The Tokyo Foundation has supported three Sylff musical institutions—the Paris Conservatoire, the Juilliard School and the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna—in their collaborative organization of a Sylff Chamber Music Seminar and Concert since 2006. Selected Sylff fellow musicians from the respective institutions meet at a host institution, and after intensive practice with coaches for a week, they perform at a finale concert. This winter, the event was hosted by the Paris Conservatoire.

The following is a report by Ms. Gretchen Amussen, an administrator of the Sylff Program at the Conservatoire, the host of the Seminar.

From January 24th to February 1st 2010, Paris became the theater for a unique three-country chamber music project involving some 21 musicians… The Paris Conservatoire, the fifth institution to be awarded Sylff status in 1988, was hosting its second Sylff chamber music seminar, thanks to generous support from the Tokyo Foundation.

Collaboration of Three Music Institutions

The project had evolved through lengthy conversations between the three arts institutions in the Sylff network, the Juilliard School, the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna, and the Paris Conservatoire for Music and Dance. Each of the three institutions is renowned world-wide for training musicians at the highest professional level, and our “stock in trade” is performance. Thus, we agreed, the most natural way to engage in a three-way conversation involving musicians would be through chamber music. In this unique blend, each actor has a distinct and essential voice, each must listen to the other, and the end result can only be successful if there is agreement amongst all performers as to the overall artistic vision to be conveyed. The existence of repertoires from different cultures allow us to know each other better whilst also being attentive to the specificities of the musical cultures represent and which we wish to share with our public.

We chose to integrate the Sylff project to a major chamber music project held each year entitled “Quinte et Plus”, or “Five and more” – the idea being that at least five musicians come together to perform, and that within each group at least one professor performs as well.

Wide Range of Participants and Coaches

This year, we had some of the Conservatoire’s most well-known professors sharing center stage with the French, Viennese, and American musicians. Philippe Bernold, flute, had chosen an arrangement of Claude Debussy’s beautiful orchestral work Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune for 9 instrumentalists ; Claude Delangle, the world-renowned saxophonist, had chosen the Mystic Sextet by the Brazilian Heitor Villa-Lobos; and the cellists Marc Coppey and Diana Ligeti were coaching and performing the version for sextet of Arnold Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night. The performance, scheduled for February 1st, was to be held in the magnificent “Grand Salon” of the Army Museum at the Invalides, whose cathedral is home to Napoleon’s Tomb. Each of the participating professors has wide experience performing throughout the world, and each had responded with enormous enthusiasm to the invitation to perform with musicians from Vienna and Juilliard. The cellist Diana Ligeti, who had previously participated in a Sylff Forum project held in Bochum, spoke all the languages represented by the participants (except for Mandarin and Hebrew!), as she speaks fluent Hungarian, Rumanian, German, English and French…. Although to paraphrase Claude Delangle, we say in music that which we cannot say with words!

Activities and Voices of Participating Fellows

Every day lunch was served at the cafeteria — allowing us to meet and make sure that our guests had everything they needed. The flutist Jessica Han, the oboist Gernot Jöbstl, the harpist Veronika Villányi and Sylff scholars Moran Katz, clarinet, and Sally (Yen) Hsin-Chieh, piano were eager to hear classes in their respective disciplines ; Sylff scholar Emily Daggett Smith, violists Megan Griffin and Paul Rabeck had less free time due to a heavier rehearsal schedule. Most of us joined up to attend a concert at the famed impressionist Orsay Museum on Tuesday night; Thursday we had a joint dinner. And in between there was the tour of Paris, and connections each musician made with fellow students at the Conservatoire — including informal outings. Some had dreamed so long of visiting Versailles or the Louvre that simply being able to do so was heaven.

As for the music-making, Jessica Han recounts “Everyone was very friendly during the first rehearsal. Even though there was a language barrier, I was thrilled and relieved to see that everyone, although shy, was curious and interested in getting to know one another. Smiles and jokes were exchanged and laughter was shared. We briefly talked about our respective cities and established relationships as people and as friends before we started to work…
“The rehearsals themselves were as interesting as they were productive. Coming from New York, rehearsals are often intense and pressure filled. In Paris, there was an easiness in the rehearsals that allowed for an easiness in myself as a person and musician. It was eye opening to me to see that this easiness allowed for much of the music to happen on its own. The elements that did not take care of themselves were easily remedied with a bit of extra time and attention.

“When I was not in rehearsal, I had the unique opportunity to visit some classes. As a flutist, I was astounded by the differences in sound and approach to the flute. It was distinctly French to me and reminded me of my Jean-Pierre Rampal recordings. I felt that a huge amount of attention was paid to sound and sound production. Everyone I heard play had a beautiful silvery sound with fantastic clarity that seemed to float and flow effortlessly.”

A Medley of Musicalities Create Perfect Harmony

For the cello coach Diana Ligeti, the theme of the Schoenberg — referring back to the literary text which accompanies the piece — summed up the goal she had set herself for the week: “to go beyond oneself and sublimate difficulties in order to reach perfect harmony. We had with not students, but true artists. Each brought their musicality, their experience, their conception of the work. At times we disagreed, but we always sought to understand each other’s point of view. At the end of the week, we felt we’d known each other for a long time! In a world where discord [often] wreaks havoc, we, musicians are indomitable: concert after concert, we build bridges over and beyond the chasms that separate us.” Enthusiastic, fascinating personalities emerged as the week went on: Megan, the violist who’d created an extraordinary outreach project in Tanzania; Moran, the Israeli clarinetist who’d dreamed of coming to study in Paris but had ended up in New York — she already knew the city well and went to concerts every night!; the Hungarian harpist Veronika, who was so happy to meet the harp teachers at the Conservatoire; Gernot, who had already joined the Viennese Radio Orchestra, sought out fellow oboists…

Akiko Matsunobu and Ayako Hoshino from the Tokyo Foundation, Dorothea Riedel and Gregor Widholm from Vienna, Bärli Nugent from Juilliard — all had made the trip to Paris to share in the joy of the final concert. The Grand Salon is an exquisite 17th century room with marble floors and elegant royal portraits — the large windows look out onto the Esplanade leading to the Invalides, a royal way if ever there was one. The hall, seating some 200 guests, was packed — and in fact the organizers had to even turn some away... The quality of the silence once the musicians started playing was remarkable: everyone was absolutely present to the moment that was to be ours. From the mood-setting Debussy to the intense and extraordinary Schoenberg, each performer and each performance was extraordinary. The applause was warm and long, and when all the musicians stood up to bow together, you could feel the joy of the shared music-making, of everyone coming together.

At the reception following the concert, I heard musicians saying “we’ll stay in touch now on Facebook” and exchanging addresses. Musicians from one country who’d dreamed of studying in one of the partner countries sought out those who could answer their questions, but mostly people were simply happy to savor the moment and the success of the concert. The last word comes from Jessica Han: “How often does anyone, regardless of who you are, perform in a gorgeous private room in a respected museum with huge windows where one can look out over Paris, with crystal chandeliers everywhere, under an original portrait of King Louis XIV? The concert was excellent and the experience, remarkable. I could not have dreamed up a more beautiful conclusion to such an amazing adventure in Paris.”

Gretchen Amussen Deputy Director for External Affairs & Communication Conservatoire de Paris

Message from the Tokyo Foundation:Why don't you write an article too?

“Voices from the Sylff Community” is a space showcasing the activities and opinions of Sylff fellows and faculty members. We have received contributions from fellows and faculty members all over the world.　We are looking forward to sharing YOUR voices with people around the world, including global issues with local perspective, grassroots issues requiring global attention, and your first-hand experience.
For further details, please click here.

(The following is an excerpt from the SYLFF Newsletter No.21, Aug 2008)

Dorothea Riedel and Wolfgang Klos

How the Joint Project was Initiated

Among the 68 SYLFF institutions are 3 music universities representing the world’s top training schools for professional performing artists: the Juilliard School in New York, the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique et de danse de Paris, and the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.

These institutions, which for many years have received generous SYLFF endowments via the Tokyo Foundation, have also been able to benefit from the SYLFF Fellows Mobility Program (FMP), which the foundation launched to promote SYLFF fellow exchanges. The 3 schools jointly proposed, as an FMP project, a challenging exchange program in the field of chamber music. This full-of-spirit project, known as the SYLFF Chamber Music Seminar, has produced outstanding collaborations between highly educated people in an international language, namely that of music. Each of the 3 schools organized 10-day-long coaching programs, the first of which was held at Juilliard in New York (2006), the second at the Conservatoire in Paris (2007), and the third in Vienna (2008). The highlight and outcome of each coaching program was a joint concert held at each of these cities in turn at the end of its respective 10-day program.

Why Chamber Music?

It seemed particularly meaningful for the 3 institutions to cooperate in this field, because many musically knowledgeable individuals regard chamber music as a dialog on the highest spiritual and mental levels. Moreover, one of the advantages of combining the outstanding musical and technical skills of a small number of the most highly developed students is that wonderful results can be obtained from a minimum of resources.

For many decades, chamber music — with its intimate atmosphere and the challenges it offers to not only musicians but also to audiences — stood in the shadow of the more spectacular performances of symphonies and operas. This position of chamber music has changed dramatically within the last few years, mainly due to sociological and financial reasons. Music universities reacted to this change by offering their graduate students a realistic professional perspective; for example, the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna launched a Chamber Music Institute and a chamber music curriculum on the master’s and doctoral levels that perfectly match actual professional demands. As a result, chamber music was the logical choice for the collaboration between the 3 music universities in the SYLFF network.

Our intention in Vienna was to offer to the audience a concert program that reflects significant works from each of the three cultural areas where the schools are located: Paris, Vienna, and New York. We also wanted to present to our fellow musicians from Juilliard and Paris both the major musical areas for which our university is well-known and the methods that our teachers use, thereby offering the visiting musicians the resources, possibilities, and contacts of our university.

The Seminar in Vienna: Its Process and Fruits

The students participating in the seminar were expected to be well-prepared prior to their arrival in Vienna. Their schedule during the program was so full that they had to start working the very next day after arrival. The frequency and intensity of the coaching, and the necessity of the musicians having to work with colleagues they had not previously met, was a kind of training very similar to the actual situations that professional musicians face, and is 1 of the factors that make this program so valuable for the students.

In addition, the SYLFF Chamber Music Seminar is unique in that it gives each student rare opportunities to compare the learning conditions of one’s mother institution with those of another university, to meet new teachers, compare teaching methods, and to compare one’s own artistic level with that of others.

The end of the coaching program in Vienna was a public concert in one of the halls (Gläserner Saal) of the world-famous Musikverein. The performance included masterpieces by Mozart, Debussy, and Gershwin, and lasted almost 3 hours — a very challenging concert, because so many different formations were presented — from a classical wind octet (to collaborate with Viennese horns and oboes was an amazing experience for our friends from New York and Paris) to mixed ensembles (strings, including a harp; wind; and keyboard), and 2 pianos. Thanks to the rigorous professionalism of the intensive practice sessions, rehearsals, and coaching, this concert was an outstanding event.

To attract public attention to our concert was a challenging adventure for the university’s staff because, as one can imagine, in Vienna every night is filled with concerts featuring famous artists. Moreover, Viennese audiences are spoiled and choosy. Therefore, we were all very happy to see that many people came and nearly filled the hall. The concert was a great success. The success was also expressed in the audience’s applause: a well-earned reward for the many days of hard work put in by musicians, teachers, and organizers. The aims of the program — to widen and deepen the professional and cultural perspectives of all concerned, to make new friends, and to develop close relationships among the participating SYLFF fellows from 3 different music schools — were achieved in a wonderful way.

In addition to this ambitious coaching program, the city of Vienna itself, a center of music for hundreds of years, also left a strong impression on our guests. On the very first day, the students of the three music universities who had gathered in Vienna for the SYLFF Chamber Music Seminar were taken on a tour to the city’s major sightseeing spots by a professional tourist guide. Also, with the university being situated close to Vienna’s old city center, the students were able to move around by public transport to explore the city on their own.

On Sunday, which was the only day without rehearsals and training sessions, Professor Wolfgang Klos, former vice-rector and one of the initiators of the project, took students on a special tour to visit very special sites of Vienna’s past: the homes of Mozart and Beethoven, the house where George Gershwin composed his famous work “An American in Paris” (which was part of the final concert’s program), and other places of cultural and historical interest of which Vienna has many. The latter include the cemeteries where Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, and other prominent composers are buried, places from which it is easy to access museums, libraries, and private collections that display autographs and other memorabilia of the respective composers. I am sure that the students felt the special atmosphere of artistic creativity that makes Vienna the world capital of music. That Sunday started with a solemn Catholic service with music performed by our university’s Church Music Department in the baroque-style Church of St. Ursula, one of our university’s buildings. This was a very special service featuring a choir, orchestra, and organ music, which is still thriving in Vienna. The day ended with a typical Viennese dinner in the "heuriger" where Beethoven wrote his famous “Heiligenstadt Testimony.” Everyone could feel the atmosphere of the world famous composer’s spirit that led to the masterpieces that were to be performed as the final concert of this intensive rehearsal period.

The Importance of This Kind of Project

This kind of project is important, for many reasons, including the following:

• • New professional challenges need new instructional approaches.

• • To bring together high-level musicians from different cultures is a challenge for all participants (students, staff, administrators), and also represents the reality of a professional musician’s life in the increasingly globalized world of musical arts (though for most of these students, being rather young in age, this was a first grand adventure in that world).

• • Cultural interaction of this intensity among such different training institutions offers a unique opportunity to collaborate at the highest level on an extremely challenging program: a world premiere.

The final concert represented the climax of everyone’s efforts, and it was highly appreciated and enthusiastically applauded by the musically spoiled-for-choice and difficult-to-please audience of the Vienna Musikverein; the concert turned out to be a very rare happening. This kind of joint undertaking actively demonstrates that music is an international language and that the sphere of action of high-level musicians is the world in its entirety. For advanced students of these world-leading music schools in different parts of the world that are connected through the SYLFF network, the opportunity to interact with students, staff, and administrators of the highest artistic level from other countries and cultures was an important step in their professional development.

The Significance of Chamber Music Education and Training

The current year’s project has revealed that the SYLFF Chamber Music Seminars are significant in at least the following 2 ways.

1. For society

a. When the students complete their highly professional music education, they will be specialists, perfectly trained to entertain the most demanding audience at the highest level. As musicians they will be able to elevate people from everyday life to an artistic sphere, presenting human feelings and a humanistic and dignified approach to human life.

b. Musically educated individuals reach higher levels in all fields of human education (even in mathematics, as internationally validated studies have indicated for decades) and enrich human society by their very intense lives, broad visions, and wide tolerance.

2. For individual musicians

For the reasons already mentioned above, music education at advanced level leads to personal development that offers to the musician both a more fulfilled life through his or her highly developed craftsmanship (as well as through the difficulties experienced along the way) and an artistic insight into human life that makes him or her more mature and richer in personality.

The ability to create and appreciate the fine arts, especially music as a perfect means of international communication, are major factors that define us as human beings.

The SYLFF Chamber Music Seminar 2009

In 2009 Austria will celebrate the bicentennial of Haydn’s death, and therefore the 3 music universities have decided to start the second cycle of the 3-year seminar in Vienna. The SYLFF Chamber Music Seminar 2009 and its final concert will take place at Eszterhazy Castle, where the famous composer and “father” of classical chamber music, Josef Haydn, created his masterpieces over several decades. This will be a new challenge for outstanding young artists from the Juilliard School in New York, the Conservatoire de Paris, and the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.

(The following is an excerpt from the SYLFF Newsletter No.18, May 2007)

Gretchen Amussen

From January 24th through February 3rd, 2007, the Paris Conservatoire was the scene of intense music-making as 10 musicians from The Juilliard School and the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna joined forces with 10 students and seven professors from the Conservatoire to prepare a major chamber music program that was presented on February 1st and 2nd at the Conservatoire, as part of the school’s annual Quinte et Plus (Five and More) chamber music festival. This intensive event was the second of three SYLFF chamber music projects to be held over a three-year period, the first having been held at The Juilliard School in January 2006 under the FMP.

One specific aim of the Paris project was to include professors in the music-making— indeed this is the drawing point for Quinte et Plus, which features a week-long chamber music festival of the highest caliber. Our approach was to feature works by major French composers of the 19th and 20th centuries (Chausson, Poulenc, and the contemporary French composer Michael Levinas, who teaches at the Conservatoire), rounding out the program with works by the American Elliott Carter and the Austrian Strauss-Schoenberg. In order to enable the SYLFF students to mix with as many musicians as possible, each student participated in two chamber music groups—making for no small scheduling feat! Michael Levinas’ work, doubtless the most challenging on the program both for its musical language and ensemble work, necessitated a sizable investment in time by the quintet’s members. Levinas himself attended several rehearsals as well as the final performance, with which he was very impressed.

Above and beyond the intense rehearsing, which occupied a sizable portion of each musician’s time, a city tour was organized for the entire group on the second afternoon; it proved highly popular. Many Viennese and New York students also took time to sit in on classes given by professors of their respective instruments; for the wind players, attending a class for the virtually extinct French bassoon was a high point of their time in Paris.

Barli Nugent, who had helped organize the project at Juilliard, and who is in charge of chamber music there, accompanied that school’s group. She was able to visit classes and participate in meetings with Conservatoire department heads. Barli’s participation in my department’s meeting was seen by us as a high point of the year, and all of us were on our toes to ask questions in English. Many found it inspiring to hear about how issues like professional development are handled so imaginatively in an American institution, and such an outstanding one at that! Barli’s experience as a former Juilliard student, seasoned chamber music player, doctoral student, and now an assistant dean having responsibilities in career development and chamber music, made our exchanges all the more rich. Barli’s warmth and openness added immensely to the project.

The final result was music-making of the highest order. Our SYLFF musicians had the joy of performing for an enthusiastic audience that included the Tokyo Foundation’s Ellen Mashiko, who took time afterwards to speak with each and every one of the participating musicians, sharing her impressions and getting feedback from them. At the post-concert cocktail party, laughter and delight abounded as musicians who had been absolute strangers to one another the week before snapped photos and eagerly sought to jot down e-mail addresses and phone numbers.

The concert took place in this building―Espace Maurice Fleuret―at the Conservatoire de Paris.

In retrospect, were we to do this again —and all of us believe such exchanges are essential for musicians, whose lives are spent on international stages and often interacting with artists whose training and indeed cultural references are quite different— we would probably reduce the number of participating musicians and designate one or two coaches. The complexity of juggling so many people’s schedules—made all the more complicated because the French students also had their regular course load— would simplify things considerably and allow for visiting students to have more time both to visit classes and to get to know Paris.

Nevertheless, we believe that this was and is an absolutely perfect project for music institutions within the SYLFF family, because chamber music is in fact an ongoing conversation that requires that musicians be able to listen to one to another, the best possible musical outcome only successfully reachable if each musician has engaged in this “active listening and performing” in an atmosphere of profound respect for the different artistic approaches being expressed.

All of us are eagerly awaiting year three of the SYLFF chamber music project and a stellar experience in Vienna. For now, we give our heartfelt thanks to Ellen Mashiko and the entire SYLFF team for providing us with this magical opportunity to get to know one another in the best way we know how—by making music!

Gretchen Amussen

Ms. Gretchen Amussen is deputy director of external affairs at the Conservatoire national superieur de musique et de danse de Paris. She studied music and French as an undergraduate student. Her career has included management positions in not-for-profit cultural institutions in the United States and developing an international program and an external affairs division at the Paris Conservatoire. She is an ardent lover of music, loves to travel, and voraciously reads fiction from the many countries she visits. She is particularly interested in how the music profession is evolving (and what this means for training professionals). She serves as the contact person of the SYLFF Steering Committee and is an avid networker in general. Gretchen, was instrumental (no pun intended!) in organizing and implementing the SYLFF Chamber Music Seminar that took place earlier this year at the Paris Conservatoire.

Jimmy Chiang thanking the first violinist after the performance.

I left my home in Hong Kong when I was 18 and went to the USA to further my musical study. I later moved with my wife to Vienna, which became our new home, and where our son was born in October 2006. I am the only son in a traditional Chinese family and —despite my parents’ full support —it has not been easy for people around me to feel fully confident that I would succeed as a professional musician, a conductor and pianist. Some 12 years ago, as a teenager with an uncertain future, I decided that by the time I became 30, I would either have already attained international recognition or I would have to get a regular, steady job. Now, as I have just reached the big “3-0”, I can say that I have fulfilled my dream and my promise to myself by winning first prize at the Lovro von Matacic 4th International Competition for Young Conductors held in Zagreb, Croatia, in September 2007.

The Lovro Von Matacic Competition

This competition, founded in memory of the renowned Croatian conductor Lovro von Matacic, is held every four years. From among the many outstanding conductors from all over the world, 16 were picked to travel to Zagreb, based on DVD recordings of their performances. It was an intensive week filled with rehearsals, and a fair amount of psychological pressure from having to maintain a constant state of concentration, despite insufficient sleep. Among the 10 international judges who would decide the winner were Berislav Klobucar, Simone Young, and Dimitri Kitajenko.

More than 15 pieces of music, consisting of overtures, symphonies, symphonic poems, opera arias, and Croatian compositions, were to be prepared prior to the remaining rounds of the competition. The pieces that each candidate would conduct were decided by drawing lots before one’s performance, and only a limited amount of time was allowed for rehearsing the pieces. I was given 30 minutes to prepare Wagner’s Rienzi Overture, J. Gotovac’s Symphonic Kolo, and Leonora’s Aria in Beethoven’s Fidelio. Then, for the final round, I was given 50 minutes to prepare Stravinsky’s Firebird (1945) as well as Papandopulo’s Sinfonietta. For the final concert, I conducted Shostakovich’s First Symphony, the performance of which would determine my fate in the competition. I was allowed only one general rehearsal of the Shostakovich piece, on the day of the concert. During the rehearsal I used mainly clear gestures and expressions, without much talking and interruption of the playing, to show the musicians the interpretation that I wanted, and I wondered if my performance could turn out well under such circumstances.

However, upon ending my performance I felt triumphant! From the audience’s passionate reaction after the last chord ended, I immediately knew that I had done exceedingly well. I felt in my heart that I had won, no matter what the judges result might be. There is nothing better than the feeling after a successful performance—a close bonding between me and the orchestra, and a warm crowd cheering in applause! I must admit that this part of the experience was so overwhelming that I showed almost no outward reaction when it was announced that I was the winner. Congratulations, receptions, press interviews, and the like were to follow. Meanwhile, my mind was still occupied with the sounds of Shostakovich, and that continued for the next few days.

What I Learned

The competition was an especially significant experience. In addition to having opportunities to rehearse with and conduct a professional orchestra, I made new friends and learned a great deal from watching others. It is wonderful to see how different conductors educated in different countries perform, and through conversations with my colleagues I was impressed by how different the traditions and teachers are, such as the concept of the role of the conductor, the way to approach a piece of music, and so on.

However, I must admit that I have never been a fan of music competitions. Although such competitions as that in Zagreb can confirm one’s music-making capabilities and power as a conductor, I realize that to win always requires some luck, too. In any case, I believe that music is not a sport that one can or should compete in. To appreciate music involves taste as well as many other subjective factors. To be named “winner” therefore does not necessarily say much about the true degree of one’s abilities. For me, the real prize was that I had won the hearts of both the people in the audience and the members of the orchestra. The appreciation of people is a prize that I will have to continue to earn through concerted effort throughout my life.

The Path Leading to My Success

Many factors in the first 30 years of my life contributed to my recent success. First, my parents sent me to piano lessons when I was 4 years old, and through their discovery of my musical talent I was able to receive further support and education. Ms. Ching-yee Choi, my first piano teacher for 14 years and her husband, Dr. Wai-hong Yip, who taught me composition when I was 11, were and still are dear to me. Dr. Yip founded the Pan Asia Symphony Orchestra, with which I was able to start my performing career as a concert pianist when I was 13. I am now the principal guest conductor for that orchestra, for which I was also once a cellist. That orchestra will always retain a special value in my life.

After I earned a Fellowship Diploma from Trinity College London (FTCL) at the young age of 16, I decided to go abroad to the USA to continue my education. It was at Baylor University in Texas that I met my second great mentor, pianist Krassimira Jordan. She had studied in Moscow with Emil Gilels, one of the most important representatives of the famous Russian School of piano playing, heritage which I am honored to be a part of. It was through her summer academy and acquaintance with her friend and colleague, Wolfgang Watzinger, that I made my first connection with Vienna, the city of music. Here I became a student of Watzinger, whose teacher was Rudolf Serkin, a major figure in the German school of piano playing in contrast to the Russian techniques. It was my destiny to be able to master the two schools’ techniques, which complement each other so well and which enable me to understand the importance of maintaining a balance between emotion and intellect in my performances, both as pianist and conductor. Amid all of these developments, in Texas in the year 2000 I seized the chance to found my own chamber orchestra, the Ensemble Amadeus Waco, where I developed both conducting as well as organizational skills.

But it was not until I had moved to Vienna and met my other mentor, Leopold Hager, that I considered myself as having begun my understanding of what it means to be a conductor. He tore down not only my preconceived notions about conducting, but my self-assurance. Then he slowly built me back up through the precious tradition of European conductor training, as well as in his specialty—the interpretation of Mozart. I am considered to be his very last student, inasmuch as he has retired from the university and no longer teaches. Moreover, to be home in Vienna is like putting a beautifully prepared gourmet dinner on a beautiful plate for a stunning presentation. Here I am constantly spoiled by the sound of the Vienna Philharmonic as well as experiencing the rehearsals of great living conductors. I can’t complain!

In addition to all of the above, my experience with Maestro Seiji Ozawa at the Rohm Music Festival in Kyoto in 2003 was enormously stimulating. The ideas he sparked in me during that week vividly remain.

Above all, I must mention my dear wife, a wonderful opera soprano, whom I met in the USA while we were students. We have had not just a loving relationship but a singer-coach relationship for almost 10 years. Because of her, I have developed a sensitive ear for voice, which benefits me very much as an opera conductor and had contributed to my work as an opera coach on a daily basis with singers from all over the world.

To conclude, I am certain that I haven’t mentioned everyone and everything that somehow contributed to my success in my first 30 years of life. But I will end by expressing my gratitude to the Tokyo Foundation; the lasting effects of the support the Foundation has given me as a fellow has been like the ripples formed from dropping a stone into the pond of my life and making waves that will have lasting repercussions.

(The following is an excerpt from the SYLFF Newsletter No.15, May 2006)

Bärli Nugent

January 8th, 2006 was a dreary winter day, but the excitement in the arrivals hall of John F. Kennedy International Airport was palpable. A small group from Juilliard stood behind the barrier, straining to see the travelers emerging from the U.S. Customs section. Five young people had flown through the night from Vienna and landed an hour earlier; five more were soon due in on a flight from Paris. Any string or wind instruments in the crowd? We didn’t know what the students looked like, and we were not sure they would spot the friendly but small, hand-lettered “Juilliard School” signs we were holding. We were eager to welcome them to New York for the start of a project that had been dreamed about and worked on for two years.

This project, later called in this, its inaugural year the ‘SYLFF Chamber Music Seminar at The Juilliard School of the Ryoichi Sasakawa Young Leaders Fellowship Fund Fellows Mobility Program’, marked the first collaboration in a landmark three-year series of exchanges involving the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris, the Universitat fur Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien, and The Juilliard School. These exchanges have been designed to foster an educational and artistic experience that embraced the learning process at the heart of each institution. A 10-day chamber music seminar, hosted by each institution in turn during the three-year period, incorporated five students from each visiting institution into a chamber music event at the host school.

The seminar at Juilliard placed the 10 visiting students—from Austria, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Hungary, and Poland—into 4 chamber ensembles with 9 Juilliard students—from Canada, China, Germany, and the United States. These 4 ensembles joined 14 others that together made up the performers of ChamberFest 2006. ChamberFest is an opportunity for the serious chamber musicians at Juilliard to return to the school during the final week of the winter break for an intensive week of rehearsals and daily coaching on a substantial piece of chamber music. The second week of ChamberFest coincides with the reopening of the school, and the 18 ensembles perform in six concerts given during that week.

People continued to come from the U.S. Customs section in waves. When at last a tall young man emerged with a cello strapped to his back, accompanied by four other people carrying cases for violins, a bassoon, and a trumpet, we saw the looks of relief that spread across their weary faces as they spotted us, and we knew that the SYLFF fellows from the Universitat fur Musik und darstellende Kunst Wien had finally arrived. They were greeted in German by Juilliard graduate and cellist Sabine Frick, escorted to the waiting bus, and whisked off to Juilliard. Our five guests from the Conservatoire National Superieur de Musique et de Danse de Paris arrived shortly thereafter, easily identified by their cases for clarinet, trombone, violin, viola, and cello. This group was greeted in French by Juilliard graduate and harpist Sivan Magen, and then also whisked off to Juilliard. The 10 musicians settled into Juilliard’s residence hall in rooms on the 22nd and 29th floors, which offer spectacular views of New York City and the nearby Hudson River, and then went for dinner in the school’s cafeteria with the Juilliard students. I was profoundly moved by the enthusiasm and sincerity of our guests, and I was eager to see what their collaboration with our students would bring.

Days later, I found myself wandering about on Juilliard’s 5th floor, delighted to hear strains of Charles Ives, Antonin Dvor˘ak, Igor Stravinsky, and recent Juilliard alumnus Jefferson Friedman emerging from the studios where the SYLFF ensembles rehearsed. The works by these four composers had been requested by the Juilliard students due to the latter’s desire to share music that represented their own interests and Juilliard’s chamber music traditions. As the days passed, students and faculty alike popped into my office during their breaks, with huge smiles on their faces as they described the joy of discovery, the exhaustion from the long hours of work they were undertaking, and the immense satisfaction of making new friends with each other. Juilliard cello-faculty member Bonnie Hampton perhaps expressed it best when she described the group she coached, saying,

“They were the best group I have had the pleasure of working with at Julliard in terms of attitude, and they were extremely fine players. The other remarkable thing is that they did not know each other at all prior to coming to the Juilliard program, but they worked together extremely well, seriously, and very professionally, and they also seemed to like and enjoy each other. Putting three unknowns together is always a “chance” and this one came up ‘golden.’ None of the musicians had played the Ives Trio before, and they were extremely open and receptive to working with his musical language. It was a real pleasure to work with this group.”

As the days of preparation came to a close, the students joined in our traditional end-of-week ChamberFest Chinese banquet. The marble floors resonated with the laughter and ebullient talk of the 90 ChamberFest participants, who consumed endless trays of lo mein noodles (stir-fried, Cantonese-style egg noodles), sautéed bok choy (Chinese chard), kung po chicken (diced chicken sautéed with sweet peppers and peanuts in spicy pepper sauce), and tofu with mushrooms, among the more than 40 dishes offered. And as is traditional with the ChamberFest banquet, all of the leftovers were wrapped up and given to the students to take back to the residence hall to share in late-night snacking together. This traditional sharing of abundant food from another culture seemed to be a delicious and fitting way to mark the SYLFF exchange as the students prepared for their performance several days hence.

Violinist Elenore Darmon noted,

It [the seminar] was very beneficial because we were put into a situation that one often encounters in a musician’s life: preparing in 10 days a work (contemporary in my case) without knowing one’s partners, and working intensively in order to construct a unity of sound and intonation, and all the while exchanging approaches to the work and choosing an interpretation that pleases each person. And it was also very good for my English!

Juilliard percussionist Luke Rinderknecht remarked,

“Working with the students from Vienna and Paris was certainly an exciting learning experience. Our rehearsals were complicated by language challenges, but with perseverance we learned “L’Histoire du Soldat” and a little of each other’s languages. Our concepts of sound were somewhat different, but through discussions about the educational and musical difference in our various countries I began to understand why that was so. It was a thoroughly fulfilling experience.”

But it was clarinetist Maguy Girard who perhaps summed it up the best, when she said that she

“left home with my clarinets, new tour books, and a new pair of shoes. Result: my tour books are now dog-eared . . . and my shoes have no soles! And the most important thing: I exchanged magnificent musical moments with students from three different nationalities (American, Austrian, and Hungarian). It was during this kind of experience that one can truly realize that music is universal, and especially that it is a language: one can communicate and share emotions without speaking the same verbal language.”

For me, being given the opportunity to observe these collaborations, it was a joy to meet the young people from Europe, entrusted to Juilliard for a too-brief period of time, to see the friendships that began within our walls, and to hear the indescribably beautiful music that resulted. I have also been privileged to make new musical friends myself: early-morning phone conversations across the Atlantic with Paris Conservatoire Deputy Director for External Affairs and Communication Gretchen Amussen introduced me to a soul mate in dreaming and planning for this project, and countless exchanges of e-mail messages with Vienna University’s distinguished professor Wolfgang Klos, whose generosity and energy marked this collaboration. I also gained new friends at The Nippon Foundation and other affiliated organizations: Mr. Yohei Sasakawa, Mr. Tatsuya Tanami, Ms. Kazuko Shiomi, Ms. Ellen Mashiko, Mr. Keita Sugai, and Ms. Takako Nakayama, who bestowed upon Juilliard the honor of their presence at the concert of the SYLFF Chamber Music Seminar at The Juilliard School. Their vision, hailed by Juilliard President Joseph W. Polisi, to nurture future leaders who will transcend geopolitical, ethnic, cultural, religious, and other boundaries for the betterment of humankind has found a home in the performing arts communities of the Vienna Universitat, Paris Conservatoire, and The Juilliard School.

The days passed far too quickly. As the students in turn strode onstage before the packed hall and shared their music, the audience cheered their approval, and I began to dream of the next exchange: Paris in January 2007. It cannot come too soon.