A German School of Celloing?

[Ralph]

From the New York Times:

August 7, 2005
What Is It About Germans and Their Cellos?
By ANNE MIDGETTE

"THE French school of cello playing is perhaps more interested in sound," said Jan Vogler, a 41-year-old cellist. "We are more interested in tone. A singing tone, like a voice, and a very focused tone that has clear definition."

"We" is the German school of cello playing. And if you haven't considered that there is a German school of cello playing, you may want to. There are a few rising soloists to make the point.

Take Alban Gerhardt, born in 1969, who made a successful debut with the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Christoph von Dohnanyi in April and will play Strauss's "Don Quixote" in Chicago with the Grant Park Music Festival Orchestra on Friday and Saturday. He will make his debuts with the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony in the 2005-6 season.

Or take Daniel Müller-Schott, 28, who is to appear on Thursday with the Philadelphia Orchestra at the Saratoga Performing Arts Center. His new season begins with recording sessions: the two Shostakovich concertos with Yakov Kreizberg and the elite Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, and the Elgar and Walton concertos with André Previn and the Oslo Philharmonic. Meanwhile, his recording of concertos by the little-known but prolific Joachim Raff is due for release in the fall.

Then there is Mr. Vogler. On Sunday he opens the Moritzburg Festival, which he helped found in 1993 in a Baroque castle near Dresden, Germany. In November, he will appear with Lorin Maazel and the New York Philharmonic in the Schumann concerto and a new piece by Colin Matthews commemorating the reopening of the Frauenkirche in Dresden, bombed in World War II. A recording of the Dvorak concerto, made with the New York Philharmonic and one of its hottest guest conductors, David Robertson, will be released in the fall on Sony Classical.

These cellists are not exactly household names in the United States, though Mr. Vogler and his family live part time in New York, and Mr. Gerhardt used to live here. All three were born to families of professional musicians: Mr. Müller-Schott's mother plays the harpsichord; Mr. Vogler's parents were orchestra players; Mr. Gerhardt's mother is a singer, and his father is a violinist in the Berlin Philharmonic. And they all play great instruments: a Guarneri for Mr. Vogler, Goffrillers for Mr. Müller-Schott and Mr. Gerhardt.

The fact that they're all German may be the least of what unites them. For in today's international climate, and in a country that was once divided, the "German school" has become a concept as much theoretical as actual.

"I'm not sure that the German school hasn't been taken over by the Russians," said David Finckel, the cellist of the Emerson String Quartet and a co-director of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. He cited the many students of Mstislav Rostropovich who have established themselves as teachers and performers in Germany. They include Boris Pergamenschikov, one of Mr. Gerhardt's teachers.

Mr. Vogler said that musicians in the former West Germany were influenced by the French cello school, and he outlined its characteristics: "The note is strongly altered once it's there, with effects and the like. They play with more refinement in France. The German way is a whole different kind of playing, more direct, more oriented towards singing: Fritz Wunderlich, Elisabeth Schwarzkopf."

Having grown up in East Germany, Mr. Vogler was exposed to few outside influences and therefore learned a purer form of the German style. Not that he was particularly aware of a German style. He noticed it, he said, when he got to the United States and people at the Marlboro Music Festival in Vermont made him aware of it.

You can certainly hear differences in the sound of these three cellists.

Mr. Gerhardt plays with a big, emotive fullness. One of his teachers was Frans Helmerson, a Swedish cellist who also taught another player with a big sound, the Norwegian virtuoso Truls Mork.

Mr. Müller-Schott's playing favors a slightly studied beauty. He worked with the English cellist Steven Isserlis.

Mr. Vogler's recordings, including a recent CD of Strauss on Sony Classical, show a distinctive line that is at once taut and fluid, without an emphasis on size and, indeed, with a light quality reminiscent of Wunderlich. His principal teacher was his father.

"There was no such thing as a solo career in East Germany," he said. "You had to get the best orchestra job that you could." So Mr. Vogler auditioned for the Dresden Staatskapelle and became a principal cellist at 20. The job afforded him considerable opportunities: he played the Schumann concerto under Giuseppe Sinopoli on the Staatskapelle's 1996 American tour. But when he was invited to Marlboro, his eyes opened to other possibilities.

"I asked, 'What orchestra do you play in?' " he said. "And Josh Bell said, 'I don't play in an orchestra.' And I said, 'Why not?' " Mr. Vogler left the Staatskapelle in 1997 to pursue a solo career.

Another thing that unites the three cellists is their de facto demonstration that solo careers take quite a bit of pursuing.

Mr. Gerhardt made his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic in 1991 and his New York debut in 1993, followed by appearances with Young Concert Artists. But only now is his American career starting to soar.

Mr. Müller-Schott's big breaks came when he was 15 and the violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter accepted him into her foundation, supporting him through years of study and even lending him an instrument. Now she and her husband, Mr. Previn, appear with him in chamber concerts several times each season.

Mr. Müller-Schott said his career really started with winning something called the International Tchaikovsky Competition for Young Musicians in Moscow, also when he was 15. Though this is not to be confused with winning the prestigious Tchaikovsky Competition, the confusion seems to be one Mr. Müller-Schott is happy to cultivate in conversation.

The classical music world is less like soccer than like bicycle racing: allegiances and teams are formed without much regard for national boundaries. And like bicycle racing, the pack is a group of fiercely competitive individuals. These German cellists acknowledge one another's existence but are not exactly pals.

Of the three, Mr. Vogler, arguably the least flashy, seems to have the keenest awareness of musical and social responsibility. His Moritzburg Festival is a direct response to his pivotal experience at Marlboro and an effort to take the same kind of energy to Germany. Cross-pollination includes bringing in new composing styles. This year's composers in residence are Chen Yi and Zhou Long, a Chinese-born, Brooklyn-based husband-and-wife team familiar on the American music circuit but barely known in Germany.

Mr. Vogler's festival also gave a rare German performance of Steve Reich's "Different Trains," which draws parallels between Mr. Reich's childhood train trips across the United States and the trains that were at the time carrying Jews to death camps.

Of course, Mr. Vogler grew up in a different country from that of his two colleagues, even if those two Germanies are now one.

"I sometimes joke - but the joke is not so wrong - that after my time in East Germany I could either afford therapy to work through what happened under the Communists or move to New York," he said. "New York is the opposite of East Germany, the crown of individuality. That's why I can work well here and find out what I personally think of the pieces I'm learning. I can lay aside all the baggage of German education. In any case, whatever I do, I can't lose it altogether."

[Peter Schenkman]

Lets first get rid of the word “celloing” as it doesn’t exist, nor for that matter does the German school of playing the ‘cello in this era. There have been over the years good German ‘cellists (that is a word) but hardly a “school”, at least not in the last half of the last century. If we retreat to an earlier era names like Romberg (1767-1841), Dotzauer (1783-1860), Kummer (1797-1879), Lee (1805-1887), Cossman (1822-1910), Golterman (1824-1898), Grutzmacher (1832-1903), Fitzenhagen (1848-1890), the dedicate of Tchaikovsky’s “Rococo Variations, Klengel (1859-1933) and Hugo Becker (1864-1941) constitute a major school by any standard. The primary schools of ‘cello playing in much of the last century are the French, Russian, Hungarian and surprisingly the American which in spite of the fact that it is more-or-less a composite of all those named has done remarkably well with a very large touch of the English in the form of one Felix Salmond, who taught for many years at the Juilliard and Curtis turning out an entire generation of successful ‘cellists, many who took principal positions in the orchestras of North America, the tip of that iceberg follows:

Frank Miller: Minneapolis, NBC, Chicago
Leonard Rose: Cleveland, New York Philharmonic
Sam Mayes: Philadelphia, Boston, Philadelphia

And that’s just the beginning as all of those mentioned, particularly Rose, went on to teach those who would wind up replacing them. Probably from the mid 1950’s onward for about twenty-five years the two most sought after teachers in North America were Janos Starker (Hungarian) and Rose (American/English). Both have done remarkably well in turning out productive members of the musical fraternity. During this era the “German School” was hardly a blip on the radar screen.

Peter Schenkman