Volume 21 Issue 8 - May 2016
INSIDE: The Canaries Are Here! 116 choirs to choose from, so take the plunge! The Nylons hit the road after one last SING! Fling. Jazz writer Steve Wallace wonders "Watts Goode" rather than "what's new?" Paul Ennis has the musical picks of the HotDocs crop. David Jaeger's CBC Radio continues golden for a little while yet. Douglas McNabney is Music's Child. Leipzig meets Damascus in Alison Mackay's fertile imagination. And "C" is for KRONOS in Wende Bartley's koverage of the third annual 21C Festival. All this and as usual much much more. Enjoy.
INSIDE: The Canaries Are Here! 116 choirs to choose from, so take the plunge! The Nylons hit the road after one last SING! Fling. Jazz writer Steve Wallace wonders "Watts Goode" rather than "what's new?" Paul Ennis has the musical picks of the HotDocs crop. David Jaeger's CBC Radio continues golden for a little while yet. Douglas McNabney is Music's Child. Leipzig meets Damascus in Alison Mackay's fertile imagination. And "C" is for KRONOS in Wende Bartley's koverage of the third annual 21C Festival. All this and as usual much much more. Enjoy.
You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles
YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.
CHRISTOPHER DAVY<br />
Beat by Beat | Classical & Beyond<br />
Mischa Maisky<br />
Heart And Soul<br />
PAUL ENNIS<br />
“Maisky’s supercharged style of playing grabs you by the collar. He can be<br />
strong, passionate and powerful – but he can also make love to you with a pianissimo…like<br />
Rostropovich, Maisky’s playing is all about the heart and the soul.”<br />
– Julian Lloyd Webber, The Guardian, January 2012.<br />
Facts you may not know about<br />
Mischa Maisky. Born in Latvia,<br />
educated in the Soviet Union, he<br />
now considers himself a citizen of the<br />
world. (He lives in Belgium, his four<br />
children were each born in different<br />
countries; his cello is Italian, its strings<br />
German, its bow French) He found it<br />
odd that people once referred to him<br />
as a “Russian cellist,” since in the<br />
Soviet Union he wasn’t considered to<br />
be Russian at all. “I was a Jew, which<br />
was made clear in my Soviet passport:<br />
‘Nationality: Jewish.’ Very few people<br />
in the West realize that this is how Jews<br />
were treated in the Soviet Union.”<br />
He is the only cellist to have studied<br />
with both Gregor Piatigorsky and<br />
Mstislav Rostropovich. Two months<br />
before Pablo Casals died, Maisky,<br />
then 25, played the Bach Suite No.2<br />
in D Minor for him in August of 1973,<br />
in an Israeli hotel suite in front of<br />
Casals, his wife Martita, Isaac Stern,<br />
Leonard Rose, Eugene Istomin and<br />
Alexander Schneider. Maisky has<br />
recorded the Bach solo cello suites<br />
three times, most recently for Deutsche<br />
Grammophon in 1999.<br />
In an International Cello Society interview with Tim Janof in 2007,<br />
Maisky expanded on that historic meeting with Casals:<br />
“Perhaps the most frightening thing was to play Bach for him.<br />
[In addition to the second suite, Maisky played the Sonata No.3 in<br />
G Minor BWV1029 with his brother on piano.] Frankly, I was a bit<br />
depressed by his reaction. ‘Young man, I personally don’t think that<br />
what you do has anything to do with Bach. However, you are so<br />
convinced by what you do, that it actually sounds very convincing.’<br />
Isaac Stern calmed me down afterwards during lunch, saying that he<br />
thought I had received the highest compliment a young cellist could<br />
receive from Casals. I now prefer to take what he said as a compliment.<br />
I certainly didn’t play Bach like him, as if anybody could, and<br />
I was never one to imitate anybody, so I’m not surprised by his reaction.<br />
Lately, however, I’ve come to realize just how much I have been<br />
influenced by his recording of the Bach Suites, which I have listened to<br />
repeatedly since I was a teenager.”<br />
Later in the conversation with Janof, Maisky talked about his view<br />
of Bach as a romantic:<br />
“Some people think my Bach is too romantic, which I take as a<br />
compliment. I believe that Bach was one of the greatest romantics<br />
of all times. One shouldn’t forget that in addition to his wonderful<br />
music, he had 20 children. Otto Klemperer was once told that it was<br />
discovered one shouldn’t play Bach with vibrato, to which he replied,<br />
‘Huh? Twenty children and no vibrato?’<br />
“I realize this may seem odd, but I don’t consider Bach’s music to<br />
be baroque. I believe calling Bach a ‘baroque composer’ is an insult to<br />
his genius because he was much, much larger than this. People such<br />
as Bach cannot be categorized so easily and those who try to do so are<br />
diminishing him and his accomplishments, not to mention that such<br />
a label doesn’t begin to capture his essence. In addition to being one of<br />
the great intellects of all time, he was a passionate human being who<br />
I’m sure loved great food and drink. I agree with Pablo Casals when<br />
he said that there is no emotion known to human beings that is not in<br />
Bach’s music. It’s all in there and we just have to dig deep enough to<br />
find and express it.”<br />
Maisky falls clearly into the romantic camp as his Horowitz reference<br />
shows:<br />
“Vladimir Horowitz once said that ‘all music is romantic,’ and<br />
I couldn’t agree more. Playing romantically means playing with<br />
feeling and emotion, and of course people in the 18th century felt<br />
things just as deeply as we do today. I don’t<br />
Mischa Maisky<br />
mean to imply that one should play Bach like<br />
Shostakovich, I’m just saying that Bach was so<br />
far ahead of his time that he’s probably spinning<br />
in his grave as he watches us trying to go<br />
back 300 years. To regress in our approach is<br />
to go against his own mentality and his own<br />
progressiveness. He was such an innovative<br />
and experimental person by nature that he<br />
would be appalled if he were to see how we<br />
argue amongst ourselves about how to play his<br />
music ‘correctly.’”<br />
Later Maisky defends his idea of Bach:<br />
“His music is full of invention and experimentation.<br />
Just look at the last cello suite,<br />
which he wrote for a five-string instrument,<br />
or look at the variety in the Well-Tempered<br />
Clavier. I have no doubt that if somebody<br />
were to give him a modern bow, he would be<br />
thrilled to explore its possibilities. I strongly<br />
disagree with those who insist that Bach must<br />
be played a certain way. There is plenty of room<br />
for different approaches and it’s the variety<br />
of ideas about all sorts of things, not just in<br />
music, that makes life so interesting.”<br />
Before Maisky performed at Roy Thomson<br />
Hall with the Moscow Soloists and Yuri<br />
Bashmet on <strong>May</strong> 3, 2012, he appeared on<br />
Classical 96.3 FM, where he likened Bach’s<br />
Cello Suites to a great diamond which can shine differently depending<br />
on which way you look at it; he called the study of the suites a neverending<br />
process.<br />
Maisky makes no secret of the fact that he listens to other cellists. At<br />
the time of the Janof interview he had more than 45 recordings of the<br />
Bach Suites, all of which he listened to, some of them several times.<br />
Listening to recordings in general is something he likes to do; listening<br />
to his own recordings gives him a sense of where he’s gone developmentally.<br />
And he likes to hear live music when he can. “I believe very<br />
strongly that one can find something valuable in any performance,<br />
even if I don’t agree with the interpretation or if mistakes are made.”<br />
After studying with Rostropovich for four years (from 18 to 22),<br />
Maisky spent 18 months in a labour camp, “shovelling cement,<br />
building Communism, obviously unsuccessfully,” as he says sarcastically<br />
in an interview from the Verbier Festival in 2012. Then, to avoid<br />
military service, he had a friendly Jewish psychiatrist place him in<br />
a mental hospital for two months, after which he followed his sister<br />
to Israel and “repatriation.” Maisky attributes the curtailment of his<br />
concertizing and other musical activities, as well as the trumped-up<br />
charge that landed him in the labour camp, to his older sister’s move<br />
to Israel in 1969, a move the Soviet authorities were convinced (rightly<br />
as it turned out) Maisky would also make.<br />
When Maisky asked Rostropovich for advice (before he left the<br />
Soviet Union) as to what future musical path to follow, Rostropovich<br />
told him that there are two major cello schools, one Russian and<br />
20 | <strong>May</strong> 1, <strong>2016</strong> - June 7, <strong>2016</strong> thewholenote.com