A tour of Australia in Spring 1965
In March 1965, Bolet arrived by Qantas at Sydney’s Kingsford Smith airport to begin a 14 week ABC concert tour of all the states of Australia. The Sydney Morning Herald, 22 March, 1965, reports that ‘he now lives in seclusion in a fishing village on the coast of Spain.’ This is his first visit Down Under.
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The Film Australia Collection: life in Sydney, 1966
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On Tuesday 4 May in Sydney Town Hall, Jorge played Brahms Concerto No.2 in B flat major Op.83 with Sydney Symphony under Finnish maestro Paavo Berglund (with whom Bolet will have a long association). The programme began with Sibelius' Pohjola's Daughter and his Symphony No. 4 in A minor Op. 63.
Jack Kunst in The Bulletin reported that John Painter's beautiful cello playing in the slow movement of the Brahms was recognised by Bolet, who thanked him personally at the end. The Sydney Morning Herald was critical. 'Some moments of insensitivity [in the orchestra] may well have been a reflection of the work of the soloist. Bolet's performance was unquestionably massive - no suggestion here of a pianistic style and stamina too puny or retiring... But what musical, as distinct from athletic, pleasure was there in hearing the hard monotony of attack in all strenuous passages, the big bang-bang-bang of clattering virtuoso machinery? The soft passages were unmistakably soft but it was a softness illustrating a dramatic contrast rather than a positive quality in it. The lyricism in the slow movement failed to flow.'​​
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Articles in The Sydney Morning Herald for mid-May include "Russian accused Australia yesterday (16th) of starting on the road of direct aggression against the Vietnamese people by sending troops to Vietnam. It infringes the most important norms of international law and the Geneva 1954 agreements on Vietnam."
Sydney Morning Herald, 13 May, 1965
‘A tensely coiled spring lying at rest looks serene and, when tension and turmoil were not actually dominant, it was this same uneasy and deceptive sort of serenity that coursed as a current through the recital given in the Town Hall last night. Certainly neither his thunderingly potent concerto performances here last week nor the general tone of his tour publicity intimated a close sympathetic liaison between Mr Bolet and music as well-mannered and house-trained as a Haydn sonata of the more poetic components of the four Chopin Ballades.
Yet the pianist’s very individual approach...proved to be exciting enough where it was musically apt.’
In the Ballades, ‘somehow a sense of deep and convincing involvement with the music’s finer emotions was lacking.’ But in conclusion, Bolet 'has the freshness and imagination to use a formidable technique and a masterful strength to open up new vistas in well-known music, and if they are not always vistas that one sees with affection, they at least point to an individuality that commands respect'. ​
Jean Sibelius
It was the centenary of the birth of the great Finnish composer. The marvellous Pohjolan tytär ("Pohjola's Daughter") is based on a passage in Finland's national epic Kalevala. The tone poem depicts the white-bearded Väinämöinen, who spots the beautiful 'daughter of the North (Pohjola), seated on a rainbow, weaving a cloth of gold while he is riding a sleigh through the dusky landscape. Väinämöinen asks her to join him, but she replies that she will only leave with a man who can perform a number of challenging tasks, such as tying an egg into invisible knots and, most notably, building a boat from fragments of her distaff. Väinämöinen attempts to fulfil these tasks through his own expertise in magic; in many of the tasks he succeeds, but he is eventually thwarted by evil spirits when attempting to build the boat and injures himself with an axe. He gives up, abandons the tasks and continues on his journey alone.
"This Guy Fawkes night music"
Saturday 15 May, 1965, Town Hall, Sydney. 'It was a valiant and interesting idea - at least in prospect - to devote something like 70 minutes of his Town Hall recital to the glitter and reverie and frowning velocity of Liszt's "Transcendental Studies". Yet Bolet's sustained and splendid exertions, awesome as a demonstration of technique and stamina seemed in the long run principally a strenuous way of establishing that a performance of all 12 is not satisfactory as a total musical experience. The drawback of musical athletics of this kind is that they lose their undeniable appeal as quickly as a variety bill consisting entirely of jugglers and tumblers.
'He left no doubt of his intellectual quality in less hectic or spotlit music by prefacing the Liszt sequence with Beethoven's Opus 110 that lacked only the elusive magic of lyrical affection to bless its accumulation of scrupulous detail.' R.C. for The Sydney Morning Herald 17.5.65
Felix Werder's wacky report in The Age, 19 May, 1965 is a delight. Bolet ‘opened a Lisztian box of tricks at last night’s [Melbourne] Town Hall recital’. Liszt’s 12 Transcendental Etudes ‘are a veritable stud of pianistic nightmares that enter the circus ring of virtuosity dressed in dazzling splendor and breath-taking bravura. Here one cannot speak of a performance: it is an act, a seemingly gaudy ritual, in which hands fly all over the piano, notes are juggled, left hanging in the air only to await the clash of that poised hand as it swoops for a thundering chord. All sensibility is buried under an avalanche of sound – almost a turbulent Nile flood... Dr. Bolet [sic] gave a fierce rendering of this Guy Fawkes night music... One may say, perhaps, that he is a great performer rather than a great artist. He gave some indication of his musical stature, however, in Beethoven’s Sonata No. 31 Op. 110... [but] for all his delicate touch, he failed to give depth to the tragic arioso dolente which he treated as a sort of Schubertian left-over... Three-quarters of the hall was empty, showing once again how concert promoters have lost touch with the musical needs of our community.’
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The author of the above Felix Werder [1922-2012] was a German-born Australian composer and noted critic; he was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 1976.
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"Storm and Drag"
'A programme of all Liszt is bad enough. A programme of unrelieved Liszt studies is unthinkable. Yet this is what happened at the Melbourne Town Hall recital by Jorge Bolet. But not only did Mr. Bolet play these inconsequential show-off pieces (Etudes d’execution transcendante) with little but thump; he played them dully. True, he commands great technical flair to get round the extremely difficult intricacies of these pieces. But he seems to possess this flair at the cost of the overall sense of structure and formal balance which would turn the playing of them into art.
As it is, they existed, for me at any rate, as cold, heartless exhibition pieces which yet lacked the brilliance and sparkle they should have had. His rhythms constantly sagged, and in many places they dragged.
In fact he turned the “Storm and Dread” of the eulogistic programme notes into Storm and Drag. He opened his performance with Beethoven’s Sonata 110, a work which no lover of Liszt could handle properly. He failed to bring it to life.' (Adrian Rawlins)​
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Of a Brisbane orchestral concert: 'Tchaikowsky's 1st piano concert had not been heard in Brisbane since Mindru Katz's athletic performance in 1961. The soloist on this occasion was Jorge Bolet whose playing of it was completely satisfying; he had bundles of bravura when it was required, including octaves of astonishing security, but could produce admirably controlled tone in the quieter passages.' (Gerald Glynn)
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On 21 and 26 May 1965 at the Capitol Theatre, Perth, Jorge performed with the West Australian Symphony Orchestra and Paavo Berglund.​ He also gave a solo recital there on 25 May.​ This heritage theatre on 10 Williams Street was demolished. There had been a bust of the late Rudolph Valentino in the foyer; reportedly the lips on Valentino's bust were constantly red with the adoring kisses of his Perth fans. From 1973 onwards the newly constructed Perth Concert Hall was the location.​
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Ramsay Pennicuick in Electronics Australia (December 1965), while reviewing the World Record Club Chopin LP, animadverts: 'Jorge Bolet, a South American pianist, visited Australia for A.B.C earlier this year. I heard him twice but was not very impressed. He has a colossal technique, but in the Brahms he thrashed the piano unmercifully for three movements. In a recital he displayed greater variety of tone but was never a very impressive pianist. However, it must be admitted that this Chopin recital may cause one to change one's opinion.'
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Yarra River, Melbourne (1966)
1965 continued...
7 and 9 October 1965: Rachmaninoff 3 with the Detroit Symphony and Sixten Ehrling in the Ford Auditorium. Also Nielsen's Maskarade overture, Brahms' Symphony No. 3 in F, Op.90 and Weinberger's Schwanda the Bagpiper Polka & Fugue. Ehrling was born in Malmö, Sweden, (1918, d.2005), was principal conductor of the Detroit (1963-73), and had partnered Bolet a few times- see e.g. April 1963 in Stockholm. In the early 1950s Ehrling had recorded the first complete set of Sibelius symphonies with the Royal Stockholm Orchestra. He was apparently one of the last conductors to know both Stravinsky and Sibelius, personally.
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9 December 1965: Münchner Residenz (Herkulessaal), Munich, West Germany (Studio Radio Broadcast): Liszt: Piano Concerto No.1 in E-flat major, S.124, Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No.3 in D minor, Op.30
– Raphael Frübeck de Burgos / Sinfonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks.
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On 13 December 1965 the Dutch newspaper De Schiedammer reports that on a Saturday morning (11th) the acoustics of the concert hall in Rotterdam (Holland), De Doelen, were being tested. Jorge played de Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain with Robert Benzl. As the work was rarely performed, 'its performance was not able to offer comparison with other halls, in terms of acoustics'. The piano was brand new and played for the first time, so its tone could not be fully judged. The hall was originally built in 1934 but then destroyed during the German bombardment of Rotterdam in May 1940 at the outset of World War II. It was rebuilt in 1966.
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Claudio Arrau made his début at the Osaka Festival Hall, Japan on Saturday 24 April, 1965 including performances of Brahms's Piano Concertos No. 1 Op.15 and No.2 Op.83 in the same evening, with the Japan Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra conducted by Takashi Asahina. A review by Ernst Gottschalk, for the Asahi Evening News of 26th April, highlights the superior attributes of Mr. Arrau's artistry, which showed through its masterly performances despite a low quality piano and an unsure conductor.
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There werre performance in Lima, Perú by Claudio Arrau of one of Johannes Brahms's piano concertos, with the newly reconstituted National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Luis Herrera de la Fuente on Wednesday 18 August 1965. The programme also included works by Gioachino Rossini and Edgard Valcárcel.
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[El Informador, Guadalajara, Mexico, 20 Aug 1965]
Information from arrauhouse.org
Nights in the gardens of Spain, 1960s
Newspaper interviews occasionally refer to Jorge living on the northern coast of Spain in the 1960s. The place to which they refer is Fuenterrabia (Hondarribia, ‘sand ford’ in the Basque language), a colourful fishing village situated on the west shore of the Bidasoa River, just on the border with France, and also only half an hour away from San Sebastián. Some accounts suggest stayed there only for six years and that the house no longer exists. But he once listed his address as Apartado 5, which sounds like a flat.
Jorge himself told a New Zealand journalist in 1964: 'At home, I have the beautiful Pyrenees and those charming Basque valleys'.. According to an interview with the Edmonton Journal, 21 February 1981, he still kept a house in Fuenterrabia.
'Many people felt that I must have made a fortune from the movie [Song Without End, 1960] and had quietly gone away to live the good life, giving up public performance. Nothing could be further from the truth. I played and played in America, but never got anywhere, so I went to Europe and built a career there.'
(Interview, Gregor Benko, HiFi Stereo Review, July 1972)
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Jorge's brother Alberto 'for six years from 1962 in Spain, took over the helm of the Bilbao Symphony Orchestra [Bilbao Orkestra Sinfonikoa, founded 1922], where the soprano Montserrat Caballe and violinist Salvatore Accardo were among the young musicians whose careers he nurtured.' (Bilbao is only 75 miles west of Fuenterrabia) He took up his last permanent post in 1968, with the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra in California.
Martin Anderson, The Independent, 2 December 1999, obituary
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Hondarribia has been settled since the time of the Romans, and became a full-fledged village in the 13th century. As a town historically on the border, whether between Navarre and Castille, or between Spain and France, Hondarribia has enjoyed a tumultuous past.
‘Down at water level, where the broad boulevards just back from the pretty harbour are lined with pavement cafés, it feels like a resort, but its fortified Casco Antiguo, a delightful little enclave just higher up, offers a real sense of history.’ (Rough Guide)
Jorge and Tex rented Egoki in the late fifties/early sixties and kept it until the late seventies/early eighties.
Jorge had a Bechstein grand, which saw little use, and being there they enjoyed the service of a lady who cooked for them and took care after domestic things. Jorge and Tex also had a Volkswagen station-car which was used for travelling.
Staying there was extremely cheap in those days. Jorge told me once: "In Spain are no criminals except one!"
In those days, Jorge played many concerts in Spain. He even played Rachmaninoff 2 with a fantastic brass orchestra. Of course he also started, after almost twenty years of neglect, to make records in Spain for Ensayo.
In a Dutch radio interview (1978) Jorge mentioned that he had a house in Spain where he had a Bechstein, but the weather could be as bad as in Holland! (Mattheus Smits)
Adelaide Newman
The Rand Daily Mail, 7 October 1965 has an article on South African pianist Adelaide Newman.
Tot siens en alles van die beste ("Goodbye and all the best"), said Noel Coward in Rome last month. His farewell was for South African pianist Miss Newman who had played during his concert in Maritzburg more than 20 years ago. 'I thought it pretty good that he should remember the phrase after all this time', said Adelaide who had met him again during her recent 5 week visit to Europe.
She had been in Spain on a business visit with husband Max Kramer, and they had stayed 2 weeks with Jorge, 'who was in South Africa last year'. 'His home is in Fuenterrabia. It is absolutely beautiful there. Unfortunately it was rainy and chilly most of the time, so lying in the sun and bathing were out. But we were compensated by drives to beauty spots.'
She had intended flying to London but changed her plans so she could motor through France with JB and his manager. Jorge was giving two concerts in London and further concerts elsewhere. After Jorge left London, 'his impresario Mr Sandor Gorlinsky took my husband and me to hear the Helsinki PO with Sir John Barbirolli.'
A memoir of "RR"
Friday 3 December and Sunday 5th (at 11:30am), 1965 in Madrid, Spain: Rachmaninoff's second concerto with Carl Melles (also Kodály's Dances of Galanta) in the Palacio de la Música, situated in the heart of the Gran Vía, near the Plaza de Callao. Melles Károly (1926 – 2004) was an Austrian orchestral conductor of Hungarian descent. He conducted Wagner's Tannhäuser at the 1966 Bayreuth Festival, with Jess Thomas, Hermann Prey and Leonie Rysanek.
​​On 13 December 1965, the Dutch newspaper De Schiedammer reports that on the previous Saturday morning (11th) the acoustics of the concert hall in Rotterdam (Holland), De Doelen, were being tested. Bolet played de Falla's Nights in the Gardens of Spain with Robert Benzl. As the work was rarely performed, its performance was not able to offer comparison with other halls, in terms of acoustics'. The piano was brand new and played for the first time, so its tone could not be fully judged. The hall was originally built in 1934 but then destroyed during the German bombardment of Rotterdam in May 1940 at the outset of World War II. It was rebuilt in 1966.
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​​​​​​​​The Boletín de la Sociedad Filharmónica de Bilbao (No.10, July 2009) has an article "Recuerdo de Jorge Bolet" by someone who signs as R.R. (whom I believe to be Ramón Rodamiláns Vellido, b.1932) who got to know Bolet and who had visited him in the spring of 1966. He states that Jorge was living in the Villa Egoki, an attractive house in the Basque style overlooking the beautiful bay between Fuenterrabia and Hendaya. Is this to be equated with the address he once used to give in biographical dictionaries as Apartado 5?
‘Pierre Loti [pseudonym of Julien Viaud, 1850 – 1923, French novelist and naval officer], who had sailed many seas and oceans, claimed that this bay was the most beautiful piece of scenery on the planet.
I arrived at Villa Egoki with Alberto Bolet, and Rosita, his wife.
‘Alberto was as chatty and outgoing as Jorge was quiet - he could almost seem taciturn and introverted. His height and build transformed him into a dark giant (‘gigante moreno’), endowed with a deeply penetrating gaze. I must confess that this penetrating but impenetrable look, and the fact that he did not say much, had an intimidating effect on me. Later I discovered that when he relaxed, behind those unfathomable eyes there lay hidden an affable, friendly personality and an intelligent conversationalist.
‘In Villa Egoki, Jorge lived with Tex Compton, an American who had sacrificed his own business career to concentrate his energies on helping Jorge achieve great success [...]’
The writer then compares their relationship to that of Somerset Maugham and Gerald Haxton. This is an intriguing observation. Frederick Gerald Haxton (1892–1944), a native of San Francisco, was the long term secretary and lover of the distinguished British author W. Somerset Maugham. He and Maugham met at the outbreak of World War I when they both began serving from 1914 as part of the Red Cross ambulance unit in Flanders, France. Later they settled on the French Riviera in the villa ‘Mauresque’. It is thought that Haxton’s flamboyant nature, said to be portrayed in the character Rowley Flint in Maugham’s novella Up at the Villa, was the key to Maugham’s invitational success with the various members of the society at whatever location that the pair was visiting at a given time. They lived there almost exclusively until they were forced to flee the advancing Germans at the commencement of World War II.
‘Tex, like Haxton, was outgoing and friendly. When we arrived at Villa Egoki, he greeted us, smiling, warm and jovial. One might have thought he himself was the host. He prepared drinks and snacks in the garden, and he served an impeccable lunch. In the garden, peaceful and quiet, no kind of noise reached us, and the warm spring day was very nice. Jorge smoked a lot and spoke little, maybe because he knew what I could only guess - the tense relationship that existed between Tex and his brother. After coffee, we went to the living room, white from the carpet to the ceiling, where a black Bechstein grand paradoxically dazzled. Jorge sat at the piano and in that moment was transformed. He played several transcriptions, wonderful transcriptions by Godowsky of Schubert songs, plus the ballet music from Rosamunde, but offered the surprising confession that his secret dream was to play and record all Mozart's piano concertos. (He never did.)
Spanish memories
Memoir of "R.R." continued: London
'One afternoon in early 1981, we met in London by coincidence - we almost tripped over each other at Fortnum & Mason (a luxury shop, especially for food and groceries at 181 Piccadilly, where it was established in 1707). Surprised and delighted, we arranged to have dinner together that night. I took him to one of my favourite fish restaurants, which was also to his liking. With great excitement he announced to me that he had signed an important contract with the Decca label to record Liszt. It was, naturally, a task of several years, and he told me about it honestly.
[They talked about his Godowsky disc] 'And I assured him that Godowsky's No. 25 (on Chopin's Op.25, nº1) was, in his hands, a unique gem, "the jewel in the crown" [she uses the English phrase here]. Jorge smiled at my enthusiasm. He probably already knew.​​
​​'His face changed when I asked after Tex, and he looked at me with downcast expression. Tex Compton had died a year earlier, in San Francisco, leaving, at same time, life and a big emptiness in Jorge's life. He told me about his sadness during the final weeks - when he visited him in the clinic, he did not recognise him. "Imagine, after living together for almost forty years!"
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Su cara cambió cuando le pregunté por Tex, y me miró con expresión abatida. Tex Compton había muerto el año anterior, en San Francisco, dejando, al mismo tiempo, un respiro y un gran vacío en la vida de Jorge. Me contó con tristeza que durante las últimas semanas, cuando le visitaba en la clínica, no le reconocía. "¡Imagínate, después de vivir juntos casi cuarenta años!"
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'I heard Jorge for the last time at the end of 1989, in London. He played the second Brahms concerto well below his usual standard. He was aware of it, and when I was greeting him in the "Green Room", he repeated to me, over and over again, that he had just come from New York, and that he was very tired.
I tried, naturally but unsuccessfully, to cheer him up, yet the ashen colour of his face told me that he was suffering from something more serious than mere fatigue. And so it was. I think Jorge's end was sad, as [he] had been for most of his life.' (Creo que el final de Jorge fue triste, como había sido la mayor parte de su vida.)
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R.R must have been thinking of a concert earlier than the end of 1989, as Jorge gave his last public performance in Berlin on 8 June.
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Rodamiláns was born in Bilbao in 1932. He began his musical studies in his hometown where he obtained the title of piano professor at the Bilbao Conservatory. He also graduated in law from the University of Santiago de Compostela. As an amateur pianist, he gave concerts in Bilbao, Vitoria and Valencia, among which his participation in the premiere in Spain of Kabalevsky's Piano Concerto No. 3 together with the Bilbao Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Alberto Bolet. His professional activity has been directed towards the business world and, mainly, towards the importation of pianos from different countries. His research on the figure of the composer Juan Crisóstomo de Arriaga, led him to write one of the few existing monographs on the Bilbao composer.
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1966 "More Eagle than Nightingale"
Amelia Solberg de Hoskinson, Jorge's first patron in 1927, died in Florida in 1966, aged 90/1. 'She became my benefactress. She had a real old-fashioned salon in Havana, where all the leading poets, writers, artists and musicians would gather, and where everyone would read their latest poems, play their latest compositions, or perform on the piano.'
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Friday evening, 7pm 19 August at Tanglewood in Lennox, a town in Berkshire County, Massachusetts USA
Under a heading in The New York Times "Old Wine in Lennox", it is reported that 'There is going to be an awful lot of Franz Liszt's music during the final week of the Berkshire Music Festival, and the amenities were launched at this evening's weekend prelude. Jorge Bolet devoted an hour to Liszt piano music, and, if that were not enough, he devoted his program to the kind of repertory not heard for at least a generation.' (Schubert + Wagner ("Spinning chorus") + Verdi + Schumann/Liszt). Later that night (9pm) Jeanne-Marie Darré played Liszt's E flat concerto and Totentanz, in a programme that began with Bruckner's fourth symphony. Mme Darré was born in Givet, France, in 1905 (died 1999). She studied at the Paris Conservatoire with Isidor Philipp and Marguerite Long, and had worked with Fauré, Saint-Saëns and Ravel.
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20 August at Tanglewood in Lennox: Franz Liszt / Ruins of Athens: Fantasy on Motifs; Concerto for Piano No. 2 in A major. BSO/Erich Leinsdorf
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Thursday 10 November 1966, Stavanger, Norway. Beethoven's 5th piano concerto. This is the first time Stavanger has had him in a concerto; on a previous visit he played four Beethoven sonatas. 'He like perhaps no one else frolics in Franz Liszt's compositions.' Rogalands Avis 9.11.1966.
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Liszt Sonata in Madrid
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Tuesday 17 November 1966 in the Auditorio Ministerio, Madrid. Chopin's four Ballades and Liszt's Sonata plus the Mephisto Waltz. (The concert was reviewed in ABC on 19.11.66). 'He has an enviable international career and possesses - as a fundamental virtue - a powerful sound. But this power is not an enemy of the quality of sound. Last September in San Sebastian (on the northern coast, about 14 miles from Fuenterrabia where Jorge lived), he was in extraordinary form playing Rachmaninov's 2nd concerto. He is a pianist more for Liszt than for Chopin, more Eagle than Nightingale; more capable of turning his piano into a huge orchestra than an instrument for small salons; 'de encender el entusiasmo en duelo con nutrida formación sinfónica, antes que comovermos con un claroscuro', '[more able] to fire enthusiasm in a duel with a large symphony orchestra, than deal with chiaroscuro'.
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News of the death of pianist Enrique Aroca Aguado (18 November 1966) prevented the reviewer Antonio Fernandez-Cid from commenting on the second half (Liszt), but he suspected it would be much better than what he did hear (Chopin). He found two faults in particular, which he judged very serious: mannered phrasing and 'plenitudes que desquician' (unsettling fulness/loudness/fortissimo?) The Ballades abound in moments of tenderness and delicacy, but bravura seemed to take over. Abusive rallentandos, far too forceful an attack in sections of the 2nd, far too much broadening of the main melody the 1st, affectation in the phrase that opens the 3rd. No one can argue with the needs for rubato in Chopin but it must not lead to an imbalance. 'Bolet is a magnificent pianist, I just think it wasn't his night.'
Alfred Brendel on Liszt's Sonata
From a masterclass on Liszt's Sonata with Alfred Brendel. It was recorded in the Amaryllis Fleming Concert Hall at the Royal College of Music, London on 14 November 2011. He explains about the orchestration of the sonata by Hungarian composer Leó Weiner (1885-1960).
Here it is performed by the North Hungarian Symphony Orchestra, Miskolc conducted by László Kovács.
