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 20th 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.
