Young John Gielgud as Hamlet

 

Mahler

My Gustav Mahler, slightly reworked for an Instagram post...

Beethoven's Jacket

click me!

Re-worked an older Beethoven of mine. He needed some new clothes!

I was looking at children's books the other day and saw one where Beethoven was one of the characters. The artist nearly got his likeness n one of the drawings--but the others were a bit substandard, even given the possibility that this book was partially an attempt to humanize the composer, make him seem less intimidating.

There's one plate where "Beethoven" is standing on a podium in a concert hall, looking over his shoulder as if wondering where the restroom is, and you're kind of looking up at him. The composition and atmosphere and color work are wonderful, the musicians look great, the hall is beautiful...but Beethoven is fat and shiny, his cheeks ballooning and sagging at the same time, and his expression is utterly hapless. It's fine to use your uncle as a Beethoven reference, as long as he looks a little like Beethoven. And as the artist you can supply whatever's missing--cheekbones, in this case.

Yes, it is intimidating to draw composers, especially when you revere them. I felt that way doing Leonard Bernstein recently. I'm under no illusions that my Beethoven here is the definitive one. This is a caricature, after all. But he works for me. I never think of him as angry or crazy, or whatever the stereotypes are. Was he fat? I don't know, but that's something I might suggest more than emphasize in a drawing, because it's okay to idealize a larger-than-life personality like this. In one of his biographies I read a letter Beethoven sent to a little girl who asked his advice regarding her piano practice. I was completely won over by the tenderness of his response. Where do people get this idea he was a glowering grouch? So not the case.

If as an artist you're going to make Beethoven grotesque, fine—but it’s a cliche. I’ve seen some interesting odd caricatures of him, but the’re often uncharitable.  His art of course couldn’t be further from the grotesque. His resplendent works cover an incredible range, from his early Mozart-like piano concertos to his late quartets, which anticipated 20th-century music. He was a wide-ranging, rigorous and groundbreaking artist, not a chaotic one. The wild-eyed genius with unkempt hair whose mind became distorted with madness may or may not be an accurate image. It’s been done to death, but a bizarre or ugly artistic conception of Beethoven is still better than a bland one.

What bothered me most about the Beethoven character I saw in that children's book, is that he wasn't either ugly or idealized. He just looked like a life insurance salesman. Hey, nothing against life insurance salespeople. But you can't go mediocre with Beethoven. Make a choice, and make it a bold one!

Beethoven wasn't a Caspar Milquetoast, is what I'm getting at.

Leonard Bernstein

One of my Lennys. This was done recently on request. At the time I had no idea Bernstein's 100th was coming up. I figured it out in time to post the drawing to my other accounts on August 25th, but neglected to post it here...so here goes. I usually use a lot of color, but I felt the drawing was strong enough on its own. I think the black and white makes it look more vintagey as well. I love men in suits!

Will Work...

I updated one of my Marilyn drawings for this post.

Hey, if anyone is in the market for an illustrator, I would love to do some work for you. Email me at frostedcookies16 AT gmail dot com.

Guest Blogger: Cellist Kirill Timofeev, the Rastrelli Cello Quartet

http://www.rastrelli.de/en/

From left: Sergio Drabkin, Kira Kraftzoff, Kirill Timofeev and Mischa Degtjareff 

The members of the well-loved Rastrelli Cello Quartet have been traveling all over Europe and America this Spring with their "From Brahms to the Beatles" tour. Award-winning cellist Kirill Timofeev, born in St. Petersburg in 1978, has worked with a range of gifted artists, including Yuri Temirkanov.

 When we do recordings, our sound engineer Christopher Tarnow is like the fifth member of the group. In a session we play each piece all the way through, then we start working on it, trying to sound good together. It's all about playing together and expressing the same mood. Christopher's ears are very good, and he always understands when to stop us, and when to just let us play.

The sessions last a long time. It's hard not to fall asleep after five hours! It's even harder, maybe, to do the recording sessions than to do the performances! We usually have to do more than one take. A live recording is much better, because of the concert feeling and the drive. Our live recordings on YouTube are not as good as if we were recording the same pieces in the studio. It's another kind of job. We should think about the YouTube recordings and prepare them specially.

On this tour we're doing two programs: Brahms and Beatles, and James Bond 007, featuring a 12-minute medley of themes from the Bond movies. Tonight we'll play selections from Karl Davidoff's Beatles Songbook. I agree with Kira Kraftzoff that the Beatles were the first band to bring the whole world together. Without understanding a single word of the lyrics, you could hear their songs in Russia, in New Guinea, everywhere! My father had the Beatles' records and he played them a lot, so it became the music of my childhood as well. And I didn't understand a word! But that was not important, actually. I cared more about the music.

I really love the Beatles' songs. Each piece has a very special moment, if you're hearing it for the first time, when you're not sure where the music will lead you. They always choose another direction. They make a very simple thing very special. It's ingenious. Our arranger Sergio can touch this moment and exaggerate it sometimes. It would be better for you to hear it than for me to talk about it. It's something that distinguishes good music from pop music.

Funny enough, this is also true in the Brahms Hungarian Dances which we play tonight. Every piece is a simple dance, but they all have a special moment of genius. Therefore these pieces are still played, and they'll never become old. We've forgotten the bad music of Brahms' time. Nobody cares about it anymore! But really good stuff always stays alive. The similarities between Brahms and the Beatles occurred to me just this morning, and I think I should talk to my colleagues about it. Maybe we unconsciously chose to program them together.

In some of the Beatles' recordings that include strings, like Yesterday and Eleanor Rigby, the studio musicians didn't take what they were doing very seriously. I think those pieces have the potential to be done in many different and interesting ways. Very often Beatles' covers are quite boring, except for the one by The 12 Cellists of the Berlin Philharmonic. They did that recording in the 1970s, and it was revolutionary. No classical musicians had ever touched pop music before that. Now it's more common. The goal for us is to take each song and treat it like a jewel, like a classical piece.

Some people in our audience tonight will recognize their favorite Beatles' songs of course, and that's nice for them. But we're not necessarily trying to excite nostalgia or dreams of youth. We're playing this music for now, for the present. Tonight we're playing at Holy Names University, so we'll probably attract some younger people. It's one of our goals to show them that our music can be--I don't want to call it cool, but show that it's relevant to modern life, and that it's serious. Brahms' music is still modern, even though it was written 150 years ago. Maybe we'll attract some younger fans tonight! Four cellos are seldom heard together.

Funny enough, our youngest audiences are always in Russia. I don't really understand why. Maybe it's because the concerts start earlier, at seven. You invite your girlfriend to the classical concert and make a good impression, and later you can go to the disco! The whole situation is changing. It used to be classical musicians were thought of as snobby geniuses who didn't give interviews or talk to the audience. We don't feel that we're big stars, with our heads in the clouds. We love meeting the audience after the show! Staying at a hotel or eating in some restaurant, you don't have time to get in touch with people. After the concert it's really easy to start a conversation, and in America people are always ready to talk with us. It's great, I love it!

When I'm not on tour I live part of the time in Germany, and part of the time in St. Petersburg, where my wife lives. She's a doctor. It makes no sense for her to stay with me in Germany because I'm not at home much, I'm usually traveling. The quartet has a lot of gigs in Europe. But in Europe you can drive to them in a car!

I've been more or less on the road for the last six years. It's a great experience and a great chance to play for a lot of people and meet them. It's interesting to compare different countries. People who love culture are everywhere. They're the same, they understand each other, whether they're in Poland or Russia or Israel. They are much closer to one another than the politicians. I think things would be better if all the politicians would get together and sing some songs!

The world is very connected now. You can't just look at one country. We only know what we read, but politicians at the highest levels are discussing other things. They're global chess players. They can tell us about human rights, but they have their own agenda. To understand this situation I should at least study economics. I have no idea about economics! Nothing! I have no idea how it works! I can read various articles in German and in Russian, but why should I trust these people? Before giving an opinion about world events, the author should know their subject better than me.

I'm not here to give my opinion of things I know nothing about. My goal is to build bridges.

I want to thank our sound partner Christopher Tarnow, Jean Schreiber of Classics Alive Artists, and every presenter who invited us on this tour. These people really love the music. And thanks to the Meadowlark Music Festival in Lincoln, Nebraska. We have a lot of good friends there. And there are so many others.

2018-04-20	Chicago, IL USA	Northeastern Illinois University
2018-04-22	Abingdon, VA USA	Abingdon Church
2018-04-24	Willow Valley, PA USA	Willow Valley Community Center
2018-04-26	Memphis, TN USA	Concerts International
2018-04-27	Augusta, GA USA	Harry Jacobs Chamber Music Society
2018-04-28 7:30 PM	Sarasota FL USA	Artist Series Concerts of Sarasota
2018-04-29 3 PM	Sarasota FL USA	Artist Series Concerts of Sarasota
2018-05-04	Lauffen DE	Alte Kelter	From Brahms to Beatles
2018-05-13 17:00	Darmstadt DE	Centralstation	Von Brahms bis Beatles

My Portrait of Pianist Ivan Ilić

I had promised my friend, Serbian-American pianist Ivan Ilić, to do a portrait of him. Months became years. I was working on it -- I wanted it to be just right. I tried many versions, and nothing seemed good enough.

I chatted about it with Ivan around the time he was recording the piano music of Morton Feldman. While listening to those incredible sounds I was infused with a sense of the spare, chaste, penetrating and profound quality of Feldman's vision as interpreted by Ivan. I realized I had to take the same approach in this portrait, to strip away all the busyness, and just let Ivan's personality emerge. Easy, right? Not so much, but now I was on the right path.

He said he liked it. (Phew!)

Ivan's new CD is Reicha Rediscovered, from Chandos.

Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring, Riots, and Booing as a Permissible Response

Guest Blogger: Adam Stern, Conductor of the Seattle Philharmonic Orchestra
Sergei Rachmaninoff, Symphony No. 3 / Igor Stravinsky, The Rite of Spring

Benaroya Hall, Seattle on June 3, 2017 at 2pm 
http://seattlephil.org

Igor Stravinsky would have been thirty or thirty-one from the time that he conceived The Rite of Spring to the time he finished writing it.  It was the third of three ballets that he wrote for the Ballet Russe company under the artistic direction of Sergei Diaghilev. The first was The Firebird, which catapulted him from obscurity to instant fame, and this was followed by the very successful Petrouchka, which was in turn followed by The Rite of Spring, which caused the most famous opening night riot of any piece in classical music history.

The piece broke what people considered all of the extant rules--especially of what rhythm was, and of what a symphony orchestra could do. As some people observed, The Rite of Spring sometimes turns the entire orchestra into a vast percussion instrument. There's this one measure that the orchestra loves to play, where virtually everybody is just repeating the same note eleven times, but it's this massive discord: Wham, wham, wham, wham, wham! It's like the whole orchestra's a big drum, and it's tremendous fun!

But this constant rhythmic asymmetry, and what were perceived as these yawping dissonances, and the unique ways that he deployed the orchestra, coupled of course with the fact that the choreography was considered quite revolutionary--apparently, within a few minutes there were hisses and boos and laughter and catcalls, and it just continued to erupt. There were people in the audience who genuinely liked it. Maurice Ravel was there, trying to get people around him to shut the heck up because he really wanted to listen. He thought Stravinsky was a genius. So there certainly were points of view on both sides.

Stravinsky was enraged, of course, by the riot that accompanied The Rite of Spring. He said, "This was my musical child. I loved it. It had come so naturally to me. I didn't understand why everybody else didn't get it." He just got up out of his seat and said, "Go to hell!" to all the people around him, and stomped out of the the theatre.

I don't know that that kind of reaction is necessarily going to happen very often anymore, if at all. The whole face of classical music has changed. And now, if you'll forgive me for ascending my soapbox: over the last several decades, with the withdrawal of so many music programs from schools--I don't want to say that we've become an unmusical culture, but music does not come as naturally to us as it used to. And I may be be making a blanket statement here, but I think that today a lot of audiences for symphony concerts have this mindset of: Well, if the orchestra is playing it, it's got to be good, so if I don't like or get it, it's my fault.

When Gerard Schwarz was conductor of the Seattle Symphony, I went to every concert that he did. He did a very healthy amount of new music, of world and local premieres. And in all those years, I can remember only one concert where the piece got booed. One! Now, I don't think people should disrupt performances. I don't think it's proper to interrupt the concentration of those who might be enjoying it. But to not applaud or to boo, I think if you're not ostentatious about it, is a perfectly admissible reaction!

I myself once ferociously booed a concert in Los Angeles. The woman I was with, who had never seen that side of me before, was incredibly embarrassed! I shouldn't name names, but it was the Los Angeles Philharmonic under a very famous guest conductor whose work I didn't know, so I went in hoping that I would love it, expecting to love it. He ended the concert with one of my favorite pieces in the literature, Rachmaninov's Symphonic Dances, a piece I've known since I was a child. I know it fairly intimately; I know all of its ins and outs. This is one of those conductors--he's still with us--who essentially said, I don't care if Rachmaninov said, stay in tempo. I want to slow down here! I want to lean on this note! This performance is about me, and how I feel about the piece! And he just took that piece and stretched it, and mauled it, and did all sorts of what I thought were incredibly offensive things in the putative name of expression. I held on until the last bar, and then I let forth this "BOO!" My poor date said she wanted to move several rows away!

After I'd calmed down a little bit she said, "Look, I'm a novice. What was it that got you so upset? Because it sounded fine to me." I said, "Okay. Imagine, if you will, that Shakespeare is sacred to you. That every word he wrote is like a religion to you. It is understood that when an actor undertakes a part, of course he or she is going to bring to it their sensibility, their rhythm, their natural conception of speech based on how they interpret these lines. The director of course will have his or her input. But it's assumed that one person may go:

To be, or not to be. That is the question...

Or another may be more tense:

To be or not to be, that is the question!

Or another may be more languid:

To be...or not to be...that...is the question.

But these are all legitimate takes on these words. So I said to this woman, "Now imagine that you've come to a performance of this play that you love, and somebody goes:

TO BE! or...NOOOOOT...to be THAT! Is. The. QUES-TION?

That is what he just did to that piece."

And she said, "Okay, now I understand."

Regarding Stravinsky's initial efforts as a composer--and I felt a little guilty because I don't like dissing my hero--but when I wrote the program notes for this concert, I mentioned his Opus 1, the Symphony in E-flat Major.  I've played it for people who were very musically knowledgeable who were shocked to discover that it was Stravinsky! It sounds like Glazunov on a particularly boring day. It's this very dutiful, four-movement Russian romantic symphony that goes through all the right motions, and really doesn't do very much. I mean it's pretty. it's listenable. It wouldn't offend anybody.  But it's certainly not the striking Stravinsky that we know from when he hit his stride in The Firebird.

Guest blogger: Santí Duran

I met the artist Santiago Durán a few years ago, when I saw his work at the European cartoon art site, Toonpool.

Santí Durán, Artist

Reading comics and drawing them happened at the same time for me, ever since I can remember. I was an only child and had to distract myself with something. We had no TV, it was very expensive at that time. So I read all the comics I could get, buying them or borrowing them from friends.

When I was little I loved Disney, like everyone else, especially Donald Duck. I also read Western stories, humor and superheroes. Everything I devoured. I copied them in pencil, and then inked them with a toothpick dipped in ink!
When I was seven my family and I moved to France, where I discovered the wonderful world of Franco-Belgian comics and the authors who influenced me a lot: Tintin by Hergé, Spirou by Franklin, Asterix by Uderzo, Valerian by Mezieres, Blueberry by Giraud, and others. Five years later in the summer of 1968, when I was twelve, we returned to the village where our home was. The Catalans are very sentimental about the land.

My parents, like all parents, wanted me to be a lawyer, a nuclear physicist, or an interior minister, anything but an artist. As I had no enthusiasm for my studies and was a unique and spoiled son, I enrolled in a famous art school.
I had to learn about art history, art theory, perspective in art, deconstructing Picasso and his art, making art with mud, etc.  And comic art? The school principal asked me. What the hell was that? -- more or less affectionately. Fortunately a galactic conjunction would occur in my life, and I did not finish the studies of still lifes.

My parents opened a wine business in the village, and next to it there was a Cheers-type bar whose owner came to buy from our store. My father told him I wanted to be cartoonist. He said his son also drew, and he introduced me to him. So I met Gerardo Llobet, and as were the same age, we became friends right away.

Gerardo told me that some of the best cartoonists in Spain frequented his bar. By a strange coincidence they had come to our village and started a study group where they worked together, and they accepted him as an apprentice. One day he introduced me to them, and I showed them one of my drawings. They were very friendly and sociable and quickly accepted me. For a sixteen-year old boy, that was a revelation. Seeing famous artists at work was priceless. I would have paid for that, if I'd had the money.

After the Summer of Love in California and the revolution of May 1968 in France, it looked like the world was changing. In Spain we were at the end of the Franco dictatorship. Young people wanted to eat the world -- or at least a steak with mashed potatoes. And that was the atmosphere in that artists’ study group, and also in the village.

It was a school of comics, and a school of life – the Beatles, poker, girls, Cuba Libre cocktails, ping pong, Vivaldi, politics, football, sex, pop music, too much tobacco, cinema, classical music, pulp fiction, 2001: A Space Odyssey, humor, and good vibes. Ah! We also drew a little bit...

I decided to copy a lot, especially the American comic strip classics by authors such as Milton Caniff, Alex Raymond, Hal Foster, Joe Kubert, etc. We also had great artists in Spain, and I copied Victor de la Fuente and the girls of Pepe Gonzalez, the best Vampirella comic cartoonist. I also copied the works of French artist Jean Giraud, later called Moebius, whose drawings became known worldwide, influencing Japanese Manga and the style of American superheroes. His fame translsated to cinema, and influenced science fiction movies such as the classics Blade Runner, Alien, and others. Anyway, I and the other artists I knew were all huge fans of the geniuses of drawing.

The artists, writers, musicians, and others with bad reputations who influenced me -- the artists who lived in the village, as well as all the artists and friends who came to visit -- are very important to me. Carlos Gimenez, Adolfo Usero, Luis Garcia Mozos, Alfonso Font, the scenarist Manolo Medina, the writers Victor Mora and his wife Harmonia Rodriguez, and the best graphic humorist of Catalonia, El Perich. Also El Cubri, Canovas, Tunet Vila, Miquel Fuster, Joaquin Blazquez, Pepe Gonzalez, Ventura and Nieto, Rafael Losada, Ignacio Calvet, Enrique Ibañez, and many more...It would take a book to write the whole story of these people and what I learned from them. Special mention goes to the artist Fulgencio Cabrerizo, a great professional who for many years was my main mentor. He counseled me and was very patient with me.

At that time it was normal to experiment with new techniques to stain the drawings. We did scrapings with razor blades, and used sponges, charcoal, fingerprints, sand, and gray color washes like the old masters of classical painting. I greatly admired Luis García Mozos, who specialized in discovering new techniques. We all were influenced by the Italians: Hugo Pratt, Dino Battaglia, and Toppi, and by the great Argentine genius Alberto Breccia.

I admired artists who worked in color, including the Americans artists Norman Rockwell, Frank Frazetta, and Richard Corben, as well as the French Impressionists, and the great Spanish classical artist, Velazquez.

I never devoted myself to painting or to drawing portraits professionally. They were only ways of learning new techniques, and having fun in parallel to doing the comics.

I’ve worked with Gerardo Llobet many times. Usually he writes the stories, and I draw his ideas. As he is a great artist, too, his scripts were more like storyboards than texts. We created jokes and black-humor cartoons for the magazine El Papus, and cartoons in a sexy mood for the magazines El Cuervo, Harakiri, El Jueves and others. We also did drawings and paintings for Spanish television contests and advertisements. Gerardo is a total artist and with a great sense of humor.

I admire artists who have a good pulse. They can make a straight streak or perfect curve. I’m thinking of those who create ink drawings for Disney, outlining the cartoons. I was in an animation studio, and I lasted one week.  There are artists who draw directly into the computer with a stylus on a tablet. When I was in a digital art studio, I lasted one day. I also admire people who spend hours painting in front of a screen. What strong necks they must have, like a giraffe! I'm more nervous, more explosive when drawing and painting. I need to circle around the table. I like moving and splashing around when I draw, like Pollock!

Sometimes people have proposed that I have a one-man show in an art gallery in a village, or in a bookstore. But I do not consider my work important. I do not even consider myself an artist. At most, I’m a comic artisan. People with great talent are few, as in all the arts.

In addition I have almost no original material left. When I worked for them, the publishing houses kept the artists’ work, and the artists had no rights.

This is what I would tell an artist hoping to work in comics: First, study nuclear physics -- and at night, go to a school of comic art. Fortunately, now they exist.
Don’t stop drawing. Copy your favorite artists, and ask the advice of any professional who can help you. If you are young and adventurous and want to make a living, emigrate to the United States or Japan, where the world’s true comic markets are.

And if you’re shy and don’t want to leave the house, like most comic artists, buy some instruction books like the ones by American artist Andrew Loomis, and start learning about anatomy, figure drawing, color, etc. His books are classics, but very clear and didactic. They helped me a lot in the beginning.

It’s also important to expose yourself to culture as much as possible: read a lot, see classic movies, go to museums, listen to good music -- not the just the mainstream. Live life, and have experiences! Because you’ll be limited if you know how to draw, but you don’t have anything to say.

And above all: follow your instincts, and do what you want!


Artwork:

1 - My  village.

2 - Carnaval in the village.


3 - A page from one of the comic books I drew.


4 - The Wake, a collaboration with Gerardo Llobet.


5 -  Homage to my favorite guitar hero, done when I was 18 years old. Pen nib, footprints, blade stripes ...I experimented with black ink techniques as I listened to Jimi Hendrix' experiences with his guitar.


6 - A page from one of my comics.


7 - Cupido, a fun little angel who always got into trouble trying to hook people up.A project which failed, like so many, for lack of good managers.


8 - A collaboration with Gerardo Llobet.


9 - Vignette of one of the cartoons I drew for the German comics magazine Gespenster, specializing in Gothic horror for young people.


10 - Mobsters, a thickly atmospheric watercolor illustration with fun characters, done for my own pleasure.


11 -The Last Trip, a black-mood cartoon drawn by me and scripted by Gerardo Llobet for the famous magainze Papus. His critiques of the meaning of death and the absurdities of fashion, dessert, and space pollution, were very successful. 



Santí's entry in the Lambiek Comiclopedia: https://www.lambiek.net/artists/d/duran_santiago.htm

Gerardo's entry in the Lambiek Comiclopedia: https://www.lambiek.net/artists/l/llobet_gerardo.htm

It's Mozart Month

It's not Mozart's birthday until the 27th, but I wanted to give you this sneak preview of my latest Wolfie. I'm doing a collaborative art-and-music project with Seattle-area abstract artist Lisa Daniels, and Mozart is one of the composers we'll feature. She'll do an abstract painting inspired by Mozart's music.

Current project: an upcoming portrait of pianist Ivan Ilic.

(btw - I see in my dashboard that I'm getting comments, but I'm somehow unable to get them to show up on this blog. I'm working on it - but in the meantime, thanks for your responses!)

I thought I'd unearth one of my Beethoven drawings in celebration of his birthday this month. Here he is surrounded by his acolytes, one musical ancestor, and at least one rebellious composer-baby (Chopin) who was probably more influenced by Beethoven than he cared to admit! 

Random classical music radio fact: Occasionally a stickler for accuracy in the listening audience has corrected my pronunciation of the composer's last name. "It's not VON Beethoven, dear, it's VAN Beethoven."

This is accurate enough -- Beethoven's surname was Dutch (or maybe Flemish, as some maintain), but early on some of his patrons started using the "von" prefix and Beethoven never bothered to correct them. A few people get exercised about this, even today. I suppose it's possible Beethoven might have been trying to claim a certain social status  by letting people pronounce his name as if it were von Beethoven (the German prefix "von" implies aristocracy, while the Dutch prefix "van" indicates a more neutral connection to one's forebears' geographical origins). He depended on patrons, and letting the mistake persist certainly couldn't have hurt his professional prospects, but the jury's still out.

To the listening audience, it's difficult to distinguish which version of his name you're using, anyway. They both sound like VAHN. To say van Beethoven and to pronounce it like Van Morrison, is worse than saying von Beethoven -- at least to me.

Anyone who needs to say Beethoven's name on the air would do well to follow conductor Gerard Schwarz'  advice: "Just call him Beethoven."

If you do use the prefix, though, pronouncing it with an initial "F" sound rather than a "V" sound, like FAHN, gives the accuracy sticklers one less stick to beat you with.

Anyway, it's Beethoven's music that really matters!

Sir Isaac Newton

I just felt like drawing him!

Krill Timofeev of the Rastrelli Cello Quartet

Interview with cellist Kirill Timofeev of the Rastrelli Cello Quartet

"If you hear it in your heart, you can do everything on the instrument." - Kirill Timofeev

To listen to the audio: Timofeev interview

From left to right above: Kirill Timofeev, Kira Kraftzoff, Sergio Drabkin, and Misha Degtjareff.

Web site: Rastrelli Cello Quartet

I had the pleasure of chatting recently with cellist Kirill Timofeev of the Rastrelli Cello Quartet, whose new CD, Cello Effect, is out now.

MF: What inspired the name of your quartet?

KT: The three of us were born in Saint Petersburg, and we chose the name because Rastrelli was the Italian architect who built the Winter Palace, the Hermitage, a very famous building in Saint Petersburg. Anyone who has been there will understand me, because it has a kind of symbolic meaning.

MF: I read in your liner notes that Kira had to persuade Sergio that it was a good idea to form a cello quartet, and Sergio came back and said, “Are you kidding?”

KT: Yes, I remember! [laughs] I thought it could be big fun to play, let's say, unconventional repertoire with my friends. My colleagues and I were ready to rehearse endlessly and take plenty of time, and to experiment as well—with the sound, with the written form, and to try to do some improvisation, which is not usual for classical musicians, to play something not written in the score. At the first moment we didn’t know what to expect, but from the first days we started to understand that it’s not about playing cello—that we should actually forget the instrument, forget the cello itself, and just realize the sound of whatever instrumental voice we could imagine.

MF: So you have to transcribe most of what you perform?

KT: Yes, everything we play is not originally written for the cello quartet, it’s arrangements by our member Sergio Drabkin. Every year he’s improving himself. It’s incredible! Now he does really great things for us. The Prokofiev he did a couple of years ago, I really love it. I never could imagine that a cello quartet could play such a piece written for a huge orchestra. We understand what he means with his arrangements, and that’s also important.

MF: You’ve been together for fifteen years?

KT: I think thirteen would be more correct. We started in 2002 and played our first gig in Germany on Constance Lake, in the small town of Meersburg. Then we had a small pause, and started again in 2003 to play actively together.

MF: Is there a theme that guided the choice of pieces in Cello Effect?

KT: I thought we could change something—I don’t want to say, in the musical world, but we could change something in the minds of classical musicians. You can play everything you love. There was a film about this, Butterfly Effect. And with everything we are doing we hope to change something in the future. With this CD we’re trying to send the message: Let’s do this. It’s possible. Everything is possible. If you hear it in your heart, you can do everything on the instrument. It’s not important which instrument you’re playing; you just have to hear it in yourself. It’s the main idea of our quartet. We’ve recorded six CDs, and we produced them in Russia. This is the first one that will get a bit of advertisement, probably. This label, Genuin, is a very good label with good musicians and good quality. We had a great sound engineer, Christopher Tarnov. I love his work. We recorded the CD one and a half years ago, and it was ready only on the second of October. It took more than a year to get all the rights together for each piece. It was a lot of work—not musical work, but the organization, the process of doing that.

MF: Do you collaborate on the arrangements, or is that mostly what Sergio does?

KT: Good question. Sergio writes for us, and he knows all our special skills, of course—he knows us very well, and actually it fits very well for every one of us, what he is writing. But musically I would say it’s about ninety percent of his creative job, and we just check some small mistakes or something. But very often after that we sometimes change things during rehearsal. We can play additional notes or chords to increase the sound, to get more overtones and these kinds of things. You can only understand it in the process of playing. But his musical idea is behind every arrangement.

MF: I really love the bossa nova pieces by Antonio Carlos Jobim.

KT: Yes, Desafinado means “slightly out of tune” in Portuguese. Jobim made a small joke. At the time bossa nova was not taken seriously by the musical world.

MF: I loved your Take Five. Do you do it as an encore?

KT: We play it very often in our concerts at the end, because everyone plays an improvisation. After every improvisation we introduce each member of the quartet. It’s nice to end the concert with this piece.

MF: Oh, like a cadenza?

KT: Yes, actually a cadenza should be improvisation. If you play Baroque music, you don’t play everything exactly the same in every concert. It’s a little bit different.

MF: In your bio it says you studied ancient music. Do perform it much?

KT: It’s not very often now, because I play modern cello with the steel strings. But of course when you play the old music you have all these rules. Everything you learn, you can try to use even on a modern instrument. I think now it’s not as important as twenty years ago. There are many musicians like Pieter Wispelwey—he plays on a modern cello, but he knows how to pronounce Baroque phrases. Extreme Baroque time is over, I think. Now there are many well-educated musicians. At the time there was a reaction against these huge Mahler orchestras playing Bach or Vivaldi, you know. But of course it’s very nice to have a Baroque cello with the good strings, but if you’re traveling a lot and playing different programs, you can’t take two cellos with you.

MF: The picture on the CD is funny, with you guys holding the cellos on your shoulders.

KT: It was fun, yes! We had a good photographer in Saint Petersburg, Alexei Fodorov. He’s our good friend.

MF: It does imply that you work hard at what you do.

KT: If you visited our rehearsals you would be deadly bored, because we spend seventy or eighty percent of the time working on intonation, and finding a nice sound altogether. We prepare in the basement all the time. If you have a good basement, of course, you can rend the air with your ideas. If you have the greatest ideas but they don’t work, then no one will hear!

MF: Do you have a conductor?

KT: Kira Kraftzoff is the leader. He mainly plays the first voice, or the first violin. Sometimes we change the roles. I would say I’m probably the viola player most of the time. If we change our voices it’s very hard, because I used to play some double tunes to get them in tune and so on, and it’s not so easy, probably, if you never did it before. But every partiture is very interesting to work on.

MF: I thought I heard the theme from Mission: Impossible in there somewhere?

KT: Kira played it, probably, on this recording. His is the last improvisation in Take Five, and he used this Mission: Impossible. It’s just fun!

MF: You started playing at age five, is that right?

KT: Yes, quite early. The three of us were at the same school, but not at the same time. Misha Degtjareff and I were classmates. I’ve known him for thirty-one years. It’s incredible. And Kira is seven years older than we are. I was fourteen when I met him, when he was the assistant of our professor at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. He gave us some master classes, and he gave me so much power. It was so interesting. He changed so many things in my art of playing. I’m very thankful to him, because I think he gave me a really good chance. It’s always important, especially in this age, to get the fresh influence of a really good musician. And it’s not only technical things, of course. His technique is very relaxed, and probably he gave me this feeling of enjoying playing the instrument. You should relax and play, and it sounds well after that. It should not be work at all, and so on. But of course the idea of making music on such a level, it brought me quite far along. Of course there are some details, but they are not so interesting probably—working on the left hand or the right hand and so on, all this technical stuff.

MF: Where do you perform next?

KT: We play the day after tomorrow in this town in Siberia, Irkutzk. It’s very far away!

MF: Is it cold there?

KT: It’s about minus fourteen or something like that.

MF: I bet it’s a beautiful hall.

KT: Yes, you never know what is awaiting you. I think it’s a pretty good hall, and it’s very well organized.

MF: How do you adapt to different halls?

KT: You automatically change your sound. If it’s a huge hall with a big reverberation, you play differently than in a small room. But I don’t think acoustics are so important. You hear the acoustics in the first couple of minutes. After that you hear what the musician is doing inside of this context. It’s more important what’s happening musically, than if it’s a big or a small room. I don’t care, actually, so much about such things.

MF: How much rehearsal time do you get?

KT: This time we have a rehearsal the same day of the concert. I prefer to come one day before, at least, but it’s not always possible.

MF: Are you selling your new CD at the concert?

KT: After the concert you can sell them and sign autographs for the public. It’s a good opportunity to get in touch with the people as well.

MF: What does the rest of your tour look like?

KT: After Irkutsk we go to Finland and play in Helsinki, then we play at the Gasteig in Munich. The Glazonov Foundation is the organizer. Then we play in Tübingen, close to Stuttgart in the south of Germany. Then we have a couple of weeks’ pause, but we start in January a huge tour with the clarinet player Giora Feidman. We play about forty concerts with him in Germany. It’s big fun, and he’s a great musician. Very interesting work.

MF: How did you get started? Were your parents musicians?

KT: Some of us yes, some of us no, but my parents are not musicians. They studied mountain engineering—I don’t know exactly how you call it in America. They were dreaming of getting music into their home, and they wanted the cello especially. They love cello. The guys’ parents are musicians. It is always the decision of the parents, actually, because to start to learn it professionally, it’s not only fun, it’s quite hard work. A small child needs someone who will push him a bit; it’s important. You need to learn the skills quite early. If you start at eight, it’s still okay. If you start later, it’s a little bit hard. Everything is possible, but it’s not so easy. There are some physical skills, the fine motor skills that should be natural, like part of your instinct. If you learn it later you can do this, but it’s not really part of your body. But it’s possible. It’s more like sport, maybe.

MF: I haven’t seen you perform yet, but do you move a lot with the cello? Is it a kind of swaying thing you do?

KT: If you play some swinging stuff you cannot do it without moving yourself. It’s normal. Actually I think you just don’t have to stop. If you want, just move. It must be natural. I don’t think about it, it just happens. There are some pieces that are so calm and relaxed, you don’t have to show each other anything. You’re breathing together, and it’s enough. Other times you should dance maybe, a little! I think the cello is the most natural instrument to play. If you’re relaxed when you play, you can play nine or ten hours a day, it’s no problem. But probably because of the lack of movement, you should maybe take up jogging. It’s like anyone who sits much or is driving a car all the time. But somehow I don’t feel tired after playing the cello. I can be tired because I gave much power, musically, but not because of playing. It’s very nice.

MF: It’s an emotional thing too, right?

KT: Yes, very much. It’s a kind of energetic exchange with the public. It’s great! Everyone is important. The public and the musicians do something together.

MF: Do you have a favorite piece on the CD?

KT: I like Desafinado, like you, and I like the Prokofiev very much. It’s the seventh CD we’ve recorded together. Previously everyone was satisfied with some things and disagreed with other pieces. In this case, for me personally, I like all the tracks. It’s the first time in my life I can say I really agree with it, and therefore I started contacting the broadcasting companies because it’s just good! I just send it everywhere, because I love it! I want as many people as possible to hear it and enjoy this music. I love to share it. We did everything we could on this one. Everyone tried to give his best. We had a really good time recording it. I’m happy with the label we chose, Genuin Classics. They’re trying to put us in some magazines. It’s a kind of collaboration, and it’s nice. It’s the first time someone has done this for us. In America we had a good manager, Bill Capone, for about seven years. We played about two hundred concerts, about twelve times.

MF: In America? I missed it!

KT: But never in Seattle, unfortunately. But now he wants to make his agency smaller and concentrate on a very few musicians. But he did a very good job for us. He gave us the possibility for us to perform. I couldn’t organize it myself. Even if I could, I would spend so much time for this, it’s impossible.

MF: When are you coming back to the States?

KT: Actually I don’t know. First of all we need someone to represent us. Musicians who come from Europe have agencies there. It’s easier for the local presenter, too, because they know with whom they should communicate about contracts and stuff. We never took care of such things. We just came and played!