Two Cellists, One Departed

Had I been unfair? Had my adolescence so colored my judgment that I had completely misread her? Because the one time I attended a master class with the Canadian cellist Zara Nelsova, I came away convinced: the woman was a dragon.

She was, certainly, a hell of a cellist. Everybody said the same thing: she played like a man. And she had a technique that few could match, the result of natural talent augmented by six hours of practice every day, starting at the age of six. And she attributed much of her success to what she called “long bowing.”

Professional secret—a string player’s success or failure is 90% due to the bow, and how much control the player has over it. And yes, the left hand flying over the fingerboard is important, but what actually makes the sound? The right hand, forearm, and arm.

So the game she had with her flutist father was to see—who could hold a note the longest? Was her bow longer—figuratively—than his breath? And could she maintain the sound absolutely unbroken? Later, the game got expanded: could she start out at the frog of the bow, where the weight of the arm is the heaviest, with the quietest sound possible, and increase it evenly as she moved to the tip of the bow, where the weight of the arm is the lightest? Then, of course, she reversed it—starting out at the tip playing loudly, and decrescendoing as she moved to the frog.

Right—a picture being worth more, certainly, than the words above, here’s an illustration:

Not quite sure what all that’s about? Well, whether you understood it or not, there was no mistaking it: Nelsova’s playing was titanic. Everybody, she owned one of the best pieces of the 20^th century repertoire, Bloch’s Schelomo; she had studied it with the composer, who invited her to premiere it and then record it.

So she was major, but she was also—to my young eyes—a thorough bitch. Because there are musicians who believe in the musical equivalent of the stress interview, which, if you don’t know it, goes something like this:

Boss (smoking largest cigar possible, ignores job candidate for two minutes, and then shouts): WHAT THE HELL DO YOU WANT!

Job seeker: Um, ah, well…I’m here to apply…

Boss: WHY THE HELL SHOULD I GIVE YOU A JOB IN MY COMPANY!

Nelsova started out light on the youngest students, and got progressively meaner on the more advanced. Finally she pounced on one hapless grad student, who was to play the Prokofiev Sonata.

“JASON!” she kept on crying, as he struggled to play for more than 10 seconds, only to be interrupted by…

“JASON!”

It went on and on, until it became the musical equivalent of dog training.

“You must listen, listen, listen!” she instructed, when she felt that he was playing too loudly, and that the pianist had the more interesting part. So it was fascinating to see her performance the next day, when she came sweeping in in a majestic gown bedecked by pink ribbon; trailing her was her accompanist from central casting, a small, thin, nervous man who appeared terrified of the figure with whom he shared the stage. He never played louder than a mezzo piano all evening, even when he had one of the most ravishing themes Brahms ever wrote. Nelsova, not to be outshone, plucked out the pizzicato accompaniment at full volume.

She had, in short, an ego on steroids, and she must have felt—and you get a hint of this in the last minutes of the clip below—that her job was to toughen ‘em up, throw a barrage of criticism at the kids, season them before they faced the annealing fire. It was the prevailing attitude of her generation: watch Elisabeth Schwarzkopf, the famed soprano of the same era, and you’ll see much the same thing.

You were supposed to be tough, you were supposed to be able to take in the criticism, accept it, and believe in yourself enough to withstand what felt like the Nazis marching through Poland. Because when you left the conservatory? Well, there are very few people wearing kid gloves in the world of classical music.

It took me several decades before I got that, and began at last to face up to one of the particularly challenging tasks for a cellist: stepping in front of an audience with nothing and nobody backing you up, and playing solo; here’s what one critic has to say about it:

Four of the five works on his program were written for unaccompanied cello. It takes a lot of (ahem) pluck to play this kind of music. Every note is sorely exposed. There’s no piano accompaniment to hide behind. It’s the musical equivalent of walking a tightrope without a safety net.    

And who is the critic talking about?

Michael Samis, a wonderful young cellist who stumbled upon an unknown cello concerto by the German composer Carl Reinecke, performed it, and had the dream of recording it. So he started a Kickstarter campaign, got the $8500 that he needed, and embarked on the long process of recording the work on the Delos label.

I had pledged some money, and then had waited, checking in periodically on Michael via Facebook. Nor was I surprised when Michael’s dream took longer than—seemingly—expected, because dreams do. Mine had, and at last I had had my book in my hands; a couple weeks ago, I had Michael’s dream in my hands. A CD, you see, is sometimes something more than a piece of plastic enclosed in other pieces of plastic.

The concerto was everything the excerpt had promised: lyrical, virtuosic, and lush. And then we came to a remarkable piece for solo cello: the Bloch Prelude Number One. Michael was treading on Nelsova’s turf, but why not? She had died a decade before, in New York City, where she had taught at Juilliard up until her death: somebody has to carry on the baton….

And curiously, Michael seems to be the guy to do it—the technique is there, but so is the big, beautiful, lush tone, and the temperament to be unabashedly romantic. It’s curiously refreshing, in an age of increasingly safe, correct performance practice, to hear somebody with a musical personality.

So the verdict is definitely in on Michael. But Nelsova?

…still not sure.

A Composer First, a Lady Incidentally

Who knew? The eccentric English gentleman has become so accepted that he is now cliché, but what about those Victorian / Edwardian ladies? People like Gertrude Bell who energetically managed to be a writer, explorer, archeologist, state maker, administrator, and…oh, did I mention spy?

It’s been a rather trying time here—I have been battered for four months with construction in the street; at one point there were two jackhammers, an electric generator, and a tractor busy breaking up cement. And last night, I arrived home from the café which provides me escape as well as coffee to discover that there was no water. What had happened? Well, the construction workers had broken our water main, and had deemed it easier to turn a valve before the break than actually repair the break. So that they had done, leaving me very sweaty on one of the hottest days of the year.

Nor was calling the water company the solution, since I had no idea what our account number was, and of course had thrown the bill away after I had paid it. This prompted the less than helpful observation from Mr. Fernández that he always has the most recent electric bill in his wallet.

With the restraint for which I am famous, I forbore to point out that Mr. Fernández has the last 20 years of electric bills—as well as every receipt for everything he bought in the last two decades. And why is that? Because he throws nothing away. He also, however, can find nothing.

Right—got the account number by accessing “edit payees” on my bank’s electronic site. Then Raf called the water company, and waited for twenty minutes for a voice that was attached to a person, and then spoke for another twenty minutes to a charming lady who managed to locate our account—though incredibly it was under neither of our names, social security numbers, or any current address. That done, the nice lady gave us a work order number, with the assurance that someone would come and repair the break—or at least turn the valve a quarter turn.

Did they?

Well, it was nice to have the number.

And today, the little guy with the two pierced lips was busy at work, having been encouraged by Mr. Fernández. At this point, I have traveled through annoyance, anger, outrage, fury and am now squarely in abject misery. A sort of Stockholm syndrome has taken over—the little guy was my best friend, my savior.

“You won’t,” I said, “ever, ever take away my water again. Please!”

So I trotted off to see my shrink, who assured me that he wouldn’t sniff me too closely. Then I came home and thought to check in on a classical music website that was going to tell me a list of the 10 greatest gay composers. Well, I had a good idea—there’s Copland, Barber, Poulenc, and…duh, Tchaikovsky. But I had forgotten some big ones—most notably Franz Schubert (contested, but likely) and Handel (ditto).

And then there was Ethel Smyth.

Say whah?

Yes, in fifty years of listening to music, I had somehow never come across Ethel Smyth, 1858-1944, who studied composition in Leipzig with Carl Reinecke, where she also met Dvorak, Grieg, and Tchaikovsky. And it was Tchaikovsky who said, "Miss Smyth is one of the few women composers whom one can seriously consider to be achieving something valuable in the field of musical creation."

Well, the lady got around—among other passions was the Suffragette movement, and when Mrs. Pankhurst urged her followers to break the windows of any politician who opposed them, Miss Smyth did, and then paid for it by spending two months in Holloway Prison. The conductor Thomas Beecham went to visit, and found Miss Smyth conducting a group of Suffragettes in a rousing anthem called “The March for Women,” which she had composed, and which had become the anthem for the movement. The Suffragettes were in the courtyard; Miss Smyth was conducting—with a toothbrush—from out a second floor window.

And she was vigorous in other ways—golfing, mountaineering, and fox hunting. Here’s how she described herself:

Because I have conducted my own operas and love sheep-dogs; because I generally dress in tweeds, and sometimes, at winter afternoon concerts, have even conducted in them; because I have written books, spoken speeches, broadcast, and don't always make sure that my hat is on straight; for these and other equally pertinent reasons, in a certain sense I am well known.

Throughout her life, she had passionate affairs with women, but apparently only one male lover. At the age of 71, she fell in love with Virginia Wolf, who described it as “being like caught by a giant crab.” Nonetheless, they became good friends.

Right—and the music? Wow! Check out the cello sonata below—it’s original and fresh. Is it top drawer? Perhaps not, but it’s well above floor level….

A Forgotten Cello Concerto (Republished)

Note: No new post today as the day got quite complicated…. So here's an older (yet recent) one; I'm happy to say, as an update to this post, that Michael Samis did meet—and actually surpassed— his objective, with still 11 days to go! Wonderful news, indeed!
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OK—here’s the deal. I’m taking a break today from rescuing America from its rising tide of gun violence to take on another, just-as-worthy cause.

Yesterday, I wrote about all the music that should be heard, the composers we should be listening to, the pieces that are never played. In the post, I mentioned Carl Reinecke, whose cello sonata (one of them) I had played and loved.

So I was on to YouTube, this morning, to see if I could hear that sonata, and guess what? In all of YouTube, there is only ONE video of a Reinecke cello sonata, played by what looked to be a German conservatory student (very talented). And no, it wasn’t the one I had played.

YouTube offered me the consolation, however, of the Reinecke cello concerto, and so why not? And Readers, Dear Readers, we’ve got work to do!

“I’m Michael Samis,” the guy starts out, “and tonight I’ll be playing the Reinecke cello concerto with the Gateway Chamber Orchestra…” He then sits down and plays a ravishingly lovely, lyrical theme—just the stuff I remembered from the sonata. He then stopped—a musical coitus interruptus.

OK—I was off. I HAD to hear the rest of that piece. First stop, amazon.com—zip. iTunes—ditto. Google, and I’m back on Michael Samis.

First however, I had checked out Reinecke, who has a career somewhat parallel to yesterday’s man whom time forgot, Hans Gal. Reinecke was born in 1824 as a German but in an area controlled at the time by Denmark. He studies in Leipzig with an impressive triumvirate: Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt. He later spends time in Copenhagen as court pianist to Christian VIII, and in 1848 goes to Paris.

In 1851, he becomes a professor in the conservatory of Cologne, and then in 1860 is appointed as conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, a post he will occupy for thirty years. While there, he will conduct the premiere of the full seven movements of the German Requiem of Brahms, as well as the premieres of several of Brahms’s chamber works.

He is—one has to admire that 19^th discipline—teaching as well; his students include Grieg, Bruch, Albéniz, and Leoš Janáček.

After retirement, he devotes his time to composition—which he’s been doing in his “free” time all his life. He writes several operas, which are unperformed today, as well as four piano concertos.

And as you will hear Michael explain below, he’s writing in a musical style of the past. German music had evolved—Michael might say devolved—into Wagner and his followers. Reinecke stays in the style of his teachers, Mendelssohn and Schumann. He writes those long, lyric, lush themes and has the dazzling technical displays that leave you breathless.

And nobody wants his music.

He’s old, he’s out of fashion. The cello concerto, written in 1864, may never have been heard in the United States. And then Michael Samis comes along and falls in love with it—it’s the kind of music he’s loved all his life.

And now Michael has a dream—recording the concerto, as well as the Schumann concerto and various shorter pieces. But to do that he needs…

…sigh…

…do I have to tell you?

Look, if you go on kickstarter.com and donate 100 bucks, you can get a high quality DVD of Michael performing the concerto. For 2000 bucks, you get a 90-minute recital in your home! Hey, the Jones’s are gonna have to work pretty hard to top that.

And the tragic thing?

This guy needs just 8500 bucks. Oh, and if he doesn’t get it—no recording. Kickstart is all or nothing.

I’m in, I’m totally in. Readers, send this to everybody before the next 32 days. Get Michael’s message out there. Twitter and Facebook—this music has gotta be heard.

Long URL: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/michaelsamis/a-forgotten-cello-concerto?ref=live

Twitter-friendly shortened URL: http://kck.st/ZgH5iP

A Forgotten Cello Concerto

OK—here’s the deal. I’m taking a break today from rescuing America from its rising tide of gun violence to take on another, just-as-worthy cause.

Yesterday, I wrote about all the music that should be heard, the composers we should be listening to, the pieces that are never played. In the post, I mentioned Carl Reinecke, whose cello sonata (one of them) I had played and loved.

So I was on to YouTube, this morning, to see if I could hear that sonata, and guess what? In all of YouTube, there is only ONE video of a Reinecke cello sonata, played by what looked to be a German conservatory student (very talented). And no, it wasn’t the one I had played.

YouTube offered me the consolation, however, of the Reinecke cello concerto, and so why not? And Readers, Dear Readers, we’ve got work to do!

“I’m Michael Samis,” the guy starts out, “and tonight I’ll be playing the Reinecke cello concerto with the Gateway Chamber Orchestra…” He then sits down and plays a ravishingly lovely, lyrical theme—just the stuff I remembered from the sonata. He then stopped—a musical coitus interruptus.

OK—I was off. I HAD to hear the rest of that piece. First stop, amazon.com—zip. iTunes—ditto. Google, and I’m back on Michael Samis.

First however, I had checked out Reinecke, who has a career somewhat parallel to yesterday’s man whom time forgot, Hans Gal. Reinecke was born in 1824 as a German but in an area controlled at the time by Denmark. He studies in Leipzig with an impressive triumvirate: Mendelssohn, Schumann, Liszt. He later spends time in Copenhagen as court pianist to Christian VIII, and in 1848 goes to Paris.

In 1851, he becomes a professor in the conservatory of Cologne, and then in 1860 is appointed as conductor of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, a post he will occupy for thirty years. While there, he will conduct the premiere of the full seven movements of the German Requiem of Brahms, as well as the premieres of several of Brahms’s chamber works.

He is—one has to admire that 19^th discipline—teaching as well; his students include Grieg, Bruch, Albéniz, and Leoš Janáček.

After retirement, he devotes his time to composition—which he’s been doing in his “free” time all his life. He writes several operas, which are unperformed today, as well as four piano concertos.

And as you will hear Michael explain below, he’s writing in a musical style of the past. German music had evolved—Michael might say devolved—into Wagner and his followers. Reinecke stays in the style of his teachers, Mendelssohn and Schumann. He writes those long, lyric, lush themes and has the dazzling technical displays that leave you breathless.

And nobody wants his music.

He’s old, he’s out of fashion. The cello concerto, written in 1864, may never have been heard in the United States. And then Michael Samis comes along and falls in love with it—it’s the kind of music he’s loved all his life.

And now Michael has a dream—recording the concerto, as well as the Schumann concerto and various shorter pieces. But to do that he needs…

…sigh…

…do I have to tell you?

Look, if you go on kickstarter.com and donate 100 bucks, you can get a high quality DVD of Michael performing the concerto. For 2000 bucks, you get a 90-minute recital in your home! Hey, the Jones’s are gonna have to work pretty hard to top that.

And the tragic thing?

This guy needs just 8500 bucks. Oh, and if he doesn’t get it—no recording. Kickstart is all or nothing.

I’m in, I’m totally in. Readers, send this to everybody before the next 32 days. Get Michael’s message out there. Twitter and Facebook—this music has gotta be heard.

Long URL: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/michaelsamis/a-forgotten-cello-concerto?ref=live

Twitter-friendly shortened URL: http://kck.st/ZgH5iP

A Composer Reborn

There’s music that gets played all the time and shouldn’t. How many times have you heard the Moldau, the Bartered Bride, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik?

There’s also music that never or almost never gets played and should. Zelenka comes to mind, as well as Reinecke—guys who languish in undeserved obscurity.

As does a guy named Hans Gal, who appeared on a recording done by a new follower on Twitter, Kenneth Woods. Well, there’s a lot I don’t know—and more and more piling up every day—so it was time to head for Wikipedia.

Which has, I was relieved to find, only a couple of paragraphs on Gal; clearly he’s not as mainstream as I had feared. Ironic, because at one point in his life he was well known and much played.

Born in a small town near Vienna, he attended the New Vienna Conservatory and went on to win an important competition, the Columbia Schubert Centenary Prize, in 1928. The conductor Furtwangler and composer Richard Strauss helped him obtain the position of director of the Mainz Conservatory. This lasted until 1933, when the Germans overtook Mainz. Gal, a Jew, was dismissed and his music, extremely popular and influential through the twenties, was banned.

Fortunately, there’s a backup. Donald Tovey invites him to Scotland, and he assumes a position at the University of Edinburgh. All is well—as far as we know—until about 1940, when, according to one source, Churchill said, “collar the lot” and Gal and other German émigrés found themselves in an internment camp. Did I mention—there’s a lot of stuff I don’t know?

It was, as you can imagine, a pretty distinguished bunch, this cultured group of German Jews who had not so much escaped the camps as found a decidedly better one—so what do they do?

Write and stage a revue, called “What a Life!”

It took, according to Wikipedia, about six months to determine who was who, and most of the Germans were released. Presumably, Gal goes back to the University and resumes his career. As well, he edits the Brahms symphonies, composes a lot of chamber music, symphonies, songs and incidental music.

He was played extensively in the ‘20’s but, by the end of his life he was forgotten. (Grammar break—the computer has just green-squiggled that last phrase and suggested “the end of his life forgot him!” Your choice, dear Reader!) His symphony number four, his last work in the genre, was premiered in 1972, and then sat on the shelf for another 30 years.

Then along came Kenneth Woods, a writer / cellist / conductor / rock guitarist, who decides to pair the Gal with another composer of four symphonies—Robert Schumann. And it’s well received, becoming a Gramophone Editor’s Choice in 2012.

Woods, in a short clip introducing the disc, makes the point that Gal never jumped on board whatever musical style was fashionable at the time—the  Second Viennese School, or twelve-tone music. The music sounds crisp, distinctive and at least in the clip below, wonderfully lyrical.

Woods also mentions that it must have been frustrating for Gal’s daughter Eva to have to wait thirty years for the rediscovery of her father’s work. She replies with understatement: “the first thirty years are the hardest.” In fact, thirty years is not too long—in the case of Bach, it was one hundred years. And the sad fact is that there are many fine composers that we will never hear.

Kenneth—I’ve just bought the Gal Symphony No. 4 and the Schumann Symphony No. 2, and downloaded them to my iPad. Now then—could I suggest another forgotten composer?

Gunnar Johansen.