SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

The Sermoneta Masterclasses are organised by Franco Petracchi. As anyone in the music business will tell you, Franco Petracchi is the world’s Mr Double Bass. And so it is that the world’s most talented and ambitious young double bass players come to worship annually at the Petracchi shrine in Sermoneta. These days they come in greatest numbers from Spain and its former dominions. The training there is excellent, he concedes. Maestro Petracchi may be at the senior end of life but there is no indication that he is in life’s departure lounge. Get to the Caetani castle before the start of the morning classes and you’ll find him playing football with his admiring chargés.

They’re like the worst of the young Italian pianists, he says: Just ask one of these pianists who Kreisler is, and they won’t be able to tell you. These kids certainly know, and even love their double basses. But every year, it’s a battle to get them to understand that this is a musical instrument like every other and the only reason for its existence is to make music: its own special, unique music. I’m not a bassist, but I have to admit, that I’d never thought of this instrument as a music-maker. Like all enthusiasm, Petracchi’s is infectious. No wonder they return every year.

Here’s Pedro from Uruguay. He’s a well-structured lad, of athletic build and I guess, about eighteen. He tells me he’s thirty! I’ve been coming here for ten years and I live between one summer course and the next, gaining more every time on what this instrument can do. There are so many concertos which have been written for the maestro and every year there’s an opportunity to study one with him. At he moment, Pedro is winding up a doctorate in musicology at Geneva University, so he doesn’t exactly fit into the maestro’s definition of a typical ignorant bassist. This year he’s brought Armando Trovaioli’s concerto. Trovaioli is a remarkably interesting composer, predominantly of film music, and still alive at the age of ninety two. The first movement calls for blues. Blues are not within Pedro’s musical vocabulary. But with a Petracchi play-along he quickly starts to adapt to the new language. Too dry ! calls the maestro, Sex it up a bit ! At your age, you should be an expert in this field . These are calls, without interrupting Pedro’s grappling towards the right sound. Unsurprisingly, he soon gets there. A new musical language in his fingers.

If Franco Petracchi is Mr Double bass, Sergio Azzolini is Mr Bassoon. Was there ever a man who is so united with his instrument as for there to be no space between the two? I met Sergio a quarter of a century ago when he won a place in the European Union Youth Orchestra. It defied understanding as to how Claudio Abbado obtained superb results from these inexperienced players: minimum words, smallest gestures, unspoken jokes produced magnificent sounds. Sergio absorbed all this, and though he turned down postings in Europe’s leading orchestras, he has discovered he has a flair for teaching, based on his Abbado experience.

The bassoon is often regarded –unfairly, it seems to me- as the clown of the orchestra. Still, there is a lot of purposeful joking in his course. No bassoonist I, yet I quickly learn to read the signs. He’s working with five bassoons on the adaptation of a Telemann quintet. Above all, this is a course about music-making: listening carefully to yourself and the others. Lots of stops. If he blows your part so that the sheets flutter, there wasn’t enough wind going into your instrument. If he blows your music off the stand, you’re seriously short of breath. A pointing towards you then his other hand tugging his ear means you’re not listening carefully enough to your intonation. This is all wordless. But everyone is in on the jokes. And they are all making improvements in leaps and bounds. Carry on joking, Sergio. And playing. What a sense of ensemble these players are developing.

The piano class of Elissò Virsaladze draws the greatest numbers. During the academic year, she divides her time between the conservatories of Moscow and Munich, 15 pupils in each, but in Moscow she has three assistants and in Munich none. Let it therefore not be said that the Russians are irresponsible. They may be irritatingly vague on such light-hearted matters as the right uses of nuclear energy, but when it comes to such serious business as piano playing, their commitment is total. Her Moscow students have told me that if, for example, your double octaves are imprecise or wrongly placed, you will be dispatched to one of the great lady’s assistants until you have acquired this facility.

I ask her about her own lessons with Heinrich Neuhaus. There is a little sigh, before she answers with a rhetorical question: What can I tell you ? I was nine when I had my first lessons with him and if he were still alive, I’d be going for lessons now. He brought out music that I didn’t know I had. I let out a shriek of recognition. I now see where she got it from. This is exactly what her own pupils will tell you: she has little interest in putting things into you, but she will surprise you by what she will get out of you. I should also add that to witness this happening, is a privilege.

She laughs when I say this. I try to do that. But please don’t go round saying that piano teaching is all a matter of getting the music out of the pupil; there are times when you have to put something in too. She says that after a lifetime’s experience of teaching, she has no doubt about how it works, and with no exceptions. She calls the formula a – b – a : those that arrive with talent leave with talent; those who arrive without talent leave without talent. She tells me of a young man who came to her for an audition recently, having had lessons from some leading teachers. I won’t name these teachers, to save you, me and them the embarrassment. But she had to tell this young man that she was unable to help him; there was nothing there on which she could build. No one else had ever told him this. Sadly, there are teachers out there who are there to keep themselves in business.

Eight of the pianists are chosen by Madame to play at the end-of-course recital. Three of them gave most remarkable performances.

It’s relatively easy to make a beautiful quiet sound on a piano, but few can make a beautiful, big, full-bodied sound. Christopher Devine (Holland) got sounds out of that Steinway Grand that none of the others knew were there. It sounded like another instrument. Not only did he sustain all the dramatic thrust of the Brahms Rhapsody Op 79, but as the tension increased, so did the beauty of his tone. Not since Clara Haskil have I heard this remarkable accomplishment.

Alexander Ullman (British with some German and Slavonic blood, of the London Purcell School) is the youngest, at 18, of the outstanding three. He has more talent than he knows what to do with. Music is pouring out of him with an attractive impetuosity. He was also the quickest learner of the course. Madame had only to begin to explain how he might rethink a phrase and before she could finish the sentence, his nodding understanding and amazing fingers were giving her what she had half suggested. Did I ever do the right thing in coming here , he told me. In the meantime he has won a place at the Curtis Institute with Leon Fleisher. He played three of the Chopin Op 10 studies: nos 4 and 5 (on the black keys) with all his natural, volcanic verve. The slow, cantabile no 3 calls for a more meditative, singing tone than he is yet able to give it, but even here, there was noticeable improvement during the week.

Emanuel Rimoldi (Romanian mother, Italian father) uses the piano to seduce his audience. He is at once, more subtle, more assured and almost dangerous in the ease of his charm. I touch on a quality there which is all but impossible to define. But all these qualities were to the fore in this Don Juan of the piano in his beautiful gradations of tone in the Chopin Polonaise Fantasia Op 61.

Watch these three names.

You will see from these pianists that there is no Virsaladze method as such . All of them have been urged to delve deeply into musicality and what impresses is the variant paths they take to do this, corresponding to their highly individual makeup. Knowing yourself to express your (musical) self seems to me a key part of the Virsaladze way forward. Self-knowledge is always a surprise and with that surprise comes the joy of communication. That is what gives the unique freshness and vitality to these performances.

And what of Elissò Virsaladze’s own recital at the Fossanova Abbey on 26 July ? There were dissenting voices for her Haydn Sonata in C minor Hob XV1 /20: too brittle and too percussive. But her critics would surely have to concede that almost no other pianist can carry you through Haydn’s highly original musical landscape like a torchlight procession, which while it so clearly illuminates the path, never sounds as though it is stating the obvious.

The deafening applause at the end of the Beethoven Appassionato tells you that there was universal agreement that she was on home ground. This is powerful playing, always with her unparalleled sense of direction. After the interval her Schumann Fantasy Op 17 saw the most authoritative performance of this piece which I have ever heard.

Everyone eats together in Sermoneta in the austere but noble refectory of the Caetani castle. On the day following the student pianists’ recital I was at a table with Alex, Emanauel and Bruno Giuranna and his wife. Maestro Giuranna is a wise, kindly gentleman with the rare quality of genuine humility. He congratulated the two young pianists, but had a dissenting voice on Christopher, whose extraordinary pianism he recognised, but he found that the boy’s immense musical personality had overwhelmed Brahms’s requirements. It’s an interesting point, even if I am not able to go along with it.

Giuseppe Russo Rossi has received every accolade that a young violist could wish for including, recently, the President of Italy’s Prize for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts. He has formed a quartet with three friends and when they arrive in Sermoneta I am surprised to see that I know the others too, albeit in different contexts. Giuseppe has asked his teacher for a lesson on Beethoven’s Opus 95. Although the four musicians are at different levels of technical accomplishment, Maestro Giuranna is able to compliment them for their excellent sense of ensemble. They clearly have a serious commitment to this and you hear at once that they have been studying together for some time. Quartets are never made in a day. When players as gifted as this discover and convey the sheer pleasure of making music together (the Italians have the beautiful expression –musica d’ insieme ) another flag should be hoisted to their glory.

But I have saved the best till last. Daniel Palmizio is twenty three (English mother and Italian father). He has also studied with Ian Jewell(himself out of the Giuranna nest). With characteristic, smiling, self-effacement, Bruno Giuranna tells me I’ve been trying to destroy the boy for six years, and as you can hear, I haven’t managed it. He plays the entire Second Partita of Bach. Genius is not too big a word to use here. His unflinching concentration is focused precisely onto the point where the hair of the bow makes contact with the string. The excellence of both hands is so perfectly coordinated that the two hands sound as one, in defiance of the laws of physics. I’m only sorry that Richard Feynman is not still around to explain to me which laws of physics Daniel has so successfully called into question.


Jack Buckley