Nelson Freire on Holland
Updated: Oct 18
6 October 1961
Musis Sacrum, Arnhem, Holland
Jorge Bolet gave a recital here for the first time.
Willem Boone write:
The Musis Sacrum (lit. 'sacred to the Muses'): 'My earliest memories of Nelson Freire [Brazilian pianist, Minas Gerais 1944 -Rio de Janeiro 2021] go back a long way. At 15 (in 1978), my interest in music, and the piano in particular, was just beginning to awaken. Near where I lived (Arnhem), there was a concert hall, Musis Sacrum, which offered a series of piano recitals, something quite rare for a provincial town. I insisted that my father let me go, and we heard five recitals by Jean Bernard Pommier, Daniel Wayenberg, Jorge Bolet, Jean Rodolphe Kars, and Nelson Freire. I particularly remember a dazzling performance of Carnaval and several Chopin works that he played in quick succession, so much so that I didn't quite recognize the Andante Spianato and Grande Polonaise brillante...'
Nelson Freire: 'In 1964, a close friend I had known during my studies in Vienna settled in The Hague. Her husband worked for Shell. Since it was financially difficult to travel to Brazil often, her house became a sort of pied-à-terre. I found the Netherlands very charming and exotic; it was quite different from what I knew. From 1972 onward, I played extensively in the Netherlands after receiving the Edison Prize for my recording of Chopin's Preludes. I performed all over the country. The concerts were organized by a well-known impresario at the time, De Koos. Some orchestras have disappeared now, but back then it was incredible to have so many orchestras and concert halls in such a small country. And the Dutch were surprised that I even knew places like Stadskanaal...' (a small village in the north of the country, WB).
[Willem Boone blog, 2007, www.pianistique.com]
And here is the young pianist playing a favourite piece of mine, though I know it mostly from the orchestral version. It was recorded in Munich in 1965.
As with Novaes, Bolet, Arrau, Argerich and others of Latin American origin, its intersting to examine the background.
Jed Distler writes:
Born on October 18, 1944, in the small town of Boa Esperança, Minas Gerais, Freire began to play by ear at the age of three on his mother’s upright piano before learning to read music. The family moved to Rio de Janeiro to further his studies. In 1957, at the age of 12, Freire entered the city’s first international piano competition, playing works of Chopin and Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto in front of a jury including Lili Kraus, Marguerite Long and his compatriot Guiomar Novaes, who would become a mentor. This led to his first commercial recording in the same year, in which the sheer musicality and breadth of Freire’s Chopin Fourth Ballade and First Scherzo belie his age. (1957)
Brazil’s president Juscelino Kubitschek [compare President Pedro Mont/ Arrau and Presudent Juan Peron/ Martha Argerich, see here and here] offered Freire a scholarship to study wherever he wanted. He chose Vienna, where he went at the age of 14 to work with Bruno Seidlhofer for two years and met another teenage piano prodigy, Martha Argerich, who would become his ideal duo partner and best friend for life.
Freire’s abilities bordered on the supernatural. For example, he learnt about the 1964 Vianna da Motta International Music Competition, Lisbon, at the 11th hour, and entered two days before it started. Carlos Seixas’s Keyboard Sonata in G minor was a required work for the preliminary rounds. ‘When I got there,’ Freire recalled, ‘I asked for the score of this sonata, and they gave it to me but thought I was mad. What’s more, when lots were drawn for the order of performance, I had to play first.’ Yet Freire sailed through the piece without mishap and ultimately shared first prize with Vladimir Kraniev. This led to many engagements and opportunities, including replacing Alexander Brailowsky for a 1965 Mexican tour, and learning Tchaikovsky’s Second Concerto in a fortnight to cover for an indisposed Shura Cherkassky in Germany.
…
In 1995, when asked if there is a typical style of Brazilian piano-playing, Freire said, ‘After soccer the piano is the second great love of Brazilians. But while Brazilian pianists have mostly worked in Europe and have certainly been deeply influenced by Europe, it is generally accepted that they have a certain rhythm, a kind of vibration that you don’t find elsewhere. For the same reason, some Brazilian pianists have inhibitions and inferiority complexes. They try to deny themselves by becoming more European than the Europeans!
• 1957 – Recognition aged 12
Having had lessons in Rio with Lúcia Branco (a student of Liszt pupil Arthur de Greef) and Nise Obino, wins prize at Rio de Janeiro competition, leading to first recording and scholarship.
Freire later credited Obino with rebuilding his technique from the beginning, including the position of his hands at the keyboard. He remembered her as the teacher who most changed his playing during childhood. His parents kept him in ordinary school, and he later recalled practising only a few hours a day instead of spending his childhood wholly at the piano.
pianistique.com adds:
I chose Vienna because I wanted to work with Bruno Seidlhofer, an Austrian pianist who was very well known in Latin America. I’d played for him in Rio. I set off on my own because my parents couldn’t go with me. I took the boat with Seidlhofer, who was returning home.
In Vienna, I was alone for the first time in my life. I was still quite young and didn’t know a word of German or anything about the city. I found out what it meant to be independant. Those two years were very important for my personal development. It was then that I met Martha Argerich. I didn’t do much work, though, and didn’t enter any competitions. I didn’t live up to expectations. Then the time came when the scholarship ended and I had to return home. Returning to Brazil wasn’t easy. At seventeen I was in the middle of an adolescent crisis, and I had to live with my family again after acquiring a taste for independance and living on my own. During the next year I entered a few competitions but never turned up on the day. Then in 1962 I was offered the opportunity of giving a concert in São Paulo. The concert was a big success and I recovered my enthusiasm and desire to play.
• 1964 – First prize aged 19
Victory at the Vianna da Motta International Music Competition, Lisbon, followed by LP recording for the Brazilian label Classic Riosom which can be heard on YouTube.
pianistique.com adds:
I walked off with the first prize! Things really changed for me after that. For six pleasant months I was asked to give a number of concerts in Austria, Portugese speaking Africa and Madeira.
But other countries were a closed book for me until early in 1965 I received a telegram from Brazil from Ernesto de Quesada, an old man who had been Arthur Rubinstein’s first agent and went on to found the Conciertos Daniel. We had never met, but he’d heard about me from a member of the Lisbon jury. In his telegram he proposed that I should give three concerts in Mexico as a last-minute replacement for Alexander Brailovsky That was my first contract. After that, I returned to Brazil in style, I did tours in Spain, Argentina, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, Peru and other countries. In short I started to earn a living. One day I was in Caracas when Martha Argerich’s agent contacted me and asked whether I would fill in for Shura Cherkassky and play Tchaikovsky’s Second Piano Concerto with the Bamberg Symphony Orchestra.
• 2001 – A recording rebirth
Signs with Decca, his first exclusive recording contract in more than 20 years. Remains with the label until end of career, a partnership that included winning Gramophone’s Recording of the Year in 2007 for his account of Brahms’s piano concertos.
Decca plays the same role it did with Jorge.
Nelson Freire lived in a house in Joá (specifically in the Joatinga area), a wealthy neighborhood in the West Zone of Rio de Janeiro.
He lived in a spacious mansion overlooking the beach that previously belonged to Brazilian actor Reginaldo Faria. The house famously accommodated four grand pianos and several dogs. Freire passed away at age 77 in November 2021 following a fall at this home.
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