Why aging baby boomers can learn a few things from these pianists

We've all heard that the world's population is aging. We've also heard that it's aging more so in Canada than in most other places, and, again, more so in this province than across the rest of the country.

Like a caboose hitched to a train, the question that follow is this: what are we in for?

As counter-intuitive as it sounds, it might just be a new kind of youthfulness.

The pianist Vladimir Horowitz was 83 when he performed Domenico Scarlatti's keyboard sonata K87 (or L33) in Moscow back in 1986. He looked ancient by then, like something come back from the grave, his face a sere landscape of caving flesh and protruding bones.

The video of the performance opens with him sitting at the piano, his eyes fixed on the keyboard. He turns his head briefly towards the audience as if looking for someone to give him a signal, waves with his left hand, and the magic begins.

Scarlatti was one of the great composers of the late Baroque period. Much of his music is of the kind that perks you up whether you want it to or not, cheerfully driving stuff with smartly hopping tunes and their equally smart and hopping repetitions. It makes you want to skip and dance.

K87 is different. How Scarlatti himself wanted it to be played is unknown since there are no tempo instructions in the original score. The piece is basically a meditation which starts in a quiet, thoughtful place, ascends slowly into a knot of heart-rending questions, then descends again into aching but healing resignation, over and over, like waves lapping against a heart.

Many other and usually younger performers have approached K87 with an almost undue respect, playing it very slowly as if attempting to reflect a sacred swamp stagnant with sorrow and sadness.

Not Horowitz. He'd just come through a crisis brought on by prescription drugs and booze. The swamp was behind him. K87 was not going to be more of the same darkness, it was going to be the light at the end of the tunnel.

Hence the lithe tempo of his Moscow performance, its almost unbearable lightness, its serene melancholy without a shred of despair, its subtle youthfulness.

The audience held its breath.

The enthusiasm and energy of an athlete

Seventy-four years earlier, the inaugural performance of the young Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev's piano Concerto No. 1 had a very different effect on Moscow listeners.

Prokofiev performed his concerto as a 21-year-old would: with the enthusiasm and energy of an athlete. The work itself was one of those compositions that put the world on notice that things must change and will, another act of rebellion by another young artist against another set of older tastes and values.

Some critics got what the crystal shatter of the concerto's fugitive tones and rhythms was all about, most didn't. They believed Prokofiev and his composition belonged in a lunatic asylum, not a concert hall filled with corseted and neck-tied respectability.

By 2005, when the Argentine pianist Martha Argerich played it to an audience at the annual music festival in the village of La Roque d'Antheron in southern France, the piece had aged into a performance staple which allowed pianists to show off their technical skills. There's no room for lazy or sticking fingers in Concerto No. 1.

In 2005, Argerich was no spring chicken anymore either. At 64, she'd been through two marriages, a run-in with cancer, also the realization that she hated the loneliness of solo appearances and preferred performing with other musicians.

Was she going to play Concerto No. 1 the way Prokofiev played it back in 1912 — like a musical decathlete doped up on his own adrenalin?

Not a chance.

She enters the stage dressed as if she's just taking a run down to the farmer's market — in a light black cardigan over a black chemise and an ankle-length brightly-printed skirt. On her right wrist she wears a braided leather bracelet.

She smiles and puckers her lips as if someone backstage just told her a very cute joke. Her eyes sparkle with humour and a keen awareness of everything around her.

There's no formality, no polite stage fuss, not even a hint of the artist's vanity.

No need to prove a thing

From the moment her hands hammer the keys of the grand piano and then fly over them it's obvious that she's performed the concerto often enough to know she doesn't have to prove anything anymore. She's in possession of a skill that transcends all bravura.

With her at the keys, the concerto, once booed as an example of what happens when a composer incontinent with youth takes a crowbar to tradition, becomes music of the spheres which runs like water, tumbles like rock, shifts and shimmers like northern lights.

So bring them on, all those sixty- and seventysomethings coming down the pipe in the gathering numbers of a demographic tidal wave.

They won't all be world-class pianists. They won't all have heard of Scarlatti or Prokofiev.

But they will have known and lived other beautiful moments as plentiful and diverse as the earth is round. And they will have their own seasoned views and perspectives on them.

That will be a grand performance like no other this world has ever seen.