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Laurie Niles

What Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau (1925-2012) Meant to Music and Musicians

May 18, 2012 10:34

"If you want to know how to make a phrase, listen to the great singers!" a teacher once admonished me.

By the "great singers," I'm pretty sure he did not mean any singers that I'd ever heard in my then-20-year-old life: the pop singers on the radio, the choir at church. He probably didn't even mean the singers from the musicals I loved, though perhaps a few came close.

I know what he meant by now, though. He meant this guy:

The famous German baritone, Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau died Friday in Bavaria at age 86.

I will list some obituaries below, if you would like to read about his fascinating life. But on the topic of his music, many violinists admired Fischer-Dieskau's great voice and artistry, including Joshua Bell. I would advise us all do this:

For a moment today, clear your head of all the modern singing that bombards us in every grocery store, on every radio station, in every corner of our lives. Strange sounds have infiltrated our concept of the human voice: thin and amplified, out-of-tune and auto-tuned. Stop and behold Fischer-Dieskau's voice from the past: its ease, its depth, its range and rich quality. Its beauty is fully human; it certainly needs no electronic regimentation. You may well find yourself on Youtube all day; and we do thank the Internet for that!

To start you off: here is Fischer-Dieskau singing one of my favorite lieder: a song by Brahms about nostalgia. Its theme of a return to childhood and longing to rest seem an appropriate memoriam for a man whose long life was full of great difficulty, who created much beauty in the world.

Then, you can go at it all day with hours upon hours of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau on Youtube!

* * *

Here is the New York Times obituary:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/19/arts/music/dietrich-fischer-dieskau-german-baritone-dies-at-86.html

The Guardian's Ian Bostridge puts Fischer-Dieskau's life in historical context:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2012/may/18/ian-bostridge-dietrich-fischer-dieskau?newsfeed=true

5 replies

'I just get so nervous'

May 17, 2012 10:12

The Big Recital is coming up this weekend for my students, and so this week's lessons are all about preparing for performance: putting the polish on pieces, solidifying memory spots, playing with accompaniment, cleaning up anything that's tangled or out-of-tune, etc.

"I just get so nervous, though," said one of my adolescent-aged students, frowning.

Oh dear, what to do about that? It's a lot easier to advise someone to add a little vibrato, or play that "D" a little higher, or repeat the passage 20 more times with a metronome. Nervous about being nervous -- "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself!" Deep stuff!

I remembered something the British violin pedagogue Simon Fischer told me: instead of thinking about everything that could go wrong, create for yourself a strong vision of how you want it to go right. Of course, you can't just tell a young student this; as my journalism professors always said, "Show, don't tell!" I decided to go straight to the point:

"What is the part of this piece that worries you the most?" I asked.

"Hitting the harmonic at the end," she answered.

Okay: first prove you can do it. No amount of "visualizing" and positive thought will help, if you haven't first surmounted the physical challenge. Of course, I'd seen her do it many times, but she still needed to prove it to herself. So we went straight to the passage and played that shift 10 times in a row, correctly.

"Now I want you to play the whole phrase, and when you get to the harmonic, think, 'This is the harmonic that I always play right!'"

She did. And then again, "This time, think, 'This is that cool harmonic that I love to play.'"

And again, "'This is the easy part that I play so well.'"

We went through about seven different scenarios.

"So don't let your mind wander," I told her. "Find every passage that is stressing you out, make sure you can play it, then come up with a positive way to think about how well you will play it. And really exaggerate!"

She came to another place where a finger went out of place, "I always play that wrong!" she said reflexively.

I laughed. "How about, 'I always play that right?' Fix it, and fix your head!"

You can actually practice moments of relaxation and confidence into your performance, but it really does take practice and repetition. I've experienced it myself, as well. For example, I was practicing a certain passage in the first movement of the Tchaik. It was just so hard! "This is why Auer said it was impossible, it IS!" I thought. Then I noticed that while practicing it, that even in my practice room, with no judgmental teacher, no audience, no Grizzly bear chasing me, I still froze in fear, every time I came to the passage. I had this revelation, "I don't have to feel this way." So I practiced thinking to myself, "This is the place where I relax my muscles, like a wet noodle." I thought of warm beaches. I exaggerated playing it in the most lazy and relaxed way to play, while still hitting notes. Who cared if I missed a few during this process? Then I just tried to keep that feeling of being relaxed, and as we know, the fingers work much more quickly and accurately when relaxed. The passage went a lot better, without the fear. I still get to that passage and feel relaxed!

You may think that you are fine in the practice room, but then it's just on stage when it goes really, really wrong. Or, you are fine in the practice room, but it's just at your lesson that it goes really, really wrong. But have you focused on your internal dialogue? Are you truly fixing the problem? And when you have fixed the problem, are you buying into your own ability to play it correctly and to produce something beautiful and musical? Focus a little more on this, and see if it helps!

4 replies

Broken Bridge

May 10, 2012 10:21

My fellow Suzuki teachers and I were tuning violins as dozens of students and parents buzzed around before the big spring recital, when a piercing, wooden "CRACK" startled everyone in the room.

Parents froze in alarm; teachers raised eyebrows knowingly. Only one thing makes that kind of noise: a bridge. A bridge collapse sounds like the end of the world, but usually a teacher can make it right. Unless, of course, the bridge looks like this:

Broken bridge

And indeed, it looked just like that. A helpful student ran to me and handed me the two pieces. Looking on, another parent suggested, "Maybe we could kind of stack them, and the strings would hold it all in place?"

"I'm afraid this bridge is done being a bridge," I said, shaking my head.

Meanwhile, the student with the injured violin was huddled in a pew with his parents. He was one of our youngest, about seven years old, dressed in his crisp white shirt and black pants for the concert. He was crying inconsolably over his quarter-sized violin while his parents tried to make it all okay. In his pre-concert exuberance, he'd fallen on his fiddle, and there was no going back.

The buzz had returned, and the show would go on. It was to start in about five minutes.

I sat next to the unhappy boy.

"I have to tell you something that happened to me when I was about your age," I said.

He looked up.

"Right before a concert, I tripped over my bow. It snapped completely in half," I said. "I couldn't use it in the concert."

"Did you get it fixed?" he asked.

"It was ruined, for good," I said. "So I kind of understand how you are feeling."

He nodded.

"Maybe we can find you a violin to borrow for part of the concert," I said.

A member of the family sitting behind us tapped me on the shoulder.

"Does he need to borrow a violin?" she asked. "Our boy isn't playing in all the pieces; he could use his violin."

"Really?" I said, looking at the boy in the other family, who was five years old and about the same size. This was to be his first concert. "Would that be okay with you?"

He looked at his mom and nodded.

"Well, that would be a very nice thing for you to do, to lend him your violin," I said. "You'd be kind of a hero."

So the two boys shared one violin for the concert. There was actually quite a bit of switching, as one was a "Pre-Twinkler" and another in "Early Book 1," and we'd mixed up the songs. The Pre-Twinklers went first, then the fiddle was exchanged, and at the very end, they changed back for "Twinkle."

Maybe a bridge built between two little boys is worth the price of a broken one!

5 replies

Interview with Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg: 'On Our Way'

May 8, 2012 10:00

"I believe so much in the moment … anything can happen, anything should happen!" Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg said about the magic of live music.

It's just one of the many Nadja-isms (*great Nadja quotes) on the new DVD, On Our Way, which celebrates her four-year partnership with the San Francisco-based New Century Chamber Orchestra, were she has served as director since 2008. (The name is perhaps a take on Nadja's 1989 autobiography, On My Way).

The group performs with no conductor: Nadja leads from the concertmaster chair, or as soloist. Otherwise the group looks to each other, relying on a heightened musical sensitivity and spirit of teamwork. One can sense the group's high energy, with Nadja as lightning rod, in the full performances shown on the DVD: Hugo Wolf's "Italian Serenade"; Astor Piazzolla's "Four Seasons of Buenos Aires"; Pyotr Tchaikovsky's "Serenade for Strings" and more. It also includes interviews with Nadja and other members of the orchestra.

Nadja spoke to me by phone last week from Portland, where she had just performed the Piazzolla with the Oregon Symphony. She was on her way to San Francisco, to rehearse with New Century for four performances this weekend of a world-premiere piece by Ellen Zwilich. We spoke about Nadja's efforts to expand the string orchestra repertoire, about how 19 people work as a team, and about the joy of live performance:

Photo by Christian Steiner

Laurie: I've been enjoying 'On Our Way,' and I see that New Century has concerts (this weekend).

Nadja: This is the final set of New Century's 20th anniversary season, and that's why I wanted to release the DVD, as something special for this year.

Laurie: There were a few things you said on the DVD, that I just loved. Here's one: "We play repertoire we have no business playing." What did you mean by that?

Nadja: Basically, the string orchestra repertoire is very small. In the standard string orchestra repertoire, there are maybe 12 or 15 really good pieces. Not much. After that, you have to dive into the quartet repertoire or the chamber music repertoire. What I meant by that statement is that we've made arrangements of pieces that a string orchestra really shouldn't be playing.

For example, (Hugo) Wolf's 'Italian Serenade,' on that DVD, that is not a piece for 19 people. (The Wolf) was written for a quartet, and it's hard enough for a quartet. With such a difficult piece, it's more than challenging to get 19 people to play and make it sound like a quartet. We also went on tour this year with Mendelssohn Octet (written for eight people). These kinds of pieces are written, in a way, as solo pieces. To have an orchestra play a solo piece is challenging.

Also, some of the arrangements I have commissioned were for pieces meant for a large orchestra. For example, on our second season we played 'Pictures at an Exhibition.' When you hear the title 'Pictures at an Exhibition,' you immediately think: enormous orchestra! Yet, this particular arrangement by Clarice Assad was just so brilliant. It was for string orchestra, percussion and piano; and you actually heard instruments that you didn't see on stage. It was just one of those strokes of genius.

So we play repertoire that is not written for 19 people. I don't want the orchestra to be relegated to certain repertoire or go into a niche. We can play anything and everything, and so that's I want us to do.

Laurie: I understand that you and the New Century will perform a world premiere piece this weekend in San Francisco. Tell me all about it.

Nadja: That is part of our featured composer program for this season, which is something I started when I came on, four years ago. Because our season is short, with four or five concert sets in a season, I thought that instead of having a composer-in-residence, having a featured composer would be more apt. We would play at least one existing work by that composer to introduce that composer to the audience; then of course, we would commission that composer to write something specifically for us. We've always premiered that piece at the end of the season; it's exciting to end the season with a world premiere, and also, it gives the composer some more time to write and prepare it.

We give them the option of writing anything they want, even if they want other instruments -- winds and anything like that. They mostly have elected to write violin concertos for me. I begged last year's composer, Mark O'Connor, not to write me a violin concerto. So he wrote something specifically for the orchestra.

These pieces are just fantastic, and this one in particular. It's more than just a violin concerto, it's a performance piece.

Laurie: Fun!

Nadja: (Ellen Zwilich) always wanted to write for me, and I'm a certain kind of player. So she really went to town with that! She wrote a piece, 'Commedia dell Arte' -- it's based on the Renaissance art form of Italian theater. It all these theatrical characters: like Harlequin, or "Arlecchino"; and Colombina and Il Capitano. It's a theatre piece, and so these characters each have instruments associated with them. Columbina, she's always with a tambourine; the Capitan always has his drum; and Harlequin has this flapstick thing. So I have to pick players to play these instruments. I'm very appreciative to Ellen for writing not only a violin concerto, but writing something specifically for me and for the orchestra; it's fantastic piece for us. She's heard us play, and she knew what we can do. So she really went to town with this one. It's going to be an amazing premiere. We'll have a challenge on our hands, but we're good with that.

Laurie: Did the orchestra used to do this featured composer kind of thing before you came? Why do you feel it's important?

Nadja: No, I brought that on, for two reasons. One, I wanted to mix up the featured composer element: to feature the young, up-and-coming composers as well as extremely established composers. For example, Clarice Assad was our first featured composer. She's this young phenom. We've also had two Pulitzer prize-winning composers. I also wanted different styles: for example, Mark O'Connor is not strictly a classical composer. We've also had Bill Bolcom, and it's just terrific to have the palette of that.

Also, like we discussed before, the string orchestra repertoire is small. By commissioning these compositions, we add to that repertoire, which is helpful to all string orchestras. Believe me, if you are a member of a string orchestra, you're always looking for new rep. Now we create a new piece every year for that (kind of) ensemble.

Laurie: You talk a lot in 'On Our Way' about the members of the New Century Chamber Orchestra making decisions together and the trust that you've built. It seems like sometimes that can be a precarious kind of tightrope walk. How do you continue to build on that openness and trust, yet avoid it going in the direction of ...

Nadja: …anarchy! (she laughs) Well, there's a time and a place for everything. There'll be moments in rehearsals where everybody, and I mean everybody, is talking. That's when I have to take on the role as boss for a moment and say, 'Okay, everybody shut up. We're going to do it my way.' Or, 'We'll do this, let's try that, and mix in with this and this and that.'

It's very personal. I remember very clearly, when I first took this job, I didn't know what to expect. I asked every music director, nearly every conductor that I've ever worked with, to give me their best advice. It was a lot of people, and very varied kinds of people. The one piece of advice that was absolutely uniform -- that every one of them told me -- was: 'Don't get friendly with the orchestra, don't get friendly with your players. It's trouble.'

It's the one piece of advice I ignored.

In any situation, even as a soloist, it's important for me to get along with the people I'm working with and to have a positive experience. It's more than just, 'Let's put this piece together and perform it.' Also, there are only 19 of us, so it's intimate, in that sense. New Century has always been a democratic group in their decision-making process, and I did not want to interfere with that. So little by little, we all -- yes -- became friends, and we're all very much a family.

With that, comes a feeling of power, and of relaxing. There's an intimate feeling when we go into rehearsals. Everybody speaks, everyone has opinions. That's how we put the pieces together: there will be a problem, then somebody will make a suggestion that solves that problem. Then the solution causes another problem for somebody else, but then we fix that. It goes on like that. But at the end of the day, we put all the music together, the extraordinary variety of music. And when it's time for the concert, everybody brings everything up a notch. It's yet to fail. Every single time we has a concert, it's like we go into H-D. It's extremely gratifying, and the democracy works.

Laurie: How do you keep one person from dominating, and how do you keep people from getting offended?

Nadja: It's like anything, you get to know the person, you get to know how they speak. For example, they're used to me. I will just start cursing about something and speak very fast because that's me, that's who I am. I'm from New York and that's my way of speaking. Somebody else will be very quiet, and everybody has to kind of really shut up to hear what so-and-so has to say because that's how they speak. We know each other. In the process of rehearsals it can get quite tense and insulting, but we know that, and we fix that. There's always somebody there to bring it down -- mostly it's me; that's my job. We never go to sleep angry. We get very heated, but we all have the same goal in mind, so that makes it work.

Laurie: It sounds like it's probably useful to be frank.

Nadja: It is, but it depends on the mood that day. Let's say I'm rehearsing something, and a particular section sounds very bad. Depending on how the mood of that rehearsal's going, I could say, 'You guys, this is really ca-ca. No good.' But if there's a little tension going on to begin with, then that's not how I would speak to them. It's all very dependent on what's happening in the rehearsal at that moment. But no matter what route anybody takes, we always come through beautifully at the end. There is the respect there, always.

Laurie: When you are leading from the concertmaster chair, or even as the soloist, what are some of the most effective ways that you can communicate, and what are some of the things you've found that don't work?

Nadja: In these four years, I've found that I'm kind of a natural leader. It's funny, just a few weeks ago I (led from the concertmaster chair) with an orchestra other than mine, for the first time. I had been offered to do this for a few years, and I never did it because I felt like I was cheating on my orchestra. But finally I did it; I was curious to see, is this even possible, with another group? It was a phenomenal experience, very powerful. This was an orchestra that's not used to not having a conductor.

Laurie: They must have had to make some adjustments, if they were used to having a conductor.

Nadja: They were fantastic musicians. But if you're used to sitting back and looking at the guy up there beating time for you, it's huge, when all of a sudden you have to go into a completely different mode of total concentration and responsibility for your part. It almost erases 20 years of sitting in the back of the section. It's demanded that you play better and that you bring your full game to the table. That was very satisfying, to see that happen, and also just to tell them, 'I cannot cue every single entrance, do you understand? I cannot. I'm playing the first violin part. You're going to count!' (she laughs).

Laurie: I loved this quote, that 'Anything can happen in the moment, and anything should happen in the moment.'

Nadja: That's how I've always felt about music, an overall credo. Live music is not a recording. Every single time a musician begins to play music, it can be magical. It doesn't have to be: 'We rehearsed it this way, this is how we're going to play it.' You have that foundation of, 'This is what we decided, and this is how it works,' But once you have that foundation and you feel a solidity with that, then comes the inspiration of a live performance. That's where I come in as a good leader: I believe in it, and I'm capable of doing it.

Many musicians cannot do it or choose not to, and it doesn't make any sense to me. It's an art form, and it's ever-changing. There's no reason to play a passage the same way every time you play it. The passage itself, the piece itself, has so much possibility and so much life. I love exploring that. In a concert situation, I may feel that I want to go further than what we rehearsed. My orchestra is so attuned to me -- they just know, oh boy, here she goes. They can see it in my eyes: let's go. That's what I meant (in the DVD) when I said that they'll just follow me off a cliff. It's terrific fun that way!

3 replies

Eastman Violin Professor Zvi Zeitlin (1922-2012)

May 3, 2012 12:40

Longtime Eastman School of Music violin professor Zvi Zeitlin died yesterday at the age of 90. He taught at Eastman for 45 years, and his students have gone on to careers as concertmasters, professors, competition winners, orchestra players and recitalists all over the world.

Zeitlin joined the Eastman faculty in 1967 and was founding member of the Eastman Trio.

"Mr. Zeitlin was very clear in his teaching, giving the bare bones of the technique to the students, making it much easier for them to execute their notes and musical ideas," said violinist Brian Hong, who vividly described his lessons with Zeitlin from the summer 2009 in this blog. He said he was a demanding teacher who "was also very persistent about not using the terms, 'up' and 'down' bow, but rather using the French terms, 'push' and 'pull', respectively, to help with my mental image of tone."

Zeitlin was known for his passionate intensity; students have said that he could get pretty worked up at a lesson.

"Mr. Zeitlin is a knowledgeable, tactful, and effective teacher," Hong said. "Even though he can be a bit sharp and gruff, he is a very caring person and only becomes more intense because he cares about each and every student he works with and wants them to reach their full potential. He was such an incredible, generous human being; what struck me at first when I met him was the fact that he would practice for 3-4 hours every morning, no matter what. Simply amazing."

Indeed, Zeitlin continued to teach, and to play the violin, until the end of his life; here he is, at age 88, performing the Mozart "Rondo" K. 373 with pianist Barry Snyder.

Violinist.com member George Philips said that "I have the utmost respect for his students. He makes them do so much more than just play their parts. For example, he'll make them read Brahms' letters if doing Brahms, write out the piano parts, study the culture of the time, etc. It's a process that seems to be slowly dying nowadays."

He also engaged in that old-fashioned (but wonderful) practice of playing a bit of the orchestra part along with a student, as you can see, in this video of a masterclass with Zeitlin.

A native of Belarus, Zeitlin grew up in Israel and attended Hebrew University. He came to Juilliard at age 11 as the institution's youngest-ever scholarship student. He studied violin Sascha Jacobsen, Louis Persinger, and Ivan Galamian.

Zeitlin was known for championing Arnold Schoenberg's Violin Concerto, which Zeitlin premiered in 1964 in Buenos Aires. He recorded the work in 1971 with Rafael Kubelik and the Bavarian State Orchestra for Deutsche Grammophon, and that recording was reissued in 2004. He was also the dedicatee of Gunther Schuller’s first Violin Concerto, which was commissioned by Eastman as part of Zeitlin’s appointment as Kilbourn Professor in 1976.

14 replies

Queen Elisabeth Competition 2012: Round 1 Performances

May 1, 2012 12:51

This is from the first round of the Queen Elisabeth Competition, which began today in Belgium:

Here is the link for the podcast of all performances from the first round:
http://www.rtbf.be/musiq3/podcast

8 replies

Joshua Bell on Dancing with the Stars

May 1, 2012 08:50

This morning I read our friend Norman Lebrecht's blog, Joshua Bell played last night on Dancing with the Stars. Why?

Dear Norman, why must there be a why?

I'm just not going to turn my nose up at it. For those of you who missed it (we'll see how long this stays up!):

How fun is that? It looks like a lark to me, and a pretty painless way for a person to make his next Strad payment. I think I even spy a few of my LA friends, being employed to play live music in the orchestra. A full-voice "Hooooraay!" for that!

I even kind of dig the people dancing around in period costumes. Why do we spend a cazillion hours in the practice room learning to play the fiddle, if we can't have a little fun now and then?

16 replies

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