It’s very cold in Paris on this Friday in February. I had been expecting to meet Xavier de Maistre in a Paris bistrot over a hot coffee, but we’ve had to content ourselves with a remote conversation, with a small screen interposed between us. He’s between trips and his diary is “constrained”, as they say, but still, he’s making himself fully available to me.
He seems surprised to see me – the last time we saw each other in the flesh was in another life and on a day that no-one in France can forget: 7th January 2015, the blood-stained day of the Charlie Hebdo attacks. That evening, de Maistre gave the French premiere of Toshio Hosokawa’s Harp Concerto in the Paris Auditorium of Radio France, brand new at the time. We recall the intense emotion of the musicians and the audience, the strange atmosphere of that concert and the dinner near the Maison de la Radio, where no-one dared breathe a word about the tragedy of the day, but where a few gags and some exchanged laughter had eventually relaxed the atmosphere.
The years have weighed lightly on this permanently youthful man, who in the meantime has passed 50 – an intensive sporting regimen appears to have preserved him from the ravages of age. When I ask de Maistre about what motivated him, as a young boy, to choose the harp, the stereotypical instrument of choice for young girls of respectable families, he answers: “I wanted a distinctive instrument, one that was not as common as the piano or the violin. The harp served that purpose.”
Young harpists do nonetheless have to contend with the instrument’s awkwardness, being bulky and difficult to transport. “At the start of my career, I used to travel with my own harp, but in the end, I’ve given that up. Like pianists, I rely on the instruments provided for me. One gets more or less pleasant surprises, but the great majority of orchestras have renewed their stock of instruments and the harps I play are of very good quality. I’ve only had one bad experience recently, in Yerevan, where the strings were nylon. Now that one was really tough!”
I remember the sensation that de Maistre caused by being appointed, at just 22, as principal harp of the Wiener Philharmoniker – two years after his compatriot Marie-Pierre Langlamet was appointed to the same post at the Berlin Phil. I ask if the reputation of the “French School” of harpists more than just a legend? “The tradition of French harp-playing predates the figures of Lily Laskine or Marielle Nordmann – and besides, they never taught much nor did they have careers abroad. You have to go back to Nicolas-Charles Bochsa and François-Joseph Nadermann at the start of the 19th century. For me, the reference as far as sound goes is Marcel Grandjany. But for me, the French uniqueness has gradually disappeared, not least because French harpists have spread all over the world; they teach a lot in Asia. Fifty years ago, we French held all the posts and won all the prizes in competitions; now we’ve largely been overtaken by the Chinese and Asians in general.” So that’s setting the record straight!
On that note, let’s move on to the subject of Asian audiences, starting with the programmes that de Maistre will be performing in Singapore in May. “I’m playing Ginastera’s Harp Concerto 25 times this season!” I find myself wondering who, other than harpists, still remembers the name of Alberto Ginastera, the Argentine composer who died in 1983 in Geneva, where he had been living since 1971 with his second wife, cellist Aurora Natola. I relate to an amused de Maistre my memories of the concerts of the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande where Ginastera’s widow was energetically lobbying Geneva high society on behalf of her husband’s works. “But his Harp Concerto is very interesting because it goes against the image of the harp as a romantic salon instrument. The work is very percussive; it mixes several typically South American rhythms with very energetic orchestration. I love playing it and the public always likes it too.”
“I also like his Variaciones Concertantes for harp; he’s really a composer whose work should be played more often.” Is that because he’s exotic, or Latino, I ask. Isn’t it rather reductive to pigeonhole him with his South American origins? “Of course. But like other South American composers, it’s really interesting when he focuses on his roots. In a programme of South American songs that I created recently with Rolando Villazón, you sometimes get the impression that Latin American composers want to erase or apologise for their roots, to write ‘serious’ music like the German Romantics. And that doesn’t always work so well – whereas when they sing ‘within their family tree’, they can open up wide musical horizons, rarely experienced.”
Say what you like, though, the concerto repertoire for the harp is sorely limited. Can a soloist with such an international reputation keep touring with the same works? Without question, de Maistre confirms that “in the case of the harp, it’s absolutely essential that we broaden the repertoire. When I quit the Wiener Philharmoniker to take up a solo career, everyone warned me: agents and record labels were wondering how they would be able to ‘sell’ a harpist. I started off by making a large number of transcriptions, but later on, I discovered a lot of works like the concerto by Alexander Mosolov, which I recorded and which had never been played.”
I confess that I can’t imagine that Mosolov – famous for his work depicting a Soviet iron foundry – composing fine embroidery for the harp, but apparently I’m going to have to revise my judgement. I congratulate de Maistre on bringing unknown repertoire back to life, but he wants to go further: “the reputation I’ve acquired means that I can now approach and solicit the greatest composers of our era. You are well aware that composing new works today doesn’t happen on its own – it relies on the commitment of institutions and on the reputation of composers and their performers. For me, it’s still an obstacle course: sometimes, you have to wait three or four years to get a new concerto. To that, add the fact that many composers are frightened of the harp and think that if they accept a commission, it will take three times as long as a piano concerto.”
“Personally, I’ve been lucky, for example with Kaija Saariaho: six orchestras got together to create the commission, and I’ve played the work fifteen times. Last January, at the Maison de la Radio in Paris, I gave the world premiere of a concerto by Peter Eötvös, who gifted me a fantastic piece that puts the harp into pride of place. But the exercise isn’t always as straightforward.”
It’s often said that European audiences are shy of contemporary music. Are Asian audiences more receptive? “It’s meaningless to generalise about ‘Asian audiences’. There’s little in common between the Japanese audience (very educated, very reserved) and China, where increasingly large audiences are in process of discovering so-called classical music at a bewildering speed, in halls that have just been built, in an atmosphere that’s highly competitive amongst the youngest performers. For seasoned performers, it can be a real challenge to capture their ears and their attention.”
I imagine that it’s different again in Singapore, where there’s a real tradition and enthusiasm for music. Xavier agrees: “It’s my second visit to Singapore with the orchestra. Having said that, the chamber recital will be a first for me. I’ve put together a programme in the shape of a ‘best of’ what I know and love to play: transcriptions (Smetana’s Vltava, Debussy’s Clair de Lune, Granados pieces, etc.) and the classics of the harp, like Fauré’s Impromptu, and a very beautiful piece by Henriette Renié, who was a great harp virtuoso and who composed all her works before her 25th birthday.”
Given the chance, we’d have a great deal more to discuss. I know that de Maistre has to leave shortly to resume his travels, but I don’t want to let him leave without asking him about his experience passing on knowledge to the next generation. Does he want to leave a legacy, to train disciples? I already know part of the answer: “I teach at the Hamburg Hochschule twice per month, to a select number of young musicians. I have some extraordinary students who come from very different backgrounds. I don’t necessarily want to train ‘disciples’, and the last thing I would want to do is to create clones of myself. Rather, I want to help young musicians develop their potential and find their own identity.”
Xavier de Maistre’s solo recital in Singapore is on 22nd May, and he performs the Ginastera Harp Concerto with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra on 25th May.
Translated from French by David Karlin.
This article was sponsored by the Singapore Symphony Orchestra.
