Sunset ChamberFest’s Mini Cello Festival and Mike Kaufman Discusses Working with Éric Tanguy
Sunset ChamberFest’s Director Mike Kaufman on Sunset ChamberFest 2021’s Mini Cello Festival
‘After the Piatigorsky International Cello Festival was cancelled in 2020, cellists were really disappointed. For us, this is really the best thing that happens in LA every four years. So I chose to have a mini-cello festival as part of Sunset ChamberFest in 2021, dedicating the first two programmes to the Piatigorsky Festival and its founder, Ralph Kirshbaum. The three pieces on the first program are centred around the cello. Spirales is a virtuoso piece which covers the length of the fingerboard at breakneck speeds. Reena Esmail’s piece Zeher is a string quartet that features a cello solo throughout, expressing pain, frustration, and other emotions of the composer as she battled a severe throat infection. I was taken by this piece immediately when I heard it. Even more so, I knew that Yoshi Masuda had to be the cellist to play it. I’ve never heard a piece before that more perfectly matched his playing! Triptych by Mustonen is a piece that was originally written for three cellists, including two of my all-time favorites—Steven Isserlis and Steve Doane (my former teacher). As soon as it was legal to perform (back in 2014), I played it with two members of my quintet SAKURA. So far, we’ve played it with three slightly different groups of cellists, but it always presents the same challenges. Intonation is particularly difficult since the piece is very triadic. We decided to play it again, this time to make a recording. But it honestly feels like learning a new piece each time we play it.
On Working With Éric Tanguy
The first time I was introduced to Éric Tanguy’s music was back in 2015 when Jonathan Dormand (Verona Quartet) played his solo cello piece, Rising. He’d written it for a competition that had been cancelled. The following year, I played his Sonata for violin and cello and I got to work with him this time. He was very friendly and enthusiastic, but kept asking us to play his (impossibly fast piece) a little faster than we were. It is a particularly hard piece because of the irregular rhythms and the sheer speed, but he loves music to sound on the edge!
After the festival ended, Éric sent me a piece called Spirales for cello and piano. I played through it a bit, but realized pretty quickly that it was way too difficult to learn casually. So fast-forward to this year, I noticed that it worked perfectly with the programming of the festival, so I decided to push myself to finally learn it properly!
After one rehearsal with Brendan, we had a session with Éric and the first thing he told us to do was to keep the tempo up! After a grueling coaching where he wanted us to play more and more passionately, faster and faster, we decided to play the piece all the way through once more. After about 30 seconds, he stopped us. He said “For most cellists, the tempo marking I wrote is too fast, but it seems easy for you. So why don’t you try to play it faster?”’