Words by:
Phil Lambert, Music Librarian
ANAM Robert Salzer Foundation Library
Back in 2007 I was asked by Brett Dean, our Artistic Director at the time, if I had a few spare hours each week to organize his personal music collection. I did have a few spare hours, and I also needed the money and, if I’m totally honest, I was quite keen to see what a world-renowned composer and violist had stashed away. I had no idea what I was in for.
I arrived at Brett’s inner-city home, an Edwardian two-storey terrace, on a Friday afternoon and was led upstairs to the composer’s sanctum, a spacious room at the front of the house with huge windows looking straight into the canopies of century-old plane trees. Brett’s music collection was vast. He’d been a member of the Berlin Philharmonic for almost fifteen years and was a keen chamber musician, so just about every important work written for or including the viola was there. And then there was his more recent life as a professional composer, so every important work from the middle-ages to the present, and hundreds more besides, was there, Brett being an indefatigable student of musical literature. Finally, as a member of the Boosey and Hawkes composer family, he received just about every new publication issued by that prestigious house (including, of course, his own works), as well as many from other publishers, including Schott, Peters and Ricordi. Brett seemed to be on every major publisher’s mailing list. It was a fabulous collection, growing by the week, and it needed sorting. I was chuffed to be asked.
One afternoon, Brett came in with his viola and asked if I’d like to hear something he was practicing for an upcoming concert. He’d been contracted by the Radio Symphony Orchestra of Stuttgart to play Hindemith’s Der Schwanendreher for viola and orchestra, and Sir Roger Norrington was to conduct. He needed to play through the whole solo part from start to finish, and would I be his audience? Sure I would. I didn’t know the piece at all, so Brett explained what it was about.
He started with the title. Schwanendreher. It’s one of those compound German nouns which can be off-putting at first sight, an unpronounceable alphabet soup, mostly consonants. Broken into two parts, it means “swan turner”. What, or who, I asked, is a swan turner, and is animal cruelty involved? Brett reassured me that a swan turner was the old German name for an organ grinder, from the time when hurdy-gurdies had handles shaped like a swan’s neck. Ah! So the person who turned the handle of the hurdy-gurdy was a “swan turner”! And when Hindemith composed this concerto, he filled it with beloved tunes the average swan turner was frequently asked to play, a sort of karaoke hit-list from the past. As Brett explained, it’s like an old German version of Bob Dylan’s “Hey Mister Tambourine Man, play a song for me.”
For the next thirty minutes I was treated to an exclusive performance of this gloriously tuneful concerto, and wondered where it had been all my life. Brett, of course, nailed it, although he modestly told me afterwards that he still had a few passages to master. Yes, sure. To my ears, he was ready to hop on a plane and blow that German audience away.
In October I will get to hear another brilliant violist ‘turning the swan’, when Lawrence Power takes the stage with the ANAM Orchestra. Unfortunately, I will have to share that experience with hundreds of other listeners – exclusive concerto performances by world-class musicians only come once in a lifetime, I think. Power will also be leading another tuneful work with its roots in folk music, Ligeti’s Romanian Concerto from 1951. This is one of Ligeti’s earliest works, inspired by his vivid childhood memories of alpine horns in the Carpathian mountains, and it evokes the wild beauty of that spectacular terrain. To my ears, this music is pure delight, so I was surprised to learn that the busybodies of Communist Hungary banned its performance for years on the grounds that it wasn’t quite ‘folksy’ enough. Presumably they wanted more oom-pah in the base. No wonder Ligeti had to flee to the West.
Phil plays JS Bach in the Bach Diaries series
Photo credit: Pia Johnson
Finally, we have two more Bach Diaries to round off the year. In the first three instalments of this five-part series we followed Bach’s life and career from his first full-time post as organist at Arnstadt to his celebrated encounter with King Frederick of Prussia. The next concert will be a complete performance of his epochal work for keyboard, The Well-Tempered Clavier (first volume), and as this entails a lot of music, there will be no talking from me or, I hope, anyone else. The final Bach Diaries will feature another great keyboard work, the ‘Goldberg’ Variations, but in a rarely heard arrangement for string trio by Dmitri Sitkovetsky. In this farewell to the series, I plan to include authentic comments from people in Bach’s life, including his own children and pupils. I hope you can join me and our wonderful musicians for both of them.
BACH DIARIES: SCIENCE
Thursday 17 November, 3pm | The Good Shepherd Chapel (Abbotsford)
Book Tickets
BACH DIARIES: PLAYING AROUND
Thursday 24 November, 3pm | The Good Shepherd Chapel (Abbotsford)
Book Tickets