From Bach to Stravinsky, Part I

[The criticisms of the violin students' playing are hopefully not mean but just calling it as I see it, though if I were one of them these calls probably still wouldn't make me happy. As for the YouTube clips, I only linked to ones from 20th century musicians because that's the compromise with my conscience for illegally watching copyrighted material.]

From the 11th to the 13th I attended three masterclasses with the violinist Ivry Gitlis, organized by the Hanns Eisler Hochschule für Musik and held in the Galakutschensaal II of the Marstall.

For the first day I came far too early, since the announced time of masterclasses was totally wrong. The flyers said 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., which was evidently implausible given the limits of human endurance, but the class actually started at 2:30. So I went for an idle stroll around the Lustgarten and colonnades at the Neues Museum and Bebelplatz, and visited the Schinkel-Museum in the Friedrichswerdersche Kirche again. It was cold and the snow was deep, white or cappucino-tinted or speckled with dark gravel like stracciatella ice cream. The Spree lay bare and black and it lapped quietly against the banks; here and there birds bobbed on its waters or idled on the expanses of snow on the land. Of course these places are customarily overrun by tourists, so their solemn and solitary aspect was especially compelling. There was a series of posters for the Carus exhibition at Alte Nationalgalerie, which among other things proved that the turn of the 18th/19th century was a halcyon era for pedantic blurbs. Altogether the walk was a nice old-fashioned experience.

As for the Marstall, the Musikschule's part of it is a grey stone façade that faces the Berliner Dom and the Altes Museum over the sprawling quadratic hole where the Palast der Republik used to be and where the Stadtschloss will be rebuilt. "Galakutschensaal" sounds grandiose in German, so the room itself was a minimalist let-down, the walls brick washed with terra cotta paint on two sides and covered in institutional-beige plastic bulges along the others. It is not on the ground level either, as the name suggests to me. The floor is a luminous golden parquet, however, and toward the courtyard it rises into a low stage that is seamlessly and unpretentiously integrated into the room as a whole. The ceiling is high and the light ample. On the stage there is a harpsichord and two Augustus Förster pianos, whose sound I found artificial and curiously flat, but I can only compare it to our grand piano and a legion of aged uprights which have stood me in good stead over the years.

In keeping with the egalitarian furnishings, Ivry Gitlis forewent the stage and took his seat at the front of the audience, where his violin (a light golden-brown instrument, but what really impressed me, perhaps because I am a bit of an idiot, is the fact that the violin case also contained four bows) joined him. Regarding the chin-prop vs. sponge question, he uses a sponge affixed to the underside of the violin by two elastics, tied together at the chin rest. While everyone was getting settled a woman was setting up a video camera to film everything.

From what I gathered the masterclasses were a proxy memoir on a small scale, or at least a forum for which Gitlis conscientiously gathered his experiences and thoughts, and in which he tried to record and transmit the really worthwhile ones for the benefit of the rest of us. He is eighty-seven years old now and on the last day it sounded very much as if he felt the gnawing of the tooth of time. On the other hand, even on the second and third days, when he was tired and his voice was more raspy and unfocused, he was sharp as a tack, unpretentious and congenial, and altogether a person one would want to invite over on a weekend evening and then listen to over a glass of whisky or a cigar or something, for hours. Of course he rambled but I liked it because it wasn't gratuitous and rather made one think.

As for the stretches where he played the violin himself, three things struck me particularly. Firstly, he wasn't afraid to play in an ugly way (muffled bow, different key, etc.) to demonstrate a point of technique; secondly, he was content to let the students play without trying to outshine them or frustratedly show them how it must be done; and thirdly he has a wonderful grasp of the nuances of the music whereas the students' playing, good as it was, proved a comparatively blank slate. (Altogether I expected Gitlis to be sardonic and strict, but he is polite, quite open-minded, and laidback.)

The programme began with a student from China, whose name sounded like Ji Jong (obviously I'm really not good at catching Chinese, Japanese, and Korean names, so I'll be making up most of those). She played from Bartók's Violin Concerto No. 2. Her approach was a trifle humourless and aggressive, suggesting a musical education spiritually akin to military training, and she spooled off the piece very ably but without pausing to form a phrase or bring out quirks in the music. On the piano the accompanist didn't play with much greater variety of interpretation; it appears as if it accompanists are denied the right to imagination, and though this one evidently didn't lack sensibility her playing didn't express much. Otherwise Ji Jong played remarkably well; her tone was warm, a little dark, and interestingly shaded; and it was no task to listen as she held one's interest throughout.

After words of general praise, Gitlis remarked that her playing was "very healthy. . . . Perhaps too healthy," and then began in his conversational manner to investigate the possibilities for improvement. He asked her to tell a story, which after some hesitation and — with unexpected humour given her otherwise stony demeanour — she did. (The story: A man tells someone that he believes he's seen his face before; the other replies that it's highly doubtful since his head has never left his shoulders.) Then Gitlis explained that when we tell a story we don't just bluntly state events; we alter our voice, fill in details, and vary the pace at which we speak. He then played part of the beginning and did give it a conversational and Hungarian air, explaining how the composition is influenced by the speech rhythms of Magyar. Speaking of the advisability of stretching the rhythm from time to time, he stressed (to paraphrase) "One can be in time or one can be on time; there's a difference." It lends a sense of anticipation and heightens the tension. He also recounted what Marian Anderson had told him, "one of the most important things in music is the fraction of a second before."

[YouTube: 1. Georg Kulenkampff, Violin Concerto in D major by Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky; written in 1878, rec. 1939
(There are of course many versions available, but I decided to pick this one, whose interpreter incidentally once lived and taught in Berlin.)]

Then a tall French student, Simon, played the opening movement of Tchaikovsky's famous violin concerto. I found his rendition very touching and unaffected (not to mention that I have a very weak spot for the music itself). On the other hand the thought crossed my mind, and it returned on the third day, that the playing sounded as if he had heard and was beautifully recreating a fine recording of it. Perhaps it was so frictionlessly perfect that it felt like a facsimile of genuineness rather than the thing itself. At any rate Gitlis, who seemed impatient for reasons I didn't understand, asked Simon why he plays music; it transpired that the student grew up in a musical family, but other than that there was no direct answer. So Gitlis asked whether he did not feel at times that music is like wandering at the edge of a precipice. He also inquired whether Simon was playing in a competition, which was however not the case; he recalled the time when he went to Budapest and heard a student who played with a great deal of fire, only to return a year or so later to find that this fire was quite extinguished, and upon querying what the reason for this change might be, he was told, "I'm preparing for a competition." The crux of the criticism was: take risks!

[In other recordings, I love Henryk Szeryng's take among other things for its relative lightness and his tone, and Arthur Grumiaux's take for the tone and its strength.]

The third student was Japanese and since his name may have started with "T" he will be known as Toshi. He played the Fuga from Bach's Sonata No. 1. His approach was in my view too North American: the rhythm was exaggerated like in pop music and he played with some self-conscious panache. But given the circumstances it sounded surprisingly unmodern and was evidently Bach; and in his hands even the harsh chords had a sonority that lent human warmth to a piece that is in my opinion timidly and then acutely woebegone, like a sparrow vainly scratching for nourishment beneath friendless drifts of frozen snow. Gitlis, on the other hand, was all for a bit of scraping, and he got Toshi to use the bow sparingly instead of drawing it along its length. Altogether he often encouraged the economic use of the bow — though as far as I can tell economy of movement is something that naturally transpires over decades and is therefore mainly noticeable in the most seasoned musicians — and imaginative bow division so that a phrase of music doesn't sound monotonous and identical with every repetition.

*

After that Tristan took the stage, and with him a second accompanist, Dana. The latter is an amusingly temperamental personality, dressed and coiffed in the style of the 50s or so, with distinct cheekbones and a habit of energetically pursing her mouth. Tristan is French, stalwart in build and not entirely at ease, and as he played Niccolò Paganini's "Campanella" he moved a great deal and struck grave poses like a turn-of-the-century actor. This energetic presence evidently distracted him from the music, which while vigorous was comparatively expressionless. Ivry Gitlis clearly thought something similar, and said that it is not necessary to move much or to announce one's presence insistently. What I noticed was that Tristan's tone had at times a peculiar clear and steely quality. Besides he played something else by Paganini, a caprice or étude, without there being much time to discuss it, but which at least demonstrated that he has obediently put himself through the technical paces . . .

[YouTube: 1. Christian Ferras, excerpt from Stravinsky Violin Concerto in D major, written 1931]

Finally there was Susanne, who seems to be German and in character diffidently nice, and she played Stravinsky's violin concerto. Said composer may have been in a Bartokesque mood when writing the concerto, because once the movements have started out with a discordant, unsubtly attention-seeking(?) bray of a chord, they wander into strains of unadorned folkish melody whilst the piano accompaniment (or, I guess, orchestra) plonks along arbitrarily. Much of modern music falls, in my opinion, into two categories: it sounds like an orchestra tuning, or it sounds like a potpourri of uninteresting and purely functional phrases lifted from the aimless stretches in a composition by Bach, Mozart, or Beethoven, or both. Even given these prejudices, however, it was no hardship to listen to the Stravinsky in its entirety. The problem was that the violinist was nervous, since she had arrived at pretty much the last moment, so her playing was (presumably) note-perfect but colourless and flustered. On the second day, however . . .