Jorge Bolet
1970-75
There seems to be a gap in the record of concerts in Britain during the period of roughly 1967-74, though further newspaper archival research may change this.
But across the Atlantic, Bolet was finally making real progress, and the crucial period of the early 1970s can perhaps be regarded as the most significant turning point in his career. It all started in Hunter College...
Hunter College 1970
In 1970 he gave a recital at Hunter College, New York City on 3 October. The concert was recorded by the International Piano Library, a gala benefit for the Library which had been vandalised.
Harold Schonberg for The New York Times, 27 Sept.1970 gave this report: On Saturday evening at Hunter College, the International Piano Library is sponsoring a benefit for itself with 10 pianists. Several months ago it was robbed; thieves broke in. ‘What they did not find was money. The IPL has always subsisted on a diet of dandelions and blue-eyed scallops. The baffled thieves instead found $200,000 of rare piano records or rolls. In fury they set fire to the IPL.’
The head of the archive Gregor Benko found that many pianists were sympathetic but, like Chilean maestro Claudio Arrau and others, were playing thousands of miles ways on 3 October. ‘He also found that some pianists, especially those concentrating on virtuoso romantic literature, regard each other, if not exactly the way Golda Meir regards Gamal Abdul Nasser, then something the way Elizabeth I viewed Philip of Spain or Arturo Toscanini regarded Serge Koussevitzky. And vice versa. Fernando Valenti, Jesús María Sanromá, Earl Wild, Bruce Hungerford, Ivan Davis, Alicia de Larrocha (president), Jorge Bolet and the great Brazilian first lady of the piano Guiomar Novaes did play.
Francis Crociata takes up the story: 'And, as an afterthought, Bolet [was invited], for Benko had never heard him play and had barely heard of him. Jorge recognized the concert as the chance of his lifetime to be heard in the right context and he made the most of it. (...) The final two decades of Bolet’s life, leaving aside illness and a few bumps in the road pertaining to commercial recording, would be good years. From then to the end Jorge had all he ever really wanted.'
At the concert were four Steinways and four Baldwins. 'The Library 'was not out to make enemies'. Guiomar Novaes the grande dame of the keyboard, coaxed delicate tones from the Gottschalk's Variations on the Brazilian anthem. 'Dare one say who made the best impression? Okay pin me to
the wall, and I will nominate Mr Bolet for his absolutely transcendent performances of a pair of Liszt operatic paraphrases (on Donizetti's Lucia di Lamermoor & Verdi's Rigoletto).
David Saperton, Bolet’s teacher between 1927 and 1934 died on 5 July, 1970 in Baltimore, at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. His address was given as 344 W72 Street, New York City.
Giovanni Sgambati, 1971
Giovanni Sgambati (1841-1914) was one of the few 19th century Italian composers to concentrate on concert rather than operatic music.
Gregor Benko says that Bolet learned Sgambati’s Concerto in G minor (1878-80) at the behest of Dr. Frank Cooper, who was then associated with Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana. Frank Cooper sponsored a festival of Romantic music there for ten years. ‘Cooper had owned the score of the Sgambati and loved the piece, and he convinced Jorge to learn it (a somewhat difficult task, as Bolet was not anxious to learn new works). His initial performance of it was at the Romantic Festival at Butler University on May 19, 1971, with the Louisville Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jorge Mester. I was there and it was a great success indeed in every way.’
'Sgambati's 'massive three-movement Piano Concerto in G minor from 1880 might be described as a hybrid that fuses the similarly scaled Brahms D minor concerto with piano writing marked by Lisztian bravura. Imagine Liszt reworking the echt-Hungarian finale of Brahms’ Violin Concerto for piano on his own stylistic terms, and you’ll get an idea of what Sgambati’s third movement sounds like. Similarly, the grandiose first movement owes much of its existence to the arpeggiated flourishes in Beethoven’s Emperor concerto first movement and motives from Liszt’s Hungarian Fantasy.' (Jed Distler)
Bolet marked the concerto in his date book for Wednesday,
1 December 1971, a performance with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra.
RCA
His career is making real progress now as he signs a contract with RCA, but the matter is complicated. ‘RCA Records has signed pianist Jorge Bolet to a long-term contract. The announcement was made by R. Peter Munves who said: “Bolet is recognised by the musical world as one of the foremost pianists of our time.” Bolet will make his first recordings for RCA Red Seal in August in RCA’s Studio A in New York.’ (Billboard, 1 July, 1972 )
But this project fell through. A master-tape of an initial recording of works by Liszt was made but never issued.
Francis Crociata explains – ‘The reason the master-tape [which was finally issued on CD in 2001 by RCA as Bolet Rediscovered] languished on the shelf for thirty years was simple: R. Peter Munves left as head of the classical division at RCA. His successor [Thomas Z. Shepard] scrapped extensive planned future recording projects of two notable artists then on the RCA roster, Earl Wild and Jorge Bolet.
'On the schedule for Bolet were six solo discs devoted to Rachmaninoff, Brahms, Chopin, Schumann, Mendelssohn and Liszt and a seventh for which repertory had not yet been decided...and the heart of Jorge's concerto repertory was to be recorded with [Mexican conductor Eduardo] Mata and the Dallas Symphony. Much of that project was reassigned to the then new-star on RCA's horizon, Tedd Joselson. The impromptu Tannhäuser Overture filled a spot on the disc which was reserved for the Norma Fantasy, which Jorge hadn't learned (and didn't like) and would not until the 1987-88 season,
if then.
'The most important and unfortunate aspect of Bolet’s RCA experience was its abrupt end, suddenly quashed when he was at the height of his powers and playing as wonderfully as he ever could.'
“Where have you been, where were you?”
One of the most important articles on Bolet appeared in 1973, written by John Gruen for The New York Times, Sunday, 28 January. The newspaper headline takes as its starting point the (seemingly) sudden emergence of the pianist.
The article also contains a striking character study. ‘To sit in a desperately cheerful New York hotel room with Jorge Bolet is to know the meaning of absolute contradiction. The Cuban-born pianist is simply too imposing and disquieting a figure to meld easily with screaming red-and-orange curtains, and wildly patterned bedspreads... He demands a far more austere setting, possibly a sombre Buñuel set with dark, musty wall-hangings, shadows, chandeliers, sinister rugs... In a way he recalls characters out of Poe and Hawthorne.'
Edgar Allan Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher (Mario Jodra)
South Africa 1973
The Rand Daily Mail (17 May 1973) states that Jorge had changed the programmes for his Pretoria and Johannesburg recitals, at the suggestion of friends assisting him in his South African tour. They wanted more Liszt, and he also ditched the Spanish Rhapsody for Tannhäuser Overture.
In a piece by Joe Sack in the same paper on 23 May, we are told that 'The famous Bolet brothers will both be in South Africa this year but Jorge on a recital and concerto tour, will leave the Rand just before Alberto arrives in July.' (Witwatersrand ["white waters' ridge" in English, rand being the Afrikaans word for 'ridge'], the ridge upon which Johannesburg is built and where most of South Africa's gold deposits were found.)
Jorge had brought a battery of cameras and telephoto lenses. 'With these I hope to get colour slides
of the animal life in the Kruger National Park. and when I leave here in the wild life park near Nairobi.'
Friday 25 May: lunchtime all-Liszt recital in Pretoria at the Musaion (concert hall of the University).
Sunday 27 May: recital Johannesburg Civic Theatre 3pm. He will also perform in Durban (4/5 June) and Cape Town (7).
Jorge plays the Grieg concerto with the SABC orchestra in Johannesburg City Hall on May 29 and 30. Edgar Cree conducted Nielsen's third symphony after the interval.
Bill Brower in The Sunday Times (Johannesburg), 27 May 1973 said that today wasn't his cup of Sunday afternoon tea. Brahms' Sonata in F minor Op. 5, 'a complex and perplexing gambit, prolific in its technical demands, which were marvellously met but it lacked the [British pianist John] Ogdon hand of gentleness. I longed for a singing piano string, not merely exploding cascades of tonal dynamite. Liszt filled the second half, an hour almost totally devoid of human feeling. Gargantuan effort was there in abundance... What was missing for me were the unfathomable depths which no human accomplishment or instrumental arrangement can plumb, as for example, in The Art of Fugue or the Grosse Fugue. I suppose when you climb Everest, the feelings do become numb.'
25 February, 1974 at Carnegie Hall
'Stung by years of neglect, Bolet roared to the heavens –and the microphones were there to witness it.'
The most important event, conceivably, in his career awaited Jorge in February in that battleground of the pianistic giants, Carnegie Hall. He'd played there before, quite a few times in fact, but 25 February, on a Tuesday evening at half past eight in the evening, turned out to be just a little different.
It was a courageous and unforgettable programme of mammoth transcriptions - three waltzes by Johann Strauss II, dished up by Carl Tausig and A.Schulz-Evler - and ending with Liszt’s version of t
he Overture to Tannhäuser, Bolet piling Pelion upon Ossa in the incremental programme (as one
critic put it).
*Pelion and Ossa are two mountains in Thessaly, in northern Greece, and the phrase alludes to Greek mythology: two giants, Otus and Ephialtes, tried to pile Pelion and Ossa on Olympus in order to reach the gods and overthrow them.*
Somehow an original composition - Chopin’s Preludes Op.28 - got into the mix!
'I am big, it's just that the public has now got me', Bolet might have said, adapting a famous line from Sunset Boulevard.
“Sometimes lion, sometimes musician...”
On Sunday, 23 February, 1975 there was a recital in the Grote Zaal of the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam.
Het Parool reports that the pianist had brought a Bechstein from Germany, complete with tuner.
[Of interest is that Jorge played Chopin's Barcarolle, a work which does not seems to feature as much as it should in his repertory, one he has played beautifully on record for DECCA in the 1980s.]
The reviewer Rutger Schoute thought 'the storm passage in the Barcarolle churned up the Venetian waters as if Chopin had imagined wind force 8 or 9'. (De „storm"-pasage in de Barcarolle joeg bijvoorbeeld de Venetiaanse wateren op alsof Chopin an windkracht 8 of 9 had gedacht.)
'The technical achievements of this instrumentalist border on the unbelievable,' states the critic of the NRC Handelsblad in a review headed: 'Jorge Bolet: soms leeuw, soms musicus' (sometimes lion, sometimes musician)
Eleazar de Carvalho, Brazilian maestro
On 19 and 21 September 1975, Bolet played Rachmaninoff's Paganini Variations, with OSESP (Orquestra Sinfônica do Estado de São Paulo) under Gerard Devos in the Teatro Municipal de São Paulo, Brazil, as part of a series of Concertos Matutinos e Noturnos (Morning & Evening Concerts).
In 1973, after a break of more than five years, that orchestra had undergone a restructuring, led by the conductor Eleazar de Carvalho (1912-96). The rebirth of the orchestra is inseparable from the Festival de Campos de Jordão Winter Festival (July in the southern hemisphere), conceived by Eleazar along the lines of the Tanglewood Summer Festival (Massachusetts, USA), which he knew well.
He and Jorge had worked together, for example in Prokofiev's second concerto on Sunday, 5 August 1951 at Tanglewood with the Boston Symphony. Jorge was also to appear at that Winter Festival.
Music in the mountains
Música nas Montanhas. Campos do Jordão is a municipality
in the state of São Paulo in Brazil. The city, due to its elevation, is relatively cold by Brazilian standards. The winter was normally the dry season and the colder weather allowed for warm fireplaces and winter foods such as fondue, soups and hot chocolate. The city's attractions throughout the year included German and Swiss food and a cable car. Polish architect George Przirembel designed the concert hall Palácio Boa Vista, which was inspired by the English neo-gothic style.
Jorge would perform at the Winter Festival in July 1978.