Anecdotes – Alban Gerhardt

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.

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 [...]

Artist in Residence

Alban Gerhardt — Thu, 22 Nov 2012 15:57:42 +0000

The busiest one and a half months in a long time with seven concerti, almost complete Beethoven Sonatas and Bach Suites were topped by my very first artist-in-residency with an orchestra. In between concert in Sevilla (Dvorak), Amsterdam (Frank Martin), Oslo (Chin), London (Schumann), Barcelona, Madrid and Valladolid (Lalo), Berlin (4 Beethoven Sonatas), Fort Worth (another Schumann) and now Hangzhou (Elgar), I flew to Portland (no, unfortunately not connected with the set of concerts in Fort Worth with the wonderful Fort Worth Symphony and a great conducting musician, Josep Caballé Domenech) to play three times the Rococo Variations plus Silent Woods by Dvorak, starting the first week of a three-year residency in this lovely city. While other orchestras have their “artist-in-residence” come several times within one year to play different pieces with the orchestra and maybe also give a recital, the idea of the Oregon Symphony and its chief conductor Carlos Kalmar was rather unique:

After they had invited me already in 2011 (with Prokofiev Symphony Concerto), by 2014 I will have come and performed with the orchestra at four different occasions, each time staying for a week and doing a wide array of activities besides performing different concerti with the orchestra in their concert hall, the Arlene Schnitzer Auditorium. As I had to rush back to Europe to rehearse the Lalo Concerto in Barcelona with Pablo Gonzalez (another excellent Spanish conductor) we had to cut my week short by a day, but I made up for it by being willing to “work as a donkey”, as the artistic administrator Charles Calmer put it. Their plan was to make a connection with the community as well as with donors by using my German lack of tact (some people think it’s charming, how very strange!) and work ethics, and funny enough, it seemed to work 🙂

After my arrival in Portland in the evening (nine hours time difference) I was driven straight to a rehearsal with the concert master from the orchestra and a local pianist for a donor’s concert the next day at a private home, playing Mendelssohn’s d-minor Pianotrio. In the following days I spoke at another donors luncheon (gosh, I mentioned the O…. word in front of big-time donors who were rather Romney supporters…), played a couple of movements at a sponsoring bank (Umpqua, what a cool name for a bank, and they have these inspirational meetings in the morning, quite unique!) played three Bachsuites in a Mall (not amplified, but somehow the acoustics were so good that people gathered around me, especially some kids which stayed for the entire 65 minutes of unaccompanied cello-playing!), another three suites at two schools, more Bach at three locations at a huge childrens hospital, spontaneously in a cable-car connecting two sections of that hospital, teaching a masterclass for students of the Youth orchestra, another masterclass for the Oregon Cello Society (they had planned for me to also play some Bach, but I didn’t bring my cello, thus I performed on a [...]

Concerto Marathon

Alban Gerhardt — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 00:52:05 +0000

Sitting in a train, dashing back from my last concert in order to spend a bit of late-night-time with my son, always gives me the opportunity to get some work done. Answering e-mails, returning calls, or, as rather sedlomly recently, writing my little diary here. I know, I should just translate the monthly blog I am writing for this music magazin “Fonoforum” in German, but this would take much more time than writing something new – at the same time it’s kind of boring writing twice about what happened in the past few weeks which is the reason I have almost stopped posting something here.

Where shall I start? So many concerts in the past few weeks, and each time a different piece, a real marathon which culminated in the time between Jan 28 and Feb 16, when I played in Antwerpen and Brügge Britten’s gorgeous Cellosymphony with the Royal Flemish Philharmonic Orchestra under Otto Tausk (last concert a

radio broadcast, scary with a difficult and rarely played piece like that…), few days later with the excellent Ari Rasilainen Brahms Double in Hof (no, Ari was the conductor, the fiddle was played very well by Hyeyoon Park), me commuting back and fourth the 190 miles between Hof and Berlin to see a bit of János during these busy times, and directly afterwards I recorded in four sessions (what a luxury, thank you, Hyperion!!!) Richard Strauss’ Don Quixotte with the orchestra which premiered the piece many years ago, the Gürzenich Orchestra Cologne with their wonderful music director Markus Stenz. The same night I made my way, luckily joined by my very soon to be wife Gergana from Cologne via Frankfurt, Sao Paulo, Santiago de Chile to Frutillar where I had to play both Haydn Concerti with a local chamberorchestra – because of a strike by Air France (who else?!) it took us 29 instead of 22 hours, but there we were in heaven, unfortunately only for three days, returning straight back to Berlin because I had to play the day after the Dvorakconcerto in Nuremberg with the Nürnberg Philharmonic and their new music director Marcus Bosch. I took my little patch-work family with me because it was the end of János’ winter holidays, and to avoid him sitting around at his mother’s watching TV or playing playstation, I thought he would enjoy seeing Nuremberg, listening to some nice Dvorak, watching Star Wars in a 3D cinema, and as little highlight two days of skiing in the beautiful Erzgebirge, right at the Czech border, about 200 miles South of Berlin. Needless to say we had a blast! Geri learned how to ski really well in our little trip to Switzerland over New Year, and now she even managed to do some adorable parallel swings 🙂 And János is a pro anyway!

Did I mention that I am sitting in a train? Well, it’s my journey back home from my first concert with the orchestra in Cottbus, a small town near the [...]

Skiing in Switzerland…

Alban Gerhardt — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 23:37:25 +0000

I am not trying to justify myself, but I will just give you another (weak) reason for my laziness in writing here: thanks to a chief editor of a classical magazin in Germany, the “Fonoforum”, who somehow thought that my way of writing rather honestly and directly about whatever happens to a travelling musician could be of interest for his readers, I am writing every month a “thing” for his publication. And somehow, this “thing” which I am normally writing within an hour or so, takes even more drive away from writing onto my own homepage. And while writing here is without guidelines and not too many readers (or at least I don’t know them), at the Fonoforum I mustn’t write more than 3500 letters which I haven’t managed yet, and the poor man is pretty upset about my unability to just state the most important things – I just wrote the new “blog”, and I am already at 3935, which is almost 15% above.

I am also getting a bit self-conscious as I am normally not aware anybody would be reading the stuff I am writing, but being printed is a different story. The other day my old friend Lars Vogt mentioned that he is enjoying my monthly blog, and the manager of the Soloistes Europeéns, with whom I just played the Saint-Saens and Honegger Concerti, asked me if I could mention the orchestra – gratefully I told him that I would love to if he would take some photos from rehersals. I am supposed to provide photo material to each blog entry, but I am so incredibly lame about taking photos, I constantly forget to do it as you probably can tell from the few photos in this blog. To make a long story short: suddenly having the “job” of writing a column in a real paper made it less fun and less relaxed than it used to be.

At least at our skiing holidays right after Christmas I managed to take some nice shots during the only two nice days in the mountains of Andermatt near Lucerne (Switzerland). Why on earth Switzerland, with the strong Swiss Franc and the not really up-to-date skiing resorts? Well, Geri had a concert in Lucerne and we wanted to connect both her work and our fun. We drove with Janos down there, left her in Lucerne and went ahead for a gorgeous day of skiing, when she joined us the next day for her first experience on ski. We had a blast, the three of us, in our little apartment, one day completely snowed in, no skiing because of the danger of avalanches, so we just played Monopoly and cards all day long. Did I actually mention that this future wife of mine is a great fiddle player? We even played our first concerts together, last month, in Cologne, Frankfurt, at the radio station in Berlin and at a private concert in London, and it was wonderful making music with [...]

The Week After

Alban Gerhardt — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 20:55:07 +0000

I promise I really wanted to write my freshest memories from the world premier of Unsuk Chins Celloconcerto – and what happened? Nada, niente, nothing but hot air! Laziest cellist in the world has nothing to say anymore, even though there were enough emotions flowing I would have liked to capture in the aftermath. Big difference: normally I am alone after a performance, and the trip back home or to the next engagement has lots of empty time which I often fill with writing e-mails and blog. This time my little family came over to London to hear what all the work in Puerto Rico had been about. Besides that they love the Proms and didn’t want to miss my second one within 12 months (I got to play Prokofiev’s Sinfonia Concertante August 2008 after the Chin premier got postponed). But with my son and wife around I didn’t have a free second afterwards, especially since we had planned a mini-trip to Italy and Croatia right after the concert.

Long story for a cheap excuse for waiting more than a week to write about one of the scariest concerts of my life: performing a piece I had never heard before, more difficult than anything I have done before, with rehearsals four days prior (which meant no real “routine” either with help of an extended rehearsal period, in the biggest “arena” in the world, the Royal Albert Hall, and, besides the obligatory live radio and internet broadcast a live TV one (also a first for me). Lucky enough I was so nervous for just getting the piece right that I completely forgot the stakes during the performance. Trying to bring the many musical layers out while not getting lost I had no energy to actually worry about neither the expectation of the promers standing right in front of me nor the pressure of a live-tv thingy which normally would have driven me crazy.

How did the performance finally come out? To be honest, I felt best about the first and third movement (which are also musically the deeper and more beautiful once) – in the quick ones (No.2 and 4) I admit of not having been as much on top of it as I liked; I am fully aware of that I shouldn’t even mention anything like that, but what is the sense of writing in a kind-of-diary-blog how brilliant everything is if this wasn’t true? Who would lie to his own diary? To look good? I am a louzy lier, and if my intention is indeed to bring a bit more honesty and truthfulness to the presentation of classical music by writing rather intimately, I guess I should not hide my short-comings. Well, normally you wouldn’t be able to hear wrong notes without following the score, and I assure you, I played 95% what I was supposed to play, just one for me crucial place, about 30 seconds long, I had a blackout and I panicked.

Probably not even a [...]

The Unsuk Chin Celloconcerto – Preparing for a World Premier

Alban Gerhardt — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 14:33:01 +0000

Exactly ten years ago, summer 1999, I met through my friend Lisa Batiashvili in Helsinki her old friend Maris Gothoni accompanied by the lady he had just married, the Korean composer Unsuk Chin at a party following a concert of Maris’ father Ralph. Unsuk and me didn’t really get to know each other back then, but when I saw her four years later after the world premier of her violin concerto at the Philharmonie in Berlin (for which she subsequently won the Grawemeyer-Award) she invited me sponaneously to the pre-concert party at her flat in Berlin-Charlottenburg.Her violin concerto was the first piece I had heardÂ and I absolutely adored it. Its full of colours and an almost childlike imagination; I felt that Unsuk is one of the few living composers how have found their own musical language, and this made me dream of her writing a cello concerto. Her interest in me as a person and musician made me very hopeful, so whenever I could I accepted her generous invitations to her wonderful parties (she is an amazing cook!) and was happy to “give back” by not only bringing a bottle of bubbly (she loves champagne) but also my cello to play for her and her guests.

You can only guess my excitement when she first announced her plan to write a concerto for me which, she told me, would be the first time she wrote for an instrumentalist. Her piano and violin concertos were not written with anybody specific in mind, even though she found an amazing performer in violinist Viviane Hagner who played the work many times. Her desire to write a cello concerto was paired with huge respect for the genre; she was very aware of how easily a cello might be covered by the wrong orchestration.

After some months of searching and weighing the options she accepted the commission for the cello concerto from the BBC, and it was decided that it should be premiered at the London Proms August 2007 at the Royal Albert Hall together with the BBC Scottish Symphony under their chief conductor Ilan Volkov.

Unsuk is a composer with a very slow output – as natural and delicately flowing her music might appear, it takes her effort and time to compose, similarily to the great Henri Dutilleux (whose cello concerto is in my eyes the best one written in the last 40 years). Thus it was no surprise for me when she panicked and subsequently asked to postpone the premier for a year because she had to finish her opera “Alice” by June 2007, and therefor she had no time to even think of the cello concerto. I happily agreed because I wanted her to take all the time in the world to create the best possible concerto for cello she could dream of.

I remember it like yesterday when my cellphone rang at the airport in Denver in March 2008 (changing planes for some US concert) and my general manager told [...]

Father and Soloist

Alban Gerhardt — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 14:01:44 +0000

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 JÃ¡nos 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.

Besides spending quality time with my son it gave me the opportunity to catch up on some sleep, for I am not the most discplined turning off the TV/closing the book at night, but with a little person like him around we went to sleep at 10 pm! Maybe it was the lack of focus on myself or the huge amount of hours I managed to sleep, I felt better than ever playing Shostakovich’s First Concerto with Hartmut Haenchen as replacement for Mikko Franck – reached a certain freedom which I never really achieved before with that piece; oh, I have no idea if it helped the piece, but at least I felt good about it 🙂 The orchestra played absolutely beautiful, highly passionate collaboration, not just accompaniment, a real treat, besides meeting some old friends (two of them I hadn’t seen in 20 years!).

Lucky enough we had two concerts – the chance to play the concerto differently, yes, but also more or less a free day [...]