Cellists' challenge
The Press, New Zealand - 19 July 2006
Young cellists from around the world have gathered in Christchurch for the Adam International Cello Festival and Competition,
writes Christopher Moore.
A cello is a cello is a cello? The oversized violin playing the low bits? The subject of myth, legend and funny stories? The inconveniently large focus of endless media speculation? (Do cellists book an adjoining airline seat when they travel with their instrument?)
The cello attracts funny stories like moths to the flame – remember Victor Borge’s pithy comment about the difference between a viola and a cello?
“A cello takes longer to burn."
This week, New Zealand has the opportunity to discover the truth behind the legend. The 2006 Adam International Cello Festival is under way in Christchurch, with a record number of young cellists travelling from around the world to take part in the week-long programme of workshops, recitals and seminars.
They will compete for a $16,000 first prize, a recording contract with Naxos Records and a performance contract with the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra.
Each entrant will be heard by an international panel of judges, including the distinguished American cellist Leslie Parnas, and British cello commentator and stringed-instrument expert Simon Morris
.
Parnas began playing the cello at eight. When he was 14, he made his solo debut with the St Louis Symphony Orchestra, returning to St Louis in 1955 to become the orchestra’s principal cellist. He studied with Pablo Casals and Gregor Piatigorsky, winning the 1957 Munich and Geneva international cello competitions and the 1962 Tchaikovsky International Competition. His career as a cellist has seen him perform with many of the world’s leading orchestras and conductors, including Eugene Ormandy and Erich Leinsdorf. He is on the faculty of Boston University.Morris has been co-owner and director of one of Britain’s leading violin and cello experts, J. & A. Beare, since 1998. He appreciated the cello from both sides – as a musician he was acknowledged as one of Britain’s leading cellists. Today, he is a frequent speaker about cellos and cello playing and has emerged as a respected consultant on stringed instruments, working with musicians such as Mstislav Rostropovich. Both men agree that the Adam competition gives the world’s young musicians a further opportunity to be heard and learn on the highly competitive international circuit.
“Music is a very competitive field today,” says Parnas. “Competitions are one way to get recognition and access to new ideas and improved techniques. My old teacher, Piatigorsky, hates competitions, claiming that if you encourage one player, you discourage the others. But I believe that if you are strong enough, you will overcome all these problems.”
Younger players relish the opportunity to be heard and make contact with other cellists and play with an orchestra, Simon Morris suggests.
“They are also realistic enough to realise that, in a competition like this, only one person can win. They take the opportunity to listen to their peer group playing and learn from that. It’s an invaluable experience for young musicians to see exactly what they are up against rather than remaining in their own environment.”
As adjudicators, both Parnas and Morris know what they are listening for – “in one word, individuality,” says Parnas. “I don’t want to hear carbon copies. I want to hear a musician with something individual to say.”
Morris agrees.
“Where musicians often fall down when they perform in public is that they will learn and practise something to a very high level in the rehearsal room before transposing this lock, stock and barrel onto a concert platform without any sense of the place or occasion. They will play very well, but they simply do not draw the audience to them. There’s no emotional linkage – spontaneity, a sense of being of the moment,”
What attracted these two seasoned musicians to the cello?
“It was the instrument that my father put into my hands,” says Morris. “For a beginner, the cello is perhaps the least painful of musical instruments to begin with. Now I can work in this totally fascinating field of stringed instruments.”
Parnas believes that children should begin their musical studies with the piano.
“I started the cello after playing duets with my mother on the piano and playing the bass parts. My first cello was an aluminium instrument. It was a little tinny to play, but they were popular instruments for beginner in the United States. I took to it immediately.
“It’s an affinity with your instrument, the communication. You can identify with it. It becomes part of you,” Parnas says. “You can wrap yourself around a cello,” Morris adds. “You can’t do this with any other instrument in the same way. They either remain somewhat distant, or you have to be a contortionist. Somehow, the cello encourages a natural way of playing. The instrument’s size and shape resembles the human body while its timbre is like the human voice.”
This is an instrument capable of creating an entire range of sound from soprano to rich, throbbing lower registers. Not something to be glibly dismissed as just another stringed instrument.
“I once met the American comedian Red Skelton. I told him that my cello was made in 1698.” Parnas says.
“ ’Did you buy it new?’ ” he asked.
“Now there’s a legitimate comedian.”
