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Manchester
> 147 Cellists in Need of a Repertory
>
>
MUSIC
> By MICHAEL WHITE
>
>
>
>
MANCHESTER, England
> PUT seven cellists in a room together,
and you get a keen debate about the virtues of bent endpins (as
opposed to straight ones), gut strings (as opposed to steel) and new
developments in pizzicato technique. Put 147 cellists on a stage,
and you get "Rapturedux," a piece by the American eclectic
Christopher Rouse. (Influences: Bruckner, Berlioz and Led Zeppelin.)
And when "Rapturedux" had its > premiere here recently, it
provided a numerically pressive if sonically impenetrable climax to
five days of talking, playing, learning and exposure to a cavalcade
of virtuosity that was the Manchester International Cello Festival,
directed by Ralph Kirshbaum in its seventh biennial season.
>
> Mr. Kirshbaum, 55, grew up a Texan, as you might suspect
from his distinctive performance style: he doesn't so much play his
instrument as ride it. But as one of the outstanding cellists of his
generation, he is now a citizen of the world, living in England and
teaching here at the Royal Northern College of Music, which, largely
thanks to his involvement, has become a leading European center for
advanced string studies.
>
> As the home of Mr.
Kirshbaum's festival, its blandly boxlike 1970's building on the
southern fringes of Manchester is beseiged by cellists. Famous, not
so famous, young and old, they come in planeloads, generating chaos
in hotels and taxi queues with tangled barricades of cello cases.
This year, on an average visit to the college cafeteria, you might
have found yourself sharing a greasy table with the likes of Truls
Mork, Anner Bylsma, Raphael Wallfisch, Boris Pergamenschikow,
Natalia Gutman, Gary Hoffman, Christophe Coin, Matt Haimovitz, David
Geringas, Janos Starker, Karine Georgian-- The list runs on,
including for good measure the cellophile conductor of the
Manchester-based BBC Philharmonic: Yan Pascal Tortelier, the son of
the master cellist Paul Tortelier.
>
> In fact, most of
the visiting cellists, and certainly most of the music, came from
the United States, in response to this year's festival theme, "The
American Influence." Hence the Rouse commission, together with
others from Marc Neikrug, Robert Stern, Nicholas Maw and Christoph
Neidhofer, which all had premieres during the five days. But
consider those names, and you'll realize that "American" was broadly
defined here to include Europeans with American residence. Mr. Maw
was born in England, Mr. Neidhofer in Switzerland. And if there was
one story to be told by this festival, it was that of the New World
giving house room to the migrant cultures of the Old.
>
> For British audiences, the biggest draw was probably the
living legend Mr. Starker, who arriv ed in the United States from
Hungary and France in 1948 and has for the last half-century run the
world's most celebrated cello class, at Indiana University. At
nearly 77, he remains formidable in both the good and the bad senses
of that word. Decades away from Hungary have scarcely softened the
staccato of his Central European accent, which accompanies a
daunting presence. And in Manchester, after an elegant but cool
account of Dohnanyi's "Konzertstück" in the opening concert, he
resurfaced the next day for master classes with three plucky
students and an audience of the kind you find at horror movies:
scared but captivated.
>
> Mr. Starker's master classes
are unquestionably scary. While the student plays, the master sits
and stares, either impassively or, worse, wiping his face with his
hand. Then he speaks, so quietly that the audience can barely hear.
He waves aside the offer of a microphone. "If I talk quietly," he
says, "you can assume it's not important." Which is no consolation
to several hundred people with open note pads, poised to take down
every word of wisdom.
>
> But from what we could hear,
it was clear that Mr. Starker's wisdom had little to do with
interpretation. Almost all his comments were about technique: about
holding the bow lightly ("There is just one rule of bowing: Don't
grip"); about extracting maximum tone from full use of the bow ("As
Mr. Rostropovich says, `If you don't use all the bow, why don't you
cut the end off?' "); and above all, about posture. "Stand up," he
said to one student, who turned out to be the height of several
policemen. "I thought so. You're too tall for that stool. Next time,
sit on a telephone directory. Maybe two telephone directories." And
so it went. This was public teaching of the old school.
>
> But since almost every celebrated cellist in the festival
was giving master classes, there were other, less intimidating
methods to observe. Like Mr. Kirshbaum's own, which stressed
personality and broad musicianship.
>
> He explained in
conversation: "I think it's great to watch Janos at work. He's a
master analyst, he's spent a lifetime doing it, and it's why at 77
he can still play cleanly. And of course he's right. If a player
sits or holds the bow in a patently wrong way, it creates a tension
that you have to address. But for me, the mechanics of playing
aren't so central. I don't just want my students to play five notes
evenly. I want them to make shape, color and nuance in the phrase.
And most important, it should be their nuance, not mine. I want to
help them find that."
>
> One of Mr. Kirshbaum's pupils
playing in the festival, the fast-rising young Korean cellist
Yoohong Lee, confirmed his point: "Ralph's teaching is holistic. He
helps you to find the moment when you know you're making music
rather than just playing to an audience, when everything comes into
focus. I can't put it into words, but you know that moment when it
comes."
>
> Mr. Kirshbaum's own mentor, the veteran
Aldo Parisot, who teaches at Yale and the Juilliard School and was
(almost needless to say) in Manchester for the festival, talked in
similar terms: "Some people analyze, others enjoy. And I know which
I'd rather play for. Thank God, professional musicians make up only
2 percent of an average audience."
>
> But at
Manchester, the relentless day-and-night turnover of performances
was scrutinized by audiences as "professional" as they come. When
Mr. Mork, Mr. Geringas and Mr. Hoffman and their colleagues weren't
on stage, playing, they were in seats, observing. And with programs
like the grand finale, where six star instrumentalists shared the
six Bach unaccompanied cello suites among themselves, it was hard
not to sense competition creeping into an event conceived as
noncompetitive. But not, apparently, for Mr. Kirshbaum.
>
> "Call me naďve, but I really think people come here to
celebrate expertise rather than mark it out of 10," he said. "Take
the opening concert, something you wouldn't hear anywhere else in
the world: five different concertos played by five different
cellists, one after the other. Maybe you'd say X played with a good
legato, Y with strong attack. But I don't think anyone here is
judging X against Y. We're too much friends and colleagues.
>
> Friendship was the festival's great leitmotif. "You
couldn't have a gathering like this with violinists or sopranos" was
a standard comment: "Too much ego." Cellists, it was generally
agreed, do not have ego. Or if they do, it's of a more attractive
kind. Cellists, as the official festival T-shirt didn't say but
might as well have, are nice people.
>
> "And there's
some truth in that," Mr. Kirshbaum said. "When I started playing, at
the age of 6, I was attracted to the instrument by its size. I loved
the feel of it, the vibration, the warm tone. It's extremely
sensuous. And that attracts a certain kind of personality. Not that
we aren't driven - cellists have careers like anybody else - but we
get on together. Which is why you get cello ensembles. I don't think
any other single instrument does that. At least, not in our sort of
numbers."
>
> Ah, yes, the 147 cellos. In fact there
was a good deal of ensemble playing to be heard in Manchester,
mostly provided by Yale Cellos: a group of dazzlingly well
disciplined if earnest protégés of Mr. Parisot. They played
arrangements of Mussorgsky and Ravel. And frankly, it was a mite
kitschy, although Mr. Kirshbaum leapt to their defense.
>
> "O.K., the musical content of these ensemble arrangements
may not be illuminating, but the sense of color and phrasing you get
from Yale Cellos is fantastic, and you can learn a lot from that, as
the players do themselves," he said. "Aldo Parisot is one of the
great teachers. He's an inspiration to us all."
>
> As
his pupil, Mr. Kirshbaum would inevitably say so. Cellists have a
singular respect for the historic hierarchies of who taught whom, as
though it were a priestly laying-on of hands. Someone at Manchester
compiled a family tree that mapped the pedigree of every notable
performer of the 20th century. It proved a subject of obsessive
interest and pride for any who could trace their teacher-pupil
lineage back to Feuermann or Piatigorsky or the other cello royalty
of the past. And as always, it was interesting to note how many of
that royalty, from whichever corner of the world, were drawn to live
and work in the United States.
>
> The concentration of
great cellists in America has in fact hastened the death of national
schools of cello playing in the last few decades. With so many
masters from diverse traditions close at hand, students have played
the field, stylistically. So it means less and less to talk of a
Russian method, a French or a German. What survives is international
American eclectic.
>
> But that hasn't also meant the
death of personality. To hear, successively, the muscular aggression
of Ms. Gutman, the incisive clarity of the superb (American-based)
Japanese Tsuyoshi Tsutsumi, the vinous resonance of Mr. Hoffman and
the sharp, dark-chocolate tone of Mr. Mork was to hear diversity
alive and flourishing. And it's a mark of how distinctive individual
players are these days that the Manchester program managed to
include an hour of standup cello comedy (if that is not a
contradiction in terms), with a comedienne impersonating Yo-Yo Ma
and Mr. Rostropovich. Recognizably.
>
> Cellists being
nice people, the laughter was, of course, affectionate. There seemed
to be general agreement at Manchester that Mr. Ma and Mr.
Rostropovich were largely responsible for the recent popularity of
the cello, as confirmed by several surveys that identify it as the
fastest- growing instrumental interest worldwide. Rostropovich
eulogies flowed fast and free, not least from Mr. Mork, who
describes him as "a dominating infuence in my life."
>
> "The huge dynamic register, the combination of power and
control that makes that massive sound," Mr. Mork said, "these were
things I was raised on, and they are still, for me, a
benchmark."
>
> One other point of agreement was that
recent years have seen an increase in the quality as well as the
quantity of cellists. Bernard Greenhouse, formerly of the Beaux-Arts
Trio, was an early champion of Elliott Carter's demanding Cello
Sonata. "It took me three months to come to grips with it," he said.
"My students today learn the entire score to performance level in
two to three weeks. Things have improved."
>
> The only
respect in which things haven't improved for cellists - apart from
airline traveling arrangements, which remain an endless source of
sorry tales - is the solo concerto repertory. It is small and always
has been, with just four mainstream Romantic works - the Dvorak,
Schumann and Elgar concertos and Tchaikovsky's "Rococo" Variations -
that come around persistently, and a second tier of the two Haydn
and two Shostakovich concertos, the Walton and the Barber, and
Prokofiev's "Sinfonia Concertante," which surface from time to time.
"This is where we envy pianists and violinists," Mr. Mork said.
"They have so much more that general audiences want to hear: the
Mozarts, Beethovens, Rachmaninoffs. If we had all these
things--"
>
> I waited for him to tell me cellists
would be even nicer people, but he didn't. "If we had these things,
life would be richer." And I think he meant a different kind of
richness from the sound of 147 cellists making sonic treacle
courtesy of Mr. Rouse.
>
> Michael White is a former
chief music critic of The Independent in London and a commentator on
BBC.
>
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