Of Brahms and letter bombs

Pianist Garrick Ohlsson is uncharacteristically mum about the lawsuit against his former management company. If only Liszt or Chopin were around to set the sparring to music.

By JOHN FLEMING, Times Performing Arts Critic

© St. Petersburg Times, published April 26, 2000

[Photo by Philip Jones Griffiths] Pianist Garrick Ohlsson

When Garrick Ohlsson sits down at the keyboard this week, he will have two themes playing in his mind. One is Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 2, which he has often played when making solo appearances with the Florida Orchestra.

The other theme is more painful. It is the thought of an angry letter Ohlsson received from his former manager -- a screed that prompted the pianist to file a defamation lawsuit against the management company, Arts Management Group, Inc.

The reason for the letter? Ohlsson had decided to switch management firms.

"Grow up," went one of the passages in the three-page letter from AMG founder Vincent Ryan. "Your bone-crushing reign as a gifted adolescent ended a long time ago and we're all bored to sobs with you."

As reported by the San Francisco Examiner, Ryan's letter went on to criticize Ohlsson's playing ("Try to let go of your complete ego-absorption"), his wardrobe ("No more windbreakers; no more jeans; no more shorts") and the company he keeps ("Get some friends who are not emotionally and/or financially dependent on you").

On the phone last week from Hanover, N.H., where he had a recital at Dartmouth College, Ohlsson was willing to discuss just about anything except the lawsuit.

"That's a complicated story," he said. "I'd rather not talk about it. I don't want to prejudice myself in case we're not entirely finished. You're drawing a big blank from me, and I'm not used to doing that. I wish I could give you a better story about it, but I don't think I can."

Ohlsson is a familiar figure in Tampa Bay, having appeared with the Florida Orchestra almost every other season. Brahms' Second Piano Concerto has become equally familiar.

"The very first time I ever played the Brahms second in public was in Tampa in 1973 with Irwin Hoffman and the Florida Gulf Coast Symphony," he said, speaking of the predecessor of the orchestra. He also played the work with the orchestra in 1992.

"This is quite the piece for me in Tampa," Ohlsson said.

He is playing it again Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Actually, he offered to play Brahms' first piano concerto, which he has never performed with the orchestra, but it was played last season by Yefim Bronfman. The orchestra tries to vary its programming, but popular pieces like the Brahms concertos turn up nearly every season.

At 52, Ohlsson has been a star since becoming the first American to win the International Chopin Competition in 1970. He is one of the busiest pianists around, popular with audiences not only for his lyrical, powerful command of the keyboard but also for his open, engaging personality.

Alas, his own management company did not find him so personable, particularly after he decided to switch from AMG, a relatively small firm, to the much larger ICM Artists. Both are based in New York.

Supporting documents in Ohlsson's suit indicate Ryan represented him for 19 years. The pianist signed his latest contract in June 1998, promising 20 percent of his gross fees to AMG.

Ohlsson decided to leave the firm in part because he wanted a higher profile in Europe. He asked to be freed from his contract in three months rather than the agreed-upon six months.

"I work at the highest international level," he wrote to Ryan and another AMG manager, William Capone. "I need to work with people capable of showing up and working at that level with an international vision."

The reply from Ryan, the firm's founder and managing director, was faxed to Ohlsson at a hotel in Akron, Ohio.

"Since you have appeared just about everywhere in Europe for three decades, it is remarkable that the message has not gotten through to you that Europe has made its choices. Wake up, for Christ's sake."

The spurned manager seemed especially exercised over the "showing up" reference in Ohlsson's letter.

"I had a heart attack the Friday before your last Tully Hall concert," Ryan's letter said. "I wasn't willing to risk dying to hear you play another of your "Look-Ma-I'm-Dancing' programs."

Classical music sites on the Internet were abuzz with talk of Ohlsson's lawsuit ("It must have been a very slow news period last August when that happened," he said) after it was filed in San Francisco, where the pianist lives, and detailed in a front-page story by the Examiner.

The lawsuit, which seeks punitive damages plus attorney fees, said the letter injured his professional reputation and caused him "anxiety, embarrassment, humiliation and anguish." But in the interview with the Times, the pianist said the letter was not the focus of his suit.

"The real issue is contractual, not vitriol," Ohlsson said.

Ryan didn't return a phone message asking for comment on the lawsuit.

Ohlsson's publicist, Josephine Hemsing, declined to discuss the suit. She did, however, speak in general about the sometimes delicate relationship between artist and manager.

"It's an unregulated business," Hemsing said. "Not as unregulated as the antique business, but it's an unregulated business. For me, the whole idea of representation, whether it's publicity or management, is founded completely and utterly on trust. Even if you have a contract, once the trust is gone, there's no way you can represent the person. You have to go and represent this human being to the world. If you don't feel strongly about that person's abilities, how in the hell are you going to sell him?"

Though the lawsuit remains unresolved, according to the publicist, Ohlsson is moving on. He is now represented by ICM.

And he is still happy to talk about his playing, if not the lawsuit. In a profession where many soloists speak well about the music they play, few rival the loquacious Ohlsson for his explanatory skills.

Take, for example, Ohlsson on Chopin, whose music has been integral to his playing (and any top-level pianist's, for that matter) virtually since he started at 8 years old.

"Playing Chopin well helps all of your piano playing," he said. "He's sort of a Rosetta stone of what makes a pianist. If you can play Chopin really adequately, there isn't much in the standard repertory you need to be afraid of. There's hardly anything in piano technique after him that developed that is radically different, except some of the rather more muscular chordal and octave techniques that Liszt developed."

Since 1990, Ohlsson has been working on a project to record all of Chopin's piano music for the Arabesque label. "It's almost complete," he said. "The only things I haven't done are the chamber music pieces with strings. Those are going to be done this summer. In all, it's 17 or 18 discs. I can't keep track."

Lately, Ohlsson has been been playing a lot of Liszt, that other 19th century piano titan. He had a series of recitals last year at New York's Lincoln Center in which he compared and contrasted works by Liszt with those of other composers. But he's not about to give him the exhaustive treatment he gave to Chopin.

"I don't feel like filling more than a hundred CDs with pieces I'm not interested in," he said. "Chopin was an entirely different kind of artist than Liszt. He had a much smaller output. He actually threw things away if he didn't approve of them. He was very self-critical and painstaking, whereas Liszt never apologized. Chopin wrote 250 works in his life; Liszt wrote over 1,300, many of them half an hour long. Liszt was just profligate."

Music preview

Garrick Ohlsson is the soloist in Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 2 with the Florida Orchestra Thursday at Ruth Eckerd Hall, Friday at Tampa Bay Performing Arts Center and Saturday at Mahaffey Theater, all at 8 p.m. Also on the program: Mozart's Magic Flute overture and Hindemith's Mathis der Maler. Thomas Wilkins conducts. Tickets are $18-$37.