Sgambati

Mattheus Smits recalls: 'After finishing my professional music education in Holland, I decided to continue my piano studies with a private teacher. Thanks to his son Erik Ligtelijn, I came in touch with Johan Ligtelijn who taught privately in Amsterdam in his house next to the Concertgebouw.  After finishing his pianos tudies in Amsterdam, Johan Ligtelijn had studied with Walter Gieseking in Hanover and later in Wiesbaden. Johan Ligtelijn also studied privately with the Liszt student Frederic Lamond who lived in Holland during the time that he was a teacher in the conservatory in The Hague.

In the spring of 1974 I traveled to Arnhem to hear a pianist whom I had never heard of:Jorge Bolet. After the concert I was completely flabbergasted. At my first lesson with Johan Ligtelijn after this concert I told him that I had gone to hear Jorge Bolet and that he had blown me away. To my big surprise, Johan Ligtelijn told me that he knew him well.  He had been in the audience when Jorge made his debut in Amsterdam and was most impressed.

Johan Ligtelijn told me that his brother Henri Ligtelijn emigrated to the USA in 1950 and became Jorge's neighbour in Palo Alto.  As Henri Ligtelijn had a travel agency he organised all the tours for Jorge. As Jorge played in Holland frequently in the 1960s, these concerts were always Ligtelijn family reunions. Johan Ligtelijn told me I should meet Jorge with his introduction in the autumn of 1974 when he was having his recital in the main hall of the Concertgebouw, his first after an absence of 15 years.

So the day before that concert I went to the Park Hotel in Amsterdam and saw Jorge sitting in the lounge with a man who turned out to be Tex [Compton], and another gentleman who turned out to be [the impresario with the de Koos agency] Sylvio Samama.  When I told Jorge that I happened to be a student of Johan Ligtelijn, he jumped out of his chair and gave me a big hug. He immediately asked me to sit down, ordered coffee and anything else for me and started talking. We had a nice conversation and Jorge was completely surprised that a 20 year old owned an original score of the Sgambati concerto (Jorge was having to use xerox copies) and that this 20 year old could tell him exactly were he had made cuts and changes in Arnhem some month before.

This meeting, without doubt, sealed our friendship till the moment he left all of us behind.