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| In the city of Bruhl: Felix, Peter, Christine and Lucas |
1996, Lucas Barr tested the water to find out if I was interested in playing with him, Felix and Christine Pichlmeiere. I thought it was a grand idea. Fun people and very high level players. Christine played a violin that was 1/3 Strad, being just the belly, and Felix's Cello was 2/3 Strad, the original back being mounted on a wall behind glass because Stradivari had given the cello a flat back. My Smith of course was a copy of a Strad. ... Very few viola players get to play a Strad, but later that year, I would be playing one on tour with five other of his instruments in The Stradivari Sextet, Habisreutinger.
Anyway, the big plan for the quartet was to prepare a couple of audition pieces to send to the Osaka Competition.
We needed to provide the name of our quartet, but we had no name.
Lucas said:
"Let's call it the Murrumbidgee Quartet" which we all decided was perfect because it would be almost impossible for the Japanese to pronounce.
We started with Schubert's Rosamunde, and Beethoven 18.1, then sent off our application with a cassette tape and three glowing references from the Emerson Quartet, the Guarneri Quartet and the Alban Berg Quartet. Not too shabby.. probably the three best in the world.
On reading that we'd been accepted by Osaka to compete, we started work on the required rep which was: Bartok 5, Beethoven's 127, 59.3 and 18.1 and a new piece by Akira Miyoshi.
Each of the four members of the Alban Berg Quartet spent time with us. I don't remember rehearsing because it was such a pleasure to play with these people, it all went by in a flash. We traveled via LAX and a stretch-limo ride north to Santa Barbara to work with Heiichiro Ohyama, then performed in La Jolla at Felix's family concert hall, to where I would return many times in the years to come.
While in La Jolla, I bought my first ever skateboard, a second hand Sector9 which I would ride everywhere back in Köln, and use it to transport beer bottles back and forth to Felix's apartment where I ended up living. I bought all the beer instead of paying rent.
We landed at Newark airport and headed into Manhattan in two different town cars when I realized that both the people who knew the address of where we were going were in the other car, we had to find them on the New Jersey Turnpike. Remarkably, we found them, and pulled alongside, winding the windows down. Those were the fun times just before cell phones.
We made the long journey to Australia and enjoyed some free accommodation (Lucas had family in the hotel business) at Surfers' Paradise where Felix and I surfed quite a bit. We rehearsed, but again, no memory of it.
We flew down to Melbourne and played two concerts. The concert in the Toorak Uniting Church, one of Melbourne's best quartet venues at that time, had to be rented and filled, which was what I used to do a few years earlier, but the advice from one of my Arts Admin mentors, Peter Burch was to use the ticketing company Bass. It worked well. I didn't have to sell tickets door to door and it was a good sized crowd. Apparently we really blew them away. Quite a big program, challenging. We changed our name to Christine's last name because it would be impossible for the Australians to pronounce.
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I took the quartet to the Mornington Peninsula where we enjoyed some boating, dolphins, and fun with my mate Muttly, after playing the fast movement of 59.3 at his engagement party.
It was a magical few weeks.
Japan
Heading to Osaka there was one other group on the plane. Felix commented to me that their cello was in a soft case, which either meant that they were really good or really bad. It turned out to be the Egyptian Quartet, so.. really bad.
What? You were thinking it.
The practice rooms that the organizers provided us with were inadequate (we could hear the Egyptians rehearsing through the thin wall - so bad) so we gave up and rehearsed in the hotel room of Felix's parents who were in town to watch the competition. They also took us out to dinner every night, and after the competition they took us sightseeing.
I actually remember rehearsing in Japan because we left the sumo wrestling on the TV at all times. Mostly I remember the sumo wrestling and not the rehearsing. We made it through the first and second rounds and into the final. I had listened to a couple of other quartets and they both kind of tacked the Miyoshi piece on the end of the program, like an afterthought. I suggested that we walk out on stage, sit down and start with it. It was a decisive move and worked very nicely.
Festival Hall in Osaka is pretty big. A good acoustic. We enjoyed playing there. We picked up the prize money for best performance of the Miyoshi, and they gave us the bronze medal, which was pretty good going for a group that had got together that same year.
The organization wanted us on stage the next day for a kind of presentation and I realized that they would likely be sticking a microphone in our faces, so I prepared some points, and sure enough... there was a young Japanese lady asking super weird questions, and I had a lot of fun with her. The Australian juror came up to me afterwards and said he was crying with laughter at the way I was dealing with her. That was Como coming out again.
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| Felix's Mum joined us for this photo |
I figured that the Shostakovich Sonata would be the most appropriate thing to study with these two Russian legends in the room.
In 1975, Muntjan premiered Shostakovich’s last work, the Viola Sonata Op. 147, with Fiodor Drujinin, who was the violist of the esteemed Beethoven Quartet.
I wasn't scheduled to play in our first class, so I was able to watch how things went, how he taught etc. At one point when a young Italian lady came to check on us and to see if Bashmet had everything he needed, he asked:
"Can you bring me an ash tray?"
She replied, awkwardly that no, she couldn't because smoking was not permitted anywhere in the castle, noting that Bashmet was already smoking. She hurried out of the room.
Bashmet shrugged his shoulders and ashed provocatively on the castle's tiled floor. It said a lot.
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The night before my first lesson, I was up all night with a girl I'd just met. I was very tired, hungover and in no condition to play in class.
As I tuned my viola to the A, quietly given by Mikhail Muntjan, I thought about the significance of what was about to happen, the heaviness and history of the piece and the famous Russians in the room, and I suddenly I felt very shy.
I began with the soft plucked notes of the last piece ever written by Shostakovich just weeks before his death. These same pizzicato notes had been played for the first time just twenty-two years earlier by Soviet violist Fyodor Druzhinin (Bashmet's teacher) accompanied by that same pianist who was about to play the austere melody over the top of my accompaniment.
After the sonata's premiere, a critic for Izvestia wrote that the music was "like the catharsis in a tragedy; life, struggle, overcoming, purification by light, exit into immortality."
Bashmet allowed me to play just one page before stopping me. Then quietly said to me:
"I will imitate you."
He stood with our accompanist and did what I'm told was an excellent caricature of me. Then he talked to me earnestly for a couple of minutes, about how the piece should be played, finishing simply with:
"Ok, that's your lesson."
I looked at him, waited a few seconds, then smiled, bowed my head respectfully and said:
"Спасибо" (Spasiba, which means, Thank you)
He smiled surprisingly warmly, bowed his head back at me and replied:
"Pazhalsta!" (You are welcome.)
The tension in the room evaporated and everybody breathed again.
A couple of days later, after some serious practice and contemplation, I played it again.
Muntjan and I took a new tempo, a new attitude and we played the shit of the first movement. Bashmet did not stop us this time. When I'd finished, there was a very, very long silence.
"You have been practicing."
Everybody murmured. Bashmet proceeded to give me the lesson of my life, one that would make me a better musician, and would reform my approach to the Shostakovich sonata, a piece that I would perform many times in public, and would be the last sonata I would perform as a student, five years later, before becoming a professor.
That night at dinner in a restaurant with a couple of other violists, I started to doodle on the paper placemat. Five minutes later my friends were giggling at my finished caricature of Bashmet, which consisted only of his hair, and one eye looking down the length of an an elaborate viola protruding from the form that was very clearly him, and a bow flying across it all. Absentmindedly I put it in my Bach score because I quite liked the result.
The following morning, my friend from Australia stood up for her second lesson. In her first lesson, a few days earlier, she had played the Bartok and had received an instructive lesson. She'd studied the piece in depth with her Salzburg professor Thomas Riebl so it was in its polished form, and she'd probably been playing it that way for a while. Bashmet, in that first lesson, had a quite lot to say and had made many changes, starting with the first note, making her begin on a down bow instead of up.
Again, in this her second lesson, she played her Bartok, using his suggested down bow on the first note, but little else had changed. Bashmet's reaction was to give her the same exact lesson again, but this time less kindly. It was hard to watch. Pretty sadistic.
She had the right to be upset, but this was Bashmet. He was the best in the world and expected his students to try to do what he suggested. We didn't see her again after that. I was dismayed that she had disappeared. He noticed her continuing absence later in the week and said to us that she wouldn't graduate if she didn't reappear.
I opened my viola case for my third lesson, saying: "Bach E major." He held his hand out for the score which I passed him. I began the prelude, and about thirty seconds into it I became aware that he was holding up the caricature and everyone was laughing quietly. I stopped, of course. He was nodding approvingly.
"Can I have it?" he asked.
"Of course." I replied, feeling the weight of this new memory forming in my head.
He nodded, that I start again. We got through four movements and he gave me a few changes, and at the end he said:
"Good! Play those four movements in the concert."
Three of us had been chosen to perform in the class presentation concert. An Italian fellow, Bruno (Bashmet liked to call him Brunissimo) who had been studying with Bashmet in a more permanent way somewhere, had found a way to sound exactly like him. It was uncanny. He had dibs on the Shostakovich sonata.
Meanwhile I was being distracted by a beautiful Swedish/Italian girl whom I'd talked to outside Bashmet's door in the five minutes before my audition two weeks earlier. She was studying violin with Boris Belkin, and all the boys were hopelessly following her around everywhere. I'd said no to an invitation to go on some evening excursion with her as there were these hormone driven lads involved. The next morning she was at my door in an outstandingly pretty dress, carrying her camera, wondering if I'd like to go for a walk.
During the morning of the concert I was out strolling around the market with who had become my summer fling, Claudia Bonfiglioli, and we ran into Bashmet, who told me to go and rest before the concert.
The Concert went great. After I'd played I moved to the audience to watch Brunissimo. Just remarkable the similarity to Bashmet's Shostakovich, but people agreed that it somehow lacked soul as it was a carbon copy. He had an excellent ear to be able to do that though.
I recognized Brunissimo's face fifteen years later in the cafeteria of Catania's Teatro Massimo Bellini (the opera house where my wife was singing Carmen). Bruno was the principal viola in the orchestra. He has done very well.
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| My courageous program for the final class concert |
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| Chigiana Certificate |
A young Italian lady from the Academy had approached me during the first week to ask if I was interested in staying for an extra two weeks to play in the contemporary music ensemble run by the highly respected composer Franco Donatoni. We were to play the new works of nine student composers in concert. In return, I was given free accommodation for the whole duration of the festival and a stipend to keep me in restaurant pasta for two months.
"Peterrr, I think it was a-better the first-a time."
I loved the craziness of the the Italians' rehearsal style, but sometimes it degenerated too much and I could always get things moving by interrupting with some pertinent question about lunch.
Everyday for four weeks I walked from my apartment towards the palace via the pet shop where I religiously stopped and said, quietly a couple of times: "Fuck you mother fucker" to the parrot whose cage was hung outside. By the end of the festival he could say it, and we would say it back and forth until the shop owner chased me off waving his hands like an Italian.
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| Gustav Mahler Strad Viola (1672) |
So there we were with two out of the dozen (or less) violas on earth made by Tony Stradivari. The Gustav Mahler, which I now had in my hands, the Gibson, which was the other one in the sextet and I had a good old play on that one too.
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| Peter with the Mahler Strad |
On opening the case, I gazed at it for quite a while, and then began comparing the wood's grain to my Smith's. Very similar.
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| Mahler Strad |
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| My Arthur E, Smith |