NYT: Remembering Rostropovich, the Master Teacher
Premise Checker
http://select.nytimes.com/preview/2007/05/13/arts/1154675007779.html
By MICHAEL WHITE
MANCHESTER, England
IT is a truth upheld by many in the music world if not universally
acknowledged that pianists are neurotic, violinists vain and
cellists ... well, cellists are nice. Straightforward. Sociable.
Theyll tell you so themselves.
Whereas other solo-status instrumentalists tend to come together
only in competitions, cellists swarm like bees at big international
meetings. The Kronberg Festival in Germany is one. And for the last
two decades another has been the Manchester International Cello
Festival, where Ralph Kirshbaum, the American head of the cello
department at the Royal Northern College of Music, has pulled in
star players every two of three years to perform, teach, talk and
stay up until 3 a.m. comparing Strads, spikes and Piatigorsky
stories.
Last weekend the festival was back in business, with Yo-Yo Ma,
Mischa Maisky, Colin Carr, Thomas Demenga, Natalia Gutman and some
40 other participants jostling like angels on a pinhead in endurance
concerts that began at 7 and ran till after midnight. Students,
amateurs and aficionados packed the halls. Good times were had.
But there was a ghost at this feast, benign but insistent. It was
the ghost of Mstislav Rostropovich, who had planned to be in
Manchester too but died the week before.
>From the beginning Mr. Kirshbaum said he didnt want the festival to
turn into a wake; the scheduled theme was English music, and it
wasnt to be hijacked by this death. But as Mr. Ma said of Mr.
Rostropovich in an interview: There can scarcely be a cellist here,
or anywhere, who wasnt affected by him. He was supreme. He was
loved. He was a wake-up call for every one of us. You cant get away
from that.
And there was scarcely a cellist of distinction here who didnt claim
to be some kind of student of the great man, or a student of a
student. Most impressive was the number who had actually
participated in his legendary classes in the 1960s at the Moscow and
Leningrad conservatories: Ms. Gutman, Mr. Maisky, David Geringas,
Karine Georgian, Ivan Monighetti. An elite corps, they were honored
here like surviving next of kin.
Its true, Ms. Gutman said. We were his family. We have lost a
father. And their collective testimony made it clear that, in the
words of Mr. Maisky: He was a great cellist but perhaps an even
greater teacher. This was his ultimate gift.
For obvious reasons Mr. Rostropovichs teaching was less well known
to the world than his concert work. But a biography just published
in Britain, by Elizabeth Wilson, herself a Moscow Conservatory
student from the 60s, emphasizes its importance. And in hindsight it
can be seen as central to his sense of self as a musician.
Mr. Rostropovich began to teach at 15, taking over from his father,
a distinguished cello teacher who died young. Then for 25 years,
from 1948 until he left Russia in 1974, he taught in both Moscow and
Leningrad, with a particularly famous class in Moscow: Class 19.
At a time in the Soviet Union when speech was guarded, opinions were
monitored and life was gray, Mr. Rostropovichs Class 19 was
provocative, energized and, Mr. Geringas said, a ray of light,
opening up possibility. His students called him Sunshine. And 40
years later they talk of the experience as if it had happened
yesterday, with vivid recall of events and recurring images of
natural upheaval torrent, hurricane, tsunami to describe the impact
on their lives.
Less closely involved students, the ones who knew Mr. Rostropovich
only through master classes in the West, tend to describe his
influence on them in technical terms. Mr. Ma talks of the will to
make a phrase last; Mr. Kirshbaum of the plasticity of a left hand
moving so fast it encompassed new levels of difficulty; and Mr.
Demenga of a bowing arm so agile it was like a snake, the bow a
natural continuance of the arm, flesh melting into wood.
But for those who were with him in Russia in the 60s the memories
are more emotional, overwhelmed by the huge, driven, scrutinizing
personality that swept them up and left them reeling.
Such power, such intensity, Ms. Gutman said. He could look at a
person and see so clearly what was hidden within. It was the genius
to awaken genius in others.
For Mr. Maisky it was a question of attitude: He taught us to
remember that the cello, or any other instrument, is only what that
word implies: an instrument to reach the ultimate goal of music, not
the other way round. Musicians are under such pressure to succeed to
play louder, faster, more brilliant that the music becomes a way of
showing how wonderfully you play. This, for Rostropovich, was wrong.
What matters is generosity of spirit, to open your heart. And his
spirit was so great, his heart so open, this is what he gave us in
his classes.
Not that they were easy. All of his students talk of being required
to learn a concerto in two days or to come back and play the Bach
cello suites from memory in a week. No excuses.
Lets be honest, Ms. Georgian said. We were quite afraid of him. For
the first two years I was terrified. Its strange to look now at the
photos taken at those classes and realize that he was a relatively
young man, still in his 30s. To us he was a god. We hung on his
every word, and it wasnt always kind. I never forget him saying to
me when I played Brahms in his class, You havent cried enough tears
in your life to play this music. Actually he was right. I hadnt. But
I learned.
For Mr. Maisky the price of attending Class 19 turned out to be more
than just tears. It was one and a half years in a labor camp,
resulting from his habit of taping everything Rostropovich said.
The class was so incredible, and he worked at such speed, it was
impossible to absorb, Mr. Maisky said. So for years I took along an
old secondhand tape recorder, and eventually I needed to replace it.
But these things were hard to get: only from the special shop with
special certificates.
Getting the certificates involved a black-market currency deal for
which Mr. Maisky was arrested and put on trial. The whole thing was
a setup, he said. Theyd been watching me because my sister had
emigrated to Israel, and they expected me to do the same. It was
their revenge. But one and a half years was lucky. I could have got
eight.
Whether Mr. Rostropovich was instrumental in getting the sentence
reduced is not clear. Mr. Maisky thinks not. Because this was 1970,
he said, when his influence had collapsed because of his support for
Solzhenitsyn. Until then he had power. He could ring up Brezhnev.
After Solzhenitsyn his power was lost, so there was nothing he could
do for me, except in personal terms. In that sense he was like a
father. He sent money, he maintained my spirit, so many things.
Mr. Maisky was in a hotel in Munich when he heard of Mr.
Rostropovichs death. It came up on the TV news, and I was
devastated, he said. The only thing I could think to do was take my
cello out and play a Bach suite. For him.
But for all of that, did Mr. Rostropovich generate a discernible
school of playing? He himself avoided talk of schools; and although
he could trace a direct musical ancestry back to Karl Davidov, the
founder of the so-called Russian tradition, he was by general
agreement such a giant personality and such a universal figure that
he outgrew any allegiance.
It isnt meaningful to talk of schools these days, Ms. Georgian said.
Im never sure what people mean when they speak of the Russian school
beyond something thats loud, Romantic and more from the heart than
the head, which is not necessarily a compliment. With Rostropovich
there was no school. And though we are in many ways close, there are
big differences in the playing of his students, no?
Listening to everyone in Manchester, one could hardly disagree. The
hard, compacted, unadorned intensity of Ms. Gutman bore little
obvious resemblance to the mellow sheen of Ms. Georgian; still less
to the liquid brilliance of Mr. Maisky. Could these people really be
the family they claimed to be?
Yes, definitely, Mr. Maisky insisted. Different as we are, we have a
shared blood transfusion that doesnt determine how we play or
present musical ideas but does affect basic quality of sound, which
for Rostropovich was the most important thing.
The Rostropovich sound is hard to put in words. Mr. Kirshbaum called
it powerful, with an inner life that sustained its intensity even at
the most delicate and soft dynamic. And regardless of the
terminology, it has certainly inspired successive generations of
young cellists. For Natalie Clein, one of Britains rising stars here
last weekend, it was the sound I searched for through my teen years:
electric, incandescent, large but never forced, the sound that
brought me to the cello in the first place.
Bringing people to the cello ranks high among the legacies Mr.
Rostropovich leaves behind. He raised the profile of the instrument;
he raised the standard of performance. And for Ms. Georgian he
single-handedly rescued the cello from its also-ran status as a solo
instrument that lagged behind the violin and piano, largely because
of the shortage of first-rank repertory.
It was the constant complaint of cellists that they had no Beethoven
or Brahms concerto to themselves, and no Mozart at all, while
pianists and violinists had so much. Mr. Rostropovich begged,
pestered and bullied composers of distinction to write for him.
Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Britten, Lutoslawski, Bernstein,
Penderecki, Schnittke and Walton (the list runs on) obliged him with
what amounts to a near-comprehensive catalog of 20th-century cello
music.
Mr. Rostropovich gave the premieres of 224 new works, large and
small. And that means we cellists owe him maybe 40 percent of our
current repertoire, Mr. Ma said, which for me is the greatest legacy
of all.
One other item on the checklist of bequests is the very fact that
massed events like Manchester exist. Theyre just the kind of thing
Mr. Rostropovich loved and fostered. He encouraged cello clubs. He
liked the camaraderie of fellow players. And in a short filmed
speech made for a previous Manchester festival and poignantly
replayed at this one, he commended (with his heavy Russian English)
the enormous, brilliant friendship, very rare of cello gatherings.
He even offered a reason for the friendliness of cellists: We carry
heavy instruments and suffer so much planes and trains. This makes
us sympathetic people.
Participants here offered other explanations. Ms. Clein thought it
had to do with spending your life playing bass lines. Youre
supportive, she added, always helping someone else to shine.
Whatever the reason, cellists manifestly do enjoy one anothers
company. And if Mr. Rostropovichs death werent bad enough, the
participants were hit with more bad news when rumors that this years
festival would be the last were confirmed.
Things have their time frame, said Mr. Kirshbaum, the director, and
the festival has grown so much its reaching saturation point. Back
in 1987 it was meant to be a one-off. I never imagined Id still be
doing it 20 years later. And now, after 36 years of living in
Britain, Im thinking about moving my base, quite possibly back to
the U.S.
Could someone else pick up the ball? Any successor to Mr. Kirshbaum
would need to have an international profile big enough to lean on
friends and call in favors. And the owners of big international
profiles tend not to have the time for such ventures.
What Manchester needs, clearly, is a Rostropovich. So far there are
no contenders.
rkhalona
> IT is a truth upheld by many in the music world if not universally
> acknowledged that pianists are neurotic, violinists vain and
> cellists ... well, cellists are nice. Straightforward. Sociable.
> Theyll tell you so themselves.
>
Oh yes, just ask Janos Starker.
RK
Matthew B. Tepper
letters to be typed in news:1178915051.656421.106840
@o5g2000hsb.googlegroups.com:
*guffaw*
--
Matthew B. Tepper: WWW, science fiction, classical music, ducks!
My personal home page -- http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/index.html
My main music page --- http://home.earthlink.net/~oy/berlioz.html
To write to me, do for my address what Androcles did for the lion
Harrington/Coy is a gay wrestler who won't come out of the closet
her...@yahoo.com
Checker cuts and pastes an article that isn't at least a year old.
johnlew...@sympatico.ca
learning of his deaht, and played a Bach Celled Suite .... etc.,
etc....
When I heard him live at Massey Hall, I think in the early 70's, when
I was an early teen, the Dvorak concerto--which has to be played right
or is impossible to listen to--I recall that I heard no "sound."
Rather the music went directly to my head. That was R.'s genius.
And few--if any--could claim as much. As for Bach, I have yet to
hear a recording of R. playing the Suites (I have never heard him play
Bach live) that suggested he played Bach in a way that went "directly
to the head." I'd love to be corrected on that. I wouldn't doubt
it. The Russians gave us Shafran's Bach, in this way putting a giant
footprint on the recorded landscape that I haven't heard equalled in
any way, shape, or form. But, as I say, I stand to be corrected.
Did he ever play the Ultimate Cello rep live? Or in recording?
JG
gggg...@gmail.com
Joe Roberts
Years ago (I don't recall when), we went to attend a concert by him in
Providence. Seating was by general admission, so we got there early. A
sign was posted outside the hall: the concert was cancelled because he had
been prohibited from leaving the Soviet Union.
Joe