to integrate into programs with the classics of previous centuries and accessible to audiences once they actually hear it.

"It's not a question of whether the music is worthwhile or audiences can be attracted to it," Tocco said in an interview a few days ago. "It is and they can. The question is whether artists are courageous enough to program this music, to champion it, to teach audiences that it is not life-threatening. This is something we must do; if we do not, we are sealing our fate, perpetuating a rejection of modern pieces and depriving modern music of its future. We are dooming musicians of the future to life in a sort of musical museum where nothing new ever happens. Of course we should play the classics, but we should play them in a context that includes new music. A lot of artists are tyrannized by managers, orchestras and record companies whose only concern is 'How many tickets will it sell?' "

There are penalties a musician must pay for inattention to the bottom line. Tocco has recorded a CD of Copland's piano music and another of Bernstein's complete music for solo piano, but both were on the Pro Arte label, which has now gone out of business. "I don't know what will happen to those recordings -- how, when or whether they will ever be available again," he says. His latest recording is on a less endangered label, the German Harmonia Mundi, is brilliantly played and features two big-name composers, but it is still music for a relatively small audience of connoisseurs: Liszt's complete piano transcriptions of organ music by Bach.

When Tocco plays older music, as he does occasionally in the 70 concerts he gives each year here and in Europe, he arranges it in programs that have "a different slant and a personal angle." One such program he calls "Music of Love and Longing." It includes the sonata Beethoven called "Les Adieux" ("Farewell"), which is about friends parting; Schumann's Fantasy in C, written while he was separated from and longing for his future wife, Clara Wieck; Debussy's "Children's Corner" Suite, which expresses his nostalgia for a childhood that would never return; and Gershwin's "Rhapsody in Blue," which is full of "his longing for good times." Tocco often writes his own program notes and sometimes talks to audiences about his choice of program and his personal feeling about the pieces "if the setting is appropriate." But he says it has to be clear "that I am not lecturing them or trying to entertain them. I am there to share with them; my job as an artist is to know who I am and to share it with the audience."

Jet-set conductors who have one orchestra in the United States and another in Europe are commonplace, but Tocco is one of the few jet-set teachers on the international music scene, holding full-time positions as a professor of piano at the Musikhochschule in Luebeck, Germany, and an artist in residence/"eminent scholar" at the University of Cincinnati College Conservatory of Music. Before starting his current American tour, he spent Jan. 10 to 17 in Luebeck, Jan. 18 to 29 in Cincinnati, Jan. 30 to Feb. 10 in Luebeck and Feb. 11 to 16 in Cincinnati. He is able to do this, and also give concerts, because his teaching duties in Germany are very different from those in America, because he only accepts students who can do a lot of work on their own and above all because he has "one exceptional talent" that is useful to a frequent flier: "I can make myself sleep whenever I want to. I am one of the few people I know who never suffer from jet lag."

"Fortunately," he says, "the vacation schedules at the German university dovetail with those in the United States, so that I am often on vacation in one place while I am working in the other. I organized it that way, and I have also organized my concert activity so that I have periods of European availability and periods of American availability."

Besides frequent performances here, Tocco has a strong Washington connection through his 12-year-old daughter Rohya, who lives here with his ex-wife Gilan and attends the Holton-Arms School. Rohya and Chelsea Clinton became friends during a field hockey game between the Holton-Arms and Sidwell Friends teams, and Rohya invited Chelsea to come to her father's concert tonight and bring her father if he is not busy.

Does Tocco expect to see President Clinton in the audience tonight? "I don't know," he says, but he adds that he is glad to see him in the White House:

"I hope the Clinton administration will focus more attention on the arts as part of our society. Ronald Reagan defined the arts as Louis L'Amour's western novels and Hollywood, and Bush defined nothing. I am encouraged that Clinton is an admirer of jazz. This is a vital and distinctively American form of music, and it keeps alive a tradition of improvisation that has almost disappeared in classical performance and should be brought back."