Jorge Bolet
Australia 1977
On 16 July, Jorge arrived in the morning in Sydney on
a Qantas flight from San Francisco via Honolulu, then continued immediately on to Adelaide, arriving at five o'clock in the evening.
His itinerary included Adelaide Town Hall, Launceston, Melbourne, (Rachmaninoff's second concerto with Willem van Otterloo), Geelong, Broken Hill - an inland mining city in the far west of outback New South Wales, near the border with South Australia - then on to Sydney. On Monday, 8 August there was a recital at Sydney Opera House. This will have been the first time Jorge played in this iconic building. “The sun did not know how beautiful her light was, until she saw it reflected on this building.” (Louis Kahn)
August “Downunder”
A rail journey took him to Newcastle; then by road to Wollongong for a recital in the Town Hall.
On 17-24 August 1977, he was back in Sydney Opera House with Willem van Otterloo for Brahms Concerto No.2 in B flat and Rachmaninoff Paganini Variations, depending on Red/Blue series. Bruckner's third symphony was performed in the Red series. 'Some very substantial music appeared in concerts last week.' (Australian Jewish News)
Brisbane, Toowoomba, Adelaide, and then a flight across to Western Australia (Perth) on Ansett, where he gave a recital on 6 September in Perth Concert Hall. This was followed on 9/10 (Friday/Saturday) with a concert featuring West Australian SO & Elyakum Shapirra (Rachmaninoff's third concerto in D minor).
The Sydney Morning Herald 11 September 1977 had reported of the Rachmaninoff Paganini Variations: 'Elegant, stylish, pointillist in precision - but always rather cool, as of a man playing
a very long way within himself.'
On 11 September he departed for Sydney by air, then Qantas flight to back to San Francisco.
Jorge is said to be accompanied throughout by his personal business manager (actually his life partner) Houston [Tex] L. Compton. The promotional materials have this amusing detail:
Mr Bolet is American, but for publicity purposes Cuban-American.
Back in the northern hemisphere, on Sunday 2 October 1977 he played at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, in an afternoon recital. Beethoven, Schumann, Liszt.
Chopin/Godowsky, Études & Waltzes
Though not well attended, the 17 February 1977 recital in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London proved very fortuitous for Bolet’s recording career. The young and talented producer Peter Wadland persuaded Ray Ware (of the L'Oiseau-Lyre/ DECCA label) to meet Jorge for lunch.
The result was the Chopin/Godowsky Etudes & Waltzes disc, which had originally been promised to the International Piano Library. It was recorded in Kingsway Hall, London on the 3 & 4 October, 1977.
Jorge had given a recital in the Queen Elizabeth Hall the day before the sessions, Sunday, 2 October, which included Beethoven's Sonata No. 23 Op. 57 Appassionata, Schumann's Carnaval & Liszt's Dante Sonata.
Peter Wadland, Bolet's producer for DECCA
‘I remember the Queen Elizabeth Hall being almost empty, with perhaps as few as 200 people there (after all there had been no publicity) but when it came to the end there was a standing ovation— not only from the audience but also from all the critics—something I have never witnessed before or since. I persuaded Ray Ware, then Label Manager of L'Oiseau-Lyre to meet Jorge and myself for lunch. I was surprised that Jorge seemed slightly mistrustful of our intentions. He had, after all, not had wonderful experiences with record companies, and when
I proposed a record of Godowsky transcriptions, he explained that he had already promised this project to the International Piano Library label. Finally (as much as I have enormous admiration for the recordings of the IPL), I was able to persuade him to make this record for L'Oiseau-Lyre, and the sessions took place on October 3rd and 4th, 1977, at Kingsway Hall.’
Gramophone January 1991.
Peter Wadland (1946-1992) is remembered also for producing recordings of Mozart and Haydn symphonies in ground-breaking period-practice' performances: a chance meeting with scholar and musician Christopher Hogwood had led to the foundation of the Academy of Ancient Music, and 'one of the most successful recording partnerships of the post-war years'. (James Jolly)
Return to the Curtis Institute
Jorge left Bloomington, Indiana, having accepted the post of Head of Piano at Curtis in June 1977. The minutes of the Board of Trustees of Indiana University, 17 June 1977, state under Resignations and Expirations of Appointments: ‘Jorge Bolet , Professor of Music in the School
of Music, effective May 1977 to accept a position with the Curtis Institute of Music.’
He was appointed Head of Piano at Curtis by John de Lancie, and was to remain in the post
until 1986. His address while in Philadelphia was Apt. 15B, Wanamaker House, 20th and Walnut Streets. He also kept an apartment in New York City, at 1365, York Ave on the East Side, between E72 & E73 streets (as well as his home in Mountain View, California).
Brazil & Argentina 1978
In July there was a trip to Brazil for concerts. He took an evening American Airlines flight on Monday 3, arriving Tuesday morning in Rio de Janeiro.
First off was a recital on Thursday 6 July in the Sala Cecilia Meireles, Largo do Lapa, Rio de Janeiro at 9pm. This was a concert dedicated to Liszt and included Funerailles and the 12 Transcendental Etudes.
Ronaldo Miranda entitled his review in the Jornal do Brasil “Liszt Fulgurante” but Carlos Dantas in the Tribuna da Imprensa described Bolet - surprisingly - as 'mediocre, without the technique to match the composer...a pity'.
“He displayed a cold (not a Latin) temperament…”
Miranda claims incorrectly that this is Bolet's debut on a "carioca" [=Rio] stage, but in fact he had been there in late May/early June 1955. Though he was disappointed by the first half, in second - the Liszt Etudes - 'he said that the recital changed course radically'. Bolet displayed a cold (not a Latin) temperament [mostrava um temperamento frio (nada latino]. Technique was deslumbrante (dazzling), Mazeppa was a tour-de-force, and Miranda refers to 'the prodigious sound of Chasse-Neige [the final of the 12].
On Friday 7 July Jorge left for Campos do Jordão in the mountains, the 'Brazilian Switzerland'
and a recital there on Saturday 8th (Liszt's B minor Sonata, Petrarch Sonnets 47,104 and 123 and Reminiscences of Don Juan) in the Palacio Boa Vista, as part of the Winter Festival.
This happened to be the last time the Festival would be held in the Palacio Boa Vista; on 12 July, 1979, the new Auditorium was ready.
On Sunday 9 July he departed for São Paulo and on the 10th and 12th gave two recitals, the former in the Casa de Manchete, the latter in the Teatro Cultura Artistica. On Thursday 13 July 1978 he flew on American Airlines to Buenos Aires, Argentina.
(The World Cup football tournament had been played there in June. The English-language Buenos Aires Herald, under the courageous editorship of British journalist Robert Cox, had reported both on it as well as continuing to publish every case of a disappearance or murder - after the military took power on 24 March, 1976, - that was backed up with a complaint, such as a habeas corpus writ, lodged by relatives with the Judiciary. Cox expressed relief at the willingness shown by visiting foreign journalists there for the football to report on what was happening, on what was not being published in the local media. This forced the ruling military Junta to actively deny their own crimes.
(Luciana Bertoia, Buenos Aires Herald, 14 June 2018)
Brahms in Cleveland
11 August 1978, with The Cleveland Orchestra under Jerzy Semkow in Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat, Op.83 in the Blossom Music Centre, an outdoor amphitheatre at Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio - the summer home of The Cleveland Orchestra. Bolet had not played with this orchestra in 19 years. Fortunately, there is a recording, especially welcome as this major concerto of Jorge's repertoire was never recorded commercially.
The Piano Files (Mark Ainley, Vancouver) says of it: 'This August 11, 1978 performance with the Cleveland... finds the pianist playing with high-octane intensity and passion, together with the finesse and elegance for which he is justly celebrated.
' Always with that nth degree of refinement of nuance and masterful burnishing of melodic lines, we have here more of his innate searing passion and fiery temperament that seeps through, particularly in climactic chords that nevertheless retain their clarity of voicing, and inn some of the soaring phrasing (the end of the first movement, for example).'
Hamburg, 30 October 1979
'How shameful for the Hanseatic city that loves to be advertised as a cultural metropolis: the world-class Cuban pianist Jorge Bolet had to play here in front of a half-empty hall.'
'One was prepared for phenomenal virtuosity, since this piano titan (perhaps the only one) still has in his repertoire Leopold Godowsky's arrangements of Chopin, notorious for their diabolical technical finesse (die wegen ihrer diabolischen technischen Finessen berüchtigten). Bolet, a giant in stature, with the strength and tenderness of a magician in his ten fingers, also played Brahms magnificently. Liszt is his domain, and the audience understood at once that the [Liszt] Dante Fantasy offered them something perfect.'
Sabine Tomzig, Hamburger Abendblatt (31.10.1979)
Buenos Aires, 1979
Jorge had a recital at the Teatro Colón, Buenos Aires during the 1979 season (May- December), his only recital - as the editor of this website has been informed by the archivist - in that famous theatre. That such a musical artist only performed once in this great theatre is very surprising. The programme included Liszt's Sonata and the 12 Transcendental Études.
(He had also given performances in Buenos Aires in July, 1978.)
In the 1979 season of the Mozarteum, pianists Alicia de Larrocha - whom Jorge knew and admired, Nikita Magaloff and Roberto Szidon gave concerts (possibly all three at the Teatro Coliseo, in the Retiro district). The Arxiu Alicia de Larrocha website confirms that she played at the Coliseo (9pm) on 17 and 19 July 1979; she had come from concerts in Tel Aviv & Haifa, Israel (June), Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo and Campos do Jordâo, and would go on to New York.
Music & politics in Argentina
The journalist Jacobo Timerman was sent into exile at this time. He is most noted for his confronting and reporting the atrocities of the Argentine military regime's - erroneously termed - Dirty War (Guerra Sucia) during a period of widespread repression. Persecuted, tortured and imprisoned by the Argentine junta in the late 1970s, he was exiled in 1979 with his wife to Israel.
Journalist Uki Goñi has emphasised how the controversial term Guerra Sucia covers up the genocide. Partly to stop such creeping denialism, Argentina’s supreme court ruled in 2009 that the dictatorship’s killings between 1976 and 1983 constituted “crimes against humanity within the framework of [a] genocide”.
'During the almost constant political turmoil of the 1970s up to Raúl Alfonsín’s election in 1983, classical music in Buenos Aires was arguably one of the most stable domains of cultural life in Argentina.' (Esteban Buch, 2021)
'A high point of the period was the visit, organized in 1979 by the Mozarteum, of famous Argentine composer Alberto Ginastera, who by then was living in Switzerland, and who attended a concert of his music at the Colón and met privately in the Casa Rosada with General Videla. All this confirmed the Colón’s traditional status as Argentina’s Gran Teatro—the title of a 1979 novel by Manuel Mujica Lainez dedicated to Jeannette Arata de Erize, Ginastera, and choreographer Oscar Araiz—where economic and political elites could perform together the fiction of a nation united by the worship of high culture.'
(Esteban Buch, The Bomarzo Affair: Ópera, perversión y dictadura (2003).