About four years ago, Alexander Warenberg (23) – winner of the Cello Biennale Competition in Amsterdam – was asked if he wanted to come to Italy with some musical friends for a few concerts. That summer he traveled with a cosmopolitan troupe to the rolling vineyards of Chianti: he knew the French-Russian pianist Nathalia Milstein (26) and the Israeli violinist Yamen Saadi (24) from his studies in Berlin, and as a child he worked with pedagogue Coosje. Wijzenbeek and her Fancy Fiddlers grew up with the Dutch violinist Shin Sihan (27) and altoist Takehiro Konoe (24) – their parents came from Korea, Indonesia and Japan. “We have different characters and backgrounds,” says Milstein, “But in music we noticed then and now that we can transcend those cultural boundaries.”
So, after their Italian experience, the five musicians decided to move on together and – as a reminder of where it started – to call themselves Chianti Ensemble. From Saturday they will tour the Netherlands with piano quintets by César Franck and Gabriel Fauré.
The unifying power of music certainly played a major role for Saadi, also politically and socially. He was born into an Arab family in Nazareth, Israel, a city with no classical tradition. When he saw a violinist on television as a child, he was determined to play that instrument. And he was lucky. A conservatory was established in Nazareth, an initiative of the American-Palestinian literary scholar Edward Said and the Argentine-Jewish conductor Daniel Barenboim.
We have different characters and backgrounds, but in music we noticed then and now that we can transcend those cultural boundaries
Natalia Milstein pianist
Already at the age of ten, Saadi auditioned for the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, also founded by those two men, in which Arabs and Jews make music together in order to achieve greater mutual understanding. Barenboim liked his playing, but the ensemble had an age limit of eighteen, so he was too young. “If it helps you,” said Saadi, “I’d like to tell everyone I’m twenty-one.” Barenboim could not withstand that witty answer. And so Saaidi was in the orchestra a year later. “There I discovered what music can achieve: how it teaches you to listen, how you get space to express yourself and how you give it to others. Through the music you stay in dialogue with each other. If the world worked like such an orchestra, we would be a lot better off.”
The three Dutch string players had that experience as children with Coosje Wijzenbeek’s Fancy Fiddlers. “She let us memorize all the pieces,” says Sihan, “so we wouldn’t focus on the desk but on each other.”
Warenberg: “Sometimes she even put our backs to each other, so that we had to listen more closely to each other. At school you often had in class that a class fell apart into islands of attention or distraction, but at Coosje everyone was always, as the English say, on the same page.”
Every now and then we play certain passages slower or softer and then suddenly a hidden chord or harmonic turn appears.
Alexander Warenberg cellist
Kanoe: “She managed to cultivate a natural bond between all the children. A legacy from which we are still reaping the benefits. Above all, Wijzenbeek taught us in the spirit of making music.”
In the coming weeks, the Chianti Ensemble will focus on piano quintets by two composers who gave color to Paris in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Milstein: „Franck’s music from 1879 is concrete, the sentences are clear, you could fill in words. But at the Second Piano Quintet from Fauré you sometimes don’t hear where a line starts or ends. The piece dates from just after the First World War, and exudes a nostalgia for an era that no longer exists. Fauré wrote it a few years before his death, when he was largely deaf. The music is intimate, introverted. Every now and then it seems like he is whispering something in your ear.”
Saadi: “It sometimes reminds me of patches of fog.”
More than a story, when performing these pieces, colors and paintings appear in my head
Takehiro Konoe alto
Sihan: “There are so many details under the surface with Fauré. As you rehearse, you discover its amazing beauty.”
Warenberg: “Occasionally we play certain passages slower or softer and then suddenly a hidden chord or harmonic turn appears. It feels like a descent into one’s inner world.”
Konoe: “More than a story, when performing these pieces, colors and paintings appear in my head.”
Saadi: “In the second part of Franck I always see a woman in front of me, she sits behind a window where the rain taps, a rhythm that evokes the past in her images.”