Viola players are the Kerrymen of the musical world, so much so that there's even a website devoted to viola jokes. "How do you tell when a viola-player is playing out of tune? The bow is moving. What's the difference between a viola section and a pot of yoghurt? There's more culture in the yoghurt. What do a viola and a lawsuit have in common? Everyone is happy when the case is closed."
The viola and viola players (often derided as "failed violinists") may be the butt of sharp humour in the musical world, but you'd never have guessed this at the summer course of the Accademia Chigiana in Siena in the mid-1970s. I was there as a pianist on the chamber music course. But it wasn't at the chamber music classes that I spent most of my time, nor was it in the piano room, where the Guido Agosti, a revered pupil of the great Busoni, was at work. No, I gravitated, like a lot of others (violinists included) towards the viola classes. Here, the atmosphere was different, warmer, less formal, and much more illuminating. On a typical day, not only would any available chairs be taken, but the walls would be lined with two rows of young musicians, one standing, backs to the wall, the other sitting at their feet. The pianist, Giorgio (I've forgotten his surname), was as often looking at the girls as at the music, but he rarely skipped a note or missed a cue. And presiding over the proceedings with benign firmness and probing insight was Bruno Giuranna, as inspirational a teacher as it has ever been my privilege to see at work.
I remember in particular how he struggled over a German student, whose dryly note-perfect playing of a solo piece by Hindemith he was trying to improve. Giuranna's every suggestion, every query were absorbed with ease by the talented student, and yet the dryness, the unlistenability of her playing remained constant. But he wouldn't give up. He eventually struck off in an unexpected direction. "Do you like this piece?" he asked. "Yes." "I mean, do you really like this piece?" "Yes." "But do you reeeeally like it?" Long pause. "Well . . . " Having got this admission, he picked up his own instrument and played the music with the most extraordinary, exaggerated seductiveness, highlighting its every attraction, sometimes with distortions that would have no place on the concert platform. The room filled with mirth at his cleverness, the student's face lit up with understanding. And she never played the Hindemith the same way again.
Giuranna's role in Ireland, these days, is not that of a teacher, and not even primarily that of a viola-player, but rather that of a conductor. His forthcoming ICO programme of Boccherini, Ghed-ini and Schubert was, he says, reached by a process of negotiation. Naturally enough, he points out, there is a tendency to ask him to play as well as conduct, and, as he had already played what he regards as the most immediately suitable works for viola and chamber orchestra with the ICO (Britten's Lachrymae and the Hoffmeister Concerto), he suggested the Musica da concerto by Giorgio Federico Ghedini (1892-1965), a composer now neglected in his native land and scarcely ever represented in Irish concert programmes.
It was in this concerto that he made his debut as a soloist, premiering it in Rome in the early 1950s, with Karajan conducting the Radio Symphony Orchestra. "Ghedini wrote it for me, showing me some parts while he was writing, asking me to play them, to see how they would sound. I cannot have a clear judgement about this piece. It is like having to judge somebody in my family, it's difficult, it's part of myself. I think it is a very good piece. The viola is treated very well." Ghedini, he says, shows himself in some pieces "a great composer". "There's a piece by him called Architetture, and Italian Radio has a fantastic performance of that by Sergiu Celibidache, really showing what a masterpiece it is." Sadly, he says, Ghedini has been following the fate of most composers in Italy, "as soon as they are dead, they are forgotten".
Looking for a short symphony to start, and remembering how Ghedini connected with the Italian composers of the 18th century, he felt that a symphony by Boccherini would make "a very fresh opening piece". And, at the end, there's Mahler's transcription for string orchestra of Schubert's Death and the Maiden Quartet.
Giuranna used to think that Mahler carried out this exercise, "just to have his orchestra practise, and be challenged with this difficult piece. I always thought he did it with a pedagogical goal. Now that is true, but there is another aspect, which I have seen anytime I have performed the piece - all the players in the orchestra are so happy to play it. Because, if you play a second violin or a viola part in that quartet, you play a fantastic part. You don't just play some accompaniment. And it is a very good school, I must say, for bringing consciousness to all the smallest nuances of interpretation."
Before his fame spread as a soloist and later as a conductor, Giuranna was best-known as a chamber music player. He played in a piano quartet, the Quartetto di Roma, and in the Italian String Trio, with whom, in the 1960s, he recorded the complete string trios of Beethoven for Deutsche Grammophon. Twenty years on, he worked on the same repertoire for DG a second time, now in the stellar company of Anne-Sophie Mutter and Mstislav Rostropovich. It's easy to imagine how such an undertaking might turn into a battle of egos - the famous "million-dollar" trio of Heifetz, Piatigorsky and Rubinstein is said to have fallen out over who got top billing - but Giuranna reports exactly the opposite in working with Mutter and Rostropovich. "It was very easy, extremely easy. Anne-Sophie is a fantastic musician and a fantastic colleague to work with. Her attitude is very positive, so there was never a problem of bowings - I'm easy, too, I'm not difficult. And Rostropovich, in chamber music, is one of the most modest players that I have ever met. I often speak about him, to show what is a typically good attitude of a musician: to be like a question mark. Is what I'm doing, for instance, in tune?
"Very often you have rehearsals of young people, where nobody dares to say, `that G sharp is a little bit too sharp', because they're afraid of insulting the friend or the colleague. And with Slava - as Rostropovich is known to his friends - I learned that it has to be the opposite. We all know by experience that it's much easier to hear something wrong from outside than from inside while doing it. And he was a total exemplification of this attitude. For the rest, the rehearsals were like . . . feasts . . . like parties, no, like feasts."
Giuranna's experience with Rostropovich matches what can be heard in recordings, in the way Rostropovich accommodates to the very different personalities of the conductors he has worked with. This also tallies with the view that in rehearsal, if you tell good musicians about their mistakes they'll be grateful, but bad musicians will be annoyed.
As with Mutter and Rostropovich, the experience with Karajan was also entirely positive, "ideal, unbelievable". I asked, semi-seriously, if Karajan had his eyes open or closed (as was his wont in later years). "No. He was looking at the score. I must say, it was a different Karajan. He was a great musician. I was impressed, because, although he had a huge programme to conduct, he rehearsed this piece at least five half-rehearsals. Imagine that. It was not the attitude you might have expected, somebody doing one half-rehearsal for this `accompanying' piece. It was very, very special. "At the time he was guest conducting a lot and he often came to Italy. I heard him on many, many occasions with different Italian orchestras. That was still the time before he became the Karajan that we all know now, which is a pity, because, he was much better then, from my point of view, than the kind of industrialist of music, the big manager of records, production and so on, that he became."
Giuranna sounds excited at the prospect of working in Ireland. "The Irish Chamber Orchestra is a fantastic small group. I told them, if I had had, when I started in Padova - where he conducted the Orchestra da Camera di Padova for 10 years - that level, I would have been the most happy man in the world. They are very good. They have a quality which is for me" - he reaches for an Italian word - "insuperabile, their musicality, this flexibility, this musicality, this continuous joy of making music. This is the greatest gift that anybody, conductor or performer, can really only appreciate and be grateful to life to find something like that."
Bruno Giuranna directs the ICO in Boc- cherini, Ghedini and Schubert in St Finbarre's Cathedral, Cork on Thursday, University Concert Hall, Limerick on Friday and at the Irish Museum of Modern Art on Sunday afternoon.
