A bag of New Zealand reviews
New Zealand Listener, 4 September 1964
A VERITABLE DYNAMO
Jorge Bolet, the pianist who begins his tour of New Zealand for the NZBC next week, is a man of great physical stamina. This is reflected in his playing: Press reviews consistently describe his performances as blazing, imposingly vigorous, masculine, virile. And he has been called “a veritable dynamo of power and feeling” (...)
Bolet is regarded as a specialist on that composer [Liszt]. At a Berlin recital in 1961 he was described by the German press as the successor to Liszt. The Berliner Morgenpost said: “Our point of view regarding Liszt has been a problematic one for decades, but Bolet has a solution for all problems. One agrees with him from the first note. The piano is never a percussion instrument with him. His hands seem to breathe like a voice and the in--strument sings’. A marvellous evening lifted the audience into ecstasy.”
Jorge Bolet will give concerts at Auckland (September 12). Hamilton (Sept. 15), Gisborne (Sept. 21), Wellington (Sept. 22). Timaru (Sept. 24), Christchurch (October 1), Wanganui (Oct. 3) and Nelson (Oct 6); and he will appear with the NZBC Symphony Orchestra at Wel--lington (Sept. 17). Palmerston North (Sept. 19). Christchurch (Sept. 26). Dunedin (Sept. 29), and Wellington (Oct. 8). The first broadcast of his performances will be on September 12 at 9.00 p.m. over all YCs.
Bruce Mason, New Zealand Listener (9 October 1964)
I think this review is of the recital on 22 September 1964
Wellington Town Hall
Recital incl. Schumann Fantasy, Beethoven, Appassionata, 7 Transcendental Studies by Liszt
Before Jorge Bolet came on stage for his recital last week, I wondered idly what, say, a performer on the Malayan nose-flute who had never heard Western music, would make of the auspices before us. A stage bare but for some gigantic bouquets of flowers, centre this huge shiny black monster with a gaping lid like a shark’s maw, equipped with 90-odd black and white teeth: who could catch and subdue the thing, who make it discourse? The nineteenth century marshalled a squad of leonine Orphei to woo the beast, imperial tamers like Paderewski and Anton Rubinstein; a few weeks ago, we saw the last of this seigniorial line in Arthur Rubinstein.
But Jorge Bolet, as I realized at the end of the recital, is not of this line at all. He is the Commando Colonel of the keyboard, and the images he evokes in me are all military. Playing an entirely nineteenth-century programme he seemed to say that public music is a campaign, a matter of careful strategy, successful siege and the combined operation and early preparations seem to demand that the music be brain-washed before any statement can be made. The piano is not merely tamed but cowed: ‘Down. sir, or I’ll have Queen’s regs on you!”
His account of seven Liszt Transcendental Studies ,only two of which ] had heard before, was indeed titanic – (I now concede the justice of the NZBC publicity tag) but I hazard that no one who had not fought through the Second World War. as Bolet has with distinction, would have played them in quite this way. This was post-1945 playing, ruthlessly efficient, with an armoury of effects honed and polished to the last demisemiquaver, his fortes prolonged barrages. his pianos the coldest, iciest steel.
The virtues of this playing are accuracy, without which no Liszt at all - transcendental or otherwise, brilliance, and where glitter is not possible, plainness, to the point of severity. You see, I want to make it clear that I am not just being puppish, because the Beethoven Appassionata was a plain and deeply honest account; every note was there, every dynamic change observed. If no poetry, then equally, no tricks; if no finesse. then no false heroics, either. I confess that I found no trace of charm in the playing nor any evidence of that love of the craft that makes Rubinstein’s concert so warmly memorable.
I would find it hard to say whether Bolet really liked playing the piano at all. But there is a job to be done. So many thousand notes to dispatch by the quickest route and one could nowhere fault his supply lines Let me acknowledge the huge energy of the man and a brilliance of tone in the Liszt such as ] don't think I have ever heard. If this amounts to music. if this is what you want, then Bolet surely is your man.
8 October 1964
Wellington Town Hall, New Zealand
"Fountains of Rome" Respighi
Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 16 Prokofiev
Symphony No. 4 in E Minor. Op. 98 Brahms
with conductor Juan Matteucci
New Zealand Listener 23 October 1964
Bruce Mason
The Prokofiev Concerto No. 2 in G minor received the performance it deserved from Jorge Bolet. An avowedly student work, it showed, in passages of glittering asperity and lyrical fairy-tale episodes, the first statements of the distinctive sweet--sour idiom which was to receive full-scale definition in the justly famous third concerto. Bolet was fully equal to its prodigious technical demands, sending out cascades of notes at incredible velocity and evenness of tone. The splashy exuberant cadenza, which must have raised the hair on the necks of its first listeners in the St Petersburg of 1913, was performed by Bolet with magnificently casual bravura. I will refer to his lapse of memory in the last movement only because of the taste and skill with which he coped with it. Instead of fumbling around, vamping till ready as it were (and we would not have known, after all) he simply stopped. rose, went to Matteucci’s score, glanced at it, returned, resumed. No fuss from him, no anxiety from us.
I could not help recalling the celebrated story of Victor Borge in the davs when he was on the concert platform. Finding that the orchestra was winning, he went to the conductor’s desk, turned back the score 10 pages, and started again. The audience, convulsed, launched him on his career as a musical comedian. If there is no sign of Bolet turning into a comedian, I would still like to applaud his honesty. The Prokofiev revealed him at his best: this dry Russian glitter seems peculiarly his world.
New Zealand Listener 2 October 1964
Diana Farmer
BRAVO FOR BOLET
You'll find him down the corridor,” I was told, “talking to Mr Matteucci.” Instead, I found Jorge Bolet alone, relaxed in an easy chair although, he said, feeling rather hot in spite of the heavy rain outside. “I’ve just been talking to your new conductor Juan Matteucci,” he said. “I was delighted to find him here; he’s a wonderful conductor. As I was just telling him, the two works I’m playing in my next concert are unusually difficult for me, because so often the conductor doesn’t know what I'm doing. But Matteucci understands what I mean every time. It’s a pleasure to work with a man like that.”
Visiting pianist Jorge Bolet is Cuban-born, but is a naturalized United States citizen who now lives in Spain, “‘almost on the frontier of France.” He had just arrived in Wellington from concerts in Auckland and Hamilton. “The Auckland concert went very well, I think. They have a wonderful hall there and the audience was very receptive, very enthusiastic. I find British audiences wonderful, and I include New Zealand in this.” Weren’t British audiences traditionally undemonstrative? "No," he said, “not undemonstrative. Audiences have different ways of showing their enthusiasm and approval. They don't all yell and holler! British audiences would be frightfully shocked if one of their number suddenly shouted Bravo! I was a member of an English audi--ence not long ago and I did shout out a lone Bravo! My neighbour turned to me with an amazed look – You know, sort of 'Where did this monster come from?' Strangely enough, the wildest audiences are German. It’s odd, isn’t it? You’d expect them to be sedate and proper, but in fact they’re absolutely wild, liable to do almost anything. I approve of this. If an audience is demonstrative it’s all to the good.
“I was a soloist with the Berlin Philharmonic not long ago. We were doing Prokofiev’s 2nd Piano Concerto, and at the conclusion of a very rousing movement, not at the end of the work, the audience burst into wild applause. This is quite unheard of in Germany, where they take their music very seriously. I prefer that to a pseudo-intellectual audience that is so concerned with appearing learned that its members wait about 10 seconds after I finish before applauding. This is to make sure that I have actually finished. Half-way through a piece in one performance, a woman yelled Bravo! It was quite accidental – a sort of involuntary reflex. She came backstage afterwards to apologize. I told her I’d been delighted. I had wished a dozen more had yelled Bravol”
The people touring with Mr Bolet describe him as “easy to work with one of the most punctual and obliging artists ever to come to New Zealand.” Over six feet tall, Bolet is often mistaken for a footballer or an advertising executive. “I guess I was just naturally blessed with good health,” he says. On another subject he comments: “I have very little patience with artists who are temperamental. Many of my colleagues, I know, are difficult to work with. This shows lack of discipline. You see, most of us show musical talent at a very early age. Parents of these child prodigies treat them as if they were made of fine bone china. They grow up into men and women who expect to be humoured, who still believe they have Mama and Papa to nurse their every whim. Do you know the only thing worse than a child prodigy? It’s a child prodigy’s mother. That’s a well-known and true saying among pianists.
Although Bolet first served in the Cuban Army and received Cuba’s highest military award, he ended the last war as a lieutenant in the United States Army. Now he speaks and looks like an American – an American with a Latin-style moustache. Because he has appeared with all the major orchestras in the United States, I asked Mr Bolet which had seemed to him the best. “There are no good or bad orchestras,” he said, "only good and bad conductors. I have heard some really good orchestras sound bad because the conductor was inadequate. On the other hand, a bad orchestra can be made to play well under a good conductor.”
During his term in the United States Army, Jorge Bolet conducted the first Japanese performance of The Mikado, in Tokyo. “Not only conducted,” he said. “I also had to find rehearsal rooms, chairs and stands, music for the orchestra and all the musicians It wasn’t exactly D’Oyly Carte, but it was quite a good show.” Between his frequent concert tours Bolet appears on television. “‘Television is very hard work,” he commented. “In Britain they keep everything simple. But in the United States you usually appear with a lot of other artists. There are endless rehearsals to get all the cues right. A television performance involves all sorts of technical and theatrical details which one just isn’t used to. I have so many cameras around me that I sometimes feel that if I lean too far to the left or right while playing I'll knock a lens out of one of the cameras. And television producers want such a variety of shots! You see I have rather a large bald spot on the top of my head? Well, once they assembled a television camera and lights directly above me. All they could see was a bright gleam from the top of my head. Finally, they sprayed it all over with some sort of black paint. There are so many distractions like this with television, it’s difficult to play as well as you would on stage.”
Jorge Bolet is a pianist only. He does not compose; he has done no further conducting since The Mikado He plays no other musical instrument. With his heavy concert schedule (over 50 concerts in Australia after his New Zealand tour) he does not have time. Does he like travelling so far from his home so often? “Not really. But then we never like doing the things we have to do. The man with the nine-to-five job always has the wanderlust, while we who have to travel dream about staying home.”
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