Alexander-Max, Susan

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Susan Alexander-Max

Keyboardist, educator

The piano was invented in Italy by Bartolomeo Cristofori in 1700; the instrument underwent a series of refinements, until around 1850 pianos resembled those made today. Until recently, most performers saw no reason to revive the earlier versions. However, beginning in the 1980s and 1990s, a group of keyboard players began arguing that music from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries could be better understood if it is played on the instruments for which it was written. The American-born performer Susan Alexander-Max, who has been based in Britain for most of her career, is one of those performers. In her opinion, modern performers tend to approach older music without understanding the world of ideas and sounds the original composer inhabited. "We don't really know the vocabulary and we tend to look at all music with 20th century eyes and ears," she wrote in "Do We Understand 18th Century Music?," an essay for the Forum on Piano Performance published online at the Piano Pedagogy Forum.

Born in the 1940's (an account of a lawsuit in which she became embroiled in late 2000 gave her age as 60), Alexander-Max was a native of New York City. She graduated from the Juilliard School, among the top music schools for college-age students in the United States. After finishing the program there, she was awarded a scholarship to travel to London, England, to study with the Hungarian-British pianist Ilona Kabos (c. 1902-1973). She has continued to live in England since that time.

For the first part of her career, Alexander-Max played a conventional piano. She toured the United States, Britain, and continental Europe as a concerto soloist, recitalist, and chamber ensemble member, and until the mid-1990s she was a faculty member at the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in London. Alexander-Max was often heard in London concert series, as well as in a number of concerts on television and radio, and she was noted as a supporter of contemporary classical music who played world premieres of works by composers from Russia, New Zealand, Switzerland, and Britain.

Alexander-Max also had a strong interest in music from the earlier eras of the classical tradition, however. Earlier in her career she had become a finalist in the International Bach Competition, and she began to investigate the instruments that would have been played during the eighteenth century. These included the harpsichord, the smaller and quieter clavichord, which was used in domestic settings, and the fortepiano (probably unknown to Bach himself)—which differed from its predecessors in several ways, the most important being that a string is struck by a hammer rather than plucked by a plectrum (a small quill-like point) when a key is activated, and thus can be made to sound louder or softer depending on how hard the player strikes the key. The word "fortepiano" literally means "loud-soft" in Italian.

For Alexander-Max, using historical instruments (or modern replicas of them) involved not just authenticity but an attempt on the performer's part to put himself or herself into the composer's frame of mind. "To play a Mozart sonata composed in 1775, and to understand the strange, quick succession of changing dynamics," she wrote in the forum essay, "is to understand that the piano was a novelty for Mozart at this time, and forte and piano were dynamics that, for the first time, could be changed in quick succession."

In 1996 Alexander-Max founded The Music Collection, which was defined on its Web site as "a collection of musicians using authentic instruments to play repertoire of Mozart, Beethoven, Haydn and their contemporaries that focuses around the fortepiano, an ancestor of the piano we know today." The group added musicians from top London orchestras in order to play pieces for larger ensembles, and it attracted the regular participation of Simon Standage, one of England's top experts on historical violin performance practices. A notable aspect of the group's activities was its Music in Schools project, a perhaps unique effort to expose young people to the ancestors of the modern piano.

Deeper involvement in the world of historical instruments brought new prominence to Alexander-Max's career. She taught and gave master classes on the fortepiano and clavichord at institutions including Queen's University in Belfast, Northern Ireland, the universities of North and South Carolina in the United States, and her alma mater, the Juilliard School of Music. Both solo and as part of The Music Collection, she gave regular concerts in Britain and the United States, although her concertizing was interrupted by injuries resulting from a fall on wet leaves in Williamsburg, Virginia. Repair of the pianist's fractured knee required three surgeries.

Alexander-Max was also heard for the first time on CD, making recordings for the Naxos, Albany, and Meridian labels. On one of these, featuring music by Italian composer Domenico Zipoli, she played one of the oldest pianos in existence, a Cristofori instrument from 1720 held in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. She ventured into the repertoires of composers, such as Muzio Clementi and Johann Nepomuk Hummel, who were among the piano stars of their time, yet had been forgotten as their styles began to make less sense on larger pianos that missed the subtleties of their music.

Alexander-Max received positive reviews for both concerts and recordings that reflected this new direction. A Musical Opinion review of a 2001 London concert by The Musical Collection praised the "masterly interweaving of the three instrumental lines and the music's textural clarity" in a performance of a Mozart trio that included Alexander-Max, and further noted "a performance of delicacy and perception" in a solo appearance by Alexander-Max in music by Clementi later in the program. Patrick Rucker, writing in Fanfare, called Alexander-Max "a splendid pianist who employs an uncommon variety of touch and articulation, perfectly calibrated for late 18th-century style," although Rob Haskins of the American Record Guide, reviewing an Alexander-Max Clementi disc, complained that "all the fast movements seem a little slow and the interpretations just too cautious." The preponderance of reviews for Alexander-Max's second career were strongly positive, however, and she seemed to be a growing star in a growing field.

For the Record …

Born c. 1940 in New York, NY. Education: Graduated from Juilliard School, New York City.

Concert pianist; professor, Guildhall School of Music & Dance, London, England, through mid-1990s; founded the Music Collection historical instrument ensemble, 1996; founded Music in Schools program within Music Collection; made recording debut with CD of Clementi sonatas, 2002; recorded for Naxos, Meridian, and Albany labels.

Awards: Finalist, International Bach Competition.

Addresses: Office—Susan Alexander-Max, Artistic Director, The Music Collection, 38 Fairhazel Gardens, London NW6 3SJ, England.