Sprout of Inspiration

Last week in Germany, I played 3 Concertos of Mozart. My friend cellist Julius Berger is the music director of Eckelshausenmusiktage for 18 years. It is a festival of 10 convective days at the riverside of the beautiful Lahn, which is located 100 kilometers north of Frankfurt. You can listen to various performances in the forms of orchestra concerts, chamber music and solo recitals.

His "dream" of "listening to violin concertos of Mozart all the night" sounded interesting. I accepted to realize this "rare occasion".

I usually prepare concertos with a pianist before the concert, but for this Mozart in Germany, I suddenly asked my students to play the orchestra part. I always talk about Mozart to them and it was a good practice for them too. They know how suddenly I come up with ideas. The next day my students came. A student played the cello part of the concerto for the first time in her life, but fortunately she found it interesting.

"Playing solo and teaching" is the same as playing the chamber music.

They first played as the scores told them to do. Mozart's scores are not hard. None of super technics are there. The question is how to express something out of the scores. That's the tough part indeed.

Some people say "Children can play Mozart, but it gets more difficult after they grow up". It sounds profound, maybe they claim that too much thinking makes it bad. But I don't agree with this opinion. How can we express something without thinking? I only believe that Mozart should be played without too much decoration. It means you have to know exactly what he expresses on the notes!

It took me some courage, but I gave it a try as my everyday lesson.
Cantabile, Grazioso, Resoluto…. When I teach Mozart, and when I play his music, I talk in the language of Mozart which I learned from Mr. Sándor Végh in Salzburg. Actually I feel like everything about Mozart, I learned from him.

My students were quick to learn. Then the challenge was how they would express it with the sounds. Every sound has to shine like a pearl. Végh taught me that "contact" is important. It's about the relationship between the strings and the bow. The right hand fingers have to move flexibly like the left hand fingers. Each finger has each role to move the bow and control the tension. Végh often said "Mozart should be played like Opera". Originally, words are turned into music to be Opera. The key to success is turning music back to words. I think it's very important to capture emotions in theatre play and find truth in ordinary words in our life. All of these elements emerge in the chords or the accompaniment. The student playing the cello now understands the nuance of the chord. She made the chord subtly sad with a flat tone in the low scale.

Just after these instructions, it was my turn to play the "solo part".
It is a hard task too!

Tchaikovsky and Brahms don't hurt my hands even with their grand concertos. But every time I play Mozart, it hurts me somewhere in my hands. To make every single sound shine like a pearl is to continue endless operations which require delicate and rapid changes of the body and mind.

On the first day, my voice got hoarse by 1 hour of coaching. While I took a pause tired with my sore arms, my dear students were immersed in chatting. How hard it is to sprout young talents…. I didn't think it would be tough like this….

On the second day, a small hall in the school was at our disposal. Some students who missed the first day came, but a viola couldn't come so someone of my violin class played the viola reading alto clefs. I was relieved that they gradually, or finally, understood the laborious tasks of preparing Mozart…. What a difference from the day before! They even started practicing seriously during the pause after I said "We play through the whole concerto after the break".

I played Mozart Violin Concerto no.2 and no.5 together with my students. I had no choice other than playing and conducting with gestures. It's the spirit of chamber music; the most essential value is to play music together.

It was my first try in my 13 years of teaching career. But things went so smoothly that I wondered why I had not thought about doing this by now.

Firstly it was a tiny sprout of "why not try it?"
Then I grew it with most care.
It was crucial not to discourage it.
Then it started growing itself.
"The sprout" is a tip of the huge iceberg. All the DNA information is written already before the sprout hops up.

On the next week, I went to Germany and rehearsed with the orchestra which was of young students. I had seen on the document a profile photo of the conductor, but he was there only for instructing, not for conducting. Oh, my goodness! I didn't expect that.
Funny enough, this incredible coincidence surprised me rather than angered me!

Again, I was in the situation of nursing young talents to make their sprouts hop up. They were not my disciples. I had to convince them somehow….

After all, it was not a difficult operation.
We played together and we gradually succeeded in establishing our musical conversation. I only had to instruct which part and which part should be harmonized. The balance as a whole orchestra was fine-tuned by my husband Bart and the teacher in the audience seat.

2 times of rehearsal, 3 concertos of coaching and playing made my hands and arms so fatigued. In Japan, I would say "I can not even handle the chopsticks", but in Germany it was "I can not even handle the knife". To be prepared for the concert in the evening, I took a steak for lunch. Though the meat was not hard, but it was tough for me to cut it with the knife.

The concert went marvelous!

I have a confession to make. It is fearful to play in the center stage without the score. The real concert tends to reveal more details in difficult parts. Mozart provides us "pitfalls" at most unexpected places. It might have something to do with his originality and freshness, but Mozart makes me fear even with his typical, classical and well-known cord progression and melodies. I have been on stage more than 30 years, but still Mozart and Beethoven are the most dreadful composers to play by heart; incomparably fearful like looking into the hell.

At some point, I began to play rather individually in attempt to concentrate on my solo part, but I changed my mind. I had taught them how to play Mozart, I must play with them. The young concert master was doing his best, and so were the other students!

Mozart was born and lived in Austria and Germany. In his native country, we expressed our Mozart freely and the audience loved our music. I was feeling the same with Julius Berger who said "I want to listen to Mozart all the night".
I received a remark "I felt like the music is composed now in front of me".

"Instant Students Orchestra" in Brussels last week brought up the level of this concert.
The young musicians in Germany told me that they learned a lot from the experience.
Everything had started from that tiny sprout of inspiration, and I am glad that I had kept it alive!

June 2014