Auditions
While I was enjoying a long, frosty holiday at Whistler (Christmas day was almost upon us), I received word that Justus Frantz needed me back in his orchestra immediately. This time it was called the Philharmonie de Nationen. The orchestra paid for a plane ticket, which at this late notice was CAN$735 and I took the train to the Vancouver airport, leaving my sister to finish her ski-honeymoon with Scottie.
I landed in Frankfurt on the 24th of December, and after leaving my skis and other unnecessary belongings in my Russian violist friend Juri Gilbo's basement, I took the train to Leipzig on Christmas day. We rehearsed Beethoven's 9th, Handel's Messiah, Carmina Burana and some Mozart Piano Concertos, and pretty soon we were on a plane to the Canary Islands. Justus had a ready-made public there on Gran Canaria, being full of old Germans. The program was very pleasing to their ears. Lots of clapping in unison and encores, speeches...
On my birthday the orchestra played a very nice happy birthday and it was sung again at Justus' estate during lunch. He's being very generous with me. He had a large property on a hill with rolling lawns. He sat down at the grand piano with his son and played duets. It was very touching.
The orchestra and soloists enjoyed a New Year's Eve party at his place, from where we could see the fireworks.
We all said goodbye on arrival back in Germany, with actual cash money in our pockets.
I saw five of our Russians pile into a BMW belonging to the principal cellist, Sascha.
I ran into him 20 years later in 2014 when I was making short films of the Australian Youth Orchestra on their European tour. I watched the new version of the orchestra enter the hotel, one by one after their concert. It was an older and more tired looking bunch than it used to be. But I had to hand it to Sascha, still there in the factory. I wonder what kind of car he drives now.
My friend Dalia Schaechter (mezzo soprano) gave me her Berlin apartment for the entire month of January '95 while she was away. I slept 12 hrs a night for three weeks. Must have been tired. I practiced 5hrs a day, audition repertoire.
I used any time that I had left doing the busy work to get my applications in for auditions at a couple of schools. Plan A and Plan B.
The red tape of the German music schools was not necessarily difficult to negotiate, but the Freiburg school absurdly sent my papers back to Australia because something I had sent in was partially in English. I just pressed on and didn't take Nein! for an answer.
One freezing Berlin evening I went to hear Frank Peter Zimmermann play the Brahms Violin Concerto with the Berlin Phil. I went on a Thursday with my Friday ticket. Oops. One of the ushers pointed it out on my ticket then he turned to help someone else.
Now, I don't know why I did this, but when nobody was looking, I stepped over the velvet rope and walked into the hall which was about full with more people coming in. It was clearly sold out. I was screwed. I was going to have to do a walk of shame past the ushers. But then...
Someone tapped on my shoulder and I turned around to see what my fate was going to be. It was a man with a spare ticket. Not just any man, it turned out to be the Frank Peter's manager, Marco Riaskoff.
Anyway, so... Free ticket for a ridiculously good concert, went backstage, met Frank Peter, and went out to dinner with Marco and laughed for a couple of hours. He's hilarious. I came back the following night with my ticket which I didn't need because Marco had one for me. We have remained friends, even after I accidentally set fire to his dining room table one new year's eve in Amsterdam.
At the beginning of February I took the train to Köln, watched some lessons, did my audition, playing as my 'etude' Moto Perpetuo. That's all I remember, except that Rainer Moog and Matthias Bucholz, the two viola professors noted that I was right on the age limit, perhaps over it, but I was in. Rainer Moog had accepted me. I was very happy. It felt good there at the hochschule.
In the days following the audition, Professor Moog gave me a lesson. It was the beginning of an overhaul of my entire technique: bow hold, vibrato, left hand formation, and no shoulder rest. So basically open strings, and left hand exercises, vibrato exercises. It was a 'be careful what you wish for' moment, but having seen the results in his other students I felt no trepidation.
I was due back here in April to start 'Aufbaustudium' - the postgrad program.
I don't remember exactly what my thinking was, but I still planned on doing my audition in Freiburg for Kim Kashkashian. It was scheduled for the end of the month, so I had a couple of weeks to kill. I called Barnabás and we agreed immediately that I should buy a plane ticket to Budapest for a ten day stay.
His Dad picked me up at the airport. He was a cellist in the famous Franz Liszt Chamber Orchestra. His mum was the harpsichord player. I had met his Dad once or twice when they were on tour. Lovely man. They had a beautiful house up on the hill - with a guest wing. It was winter and there was snow on the hill. As we got close to the house I noticed that the local kids were taking the bus up and then skiing down through the forest.
The photo that I presented the poor ticket lady behind the window may not have been acceptable if I had not made the same face/gesture as I handed it to her. Barnabás had trouble keeping a straight face.
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| Bus Pass for Budapest |
My time in Budapest was special. We played a few concerts at home for friends of the family. We read lots of chamber music with his Dad. Barnabás had shot some video in Santa Barbara that past summer, so we had a lot of fun looking over that craziness. He ran off a VHS for me which I showed my family in March. They were charmed by him. Mum would meet him again when he was in Melbourne with his prize winning quartet.
One night his Dad took the two of us to a restaurant that had a "cigányzenekar" (Gypsy/Roma orchestra), with a well known prímás (band leader- well more than just that). The prímás knew the legend of the grandfather of Barnabás who was also a prímás, and they played one of his grandfather's arrangements or possibly original compositions, just for us. It was very special. The dress code was jacket and tie and we were given sports jackets to wear.
We went to big concerts, small ones.. I even heard Barnabás play a recital, and we went to the Liszt Academy's end of semester costume party. The Hungarians students were a happy bunch. We had a whale of a time for 10 days. I would return soon enough.
A flight to Stuttgart and a train down to Freiburg for the audition, the good news being that there would be an end of semester costume party here too, I dressed up as a cowboy and launched myself into the sea of strangers.
The audition, earlier that day, had turned into an awkward affair.
I played well, but one of the panel was acting like a douchebag, commenting that none of my audition repertoire was written for viola, Schubert was written for Arpeggionne, Brahms was for clarinet, Bach was for cello, Paganini was for violin.
-Dude, this isn't the appropriate time to express your hatred for your parents-
I only thought it.
Kim K. K. had, in fact accepted me into her class, which I found out much later, and she was obviously embarrassed by the dude making waves. I didn't react, but I made a mental note that the school had been oddly inhospitable during the entire application process.
In any case, their acceptance letter was sent by ship to Australia, so by the time it arrived I was happily immersed in my studies in Köln.
A few years later I went backstage at one of Kim's concerts in New York and she asked me where I went to study. She was quite lovely about it. She was like : "Yeah, he's a toughy." - referring to Moog.
-Seven years later in 2002, shoe on the other foot, if she had decided to go for the professorship at Stony Brook where I was finishing my Doctorate, I would have been on her committee. If she had come, I may have chosen to continue studying even longer.
A Month in Melbourne
March, I spent living at Mum's house. I'd been out of the country for about two years, having stayed in touch with pen and paper and the occasional phone call. As requested, mum had kept all of my letters, many of which I'd written on the back of important milestone memories: paper programs from recitals, official documents etc. The letters have proven to be invaluable for keeping the memories fresh and in order.
My old director of music at Melbourne Grammar invited me to come and give a masterclass to a couple of their more talented violinists for the parents and staff. I borrowed a tweed blazer from my friend Emma Boling and went back to my old stomping grounds and used what I'd learnt from McInnes about teaching in public. You find one thing that makes the biggest difference in the shortest time and focus on that.
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| Masterclass at Melbourne Grammar |
With all the professional playing I had been doing, my bank account was healthy enough for me to shop for a better viola. I'd been imagining myself playing an Arthur Smith viola. Lofty dreams. His instruments had been acquired by the likes of Menhuin, Stern and David Oistrakh. The most sought after of his instruments were his violas which rarely came up for sale. He made a greater number of them than Stradivari did, but still... not many to go around.
There was an unusual one floating around on the market that nobody seemed to want. It had a funny yellowish varnish which may not have been Smith's, but it sounded fine. Faciebat Anno 1957, according to the dealer. It was cheaper than any other Smith I'd ever heard of. I was dubious.
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Me and my sister Jennie with the yellow Smith |
I took it home to try out, played it in the Melbourne Chamber Orchestra for a little gig, and Spiros Rantos looked at it and, making an ugly face, he drew a parallel between a toothless, ugly wife and a roughly made instrument. He had a point. It might be hard to sell at the end when I was done wit it.
I returned it to the dealer. He called me on the phone later that day and started out on what was to be a very long and ranty lecture, but I had quietly rested the receiver on the table and went and made a cup of coffee. When I returned, he was finishing up. I said goodbye, politely.
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| Click to enlarge |
A few days later I was inquiring in my local violin shop about Smith violas. "No I haven't heard of any for sale, sorry."
I felt a tap on my shoulder. It was one of my guardian angels in the form of a stranger who I would never see again:
"I happen to know an old lady who has one in the cupboard. I can give you her phone number if you like."
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Beryl Ramsay, a retired violist who used to play at the opera, at that stage it was the Elizabethan Trust Melbourne Orchestra, was happy to receive my call, probably with advanced warning from my violin shop stranger. The viola case came out of the closet and we opened it together revealing an achingly beautiful viola with a lovely deep red-brown varnish, wonderful lines and cleverly chosen wood, whose grain was very obviously in the style of Stradivari. My heart welled up. I hoped I could afford it.
I was only allowed to play it in her apartment, which was unusual, but I completely understood. We sat and talked for a long while. I played. We talked more, mostly about Mr Smith and their communications by mail.
The instrument had been commissioned for her daughter. It was based on a Stradivari viola named: The Macdonald, (after the third Baron Macdonald) which was sold privately in 2026 at a record price of well over $23 million. The Smith is almost identical to the Strad.
I visited Mrs Ramsey again and we continued our talk. She gave me advice for the future, and organized for her daughter Sheina to send me the series of letters Mr Smith had written during the months of 1963 when he was crafting the viola.
We came to an agreement on a price that we were both happy with. I wrote her a cheque, and she wrote a nice personal receipt in fountain pen. We sat there for a while. It was a momentous meeting that deserved pause and gravity. She bid farewell to the viola, but I stayed in touch with her for the next few years until she passed away.
My sister's wedding was hurriedly organized so I could be there.
I called the opera's harp player to ask her to accompany me for Camille Saint-Saëns' The Swan, one of my sister's favourites, being a cellist. It was a beautiful wedding.
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| After Jennie's wedding reception |
A productive and restful summer month with backyard BBQs, boating with my mate Muttly, big catch-ups and some viola playing, before throwing my attention at getting a running start on the complete overhaul of my technique.
Passing through Frankfurt to pick up my stored luggage I headed to Köln.
Until I found an apartment in Ehrenfeld, I stayed with a couple of different Aussies, and for a week or so with the parents of a new friend, an oboist called Ina. I moved into my apartment as quickly as I could. The carpet had obviously been the scene of some motorcycle maintenance, so Ina's dad and I bought some bright yellow carpet and laid it down, laughing. It was really bright. I basically treated the place as a big practice room with a bed and a bathroom. The apartment tenancy change was never made official because I had other things to do.
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| Professor Rainer Moog, later at a summer festival |
First semester began. The school ID was good for free public transport. There was a cafeteria at the school where everybody ate. You could even go in there at breakfast time and get a marzipan croissant. Some of my new viola colleagues commiserated with me about the gauntlet of mundaneness I was about to pass through while changing my technique as they had all done. No music for a few months.
I went to the big auditorium in the school and let myself in, unpacked and played through some of my favourite repertoire for the last time. At one point, playing solo Bach, I looked to the back of the hall and saw that Günter Pichler had just walked in the door with another man and two violin cases. I played a little more and we met eyes, so I stopped. He called out:
„Entschuldigen Sie die Unterbrechung, könnten Sie diese beiden Geigen kurz für uns anspielen?“
He had brought his colleague's (Gerhard Schulz) Strad and a newly made violin -and it's maker- to compare them. They wanted me... to play them so they could hear them in a big hall.
Oh, I omitted that he started the conversation by telling me his name and I replied that I knew who he was of course. We laughed.
So he brought up the strad and handed it to me. I played it. He said: could you play it with less weight in the string. We laughed again. It was kind of a mild viola joke happening in real life. I was probably using a viola bow too. I don't remember. Anyway, the Strad was amazing, but so was the new fiddle. The Strad, though, knew how it wanted to be played and told you.
I love that story. Fun little gentleman. We met again when he coached my quartet a few times the following year. I was sorry to learn just now when I looked up his Wikipedia page that they had put the date for the end of his life, which was just 6 weeks ago.
Moog gave me three viola lessons in the space of ten days. He had done enough of these overhauls to know what worked. I was playing my original viola while a local luthier refitted the Smith with a new bridge, planed the fingerboard, and touched a couple of scratches in the varnish. Thirty years later it would still be in perfect condition.
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I wasn't gigging yet and had spent a lot of money on the Smith viola, so I was pretty cash poor. At the pub I made it a habit to do only one Weizenbier, moving to imported beer after that (imported from the kiosk next door in my coat pockets).
We had a lot of fun, drank responsibly and we felt like we owned the place.
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| Toby Breider, Felix, Maria Scheid, Peter |
Moog enjoyed my German, as I had learnt my general greetings from a 60s cassette tape I bought in LA: old fashioned and excessively polite. I would say:
"Guten Morgen Herr Professor."
He would always reply with exaggerated gusto:
"Guten Morgen meine Lieben Studenten"
We maintained a fun student teacher relationship for the full two years. Together we successfully switched my technique over to the stronger more secure way of playing, which of course was the reason I was here. Meanwhile there were other developments.
My Smith viola came back from the luthier in fantastic shape. It sounded even better than before. Around the same time an old early music contact answered a letter telling me to give her a call. She had an extra baroque viola to lend me and she brought it over directly to listen to me play. She passed my name on to a couple of people and I was almost immediately immersed in the scene.
Köln was still a hot bed of early music in the 90s. Reinhard Goebel had been at it there since 1973, famous for his coke fueled touring, his extreme tempos and tight ensemble playing that his group Musica Antiqua Köln championed. His aggressiveness was legendary.
I remember a live radio broadcast I played with them in which he held the silence at the end of a piece for an uncomfortably long time, and then leaned towards the orchestra and stage-whisper-hissed at us: "Scheiße..........Scheiße...." and then turned to the public and bowed, almost sarcastically. I thought he was hilarious. He lent me a bunch of early music books to read, and when I returned them, he said: "These are not mine."
When their booker called me for the next project, the guy on the phone was noticeably shocked when I said no. I had a better gig.
I was now playing somewhat regularly in the Munich Chamber Orchestra, an easy, five hour train trip from Köln. The situation was the exact opposite down there, the soft touch.
The director Christoph Poppen favoured composers whose music needed to be practiced: Alban Berg, Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern... but I barely practiced it, choosing to instead learn it during rehearsal, my reason being that they were not paying us nearly enough and I had my own practice to do. It was a mostly young and talented group, 70% of them on a salary. The concertmaster's name was (and I loved this) Daniel Giglberger. He's still there, thirty years later along with four other players. Talented bastard and well trained by some of the best pedagogues in the world.
We toured quite a bit. My most vivid memory of it all was playing with a seventy-year-old Slava Rostropovich in Città di Castello. Poppen, on the podium, suddenly became a young, shy school boy in his presence.
I had a good look at the bottom ribs of his Strad and I could not see the Spur mark that Napoleon had supposedly inflicted there in 1812 when he grabbed the cello to try and hold it.
After that concert, the orchestra got on the train and went home, my friends from the orchestra gazing at me through the windows of the train, somewhat stupefied. I stayed in town for a week, having met the festival's four pretty ticket girls, and taking the time to talk to them and ask about their studies etc.
They organized a bed for me in the house on the hill that belonged to a wealthy couple, music fans. Georgio, the man of the household, asked me if I liked guns, and showed me his Beretta.
I hung out with the girls and their eclectic group of friends for those few days. We sat in piazzas at dusk with the local families. Went to the rest of the concerts in their festival, and stayed up late with all the usual Italian comings and goings of various vespas and little cars. It was engaging and a beautifully abrupt diversion from what I'd been doing lately, in Germany.
I recall going North, somehow, to Cervo -still in Italy- for the International Summer Academy. Moog was teaching there. I shared a room with a Hungarian cellist Laszlo somebody who I'd met in Budapest a couple of years earlier. He was some kind of cello superstar. The viola class had a little Telemann competition to see who would play the concerto with the chamber orchestra. We each stood up in class and played one movement, and then he decided. Moog hated baroque playing and at that time he really didn't get the idea of the baroque traditions and protocols of ornamentation. I knew this, but I wasn't going to play to win and then get up on stage and play completely differently. That would have been dirty and dishonest. So, I played ïñ štÿle, adding a few ornaments, as I played: acknowledging to Moog and the class with eyes and a couple of facial expressions that I was well aware etc.
The winner was Sebastian Burger. I liked to put the accent on the SebÀstionburger, so it sounded more like something you could order at McDonalds.
Interestingly, a month or two later, Moog called me on the phone and asked me to come to his house. He explained that he had done some reading (perhaps Quantz's "On Playing the Flute" for example) and realized that I was, in fact, right. He wanted a lesson from me.
How many times have I written "Shoe on the other foot" so far?
Moog's lesson with me was fun for both of us. His ornaments needed work, and remember saying "Oh there's your favourite one again" which was an amusing moment. The ones that ended up on the recording that he was practicing for were not always kosher but it was very 'Moog' and he's a wonderful player.
We had a moment where I was being encouraging with him and he was like:
"Oh that's how you want me to be with you when I teach!"
God, I laughed hard.
While I was away from Köln that summer, only two people left messages on my answering machine: An old girlfriend and an American violinist: Professor Peter Matzka. Turns out I had left an entire Beach Boys album as my outgoing message. So they had both made it to the end of the album and then left a message. Very impressive.
Peter Matzka, one of the violin professors had set up a baroque ensemble at the hochschule. I was at that point playing a beautiful authentically set up viola - on loan from Christine Moran-. So I did get to play the Telemann Concerto in the end. Christine was sitting next to Antoni Steck and apparently he kept saying: "He's just a really good musician." I ended up playing a bunch of stuff with Tony the next year.