FEATURE ARTICLE
Billy Joel: A classical man
by Seth Rogovoy(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., Oct. 3, 1997) -- Billy Joel's appearance at Tanglewood's Seiji Ozawa Hall in Lenox tomorrow night could hardly have come at a better time. The pop star's performance -- not a concert but a forum, one part master class, one part question-and-answer session, with a bit of music thrown in for good measure -- comes on the heels of reports that Joel is putting aside popular music in order to devote himself more fully to his lifelong love affair with classical music.
Joel has also reportedly been looking to buy a house in the Berkshires.
While these reports are not entirely accurate, says Joel -- he's definitely not looking to move to the Berkshires, he said, although he likes it here -- they do reflect his desire to spend less time on the road and more time at home at the keyboard, where for the last few years he has been composing instrumental music in the classical tradition.
In that vein, tomorrow night will mark the world premiere of one or two of Joel's classical piano pieces, to be played by Yuliya Gorenman, who made her debut at Ozawa Hall in 1994 as the recipient of the Billy Joel Keyboard Fellowship.
Saturday night's event, a benefit for the Berkshire Theatre Festival, is completely sold out. The proceedings, however, will be recorded by National Public Radio for broadcast on its award-winning, classical-music program, "NPR's Performance Today," on Nov. 28, when the program can be heard locally on Capital District public-radio station WMHT-FM at 9pm.
"I'm not giving up pop," said Joel in a recent phone interview from his home on his native Long Island. "If I get inspired to write a whole slew of rock and roll music or pop songs, of course I'm going to write them. I'm not shutting off the possibility of writing anything. But right now I'm just concentrating on writing instrumental music for piano and orchestra, too."
Joel is planning on saying farewell, however, to the grueling, multi- city, months-long concert tours that are expected of top performers like him.
"I'm going to do one more tour with Elton John, and that's it," said Joel, referring to a double-bill tour the two are planning for this winter. "I really don't intend to perform any more after that. I don't want to make a big deal out of it, because I've seen too many people do that, and then they show up again three years later, like the Who. However, I can pretty much guarantee that this will be the last time I'm going to do a long, rock and roll-type tour.
"I want to have time to write. I want to be able to spend time with my daughter. And I don't have the desire to continue making an idiot out of myself on stage.
"Don't get me wrong -- it's not like when I'm there it's like pulling teeth. It's not the playing that's the problem. It's the touring, it's the travel, it's the being away from home for a long time, it's not having enough contact with my family, it's the time away from writing which I really would like to be doing."
The man who gave the world countless pop standards, including "Just the Way You Are," "Piano Man," "Honesty" and "An Innocent Man," says that his music has always been informed by a classical sensibility.
"I grew up playing classical piano," said Joel, 48, who recently released his third volume of greatest hits. "I took classical piano lessons from age four until I was about fifteen. The music I heard in my house was classical music. My father was a classically-trained pianist. My parents met at a Gilbert and Sullivan production where they were in `The Mikado.' My grandparents met at an opera. My whole family goes back to this love of classical music.
"The process of writing melody and chords and rhythm for me is not all that different from when I was a kid learning to play piano sonatas. If the melody was strong enough, it stayed with me. That was the hit, you know? Like Mozart, he had a lot of hits. He was good.
"The guys who have lasted were the guys who really wrote a great melody and a great chord progression and put it together well so that it struck a tone throughout time. It's the same thing with songwriting. There's always barriers between classical and pop and there really shouldn't be. We have to kick away all this orthodoxy because it keeps us apart from each other."
In large part, this is a battle Joel has taken for his own. He's already laid down the gauntlet via his keyboard fellowship at Tanglewood. He points with pride to Gorenman's accomplishments -- the Russian-born pianist took top prize in the 1995 Queen Elizabeth International Piano Competition -- and another recipient just won the prestigious Dublin Piano Competition. "I'm becoming like a patron of the arts," he said.
He has also written a book with Anthony J. Rudel, a classical-music record executive, about the relationship between pop and classical music and the difficulties in selling the classics to younger people.
There is deeper significance in Joel's decision to support aspiring classical musicians. As it turns out, the multi-Grammy Award winner identifies more with them than with young up-and-comers in his own field.
"When I started out in rock and roll, we were the bohemians, we were the outlaws," he said. "Then the music business got so huge for popular music that now the bohemians are the young classical artists. These are people who have devoted their entire being to learning how to play the instrument and the works of the great masters, while the record companies are scrambling to sign up the most untalented and ungifted people they can find in pop music."
Joel assumes the persona of a record company executive, and says, "So, you can't write, you can't sing, and you can't play? Hey, you're our guy, we want you."
Returning to his own voice, he said, "I feel a kinship with people on the outside, people who don't have two nickels to rub together, who are totally devoted to the craft and the art of music." Joel doesn't only blame the pop music industry for this sad state of affairs. He also finds fault with a short-sighted classical music industry.
"These young people, they can't get their foot in the door because there's a lot of older people with the establishment up there who are sitting on their heads and not letting them in," he said. "The audience is beginning to age and they haven't brought in a whole bunch of new people. The baby boomers really got sidetracked with rock and roll and very few of them have actually ever discovered classical music."
Joel sees himself as a potential bridge between the pop and classical worlds. "I'm championing this because when I write pop songs, they're infused with a classical sensibility," he said. "You can take a great number of my songs and arrange them for classical piano. As a matter of fact, I'm in the process of doing that right now for piano students. These arrangements are going to enable the pianists to play a piece which is familiar to them as popular music -- however, it will work on the piano as a piece on its own."
Joel said that tomorrow night Gorenman will illustrate the kinship between Joel's music and classical music with one of her own arrangements of his songs. "We hope to show that when I began writing a piece, I wrote it as a simple, romantic, 19th-century piano piece, and then I arranged it as a rock and roll song. It could be `Uptown Girl,' it could be `She's Always a Woman,' it could be `Honesty,' it could be `Leningrad.' I'd say about half of my songs could be done as classical piano pieces."
Don't go rushing to your local record stores to find "Billy Joel Plays the Classics" any time soon, however.
"Of course my record company would love me to do a Billy Joel album with classical music, because it would be easy to market something with my name on it," said Joel, easily one of the top-selling recording artists in history. "However, I'm not the guy to do this stuff justice. Writing a piece in small increments is one thing. Playing it from beginning to end takes someone who is a virtuoso."
[This article originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on Oct. 3, 1997. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1997. All rights reserved.]
Seth Rogovoy
rogovoy@berkshire.net
music news, interviews, reviews, et al.
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