SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Eight days, thirty applications of which twenty eight show up and eleven manage to pass the entrance audition as active participants (which gives each three lessons of forty five minutes); the rest learn by watching and listening. The active participants also watch and listen.

Watching, listening, studying, learning. Does that sound like a hothouse atmosphere? So it should. Casual witnesses like me see amazing talent blooming faster than tropical orchids. And in the process, I’m learning something about hothouse gardening.

Here’s Philip, an aristocratic young German, now responsible for a Music Faculty in Korea and a sixth year participant in this course. But this year he has chosen to come as a listener. He tells me he learns just as much and maybe more, in this capacity and didn’t want to join the race to arrive at what Madame would consider a real performance level. Only seven of the eleven active participants are invited to participate in the end-of-course recital.

On the day before that recital the Great Lady is giving Alexander Ullman a lesson on the Chopin Fourth Ballade (by her own admission, perhaps the most demanding of Chopin’s works). He is programmed to play the piece at tomorrow’s concert. I commented on Alexander’s outstanding native talent at last year’s course. In the meantime, he has just finished the first of a three year course with Leon Fleisher at the Curtis Institute. His amazing finger dexterity is even more impressive than when I last heard him.

At this last lesson, Madame is stopping him every eight bars, showing him various ways he might re-think every bar. His response is quick, if sometimes confused. This is the most monstrously cruel bit of teaching I have ever witnessed. And all the more shocking in coming from a woman who is probably the most humane, caring person of my acquaintance. But is my shock due to my ignorance of hothouse gardening?

The boy has to perform this piece tomorrow. It would be another matter is this were a lesson on her Moscow course, and even though she tries to tell him that the re-thinking is for his future study and not for tomorrow’s concert, how is he going to cope with the questioning now aroused in his mind? Fortunately, the lad turns out to be remarkably resilient.

To continue. That night at dinner, Alex happened to be sitting next to me. He is tall and handsome with delightfully old-fashioned manners. After a couple of forkfuls he says, I know this is extremely rude, but I just have to go to study. I smile understandingly. To my surprise, he re-appears during the next course. It’s just not working; I’m not getting what I want, he says, shaking his head. Two more forkfuls, another apology and he is off again to study.

Flash forward to the concert. Madame has arranged the performers with a crescendo of talent, the weakest first, with Alex as the penultimate. His performance of the Chopin fourth Ballade will live in my mind’s ear for ever: every nuance perfectly judged, poised and placed. A superhuman achievement. His sound is unique. It is not that Ullman is going to be one of the world’s great pianists. He is that now. If ever you have the chance to hear Alexander Ullman, don’t pass it by.

The first to play at the end-of-course recital was Maria Tretyakova, daughter of the famous violinist. Binga bonga banga I don’t want to leave the jungle, o no, no, no. The jungle here is the worst thickets of the Russian school of pianism. Maria offered two Liszt pieces –Isolde’s Liebestod and the Transcendental Study no 4 in D minor, Mazeppa. Both pieces sounded the same. Of course, they shouldn’t have. It is as though Maria cannot let you forget for a second that she can play louder and faster than anyone else. A real Russian basher.

I had not managed to catch any of the lessons of Mario Mora Saiz from Madrid, but I had found him intelligent in conversation and looked forward to his performance. His Malaga from the Albeniz suite Iberia was all right, but in this hothouse atmosphere, all right is simply not good enough. I couldn’t hear any distinguishing qualities.

Both Evelyne Berzovsky’s parents are acclaimed pianists and the daughter has also inherited her parents’ physical beauty as well as their outgoing personalities. I have been aware of a profound poetic soul in conversation with this very beautiful young woman, but before this year, I had never heard it in her playing. Every performer has to put herself in the hands of the gods and Evelyne made it clear that she had paid her dues to her masters, who duly supported her. That morning she had already paid an unexpected price to Nature by having a little finger stung by a wasp. Both she and Ullman played the Chopin Fourth Ballade and knowing they were close friends, Madame had agreed to this. It was fascinating for me to witness the different approach to the two by Elissò Virsaladze. At the end of one of these lessons, Evelyne had asked me, How was that? I hesitated, then said, A bit Russian. O Christ! she said, That’ll never do!

Christian De Luca is a notable home-grown talent from Puglia who has acquired a solid pianistic technique from Claudio Trovagliola (grandson of the composer). He played the Second Chopin Ballade. I sensed him feeling his way through this music with a fine musical sensibility, even if he didn’t yet always quite arrive where he would like. He is seventeen.

The most remarkably gifted newcomer was Beatrice Rana, also a seventeen year old Pugliese and pupil of Italy’s most acclaimed teacher, Benedetto Lupo. Some of her performances in class were deeply moving, though her playing of Chopin’s C sharp minor Scherzo, no. 3, at the concert did not sound as though it enjoyed that necessary support of the gods. Bad luck, Beatrice. Yours is a name we shall all be watching.

Emanuel Rimoldi was the final pianist of the concert (see my review of his recital at Latina last year.) Emanuel’s speciality is various qualities of pianissimo which you will not hear from any other pianist of any age. Moreover, he has also just finished his first year of Elissò Virsaladze’s Moscow course. It was also somehow right that a concert which began in the Russian jungle should end in an ethereal heaven. Virsaladze had chosen the right piece for the boy’s special gifts: Liszt’s transcriptions of the Priestesses’ Dance and the final duet from Aida. If there was a prize for subtlety on this evening it should immediately go to Emanuel Rimoldi.

‘He’s probably the finest double bass player in today’s world.’ These words carry a certain weight when the speaker is Franco Petracchi, Director of the Sermoneta Courses and teacher of the double bass course, so I am happy to take up his invitation to attend the boy’s lesson.

Anyone who knows the Renaissance portraits in the Prada would guess at once that José Vilaplana (Peppe to his friends) is Spanish; he is radiant when he smiles and strikingly handsome when he is serious, which is most of the time. He is of medium height. Until, that is, he takes up his instrument. He has a total command of the instrument, but it is the command of a lion tamer who loves his animals. What one sees is a ballet of easy, gracious, natural movements.

And this is no ordinary instrument. It is Franco Petracchi’s own 1765 Galliano, which the maestro has been pleased to loan to José for this year’s course. (There is some four hundred thousand dollars worth of instrument here.) The boy is twenty three and has been coming annually to Sermoneta since he was eleven.

It becomes a challenge to try to describe his sound. He is playing the Bottesini Capriccio. His tone has the sweetness and lyricism of the violin but at bass pitch. And what a joy it is to hear this instrument with every note perfectly in tune! José is always right in the middle of the note. And effortlessly. Of all the string instruments, the double bass has the greatest margin of intonation error because of the size of the finger board. In one virtuoso passage he turns the instrument into a coloratura soprano. All done with an almost impudent, natural ease.

When I later talk to him, I find him modest to the point of shyness. Don’t ask me how I do this, he says, I just do. And no, he doesn’t much like talking about music. He leaves that to lesser mortals like me.

Jack Buckley