on chamber music ❧ 79
In the spring of 1947, we embarked on a small European tour. It began some-
what inauspiciously in Holland where, after the harpsichord was actually in
place in the hall of the Concertgebouw, the Dutch government persisted in
refusing us labor permits for concerts which were given at our own expense.
Except for stops in airports, I have never again set foot in Holland. In London
we were better received, and I was touched that Artur Schnabel, who had been
recording all day and who hated the harpsichord, came to our fi rst concert. We
played thereafter in Paris and in Zurich before I departed to Italy and Spain in
pursuit of Scarlatti.
After our fi rst season, Sascha and I had begun to feel the restrictions of pro-
grams devoted exclusively to Bach and Mozart, and since there was no other
music with obbligato harpsichord worth playing, we began experimenting
with sonatas for violin and continuo. This had its disadvantages from the very
start; fi rst of all, we could not afford to take a cellist with us in order to ensure
proper support of the continuo part, and secondly, Sascha was so much accus-
tomed by his quartet discipline to adjusting to what he expected to hear that
he was never comfortable with an improvised continuo part, nor indeed has
his gift for ensemble playing ever taken the direction of any sort of improvisa-
tion. Most of our experiments in this direction were fl at failures. A few such
works survived on our programs in later years but we both knew that they were
retained only to vary the otherwise constant diet of Bach and Mozart that we
were offering our listeners.
In 1945, we commissioned works from Darius Milhaud and from Walter
Piston. The two works could not have been more different. The Piston Sonatina
is beautifully written, in a contrapuntal texture that renders the combination
of harpsichord and violin perfectly successful, and we played it often. It is well
constructed, but to this day I am not sure whether it is real music. The Milhaud
Sonata, like many of his other works, is carelessly written, and the harpsichord
part would sound better on the piano, but it is real music, even if only music of
a minor order.
Among the many musicians with whom I came in closer contact through
Sascha or who were asked to listen critically to our rehearsals, it was Diran
Alexanian who exerted the greatest infl uence. A contemporary, and in many
ways the disciple of Casals, he had long since ceased to play, but for years had
been renowned as a pedagogue of the cello. I have the impression that most
of his life lay in ruins behind him and that some sort of drug addiction had led
him into numerous fi nancial irregularities, but of none of this was I ever a wit-
ness. I have seldom encountered so sharp and so precise a conception of music
that was itself like a magnifi cently structured piece of architecture. Much of
my subsequent musical thinking, as represented in the little catechism that
precedes my edition of the Scarlatti Sixty Sonatas and in my still-unpublished
Berkeley lectures, takes its departure from Alexanian’s ideas. As I said in the
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rick simeone
(Rick Simeone)
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