Live Stream from Australia
In a couple of hours I am going to play my debut with the Sydney Symphony in the probably most photographed concert hall in the world, the Sydney Opera. Yes, the famous landmark right at the water front, and it does look even more spectacular in real live – and it is huge! I didn’t know that inside this beautiful architecture there is a full opera house plus a concert hall which seats 2700 people, home to the really excellent Sydney Symphony, and I can’t wait to play the fragile but gorgeous 1st Saint-Saens Concerto there tonight (well, concert starts at 8 pm here, which is 12 pm Berlin time, or 6 am NYC, and there is a Bizet-Symphony first) – acoustics in rehearsal were excellent, but it can be always a surprise with people filling the hall.
Dvorak in Utah and Madrid
Yes, I made it finally to Utah after all the trouble with visas and ticket changes – and I was rewarded with the most gorgeous skiing weather you could imagine! My son János came with me and we skied every single day; I was a bit jealous because he got to do it the whole day while I had to dash in and out of Park City into Salt Lake City to rehearse the Dvorak with the Utah Symphony under their chief conductor Keith Lockhart but I must admit that in spite of all the fatherly envy I enjoyed my time with this courageous orchestra which played two beautiful concerts – for free! They donated their salary for the sake of keeping the organisation going, and they really put their pride into the two performances which included two of the great pieces of the last 100 years: Dvorak Cello concerto and Strauss Heroes Life. And while knowing Keith for 15 years now.
Visa Trouble
In Mid-February I wrote about my little greencard-theft-desaster and the ensuing trip from hell to the US Consulate in Frankfurt, almost missing my flight etc… Now I seem to be bound to go through exactly the same once more: The greencard, which I “earned” by being married to a Puerto Rican lady with a US passport (well, all Puerto Ricans carry a US passport) was about to expire in September anyway, and since I don’t spend enough days in the US and the center of my life is right now in Berlin, I decided not to attempt to apply for a prolongation but to give it up.
Financial Crisis
One hour ago I was affected for the first time by the financial crisis, but first a little update on what I have been doing since my last scribbling:
After an enjoyable Elgarconcerto in Bonn two weeks ago with Stefan Blunier, a wonderfully original conductor, and his newly acquired orchestra I had a whole week at home to take care of some paper- and office-work while spending some quality time with wife and family. Right now I am sitting in the plane flying me home from Valencia (via Zurich) where I played another Haydn D Major concerto with the local orchestra and the 78 year-old Günther Herbig. In the second half I took the opportunity to join the orchestra in a very gripping and emotional performance of Shostakovich’s 7th Symphony, 80 min of intense music-making. I was in awe by the energy this old gentleman projected into the orchestra which played their hearts out for him. Great energy, good amount of wide hair and not too many wrinkles, I thought he was about 60 years old when I met him at first, discovering only later through wikipedia his real age.
Father and Soloist
Often I am being asked in interviews how difficult it is to combine the life of an egotistical soloist with having a family (somehow this subject sounds familiar – I must have written about it already; if so, please forgive me for repeating myself!). Last week I lived the perfect example of how easy it can be to combine the two pleasures; my ex- wife attended a seminar in Los Angeles and our son János who had just switched schools refused to stay alone in Berlin during my trip to Oslo (he could have stayed with my father or my sister). The solution was far too tempting for me to turn down: He had to come with me to Oslo. During school time. Why not? He took massive amounts of homework with him, his laptop with online-work to do, and by experiencing a new city the loss of missing three schooldays would be within the limits. We had done it once for a much longer trip to Vancouver and it worked beautifully, but this time was even better. He is ten years old now and a wonderful travel companion, witty, warm and very supportive, strangely enough. He loves music and didn’t mind me practising next to him while doing his homework or playing Fifa 09 and chess on his PSP (this is some Sony playconsole, for those who don’t have 10-year-old children) and practising the piano during my rehearsals. And it was wonderful of having at least one loved one for my debut with the Oslo Philharmonic at my side. The afternoon after the first rehearsal we had some rather philosophical conversations about love, life and especially death (he is fascinated by this, also women start to be more interesting for him than a few months ago – he doesn’t understand them or at least not the ones he knows), studied a bit and then – only free evening of the stay there – we went to the movies to see Pink Panther.
Birmingham, AL - Birmingham, UK
Maybe it is nothing to be especially proud of, but I had a laugh when I realized a couple of months ago that I was going to play within four days with the two resident orchestras of the cities of Birmingham in Alabama as well as the “original” one in the UK. Pure coincidence, I promise, I had nothing to do with it. With both orchestras I have played before, obviously the one in England having the higher profile, but I must admit the Alabama Symphony did also quite a wonderful job with their energetic young British conductor (and pianist) Justin Brown.I just finished playing the second and last concert in Birmingham, UK, with the CBSO and their new chief conductor, Andris Nelsons, and it was maybe the most fulfilling Dvorak concerto I played so far. I met Andris three years ago – we did a tour together with the German Youth Orchestra to Venezuela, playing Haydn C Major and a modern piece which we both didn’t care much about, but still I could tell what a major talent was growing there. In the meantime he has grown even more, as musician and conductor, is 30 years old now, and I have never come across a musician with more intensity and passion. Already in rehearsal he wets his entire shirt after 5 minutes with his own sweat, but every move, every gesture has a direct reason and musical effect, there is no showmanship whatsoever in his demeanour, rather the opposite.
Vibrato - Little Vibrato - No vibrato ???
Sitting in trains allows me to write a bit about my performances I am playing these days. Besides quite a range in repertoire (between Jan 13 and Feb 25 I am playing the concerti by Dutilleux, Strauss, Schumann, Lalo, Haydn D, Saint-Saens No.1+2, Beethoven Triple and Dvorak) I have the rare pleasure of working during the next few days together with one of the the specialist of “authentic baroque-music-playing”, Ton Koopman – on the Haydn Concerto in D Major.But first I would like to write about my experience playing in Helsinki last week, the city which is the cradle of so many wonderful conductors and musicians of today. Yes, I was more nervous than normally, because somehow my respect for these Finns is very high. Two days before travelling north I attended the concert of one of Finnland’s finest, Sakari Oramo conducting Berlin Phil, and his Schumann 2nd Symphony was really one of the most gripping and moving peformances of any Schumann Symphony I have heard so far. The “Sturm und Drang”, which is so omni-present in his music came out beautifully without him overdoing it. In Hannu Lintu I had a similarly intense conductor for the Schumann Concerto in Helsinki and even though I haven’t dared to listen to the live-broadcast yet I felt that it was one of the better performances I have given of that piece.
Dutilleux and Don Quixotte with the Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne
On January 31 2005, the 6th birthday of my son Janos, I had the craziest jump-in of my life. At 6 pm on Jan 30 I received a phone call from the Gürzenich Orchestra if I could play the Lalo Concerto at 11 am the next morning. At this moment I had just returned from the ski slopes back to the hotel in Austria, where I spent some days of skiing holidays with my son. I hadn’t played the Lalo for about two years, but since it was one of the first concertos I had ever learned I was confident enough to agree to the gig.
Messiaen in Lisbon, Birmginham and London-Debut in Poland
When I look at all the works I have played so far for cello – be it solo, with piano or with orchestra – I might be tempted to state that the cello repertoire is not that small, but if I just have a tiny little look at the piano rep I must admit that we have nothing in comparison. This year we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the great French composer Olivier Messiaen, and while the pianists are in full combat-mode (2h15 minutes of “Vingt regards” for piano solo, or the 80 min Turangalila-Symphony, which is more or less a piano concerto, just to name a few) we cellists have practically nothing. Nothing? Well, there is the heavenly beautiful “Quatuor Pour La Fin Du Temps” for piano, violin, cello and clarinet, and since my friend and piano-partner Steven Osborne is one of the top Messiaen players (well, not only top for Messiaen) I am lucky enough to have been able to play this 50-min piece a couple of times this year, among others last week in Lisbon, Birminham and London’s Wigmore Hall.
Time flies, and some cellist is getting lazier and lazier
Actually I wanted to write at least a little bit of something after last week’s Brahms Double in Berlin with the RSB, again Marek Janowski and lovely Arabella Steinbacher, especially since it is always very meaning- and also stressfull and special for me to play in my hometown, in “my” hall, the Berliner Philharmonie in which I have heard so many unbelievable concerts, seen the greatest players and conductors, in short: where I received my musical training, at least partly.Thinking of the musicians I have had a chance to hear in there, just to name a few of the real good, dead ones: Vladimir Horowitz, Claudio Arrau (he even kissed me on my forehead :)), Emil Gilels, Pierre Fournier, Paul Tortelier, obviously Mstislav Rostropovich, conductors like H.v.Karajan, Jochum, Giulini and so many others – sooo lucky having grown up in this amazing city with wonderful orchestras performing more or less 10 concerts each week.
Dvorak in Boston
What a privilege to be able to play one of the great concertos of all times in one of the most gorgeous halls in the world, Boston Symphony Hall! I played here already three years ago, but I was far too nervous to actually enjoy and live the moment – tonight I was much more at ease, and it felt really special. Actually, today we even had two concerts; the dress rehearsal was an open one, and when I got to the hall at 9 am to practice I saw already many people streaming towards the hall. I got scared, thought, that maybe the rehearsal didn’t start at 10:30 but at 9:30. But no, it was just the free seating which made people come really easy so that could grab the best seat in the house. At 10:30 the house was packed and we didn’t “rehearse” but played a full-powered performance for this lovely audience. I am not a big complainer, but I had moments when I wished I could just stay home and enjoy my life. Tonight was one of the moments which reimbursed me for all the trouble this profession (or calling) brings with it. Playing Dvorak Concerto with Boston Symphony under a conductor like Marek Janowski (for me one of the great living conductors) just pays off anything, and at least on stage the Symphony Hall sounds better than all other halls I have played in – the cello plays more or less on its own. Audience wonderful, very attentive and apreciative at the end, and I must admit, I am really sad that already a third of my time in Boston is over :(
Paris: City of Love and the Arts
Actually I wanted to write this text on my way from Paris to Cologne in the train, but sitting together in the TGV (train grand vitesse = French superfast train) next to my good friend and pianist Steven Osborne prohibited me to do anything else but talking to him about life, love and music – which means this text had to wait until my next journey, which was obviously not the drive in a rent-a-car from Cologne to Berlin the night after our concert in Siegburg, but now, a day later, on my flight from Berlin via Frankfurt to Boston (long live the online-checkin: I am sitting in the exit-row with endless leg-space – no seat in front of me!)..
Moving - Unpacking - Playing Concerts in between....
Oy wey, I feel guilty, haven’t written in such a long time, and now I am writing without having anything specific to say. This will be probably the shortest blog ever on this page, but somehow I have to justify its existence, and since some people seem to read it, I don’t want to stop without at least trying to keep writing at least once a month. I just finished playing another Elgar performance in the very charming little city of Madison – I think it wasn’t a bad performance, but somehow I didn’t feel the closest of all connections with the audience; there was quite some coughing in the first minutes of the piece, and I guess it’s my upbringing to look for the blame in myself. I didn’t manage to engage them and draw them in with what I had to say with the music which resulted in the fact that they weren’t quite with me.What can one do if one realizes that? Start throwing some antics at them? No way, bad idea, even though it might do the trick, but I tried to just give as much intensity and emotion as I could to make the coughers be silent, and maybe I am wrong, but I think it worked later on. The orchestra did a wonderful job sticking with me and I can’t wait until tommorrow after having done some more thinking about the beginning, what to do to surprise the audience and take them with me from the start. Well, some might say, it wasn’t my fault, it was just bad atmosphere, maybe the weather was too cold and people were sick – my answer is NO! It is the performer who can create a breathless atmosphere in which nobody dares to make a noise, but it is very hard and doesn’t happen to often.
Facial Expressions during the Dvorak Concerto in Canada
Chilling out and preparing for a short night on the plane from Toronto to Munich I take the opportunity of the wireless service here in the Air Canada Lounge to write about my thoughts of my past week. I played the Dvorak with the orchestra of Kitchener/Waterloo (near Toronto) conducted by their very talented young chief conductor Edwin Outwater. I met him before in San Francisco and heard such wonderful things about him from the musicians of the SF Symphony that I decided to come to Canada for only these performances to open his 2nd season – and I didn’t regret that decision: each performance got more flexible and more profound, a real treat for a maybe over-played concerto.
Being or at least acting important
Gosh, I need a break – recording one program, performing a full recital with another one with no time in between, wears the most resilient musician down. Last night Markus Becker and me played the opening of the Reger-Festival in Weiden (near Nuremberg), and if somebody would have listened to our rehearsals, he or she wouldn’t have believed that we were attempting to play that repertoire in concert the same day. We had good excuses for not being ready though; both of us just came out of tough recording projects, him doing Reger-Bach arrangements for Hyperion, I did the two very difficult Prokofiev Concertos. But at the end of the day, the audience in Weiden didn’t know about this and deserved a good concert.With the last amounts of concentration left, after working hard all day (again I must have played the cello for at least 8 hours including the concert) we pulled off the miracle and played actually really well. I was especially nervous because it was the first time since about 17 years that I was playing a recital with the music in front of me. I had spoilt myself by always knowing the sonatas I was performing by heart, which gave me another authority and view over the piece, at least this is the feeling I have while playing. But for yesterday’s concert there was no chance to re-memorize the Sonatas by Strauss and Reger in half a day, even though I knew them a year ago. The 5th Bachsuite I had to play by memory since the music is all packed in some moving boxes, but the rest of the concert I had to endure looking at the music once in a while. I survived and the concert is history :)
Loosing 3 kilos in 6 days just by recording Prokofiev
When I arrived last night at home in Berlin after having been gone for the week, my roommate looked at me and claimed that I had lost weight. This morning after sleeping like a child for almost 9 hours I verified her claim: 3 kilos (6,6 US pounds) in 6 days – and that without sports or dieting, just pure and utter stress. What had happened?
Well, the last week I had spent in beautiful Bergen, Norway, in order to record for Hyperion two big concertos by Prokofiev, his op.58 “Concerto” and the more famous “Sinfonia Concertante”, both considered among the toughest pieces for cello; technically and physically that might be true. As usually I was very well taken care of by my favorite producer-team of all times, Andrew Keener and Simon Eadon, and the Bergen Philharmonic under their “chief” Andrew Litton was in splendid shape, but he schedule was grueling.We had so-called “Rehearse/Record” sessions, which means not an isolated day of rehearsals for these two 40 minute pieces of which the op.58 is practically unkown (I had never heard nor played it before) but we rehearsed a movement and then jumped into recording it. What I found especially brutal was the fact that the sessions happened each day from 10 am until 3 pm with two, three breaks in which Andrew Litton and me just listened to what we had recorded. After the session I went back to my dressing room to practise another two, three hours the next day’s movements.
In London at the Proms
While my little family is still sleeping in the hotelroom here in London I am taking the opportunity to do a bit of writing before the gap to my last entry is too long and I broke my promise to write at least twice a month. Normally they are never travelling with me, but since the Royal Albert Hall is one of the most amazing places to play at in the world (and one of the most scary as well – soooo big, and without amplification we feel like little dwarfs in front of far too many people) I thought it would be nice for them to see their father/husband sweat. And sweating they’ve got plenty of to see….After returning from New Zealand I really had it for a while, couldn’t stand touching the cello for a while, so I decided instead of practising and learning the Prokofiev Concerto (recording in 11 days, arghh!) I took a break of more than a weak and spend some quality time with my family who returned shortly after me from their holidays in Puerto Rico (lucky them!).
"Go home and take a shower!"
1988/89 I spent studying in Cincinnati, OH. My cello teacher turned out to be rather lame, so I focused a bit on playing quartet and taking lessons with the quartets in residence there, the LaSalle- and the Tokyo-Quartet. I had the time of my life, living together with two German guys in a one-bedroom flat, getting up every morning at 6 am to the sounds of either the beginning of Tosca or Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet, (the part, where the violins go crazy – God, I am so bad with names, I even forgot what that part is called) in order to start practicing at the practice floor of the Conservatory at 7 am.Why am I writing about this right now? Well, after one of the lesser succesfull quartet recitals of our quartet, Henry Mayer, the second violinist of the LaSalle-Quartet, an Auschwitz survivor with the driest sense of humour, didn’t congratulate us, he only said: “Go home and take a shower!” This was so wonderfully prosaic that we used this saying at many occasions, describing a bit the indifference one tends to feel after having finished or accomplished something, and afterwards, when there wasn’t much else to do, you could just go home and pour some water over yourself, forgetting about the success or the lack of success one just had – it all passes anyway.
Travel to Australia
My last concert in Europe this season happened two days ago, playing the Rococo Variations with the Russian National Orchestra under Philippe Auguin in Bad Kissingen, but unfortunately I am not going to some well-deserved family holidays, but while my son and his mother are travelling to her mother to Puerto Rico, I am right now on my way to my first visit to Australia and later New Zealand. Actually pretty exciting, but I just find it very sad that I can’t spend the first half of Janos’ summer holidays with him – something I swore myself to avoid, and when the offer came to play during summer on the other half of the world I agreed hoping I could take him with me. I wasn’t aware though that it is winter in New Zealand right now, and this poor German boy deserves a nice summer after the grueling German winters…
Haydn and Prokofiev in Wellington, New Zealand
The infamous Haydn D Major - how come this piece scares every single cellist? It ain't fair, because it doesn't sound difficult, not even remotely so, doesn't look anything, but still we pee our pants before having to play it. This morning in the dress rehearsal I felt as incapable as I hadn't felt in a long time (maybe I shouldn't have watched the Tour de France until 4 am) and lucky enough the saying of "bad dress rehearsal, good concert" worked once again, but still I wasn't completely fulfilled with myself. What to do with this piece of music? Lovely, springlike, fresh, yes, but at the same time so delicate and dangerous, that you just have to watch out and concentrate so much for just playing in tune.