Music – Alban Gerhardt

Contemporary Cello Concertos in the standard repertoire?

Alban Gerhardt — Tue, 21 Jun 2016 22:13:26 +0000

Sitting on the train that will bring me to my first performance of the beautiful cello concerto by Unsuk Chin this year in Hamburg I started thinking about contemporary cello concertos and the fact that none has really made it into the standard repertoire (and I am not talking 20 or 30 performances, but hundreds). Commuting back and fourth between Berlin and Hamburg between the rehearsals and now the concert – my oldest son had all his wisdom teeth removed at once, and I didn’t want him to be alone at home with that challenge – it gives me some time to not only read the „Zeit“ and take care of old e-mails but also write a bit after more than a year of abstinence.

Asking cellists, conductors or orchestra managers which concerto they thought has become standard repertoire in recent years, the answer normally is „Dutilleux and Lutoslawski“. Yes, two outstanding concertos, inspired by Rostoprovich – almost half a century ago (ok, 45 years)! In the meantime maybe more cello concertos have been written than in the 250 years prior but I don’t want to believe that none of them was good enough to stick in the repertoire. Impossible, there must be some great ones, but most probably they have been forgotten because the next one was written a couple of weeks later and took attention away as it was the latest one….

I am not suggesting too many concertos are being written, but to get a new piece performed which has already been performed once is very hard. The easiest thing is to get the world premier, everybody wants to write it, play it, schedule it, listen to it, write about it. It’s like the world record in some track and field meeting; the runner is proud because he has done something nobody has achieved before him, the organizer is happy (and pays a fortune) as he can claim that at his event this world record was broken, the press is excited to write about it, and the audience is thrilled because they can brag about having been there.

Yes, premiering a piece is an honor and a privilege but it also comes with a huge responsability as it is not another „world record“ but (at least for the composer) it is like a baby. A performer is not the parent, that is the composer, but a performer should not „just“ be the midwife who professionally helps to give birth to thousands of kids and forgets about them the next day (as meaningful as every single birth is for them), but we should be like a god-parent to the piece, watch over it not just for the birthdays but help it on their way to adulthood, at least until its 18th year and beyond, as the greatest pieces need to be kept in the minds of audiences, orchestras, other performers and the media.

What to do? Well, first step would be instead of premiering a new piece every [...]

Sharing thoughts or just describing concerts?

Alban Gerhardt — Sun, 22 Mar 2015 20:51:43 +0000

A German journalist reminded me the other day of my diary which is called “blog”, asking how much my audience has to know about me. I told him that as long as it wasn’t embarrassing they could know everything, and since there is very little I am embarrassed about it would leave far too much material which obviously I am not sharing here as I hardly ever post anything. And do I really share my deepest thoughts about music, life, feelings, ideas on these pages here? While I have never received a proper shitstorm I have been misunderstood and misquoted before, I have harmed myself by sometimes being too opinionated and by giving out judgements where it might not be my place to judge as I am too involved in the musical world.

Mahler on the Westcoast

Alban Gerhardt — Tue, 25 Nov 2014 12:12:43 +0000

In the passed week I had the pleasure and unique experience to perform two different Mahler symphonies in the second halves of my concerts in Portland, Oregon, and San Diego. Somehow Mahler has always been one of my favorite composers whom I didn’t have much chance performing because he didn’t write much for cello solo and his symphonies are hardly ever connected with a cello concerto in the first half because of their sheer length. But last week I got lucky, Carlos Kalmar in Portland connected “my” Haydn C-Major Concerto with Mahlers 5th symphony, and Jahja Ling Mahler No. 7 with the Rococo Variations with his San Diego Symphony. Already as a child I have always been drawn to Mahler’s music, played on the piano many of his songs and the Kindertotenlieder with my mother, a singer, heard most of the symphonies numerous times with Berlin Phil and various conductors and until today his tender, slightly depressed yet optimist moments of bliss bring tear to my eyes. Yes, the big symphonic moments are impressive, great fun to play and listen, but what gives me goosebumps are the parts of deepest sadness combined with a slice of happiness. This reminds me a bit of Thomas Mann’s theory (in “Joseph and his brothers”) that good and evil are the two opposite sides of the same coin, it depends on which side the coin lands in order for either to come out – and with Mahler the opposites of sad and happy seem to be inextricably entangled which makes his music so real as this is how I have always felt life: beautiful but with an unspeakable sadness underneath.

Quite interesting how the audiences reacted to it: in Portland it was a huge success, maybe also because No.5 is a bit easier to understand, while in San Diego I saw more people walking out in the middle of the performance than of any contemporary piece, although at the end it was a big success. While watching this unfold I thought to myself that maybe the attention span of people living constantly in the most beautiful weather for such depressive music is not as strong as it is for and audience who is used to rough weather like in Portland?

This passed October has been one of the more challenging months for me as my curiosity for new repertoire and my readiness to play a rather wide variety of concertos by heart led to a certain craziness I could live without. Right after having played the Chinconcerto in Porto with my friend Christoph König at the gorgeous Casa da Musica, I had a lovely little photo session near Geneva; a friend of a friend had invited a couple of Nikon buffs and artists to her gorgeous house and created some kind of brainstormy photo shoot with some very interesting results. With a hired a car I drove from there to Basel to rehearse the Dvorak with the Royal Philharmonic under Charles Dutoit before they [...]

Winter in Australia

Alban Gerhardt — Sat, 09 Aug 2014 12:11:34 +0000

How I was dreading these past three weeks, being “forced” to leave my beloved family in the middle of the summer holidays behind to go once around the globe into the Australian winter, but as it sometimes happens, my fears were all postively disappointed and I had the most wonderful time while my big son is surfing in Puerto Rico (staying at his grandmother) and my wife having a blast in Bulgaria, her parents taking care of the little one.

We had spent quite a lot of time together the months before, me only leaving for either very short (like the Wigmore Hall solo recital in mid June) or us travelling all together, the ten days in Brussels (playing Dvorak and Gubaidulina with the Orchestre National of Belgium with Andrey Boreyko conducting) or five days in Florence (Prokofiev with Orchestra della Toscana and Thomas Dausgaard) – oh, such good food at both cities, where we stayed in private apartments which makes you feel much less of a tourist than much rather a local.

Right before I had the pleasure to perform the beautiful cello concerto of Unsuk Chin three times with the Berlin Philharmonic in my favorite hall. Favorite not so much because of the acoustics but of all the memories and experiences I had in this hall. My father having played in that orchestra for 46 years took me at every other week along to a concert, I grew up with this amazing orchestra, heard the most phenomenal soloists (Horowitz, Arrau, Serkin, Gilels, Fournier, Tortelier, Nelsova, Rostropovich, just to name a few) and finally did my orchestra debut there with a small chamberorchestra in 1987.

This peformance of the Chin was for me very meaningful also on a different level; I feel that inspite of the huge amount of contemporary concertos written for the cello in the past 40 years, very few have managed to “stay alive”, being performed again and again as it happened with the great concerti Rostropovich had inspired from Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Britten, Dutilleux, Lutoslawski and Schnittke (for example). Are these just better pieces or is there another reason? I think it has a lot to do with Rostropovich having relentlessly pushed these masterworks until everybody knew of their value.

Today we ask every composer to write us a concerto, then we premier it, maybe record it, just to jump to the next concerto written for us. The excitement of the world premier has taken over (similar to the need of having a world record at an international track and field meeting) and the necessitiy of performing new pieces as often as possible in order for them to grow (including the performer) is being neglected. It is very difficult to convince orchestras to schedule a new piece if it is not at least the country’s first performance, but the concerts with Berlin Phil marked the first time the Chin celloconcerto was being played without being “a premier”; the first German performance had already happened some years [...]

Dvorak Concerto

Alban Gerhardt — Wed, 18 Jun 2014 19:48:07 +0000

I know, I am getting incredibly irresponsible with this blog thingy here, but there are many good reasons for it: too many concerts to play and if not that, too much fun with the little one. And if that wasn’t enough, there is the daily stuff to take care of, booking travel, answering e-mails, doing interviews – at least one of the interviews I had to write about the Dvorak Concerto, and I thought, lazy as I am, I just post this here.

The Dvorak Cello Concerto is a blessing and a curse for us cellists; a blessing because not only cellists claim that it is the most beautiful concerto for any instrument. But I also see it as a curse as no other concerto is as strong as “the Dvorak” which I believe is the reason why so few concerti of the vast cello repertoire are getting performed. What makes it so unique? It features the cello at its best, as the melodic, sensual instrument it is, with its beautiful human voice which can whisper, cry, long, but also become angry and scream or threaten. There are also virtuosic elements, fireworks and impressive passages, but I have always been most attracted by its lyrical side. At the same time the orchestra is featured as an equal partner without ever drowning the cello. Dvorak’s orchestra writing is as exquisite as in his best symphonies, but he treats it so delicately that in a good performance the cello is always the protagonist, once in a while challenged by the solo violin, flute, clarinet or oboe. Whenever I play the work I have to think of the Czech grandfather I was never able to meet but whose many piano opera deductions (he was composer and conductor) influenced me deeply in wanting to become a musician myself.

Not without my son…

Alban Gerhardt — Thu, 03 Apr 2014 00:37:09 +0000

After not really having been much of a father the first time around 15 years ago for my first son I am making up for it the second time. When my first son Janos was born I was living with my first wife in New York, mainly performing in Europe which meant I was travelling back and fourth sometimes for just one single concert, and still I didn’t really manage to participate in his first two years, neither do I remember much of it, sadly. As I was the sole generator of income it was the deal that I would continue my career while Janos’ mother took care of him while studying part-time. Entering the third year of my second (and last!) marriage I am happy to realize that I learnt from my mistakes.

My wife Gergana is a wonderful musician herself, violinist, and as she has the same right and needs to perform as I do we are succesfully coordinating our concerts so that we can be as much together as possible while still playing the engagements we like to be playing. But at times even our genius planning can’t avoid us having to perform at the same time at two different venues which just happened for a couple of days. Although it is not easy being apart from your loved one we had some beautiful weeks before this dry stretch, spending 2 glorious weeks in Tenerife and around that time some quality time at home. March and April have become our working months, and I had some wonderfully intense schedule while being in charge of little Kaloyan, now 9 months old. The first intense week I was still on my own, performing with members of Düsseldorf Symphony Schuberts String Quintet and with the orchestra three times Shostakovich’s First Concerto conducted by Andrey Boreyko who really brought out some frighteningly beautiful moments, especially in the slow movement. Concerts where Friday, Sunday morning and Monday evening, so I chose to follow the call of a friend, Maarten Mostert in Amsterdam to do six hours of teaching at his school on my day off, Saturday March 8. I left Dusseldorf in a rented car at 6:30 am and started teaching in Amsterdam from 9 am until 2:30 pm, drove afterwards to some gorgeous little castle near Dortmund where I spent the evening and night babysitting my son during a trio concert of my wife only to leave them at 8:30 am the next morning to make it to the matinee performance at 11 am in Düsseldorf. After the concert I took a train to Stuttgart for a Dvorak rehearsal with Walter Weller and Stuttgart Philharmonics the next morning, heading right back the 450 km to perform the last one in Düsseldorf. As there was no train left that night I took the car and drove after the concert to Stuttgart for the dress rehearsal the next morning. Silly me, wanting to be back home as quickly as possible, I had chosen a flight [...]

Fitzenhagen and the Rococo Variations

Alban Gerhardt — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 07:50:06 +0000

Wilhelm Fitzenhagen was a young German cellist and composer who had taken lessons with the famous professor Friedrich Grützmacher in Dresden, and after performing at a Beethoven festival in Weimar, Franz Liszt offered him the job of principal cellist there. Simultanously Nikolai Rubinstein had tried to lure the talented Fitzenhagen to Moscow to become the cello professor at the conservatory there and in what I’d consider a very brave move, Fitzenhagen accepted the Russian offer over staying in Germany. In Moscow he became good friends with Peter I.Tchaikovsky and convinced him to write a piece for cello, the Rococo Variations. Fitzenhagen never performed them in their original version but arranged them differently, maybe to the dislike of Tchaikovsky, but for me he did such a good job in “improving” Tchaikovsky that I jumped onto the possibility to record some of Fitzenhagen’s own music when Stefan Lang from Deutschlandradio suggested it a couple of years ago. My label Hyperion loved the idea which is the reason why instead of taking the month of August completely off I had to prepare for one of the hardest recording sessions in my life with the Deutsche Sinfonieorchester under Stefan Blunier.

Recording venue was the Jesus-Christus church in Berlin-Dahlem where among others Karajan had recorded the Ring. Since my parents lived close nearby my mother had gone to these sessions in the early 70ies with me to listen from the outside, awaiting my father who was playing in the orchestra. Quite an emotional feeling for me to record in a venue charged with so much early childhood memory. Considering what legendary recordings had been made there, one might compare the “Jesus-Christus-Kirche” to Abbey Road Studios, except that only classical music has been recorded there (at JCK).

After two very nice chambermusic concerts with the Skride sisters, another Dvorak concerto with Stuttgart Phil and Marcus Bosch in Heidenheim, I had roughly four weeks to learn Fitzenhagen’s concerti Nos. 1 and 2 as well as his Ballade. Fourth piece on the disc would be the Rococo Variations in the version everybody plays, the one by Fitzenhagen. Two days before the sessions started I managed to play through the entire program in a little houseconcert in front of some friends although I had already realized that my strings were rather high these days. 3-5 mm are the normal distance between A-string and fingerboard in the higher register, but mine were at about 7 mm. I had the choice to have the bridge cut down but chose not to as I didn’t want to change the way the cello sounded. Unfortunately the weather became even more humid right before the sessions started and I barely made it through the first day of recording. The orchestra played absolutely sensational, focussing incredibly well on their first service after their summer holidays, playing this unkown music as if it was newly discovered Beethoven, and Stefan Blunier inspired them with his Swiss charme to play as emotional as in a concert.

We got [...]

Vieuxtemps Concertos first edit

Alban Gerhardt — Wed, 04 Sep 2013 07:13:19 +0000

Flying to Australia is always a welcome excuse to catch up on films, getting acquainted with the newest TV shows (just watched “Dexter” for the first time), answering e-mails and writing for my so-called “blog”. The first two legs from Berlin to Copenhagen and from Copenhagen to Singapore I brought already behind me, sitting comfortably in my chair on Singapore Airlines flight 213, sipping on a tomato juice, the cello right next to me. Yes, after the accident with my bow I stopped checking my instrument into the cargo, can’t take the risk and the stress anymore – getting wiser with age or just lazier?

On my two stopovers in Copenhagen and Singapore I listened to the first edit of the disc I had recorded in Antwerp last April; two concerti by Henri Vieuxtemps and two concert pieces by Eugene Ysaye. Quite thrilling, I must admit, to listen to music which had never been recorded before (Ysaye) and to hear for the first time how brilliant the orchestration matches the cello. Thrilling on the one hand, frustrating on the other, as I easily get angry with listening to myself. Why didn’t I play bar 86 out more, why didn’t I open up the vibrato at bar 43 in the second movement, and why did I have to play so loud in this intimate passage?! At the same time I am sometimes impressed how well certain passages worked out, remembering the pain I felt during recording them. Most important for me is that a recording doesn’t sound like one but like a live performance, and this disc comes pretty close to that.

Oh, I should maybe explain what “first edit” means, but for that I have to go back to the recording procedure: during a normal recording session I try to play as much “big takes” as possible, which means playing through the piece/concerto/sonata one or two times to get the shape and the direction out more naturally. As the standard of perfection is so high nowadays, we quickly move to fix movement by movement, a process, in which the producer becomes essential. He reminds conductor and me of certain passages which have not been together, in tune or musically satisfying yet which we try to correct during another run of the movement. In case we didn’t cover everything, there is the chance to record smaller “patches” which the producer will use to fix sometimes just a couple of notes in a passage. During breaks (with an orchestra one has to take them at east every 80 minutes) we do listen to as much as possible of the recorded material, but finally we have to learn to trust the producer when he says something is “in he can” or not.

After the session the producer has to try to come up with a “best of” version of the recorded material, often using one of the long takes as basis, correcting missed entrances and wrong notes with whatever he has from other [...]

Composers and Performers

Alban Gerhardt — Sun, 23 Jun 2013 15:53:19 +0000

I honestly can’t believe that almost five months have passed since the mishap with my bow (at Washington airport some security person broke it while examining it) and my last “blog” entry. I shouldn’t call it blog anymore, as I have never really been a blogger – much rather a public-diary-writer. The other day I read somewhere that I was even a passionate blogger, and since I absolutely hate being praised for something I am not, I felt at least I should write something within this half-year of silence, although it doesn’t make me passionate whatsoever.

Oh, I am passionate about a lot of things, probably first for my family, then music, then sports (haven’t played tennis in an eternity though, due to a sore right arm from having played ice hockey in February!), reading (books, papers, news) and cooking – but blogging is definitely not part of it. I think in order to be a passionate blogger I would have to take myself much more important, which is hard when you are fully aware of your own unimportance.

Ten days ago I had another chance to perform the Unsuk Chin Concerto in Munich for the 15th time or so, and it struck me once more how small and insignificant performers and conductors are. Yes, with our efforts (or the lack of it) the performance of especially new and unknown repertoire might succeed or fail, but at the end of the day we are just being little re-creators at best, servants to the true masters, the composers. The morning after the performance which happened to be partly a world-premier (Unsuk Chin had re-written the 2nd movement, and it turned out even better indeed!) I had breakfast with her, and I was humbled and ashamed at the same time, that nowadays the real “stars” are performers, not the people who are actually responsible for the creation of all that beautiful music while they have to be almost grateful for being performed at all.

The older I get the more I develop a distaste of us “artists” celebrating ourselves on stage after a performance, violinists after playing the Brahms Concerto, cellists after the highly effective Dvorak Concerto, pianists after a “Rach 3” or Tchaikovsky Concerto, conductors after any of the big symphonies (Brahms, Beethoven, Mahler, Bruckner, you name it) – as if it was due to their ingenuity that the audience goes wild. Well, maybe the “pop strategy” of the music industry today has worked by now so well, that indeed some audiences do react on the sole star status of a performer, never mind if they actually enjoy the piece he is playing or not, but in general, especially after a Rach 3 or a Dvorak Concerto, there will be ovations, and believe me, it does not depend on the quality of the performance.

A conductor told me his worst accompanying story (after I had to improvise for two bars towards the end of Shostakovich’s 2nd Concerto) when a pianist had [...]

Broken Bow

Alban Gerhardt — Sat, 16 Feb 2013 11:31:54 +0000

I am travelling internationally since almost 25 years, hopping back and fourth between continents, and as I am a rather trusting person in possession of a very strong cello case (Alan Stevenson), I am one of the few cellists who travels without an extra seat for the cello – I check my poor Goffriller with the suitcases. Twice my cello got damaged, and that was when I had a second ticket: the case fell under my supervision; nothing major, little crack which was easily be glued, but absolutely my fault. The baggage handlers never did any harm to it.

Until February 6 2013: I left Berlin via Brussels and Chicago to rehearse Prokofievs Cellosymphony in Madison, WI, but when my flight Brussels-Chicago got cancelled I knew this was not my day. Re-routed via Washington I was going to arrive just at the end of my only rehearsal for that tricky piece. The orchestra gracefully agreed to pick me up by car from Chicago Airport which was going to give me at least half an hour with the Madison Symphony (at 4:30 am Berlin time…). Upon my arrival at Washington Dulles Airport I routinely checked that the cello had survived the trip until now – it was even better in tune than after a performance of the Cellosymphony! Something inside me told me I should try to get it through security and check it at the gate, but as I absolutey hate confrontation with anybody, especially airline and security officials, I opted for the normal recheck and gave my cello to one of the baggage handlers who promised to take great care of it.

In Chicago I had to wait for more than 40 minutes until I finally received the cello, fifteen minutes after the suitcase had arrived. MY fatigue disappeared at once after opening my treasured cello case: the cello seemed alright, but my beloved Heinrich-Knopf-bow stuck half in its mounting, the other half, broken off, only tied together by the hair, was dangling around the fingerboard, a shocking and rather surreal picture. A bad curse came from my exhausted lips and the United Airlines officials knew they were in for some tough time with this little, angry, pale German cellist trying to explain to them that the bow is actually what counts most for a string player and loosing one’s bow means almost loosing one’s voice.

I was never attached to any cello in my life, but the bows I played on in the past 12 years I grew as fond of as I have never done to any object in my life before. My first good bow I bought for the cost of a (very nice) Mercedes in 2001. I never thought I would spend that kind of money on a bow, but after trying it in New York I instantly fell in love; I felt I had found my voice. When it broke in a concert couple of months later a world collapsed around me instantly, and [...]