13 October 2005

Hello everyone,This is the first installment of a travel log, which the AVS has kindly asked me to do, so from time to time I'll be sending in little snapshots and notes from my travels and projects. For those of you who don't know me, I'm a viola player based in Paris, France, and always looking for new things to do with my viola, so sometimes I get up to some slightly unusual activities!

I was thinking I should start with some reasonably typical activity, to break things in gently- for example the concerts I did in Parma, Italy last month in the amazing Teatro Farnese:

Debussy trio with Mario Caroli, flute and Anna Loro, harp

These were two concerts linking a modern composer with an established composer who influenced them. The first was Kaija Saariaho (from Finland) mixed with Debussy, and the other was Olga Neuwirth (Austria) with Schubert. The mixture Debussy/Saariaho was especially intriguing.
But time went past and I didn’t write the report- in any case, I realised that I hardly ever do anything I could call “typical,” so here is my first report of one of my “typical” non-typical projects.

This week I’m in Stuttgart, Germany, for the first real rehearsal period for an upcoming two person opera. Yes, that’s right, a pocket opera where there is only one singer and only one musician- the ultimate anti-Wagnerianism! The composer is Oscar Strasnoy, a “30-something” Argentinian composer who lives in Paris. The singer is Daniel Gloger, who normally sings with the Neue Vocal Solisten in Stuttgart. He is an amazing counter-tenor who has a huge vocal range- with it, he can easily sing five or six different roles and sound like different people. The musician is me, and I’m playing here the viola d’amore, which, with its own large range and big multi-string harmonic possibilities, can quite successfully replace (or at least imitate!) an orchestra.

viola d’amore and me

The story is a very witty comedy based on an old Italian folk tale about three old ladies (sisters of 70, 80, and 90 years old). One day a handsome young prince is walking beneath their (very high) balcony and a drop of water falls on him. He thinks it is a tear, looks up, half sees a hand, a wisp of hair, someone’s dress disappearing and immediately falls in love with what he thinks is a beautiful young girl. He knocks on the door but the old lady he supposes to be the young girl’s grandmother (actually her younger sister) says that the young girl who lives in the house is so pure that he can’t see her unless he marries her, and he is so infatuated he agrees. Inevitably, on the wedding night he discovers the trick and is so angry he throws the old lady out of the window, where she gets stuck in a tree. A passing fairy takes pity on her, and transforms her into a beautiful young girl. In the morning, the prince looks out the window, and sees with horror a beautiful young girl hanging in the tree. Overcome with remorse, he pulls her up back into the bedroom and they begin their true romance and live happily ever afterwards. (In the epilogue, one sister comes to ask the lucky girl how she became so young, and is told (wickedly) that she got herself polished by the carpenter. So the sister persuades the carpenter to polish her very hard, and she persists so much that she dies!)

We have a performance of a concert version of this at the end of November in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and we hope to do the full staged version sometime next year.

I’ve been trying out a new viola d’amore this week in the project, and I like it very much. It’s a little unusual, in that it’s asymmetrical:

viola d’amore

This makes it in fact easier to play (the resonant body space is put in places where it doesn’t get in your way) and it sounds great. The maker is André Sakellarides who works in Marseilles. He also showed me a picture of very large asymmetrical viola he had made tuned one octave lower than the violin strings. Apparently it sounds amazing. Its owner lives in Paris like me- if I get the chance to see it, I’ll keep you informed.

This week of rehearsal is made possible by the Château Solitude, which is one of these cultural centers (every state in Germany has one) that invites artists to come and develop projects. We sleep in this beautiful castle in the forest just outside Stuttgart and we have a whole theatre to ourselves for the week, which is a real luxury. Thank you to the German culture ministry! (Wish we had this in Britain or in France!)

It’s fun and also very enriching to work on a music-theatre project like this. You get a chance to see and participate in the stage and drama techniques associated with the theater.

I always think that music (and especially contemporary music) has such a strong theatrical side, and working on this explicitly can be a great help when you have to play it in concert setting. Also working with Daniel is great, to see how important the breathing and the physical gestures are to singers (and of course to us, but we often forget).

Daniel working with our stage director, Renate Ackermann

And having the living composer there with us means we can keep adapting, refining, and improving the written music as we discover what works best on stage.

Our relaxed composer, Oscar Strasnoy

Oscar has a real grasp of what works and what doesn’t, and is in no way defensive or pretentious about what he has written, which is a great quality. And his music is really good- witty and well-written.

They have very good beer here in Stuttgart, including some ecological brews with natural taste. They consider themselves the southerners of Germany, and enjoy their micro-climate of relatively sunny weather by sitting outside in cafe terraces eating pasta and drinking local wine (even in temperatures which would make true Mediterraneans run for cover!). Local specialties are for example Maltauschen and many varietes of dishes featuring cabbage (Kraut) especially sauerkraut. Pumpkins are also prominent on menus (soon be Halloween!).

Musically, they are very proud of their local composer, Helmut Lachenmann, who is one of the leading German composers of the moment. (www.schirmer.com/composers/lachenmann/bio.html.)

More soon about this project and others.

Web-sites where you can find out more about:

Kaija Saariaho: www.petals.org/kaija.htm
Olga Neuwirth : www.olganeuwirth.com
Oscar Strasnoy: http://osc-ars.com
Daniel Gloger: www.danielgloger.de/v01-DEUTSCH/02-Lebenslauf.html
André Sakellarides: tel +334 91 37 21 30
Helmut Lachenmann: www.schirmer.com/composers/lachenmann/bio.html