Inspite of maybe being happier than I have been for a long time (as described in the previous blog) I did not stop playing the cello nor enjoying giving concerts – only difference is that now whenever I have some spare time I tend to spend it on the phone with the source of that happiness which is the reason why I am neglecting my poor little Macbook.
Couple of days ago I received an e-mail from a friend who asked me if the fact that I hadn’t written any blog since a while had to do with me being finally happy – I hadn’t thought about it, but I can’t deny that since my last entry my private life has indeed taken a sharp turn towards more fulfillment apart music and travelling. Much needed, I may add, because using concerts to run away from a life which was lacking something deeper than just playing the cello and travelling like an idiot as I have done the last four months of the old year (and maybe the years before…) is not the healthiest thing to do. And while I was fully aware of this escape from reality I couldn’t really do much about it.
Now I can’t wait to come back home after almost two weeks of concerts in the United States, even though I had some rather pleasant reunions with collaborators and friends – still it didn’t compensate for what I was missing for quite a long time without even knowing it. They say that you don’t know what you have until you loose it – in my case it was the opposite: I didn’t know what I was missing until I found it (without looking for it).
Thanks to an early arrival from Memphis to Amsterdam I finally have the long-awaited lay-over which I can use for writing some lines about what I have done lately, although it all doesn’t seem to matter anymore – how things can change 🙂
Yes, I spent the last few days in Elvis-land, performing Tchaikovsky’s Rococo Variations with the Memphis Symphony and Daniel Hege, and even though I didn’t really feel like Rococo at all in this freezing cold weather it all changed after the dress rehearsal when suddenly we all found the joy in this beautiful little piece of music. One orchestra musician said after yesterday’s afternoon-performance that she was happy to experience this piece as a work of music much rather than show-off. And actually this is what it is: a little jewel, very fragile and beautiful, but except the extrovert last variation rather elegant and introvert. Daniel Hege watched me almost the entire time, I felt very much carried through the whole work which made my part much easier.
The days prior I had spent in New York at my friend Paul’s apartment in order to kill the time in between the engagement in Jacksonville and Memphis. Normally I would have flown back home in between, had four days to do so, but considering the problems all these airports were experiencing with snow and ice I thought I should be professional and stay in the country. Funny enough this winter I had not run into any weather related trouble – quite a miracle if one remembers the days of closed airports all over Europe. Even in the past few days the airport in Atlanta was […]
The past three weeks have been maybe the most demanding in my life so far, at least in regards of concertising (not talking about emotional private stuff which I won’t mention since I’d be hit on the head by too many people about being too open and I would have to justify it with the lack of privacy-filter and apologize…). After playing a week of Bachsuites at unusual venues as described in my last blog while practising the highly intense and demanding Pintscher Celloconcerto (Reflection on Narcissus), I travelled to Cleveland on the 2nd of November to play the Pintscher (by heart, couldn’t do it any other way as I like the feeling of authority to know the piece inside out) with this most amazing Cleveland Orchestra. Right after I had two days in Berlin to get the Chin Concerto back into my hands which I had to play in The Hague and Amsterdam, and now I am coming back from a week of Barber-Concerto in Sao Paulo and Belo Horizonte.
As I wrote in a previous blog, end of July I was playing all the six Bach Suites in the Radialsystem, an alternative venue for the arts in Berlin. A friend of mine attended the concert together with a gentleman who had never listened to classical music in concert before and who was so taken by the beauty of Bach’s music that he didn’t mind at all sitting relatively still for almost three hours. This came as a surprise for me because I thought the Bachsuites were a bit too complex and not exciting enough for an “untrained” listener, but maybe because of the rather informal and different approach on stage was more drawn into the music than he might have been in a “normal” concert hall.
While sitting at another airport lounge, this time in Berlin, waiting to pick up my pianist Cecile Licad for our rehearsals for the Fauré recording coming up next week, I decided to do a little write-up about my reasons to always play with earplugs. A musician from the orchestra in Winnipeg had posed the question as a comment to my last blog entry, and as I am being asked rather frequently why I put them in, I explain it here again, even though I must have written it already at some point but can’t find this entry anymore…
Lately I have been thinking about possible reasons why the cello has not become more popular among orchestra schedules. While many people when being asked about their favorite instrument name the cello, there is still an overwhelming majority of piano- and violin-concertos being performed versus rather rare cello appearances. Yes, I know they are exceptions, but in general there is often barely just one cellist per season invited to play one of the audiences favorites (Dvorak, Elgar, Shostakovich a.o.), because many artistic planners are afraid that with a lesser known concerto ticket sales would go down.
Fourteen months ago I premiered Unsuk Chin’s Celloconcerto at the Proms in London, a very rewarding as well as traumatic experience. In order to understand and communicate this technically and musically challenging work I had forced myself to play the world premier by heart; the rewarding part was the very warm reception from the audience, the traumatic one came from the fact that in the two hardest passages I panicked and got subsequently lost. Passages, I had practised as well and long as never anything before, and still when it came to it, my brain shut down and the fingers went on auto-pilot, kind of faking their way through, abandoned from their guide. Nobody realized except the conductor back then, not even the composer herself (as she claims, but I still don’t believe her!), but I didn’t care, I wasn’t doing it for the audience or for her, but as a perfectionist I always want to play as well as humanly possible, never mind if it is being appreciated or not. Until today I haven’t dared to listen to the recording of that concert, not even in preparation for last night’s concert in Tampere, Finland, where the Chin Concerto came to its second performance ever.
Within five weeks I will have hopped back and fourth between Europe and Asia altogether three times. Right now I am returning from trip No.2 only for a couple of days to Berlin before I travel to Taiwan for the first time in my life coming Wednesday. After this highly enjoyable tour with the Asian Youth Orchestra last month I came back to Seoul to play the Rococo Variations with the Seoul Philharmonic under Jesus Lopez-Cobos, a conductor I admired often as a child when I watched the “Deutsche Oper” in Berlin. We had a wonderful time with exquisite food, and this fine orchestra came as a great relief for me since I am going to play with them next April the Asian premier of the highly difficult Unsuk Chin Celloconcerto.
I find it always a bit strange to be flown in from couple of thousand miles away to play 19 minutes of Rococo Variations or five days later 20 minutes of Saint-Saens concerto which I just played yesterday and the day before in my debut with the phenomenal NHK Symphony Orchestra in Tokyo (what a rich sound, so much quality). I stress out so much more when I have to only play such a short piece. At least my new management in Japan organized also a solo recital on Monday and I felt I paid my dues by playing Bachsuites No.1 and 6, and the solo sonatas by Ligeti and Kodaly.
After playing the cello professionally since more than twenty years, it was not until now that for the first time ever I was called within 10 days to replace two different cellists in two different cities in the Netherlands: wonderful Dutch cellist Quirine Viersen felt too weak two weeks after giving birth to play Shostakovich’s First Concerto at the Concertgebouw Amsterdam so I had the pleasure in replacing her with the really excellent Netherlands Radio Chamber Orchestra under Michael Schonwandt – a truly inspirational experience, especially in this gorgeous hall of Amsterdam. Two days after I returned from that trip I received another urgent call, another great cellist, Jean-Guiyen Queyras, had fallen ill (flu) and had to pull out of playing a solo recital all Britten Suites at the Gergiev Festival in Rotterdam.
Almost 25 years ago I joined the Federal Youth Orchestra of Germany (BJO) in which I played altogether for three years every summer, Easter and winter (and one extra session I don’t remember when). This absolutely changed my life as a musician because it brought me together with young people like me, talented and dedicated to music, different to the other kids in school, sometimes outsiders, but never really geeks or nerds. Playing music together in an orchestra after practising all these years on my own was mind-blowing, an experience so elevating that after the first session I just knew that I would not want to have any other profession than playing music, for the rest of my life. When I was asked to play five concerts with the Asian Youth Orchestra I agreed, first a bit half-heartedly because I wanted to provide real good summer holidays for my son János, but then nostalgia took over and I wanted to relive the time in a youth orchestra.