Pieter Wispelwey's lifelong love of music old and new and an instrumental adaptibility will give Dublin audiences a treat this Friday, writes MICHAEL DERVAN
IT SOUNDS a bit strange. But, as Dutch cellist Pieter Wispelwey tells it, he decided the cello was for him at the age of two. And he was quite sure. “There was a lot of amateur string quartet playing at my parents’ house. I was mesmerised by the cello, and by music in general. I was allowed to sit in, because I sat still. I do remember just hours and hours of watching and listening.”
Of course, it was a couple of years before he was big enough to start learning his chosen instrument. The piano came first, and then there was a period when his head was turned by composing. “I composed a lot when I was eight or nine. It was all in minor keys, mostly C minor. And I was totally without talent. My last composition was a Piano Concerto in C minor when I was 12. That was it. I wasn’t really able to move out of C minor. I knew how to modulate on the piano, but I was never really adventurous as a composer.”
As a cellist, he’s quite the opposite. He’s an all-rounder, a musical omnivore. He plays old music and new music, and everything in between. He plays period-instrument cellos and ones got up in 21st century style, and he’s happy to play his early repertoire in either set-up, depending on the circumstances.
He grew up in a country with a glorious musical tradition (think of the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra), that’s long been a leader in the performance of early music, and which has a vibrant new music scene, so it all seemed perfectly natural to him.
He mentions with particular affection the opportunity to hear the pioneering counter tenor Alfred Deller and his Deller Consort (“a great experience, very intimate, he sucked you in, a spiritual experience”), and being a student in Amsterdam at the time when Frans Brüggen’s Orchestra of the 18th Century gave their first concert.
He explains the interest in performing the new as well as old in an unexpected way. “The popular instrument of the 1970s in Amsterdam was the recorder. They could only play early music or contemporary music. They played lots of avant garde stuff on their little recorders, and somehow they showed that there was a link between the two languages, in the field of gestures, or how phrases or intervals could be expressive, small things, details instead of the typical, long line of romantic music.”
He puts his instrumental adaptability down to the fact that he actually started playing on a cello with the gut strings that were the norm until 20th century taste brought a change to metal. “So, for me, it’s always a sort of a homecoming. I put gut strings on just the other day, because I’m recording with an Erard piano from the 1840s, Chopin and Mendelssohn. That feels like a homecoming. I know what to do with my bow, I know how to make a big sound even on the gut, when it’s necessary. I know where to find the colours. But, still, playing gut strings is more challenging than playing steel strings. Steel strings are easy. It’s like pushing a button. It’s too easy. Often when I have to teach students who’ve only played steel strings, there’s just a complete lack of bowing technique, of a real feel of what is possible with the bow. Gut strings teach you, because you get a horrible sound if you go astray.”
Wispelwey professes to have no theories about the always contentious issue of vibrato. “I hope it just comes naturally. Obviously, in late repertoire I use a lot more, and in Bach I hardly use it, and in Beethoven I like sparse vibrato.”
Dublin audiences will get to hear him in a late-night solo Bach performance as well as in the RTÉ NSO’s regular 8pm programme. He’s not just appearing as soloist with the orchestra (in both of Haydn’s cello concertos), he’s also directing the performances. It’s normal practice for him now, he says. “I’ve worked quite a lot with chamber orchestras, like the Australian Chamber Orchestra, which is a band that can play extremely vibrantly, and they’ll sound huge, because they’re used to big halls. But they play without a conductor. Most European chamber orchestras now try to do as much as they can without a conductor, just to create that feel of an ensemble playing and listening and being responsible for the artistic concept together.”
He enjoys “not having to ask a conductor if I can please talk to the orchestra”, and it’s crucial to have “a good rapport with the lead violin”. But what goes on that mightn’t happen if a conductor were involved? “A conductor is always responsible for a whole programme. So he has ‘the symphony’ after the interval to deal with. And of course you can rehearse short or long, but if you rehearse longer you can just zoom in.
“Rehearsal often goes like: you ask a group to change something, you try it once, and it’s already rare that you try something twice, and you say, ‘okay, let’s continue’. But that, often, is not enough, because it’s not in the system. And by the time the second performance is happening, they’ll return to old habits. It’s good to take time and talk about the essence of a stylistic approach, which is always in the bow, and getting rid of vibrato. Very often, I mean in Haydn, or in 19th century orchestral playing, there shouldn’t be vibrato. Even in Schumann or Brahms, it’s better without.”
What he’s looking for is “a greater awareness of how sparkling it can be. It’s not only melodies, but getting the voices in between alive. In Dublin they might just do it anyway, so we might just all go for a beer.”
Pieter Wispelwey plays Haydn with the RTÉ NSO at the NCH on Friday at 8pm, and Bach’s Cello Suite in D minor at 10pm, nch.ie
Listen
Selected recordings by Pieter Wispelwey:
Brahms: Cello Sonata (with Paul Komen, fortepiano). Channel Classics
Bach: Cello Suites. Channel Classics
Schubert: Duo in A; Arpeggione Sonata; Fantasy in C (with Paolo Giacometti, fortepinao). Onys
