I took down my last post, on violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, because I ended up using some of it for my review on the Strings Magazine website:
http://smtemp.mugo.ca/Reviews/Performances/The-Crazy-Genius-of-Violinist-Patricia-Kopatchinskaja
(The title is my editor's, not mine!)
I wanted to pick up though on another strand of thought that emerged from my reviewing this performance, which was, after all, only part of an entire musical evening devoted to celebrating the incredible talent of Fazil Say.
A Turkish musician. In Berlin. An audience dominated by the bourgeois crème of the Berlin Turkish population. Not your usual Philharmonie crowd, nor the folks you see ambling down Kottbusser Damm.
So my thoughts are already turning idly to what it must mean for a musician like Say to be playing in Berlin for this audience (before PatKop comes out and, like, alters my violin-reality).
It’s not until Say, Kopatchinskaja, and percussionist Burhan Öçal play Mozart’s Rondo alla Turca -- in a wacky, jazzy arrangement (by Say) -- that it hits me: they are reappropriating Hapsburg “Turca” as modern-day “Turkei” for the hip Berliner.
Say, speaking in heavily accented German, poked gentle fun at Öçal, an actor from Turkey famous for playing gangsters in mafia movies (that figures, with his dark looks) as introductory banter before they went on to play a funked up improvisation on Turkish folk music in 10/8 meter that would probably have let those Silk Road Project guys drooling.
Now, I’m no identity-politics-musicologist, and even if were, I’d probably still struggle to form a coherent sentence out of the following keywords: postmodern Mozart -- Turkey – Globalization – Musical Identity – Islam -- Post-Race-World.
I mean, here’s a guy who has reclaimed Scheherazade with his “1,001 Nights in the Harem” Violin Concerto: turning the exoticization element of Orientalism on its head.
This point will probably be lost on Americans who may not know that “Orientalisch” in Berlin can describe anything from chow mein to bellydance.
What’s most admirable about Say though is that he is only unwittingly contributing to the “music & politics” debate. His relaxed demeanor and humor said it all: after a program of seriously wacky music, he introduced the encore as “ein ganz normales stück … von Beethoven” [“a totally normal piece… by Beethoven”], then proceeded to play Für Elise. For a few measures, that is, before Kopatchinskaja, and Öçal joined in and all hell broke loose.
The Joseph Joachim Quartet, founded by the great Geiger himself, is still going strong. In its latest incarnation its members are all faculty at the Universität der Künste in Berlin: violinists Viviane Hagner and Latica Honda-Rosenberg, violist Hartmut Rohde, and cellist Jens Peter Maintz. On May 29 at the UdK Joseph-Joachim-Konzertsaal they presented an ingenious program of 2+4 : 2+4 (Mozart + Ravel) – by which I mean they played a Mozart Quartet (the incredible late quartet in B flat, K.589) and the formidable Ravel Violin-Cello Duo in the first half, and the gorgeous Mozart Violin-Viola Duo in B-flat and Ravel's unique Quartet in the second. Symmetrical programming. Equal division of labor. Genius.
All four members are extremely accomplished players. They gave polished performances with plenty of style and natural, unforced musicality -- an absolute pleasure to listen to. The second and fourth movements of the Ravel quartet were taken at hair-raising speed but without necessitating technical compromises. These four play well together, and it was hardly believable that it was their first performance as a quartet. That said, I was not the only person in the audience who noticed that amidst excellence, there was one star who really shone: the cellist. I first saw Mainz as a chamber musician partnering with Janine Jansen at the Kammermusiksaal. She is a top-level soloist and he entirely held his own in such august company. I’m excited to see the current configuration of the Joachim Quartet again – maybe they will even play music by Brahms, Joachim’s erstwhile "BFF."
Rudolf Ernst Pliverics (1878-1964) was a Berlin violin maker and the co-author, with Albert Fuchs, of Taxe Der Streichinstrumente (Musikverlag F. Hofmeister, 1978).
George Schlieps (1894-1977) was a Russian-born German violin maker (he was the nephew of Alexander Glazunov) who worked in Helsinki, Stockholm, Estonia, Berlin, and England before immigrating to New York City in 1950. He and his son Armin worked for Rembert Wurlitzer and then opened their own shop. Armin Schlieps (1931-2005) was a bow maker who subsequently moved to Seattle and ran his own shop there.
The 1703 Strad now held at the Berlin Music Instrument Museum (Catalogue Number 4467) came into George Schlieps’s hands during WW2 according to Pliverics. He noted also that it had undergone multiple repairs and that the top had been replaced.
Schlieps lived in Berlin from 1944 till 1947 repairing violins. Who gave him the Strad? Where did it come from?
Museum records show only that the violin entered its collection in Charlottenburg, a predecessor of the present building next to the Philharmonie, on October 9, 1956. By then Schlieps was settled in New York.
Between 1947 and 1956 the violin was supposedly played by members of the Berlin Philharmonie, but we don't know who.
It was lovingly restored by Olga Adelmann (1913-2000) and subjected to a number of authentication tests. Dr. Annette Otterstedt, the musicologist who worked closely with Adelmann, provided me with all the known documentation concerning the violin. An expert on the Alemannic School [Die Alemannische Schule] of violin making (as well as being a keen gamba player), Otterstedt contends that the Cremona School was an aberration, not the Ur-School, of violin making—and that German craftsmanship was in fact much more prevalent and influential than has ever been acknowledged before by violin historians.
Otterstedt, who trained with the late Carl Dahlhaus, embodies an enviable synthesis of musicology and organology that is inspiring to me personally. Her research into, and championing of, Alemannic instruments is valuable on its own merits but also for deemphasizing and defetishizing Cremona instruments.
A Berlin Geigenbauer told me recently that he gets at least a few calls every week from strangers who have supposedly found long-lost Strads in their attics. He is good-natured but gets annoyed by all this.
The genius mythology surrounding Stradivari is a Romantic invention—he wasn’t “Beethovenified” until Fétis’s hagiographical biography came out in 1856—and it’s important to recognize that this inflated view of the man originated in a later era.
Even as we strive to cultivate historiographical awareness, though, we are faced with this tangible object, an instrument from early in his “Golden Period,” which poses real questions for us.
Alex Ross has recently published a series of beautiful essays and blog posts demystifying Wagner the gargantuan cultural icon by focusing on a few bars from Die Walküre, Act III. By keeping it real, and focussed, he arrives at a new understanding of Wagner’s greatness, stripped of heavy baggage. Piecing together the story of this little violin might just do the same for Stradivari… if only there were more pieces to work with!
