Happy New Year to all!

What better way to begin the New Year than listening to Bach in a concert you did not expect to be in?

On the evening of the 31 December, having wondered from café to café in Soho for the entire afternoon, we were not only highly caffeinated but also looking for a nice place to see the new year in. Wigmore Hall was running a wonderful programme of Bach cantatas and the 5th Brandenburg Concerto, but tickets had been sold off for weeks. Thanks to three strangers who were kind enough to go find something else to do that evening and returned their tickets, we managed to sneak in at the last and listen to an excellent presentation of the Retrospect Ensemble.
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The main concert hall in Sao Paulo is housed in a converted train station. The station still works – it serves line 8, which crosses the city. As you approach it, in the decadent downtown area, Julio Prestes Station appears as a neo-classical dream among the faded facades of the surrounding buildings. It was built between 1926 and 1938 and operated mainly as a station until the mid-1990s, when the main building was converted into a musical centre and the grand hall into a concert hall, the Sala Sao Paulo. It is home of the fantastic Sao Paulo State Symphony Orchestra (OSESP). The story of its construction, as well as that of its renovation, offers a wonderful story of how music can make us travel.

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Recently, in Sao Paulo, I lived through a perfect example of the surreal music scene in Brazil. It was a wintry Sunday afternoon. We went to Sala Sao Paulo, the concert hall home to the Sao Paulo State Symphony Orchestra (of which more to come in these pages) and tried to get tickets for a concert the following week. Disappointingly, there was none left. We briefly thought about buying instead tickets for a piano recital by Arnaldo Cohen, one of Brazil’s finest pianists, for that evening, but the only seats left were prohibitively expensive. The lady in the tickets office, noting our frustration, dropped a few tones in her voice, leaned over the counter and, with a conspiring look, said “go to the lady in the blue dress over there – she can give you some free tickets for tonight”. Before I could ask her to elaborate, she sat back in her chair and looked stern. I thought it wise to ask no more and went over to the lady in blue who, as it turns out, did have a huge pile of tickets for that evening’s recital and gladly gave us some. Soon she was encircled by other people and I was left in the dark about how that had happened.

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If Joao Carlos Martins’s life has been pretty eventful, as I mentioned in my last article, the same can be said of his music, and the hallmark of his piano playing as well as of his conducting work is his genius originality. From the beginning of his career, Martins has imprinted his personal style on music of the compositions (often played ad nauseam) by great masters such as Bach, Schumann or Mozart. Despite having been sometimes criticised by his inventive approach to these well-known composers, Martins has remained true to his vision that great pianists are those that let their real selves come to the surface in music. In another excellent documentary about his life, Reverie (Johan Kennive and Tim Heirman: 2006), he says that “surely the point of interpretation is playing like yourself (….) somebody who played the notes exactly as they are written would be a computer!”. Furthermore, he mentions that even composers like Benjamin Britten, who obsessively annotated their scores leave a lot out, that must be intuited by the player. This feeling for the music is the mark of a great player.
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The opening scenes of the Irene Langemann’s documentary Die Martins-Passion (Martins’ Passion, 2004) are exquisitely adequate in presenting the life of Brazilian pianist Joao Carlos Martins: a grand piano is hoisted up dozens of floors outside an apartment building in central Sao Paulo. The image is as surprising as it is poetic – the piano rises above buildings and treetops, while on the pavement a man directs the workers who are pulling the ropes, moving his hands like a conductor leading an orchestra. Music rising above the realities of the street and difficulties of life is an apt summary of Martin’s life and musical career. For over fifty years, Martins has known the peak of the international piano scene, depths of injury and depression and a wildly successful conducting job. As in the opening scenes of the documentary, the soundtrack to this journey is all Bach. In this first piece about Martins, I propose to write about his life, whereas the next one will focus on his playing.
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