New Kids at the Bowl

For Ernest Fleischmann, it’s always Hollywood Bowl season.

Like a cat perched on a window sill, turreted ears responding like radar to the slightest aural blips, Fleischmann is constantly on the lookout for new talent. As executive vice president and managing director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic--presenter of the Hollywood Bowl season--he has got seats to fill, and not just the 17,000-plus out front, but those adjustable ones in the solo spotlight as well.

It’s a team effort, really. Working with Bowl General Manager Anne Parsons and Philharmonic Artistic Administrator Rosemary Gent, Fleischmann heads the process through which the Bowl seeks and books soloists enough for two, three and sometimes four different classical programs a week. Together they act on tips from Esa-Pekka Salonen and other conductors, give an ear to artists’ agents, network with colleagues and generally get out there to hear concerts, locally and worldwide, as much as possible. Fleischmann gives an extra edge to the team by adjudicating at international instrumental and vocal competitions.

He and Parsons both see the Bowl as an ideal place to showcase new talent. “There’s a large and to a certain extent new public at the Bowl,” notes Fleischmann, and the programming allows quick, one shot looks at soloists, as opposed to the more extended commitment required in the winter season. And, says Parsons, Bowl audiences “like to see these young people. It makes them smile to watch a young person come out on stage and just play the hell out of a piece.”

This summer seven young artists will make their Los Angeles debuts at the Bowl, an important event for them and possibly for listeners as well. As Fleischmann points out, Los Angeles first heard two young musicians named Jessye Norman and James Levine at the Bowl.

Describing the process that brings a newcomer into the Bowl spotlight, Fleischmann, speaking on the phone from Monte Carlo, where he is judging the World Piano Master’s Competition, stresses “that there are no hard and fast rules” in the pursuit of talent. It can be discovered anywhere, any time.

For instance, there is the case of pianist Till Fellner, who debuts at the Bowl and in L.A. on Aug. 21. Parsons, a firm believer in keeping conductors happy, recalls that Kent Nagano, who will be on the podium for that program, suggested Fellner. But Fleischmann remembers an even earlier connection.

“It must have been a couple of years ago,” says Fleischmann, jogging his memory. “I was walking through the Mozarteum in Salzburg and I heard this wonderful playing coming from a practice room. He was practicing Beethoven--Opus 109, I think. I thought it was Andras Schiff practicing because he was due to play that night or the next, and so I opened the door. And there was this stranger, a young man.

“And I asked, ‘Could I stay?’ and he said fine. Well, it was gorgeously wonderful playing.” He told Fellner that he would be in contact.

Competitions play a role in the selection process, but not the expected one. “I don’t basically care for competitions much,” says Fleischmann, “the fact that somebody has to win.” The winners, he thinks, aren’t necessarily the most interesting musicians.

Take Yuki Takao, who debuts July 31 at the Bowl. He impressed Fleischmann tremendously at last year’s Sydney International Piano Competition. However, Fleischmann said, “as is very often the case with a lot of conservative judges, many of whom are pianists themselves, Takao didn’t come first. The first prize was awarded to one of those Russian powerhouses”--whom Fleischmann didn’t sign.

He heard another Bowl newcomer, Giovanni Bellucci, through the various rounds of last year’s Monte Carlo Competition. That the Italian (appearing at the Bowl on July 24) eventually won the single and first prize is, for Fleischmann, beside the point.

“What I find interesting and useful about competitions,” he says, “is that they provide a kind of shop window, a kind of platform for young artists who have reached a certain stage, to be heard by people who can help them with their careers.”

Some musicians request an audience. When the Philharmonic visited Finland in 1994, pianist Laura Mikkola (appearing Thursday) secured a private audition with Fleischmann and Gent; they immediately proffered a future Bowl engagement. Another pianist, Rosa Torres-Pardo (July 15), upon the recommendation of her agent, a friend and trusted colleague of Fleischmann, played for him during the Philharmonic’s recent tour of Spain.

But agents play a limited role in the process. “There are agents and there are agents,” explains Fleischmann. “When somebody you respect asks you to listen to someone, you do it.”

And if that someone is Salonen, says Fleischmann, “for me that’s more than good enough.” Pekka Kuusisto appears Sept. 4 on the strength of a Salonen recommendation, a CD and, to seal the deal, a letter to Parsons from conductor Leif Segerstam requesting the violinist for his concert.

Fleischmann has heard another Bowl debutante, mezzo-soprano Markella Hatziano several times live in major European opera productions, and remembered her when the team was casting “The Damnation of Faust” (Aug. 19).

Last, but not least, does money matter? Do young artists get the nod because their fees are low? “No, no, not at all,” says Fleischmann, “it really is of no consequence.” While admitting that some do come cheaper, he says many don’t. “Once they win competitions, the price goes up.”

What follows is an introduction to this season’s starters, a sampling of the rookies hoping to increase their value on the Bowl stage:

LAURA MIKKOLA

“I like to lounge in huge things,” says Laura Mikkola, speaking of the piano repertory she prefers. She lists the Prokofiev Second Concerto and the Sixth and Eighth Sonatas, Rachmaninoff’s Third Concerto, Schumann’s “Carnaval” and F-sharp minor Sonata, Schubert’s C-minor. And then there is the music of her compatriot Einojuhani Rautavaara, some of which (the solo piano works) she has just set down on her first CD, for Naxos (due in October). She’ll record the same composer’s First Concerto in August for Naxos as well, with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra.

But on the phone from Budapest, where’s she’s visiting an old teacher, she’s anything but a tiger. Extremely soft-spoken and almost sleepy in manner, her sentences trail off into silence without ending.

Born in Espoo, Finland, in 1974--also the birthplace of Pekka Kuusisto, whom she has known and played music with since childhood--Mikkola is a product of the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, the source of a current, much-noted Finnish invasion of classical music. She credits her country’s music education system in general and her teachers in particular for her capability to perform the big, physically taxing pieces. “My teachers have always been very, very demanding. Tapani Valsta, who I had for nine years at the academy, starting at 8, always gave me many new pieces to learn. I could never play anything with [printed] music in his lessons, and he also made me play whole sonatas at that point.”

Subsequently, Mikkola studied with some of the foremost pianists in the world, including the 100-year-old Mieczyslaw Horszowski, Menachem Pressler and, when she’s in London and he has the time, Murray Perahia. Her competition victories are numerous but she counts the Second Prize at the 1995 Queen Elisabeth Competition in Brussels as her greatest achievement to date. She made her Carnegie Hall debut with a solo recital last November.

Though she has met and played for Salonen, Thursday, with Grieg’s Concerto, will be her first collaboration with the conductor. What will her performance day routine be?

“Normally I practice quite a lot on the day of my performance. And I want to be quiet--normally I rest in the afternoon. There in Los Angeles I have the rehearsal in the morning, the only rehearsal.”

Saying that she is “positively nervous” about her performance here, she adds: “I won’t drink coffee, that’s for sure.”

TILL FELLNER

Till Fellner, on the phone from his home in Vienna, also sounds apprehensive. The 25-year-old, it turns out, just doesn’t particularly like talking about himself, feels uncomfortable in English and is, well, shy.

He certainly wouldn’t budge an inch when queried about his own playing and its possibly distinctive attributes. Why should the Vienna Philharmonic and Claudio Abbado invite him to play (as they did last November) and not, say, pianist X?

“Maybe you have to ask my manager why they wanted to play with me. I don’t know.”

What qualities put him a cut above his competitors in winning the Clara Haskil Competition in 1993?

“I can’t tell you, because I didn’t listen to the other people. I just played my stuff and waited. I just try my best and I don’t care about what people are saying in general. And they seem to like me, so . . . “--an audible shrug.

He’s much more willing to talk about his musical aims than his accomplishments. He admires legendary Swiss pianist Edwin Fischer because “he doesn’t use the composition as a vehicle for his own feelings. He really tries to mediate between the composition and the audience.”

In his own playing, he contemplates more than just the notes. “Form for me is not abstract,” he says. “If you look at the compositions of the Classical period, the form is always kind of an improvisation. Then, let’s say, 50 years later, people analyzed it and said that’s the Classical form. But we should be careful not to play like this, but to really feel the form, to play it with life.”

His own thinking has been greatly influenced by his current teacher, Alfred Brendel (himself a student of Fischer), whom Fellner visits in London for intensive two- and three-day coaching sessions. Six years ago, Fellner explains, a mutual friend introduced them and Fellner “played a little bit for him. He immediately started to teach. Afterward, he just told me, ‘You can call me,’ and so I did. Since then, well, it’s a great honor for me to visit him in London, or to meet him anywhere, and work with him.”

Their focus, not surprisingly, has been the great German repertoire, from Bach through Schoenberg, and Fellner’s growing catalog of recordings reflects this. With Neville Marriner and the Academy of St. Martin-in-the-Fields he has recorded two of the Beethoven concertos for Erato, with the rest to follow. For the same label, he has just recorded a Schubert recital, including the A-minor Sonata. Next year, for Philips, he’ll record the Beethoven Cello Sonatas with Heinrich Schiff.

Just before his Bowl appearance, Fellner makes his debut at the Marlboro Festival. In the fall, he plans a cycle of concerts devoted to Schubert and the Second Viennese School in London and Vienna.

The large crowd that could greet his Bowl debut doesn’t daunt him. He has already played for 15,000 at Tanglewood in Massachusetts and 10,000 in Mexico City with Marriner and the Academy. Still, he is anxious about his appearance here--”because of the piece. Beethoven’s Second Concerto is a very tricky piece, and I’m always nervous when I play it.”

YUKI TAKAO

“This is my little story,” says Yuki Takao, 19, a polite and bashful presence speaking slightly fractured English on the phone from Fukuoka, Japan. The youngest entrant in the 1994 Moscow Tchaikovsky Competition at age 16 (where he was a semifinalist), and the youngest competitor at last year’s Sydney International Piano Competition (where he won second prize), Takao still lives with his parents, and that seems fitting, given his tale.

“I just naturally started to play piano because my sister and my mother used to play piano. So I very much liked to play with them [starting] when I was a baby really.

“But then there was a little episode which convinced me that I’m going to be a pianist. I was 5 years old and my mother had to have an operation on her right hand. It was a very difficult disease--something wrong inside the bone. After the operation, there was no hope to play piano again for her. So at that time I just tell her--you know, soothingly--I’m going to be pianist instead of you.”

Fleischmann, who served on the Sydney jury last year, notes Takao’s “tremendous charisma.” Australian audiences, both at the competition and listening in on radio and TV, concurred. They voted to give him the People’s Choice Prize.

“From the very beginning of the competition,” Takao says, “many in the audience liked me very much--I could feel that. Maybe they liked me because I was young.”

Or maybe they responded to his impressively difficult repertory, which included Ravel’s “La Valse,” Prokofiev’s “Toccata,” Beethoven’s Opus 110 Sonata and Balakirev’s “Islamey,” for many years considered the single most difficult piano piece.

Or maybe it was his persona: “When I was onstage I never tried to think I’m outstanding person because I’m so young. I just wanted to play my music, I just wanted to be very honest.”

During the concerto section of the competitions, when he performed Mozart’s Concerto, K. 595--which he will reprise at the Bowl--Takao played for the first time in his life with an orchestra. In the finals, he got his long-awaited opportunity to play Prokofiev’s Second Concerto with orchestra, and says he “was nearly to die I am so glad.”

GIOVANNI BELLUCCI

Something miraculous happened to Giovanni Bellucci when he was 14. He discovered that he was a pianist. Just like that. Now 32, he still sounds amazed.

He doesn’t “completely know” how it happened. “In my family there was nobody playing music. So I just started because I had a friend playing music. But I had no piano in my house, so I tried to play piano in his house. For me, it was very, very easy--how can I explain?”

He quickly learned to read music--”for me it was like reading a newspaper”--and, as unbelievable as it may seem, “in two months, I was able to play the whole cycle of Beethoven sonatas.” He readily admits there were holes in his readings, but at a basic mechanical level, he says he had them.

When this self-taught musician went for his first audition at age 15, he brought along “maybe 30 kilograms of musical scores. . . . All the other pupils were very surprised because this strange little boy is playing all the Beethoven sonatas. After the first piece I played, the teacher told me, ‘Ah, you can go to the circus to play because it’s a very funny show to watch your playing, it is very fast.’ ” Nevertheless, he was immediately admitted to Rome’s Conservatorio di Santa Cecilia.

But the friendly Italian’s story doesn’t end there. When he was 18, his mother died, followed two years later by his father. Alone and jobless, he began entering little piano competitions as a means of support, and winning. Having graduated from the conservatory at 21, he says he spent two years “alone in my room, alone with the piano,” perfecting his playing by himself.

And then he started to win big prizes: among others, a first in the Alfredo Casella Competition, a second in the Busoni Competition, a third in the Queen Elisabeth Competition (Mikkola won second that year) and last year, with Fleischmann in the jury box, the first and single prize of the World Piano Masters Competition in Monte Carlo.

In 1992, he came to the attention of the great Russian pianist Lazar Berman and studied with him for four years. “It was the first time for me to have the occasion to meet so well known a personality in music. So I expected to meet a very difficult person, or very cold, or very Russian, with a different style or way to understand music. No, he was very kind, very simple, always willing to listen to my personal ideas”--an important thing for the largely self-taught musician.

Though he plays all of the concertos and sonatas of Beethoven he doesn’t presume to call himself a specialist in the composer. But it will be the “Emperor” Concerto that he performs with the Philharmonic on July 24.

“It’s a dream,” he says of the Bowl date. “I couldn’t imagine to have this opportunity in my life.”