| P h i l a d e l p h i a |
| M U S I C M A K E R S |
| Vol.3, No.4 Winter 2004 |
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| Insatiable pianist Sandrine Erdely-Sayo By Jill Yris |
| Concert pianist Sandrine Erdely-Sayo spent fifteen years of her childhood savoring Bach for breakfast. Her assignment each week was to memorize a new one of his compositions. At the same time, she said, she might also have been practicing one of his fugues. "I couldn't run away from him." Erdely-Sayo was born in the South of France. By the tender age of four she was already studying piano at the Perpignan Conservatory. By age thirteen, she was the youngest recipient of the French minister of Culture prize, and was awarded several first prizes and gold medals at international competitions. She performed at the Châtelet Théâtre, Salle Cortot and the louvre in Paris. Her Philadelphia venues have included Mozart on the Square concerts, Bach Festivals and Jewish Film Festival. By the time she was eleven years old, she was on tour performing the Bach Concerto in F Minor, and had to leave her formal schooling to receive tutoring by mail and from her mother. Eventually she was able to attend the Paris National Superior Conservatory where she concentrated on counterpoint, harmony and fugue, with a specialization in solfège. |
| Though her resume makes her life sound like a sweet dream, it wasn't. As a young teenager, living and studying in Paris in an intense academic atmosphere wasn't easy. "I was living in a place for musicians and directed by nuns. I was always hungry and cold except on Sundays when I was going to Hebrew school," she said. However, she was somehow able to attend the theatre, opera, the Academie Française, and of course partying before slipping back to the nuns. "What a paradox! People called me the wandering Jew. You see," she explained, "when one has a will, a goal and a love, one can do anything." Her reward came in the summer when she was invited to stay in Montfort l'Amaury, an enchanting country property north of Paris owned by Denyse Riviere (from the Paris Conservatory). She was, Erdely-Sayo said, a decisive influence on her music and consequently her life. The picturesque summer heaven's atmosphere cradled her in a creative warmth and artistic security. "It is where I have been learning my repertoire for more than twenty years," she said. The property was one block away from the home of Maurice Ravel, and also the place where César Franck finished writing his Beatitudes, she noted. She still has strong memories - including the fact that Franck once lived with Denyse Riviere's family and that "Denyse threw his [Franck's] piano away. It was full of worms." Erdely-Sayo also remembers: "It's where I studied Franck's Prelude, Choral and Fugue. At this young age, I was very excited to play Franck's music where he lived, and Ravel's music on Ravel's piano. It's awesome." At the age of seventeen, Erdely-Sayo won the Concours de la Scène Française in Paris and was subsequently approached to move to the States, a change of direction from her original intention to go to Italy. She moved to Center City, Philadelphia, at the age of nineteen, and she says that "Americans have been extraordinary with me. I will never forget." Her next step to her American career was her introduction to the noted pianist Susan Starr, who herself debuted at age six with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Starr spoke warmly of Erdely-Sayo, saying she is a "wonderful pianist who has a very special personality in her playing and her interpretations have some quality that others don't have. ...Sandrine can inject a very special kind of humor in her playing and she transmits that when she performs. She is a superb musician with a wonderful ear and great fingers." Erdely-Sayo credits Barrie Cassileth, chief of the Integrative Medecine Service at the Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in NY, and former teacher at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medecine, along with clarinet-player Herb Hesh, for their help in facilitating her post-graduate studies a the University of the Arts with Starr. At the present time, Erdely-Sayo is single. "I haven't found my charming prince," she says, her accent pronounced and her speech studded with bon and ooh-la-la. "He probably hides between my notes. They run too fast to find him."Along with her performomg career, she teaches privately, at the Doylestown Conservatory and Temple Prep. Speaking of income, she says, "You have little chance to become a millionaire, but you are certainly richer than most people. You need to have a strong dedication, a strong mental, physical health and a smile when there is a rainy day... A person who does music for glory is a neurotic; a person who does music for money is senseless." She belongs to several organizations for the gifted, but tends to downplay her involvements in these prestigious associations and prefers mentioning her volunteering with the Children's Advanced International Learning Institute, a program to help children in developing countries reach their full educational potential. About her practice, Erdely-Sayo says, "It is indispensable to organize a day of practice where music will not be the daily bread but a holiday cake," noting that concentration is more important than the actual length of practice time. "Many studies have proved that our capacity of memorization declines after twenty minutes so it's necessary during the memorization work to learn to take small breaks of five to ten minutes. We could think that it's a loss of time, but it's during this time that our brain organizes and connects all the given information before storing them in our long-term memory." Her advice for a musician to survive and thrive through days an days of practicing is: Discipline, discipline, discipline; proper nutrition; avoid stress and think creatively and critically. And if possible, play on an instrument one cherishes. In Philadelphia, her choice of piano is a Yamaha, and in France, a Pleyel-Schimmel. In concert, Erdely-Sayo likes to perform on a Bösendorfer or a Steinway, aspecially the Steinway from Hamburg. She chooses a repertoire "that will seduce the ears of an audience. I want to make the listeners think, laugh, cry and get in touch with their own emotions. Music shouldn't be reserved for a minority, but it should be shared and understood by all." Her CDs include the work of Primitivo Lazaro, a modern-day Spanish composer, including his Rapsodia Onubense and Suite of the Marvels, the six movements of which were inspired by the Caves of Aracera, filled with effervescent arpeggios and light-hearted trills. On another recording, Erdely-Sayo performs compositions written by lazaro in tribute to three composers, which incorporate the well-mannered and formal aspects of Felix Mendelssohn, the rich warmth and abundant animation of Robert Schumann and the lyrical, poetic style of Frederic Chopin. Speaking of the technical skills required of virtuosic performers (such as those exhibited by Erdely-Sayo), Homer W. Smith, a physiologist, states (Introduction to Music, by Martin Bernstein and Martin Picker, Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1966) : "perhaps in no other human activity do memory, complex integration, and muscular coordination surpass the achievements of the skilled pianist." Smith gives an example of velocity in numerical terms: if a pianist played Schumann's Toccata in C Major in four minutes and twenty seconds - a feat which has been successfully accomplished without sacrificing clarity- 24.1 key depressions have occurred, with a total of 6,266 depressions in the composition - an astounding virtuosity of rapid octaves and sixteenth-notes. Erdely-Sayo's next CD will include music by Franck, Ravel, Messiaen and Poulenc. "I am profoundly attached to French music," she said, "not because I am French, but because this music is refined. French composers wrote in a very sophisticated way and I am very sensitive to the clarity of writing. She credits the French with teaching musicians harmonic sensitivity, magical modulations and voluptuous sounds. In her ten to fifteen-hour work days practicing and writing (poetry and several musical pieces), Erdely-Sayo also includes studies of literature, mathematics, philosophy and physics. "Knowledge completes an artist, enriches his horizon and refines his sensitivity. The more we learn, the better chance we have to see things clearer and to have a higher degree of humanism. Intelligence should be cultivated and eduction protected." She continues: "A sound is nothing if it is not opposed to another - the ricochet movement consequently creating music, which expresses and externalizes emotions while being capable of communicating thought. It bring us to the road of reflection and philosophy, but also the road to poetry, art and colors." For example, she explained: "There are seven musical memories (analytic, auditory, muscular or tactile, nominative, numeral, rhythmical and visual); seven notes in a scale; seven primary colors and seven colors in a rainbow." She used as an illustration Claude Debussy's sensitive compositions, which reveal prismatic auras through his use of coloristic effects and parallel chord movements. "How can we play Debussy without thinking of Baudelaire or Verlaine's poetry? Chabrier without mentioning Manet? Can we talk about Chopin without thinking about poetry or revolution or Granados without mentioning Goya? The history of humanity is not only political or economic, it is also artistic and even more musical." Erdely-Sayo's thirst to find solutions encourages her studies of mathematics and physics, which in turn provide concrete evidence for generally recognized concepts. "Everything abstract," she says, "whether music, the universe, God, infinity, has a frame or a logic. To be able to understand its logic and its complexity, and to articulate an idea or an explanation, it is important to put as many tools as possible in the brain. The structure of mathematics leads to understand logic. Music and mathematics are two inseparable sciences, and of course, I will think right away about the treatise on harmony by Rameau and also the two treatises of Boece about arithmetic and music which complete each other. But the 'Father' of 'mathematics-music' is probably Pythagoras. Around 550BC, Pythagoras discovered the relationships between intervals, mathematical ratios and degrees of consonance or dissonance," Erdely-Sayo continued. "Pythagoras was convinced that the laws of harmony were the same as the ones which govern the constitution of the worlds and the planets, thereby gaining access to the knowledge of the microcosm which is the universe. Physics did an intrusion into mathematics and music became a physico-mathematics science. Descartes wrote:'The object of music is sound; its end is to seduce and to excite in us diverse passions.' Physics studies the relationship of sounds or intervals. You see, again, music brings you to everything." Her insatiable scholarly curiosity led Erdely-Sayo to substantiating an important observation involving a composition by Francis Poulenc, reportedly a member of Les Six, of neo-classical orientation - his work sometimes serious, sometimes satirical. "Poulenc is for me the most mysterious and spontaneous musician," said Erdely-Sayo, who spent her childhood studying his improvisations and playing much of his music in concert. "His indications used to make me smile," she said, giving as example 'doucement baigné de pédales,' loosely translated as 'gently bathed in pedals.' "In 1995, Dr.Carl Schmidt, a great scholar who wrote many books on Francis Poulenc, asked me to give the world premiere of a recently discovered piece:'Les Trois Pastorales'. I was very honored and it was a real pleasure to discover and learn a pieace that was lost for many years. "As a French pianist, I did the world premiere in America, and Noel Lee, an American pianist, did the French premiere in Paris. In 2001, I decided to learn his Intermezzo in A flat Major (Max Eschig Edition). While I was learning it, a note was bothering me and I thought: it must be a mistake!" After buying several different recordings, she recognized that certain artists played the intended notes, while many continued playing D flat. "People thought I was thinking too much and said:'play what's written!'" Amid the ridicule, she was still not convinced. "Then I heard a recording of Rubistein and he was playing D natural. the best [way to settle it] was to call Dr. Schmidt" a professor of musicology at Towson State University, Maryland. "With his help, I had access to a copy of the Vladimir Horowitz's score (Signed and) corrected by a pencil mark by Poulenc which confirms that on the third page, last line, first measure all the Ds except the first one are natural (same thing for the second measure). You see, there is always a story with Poulenc!" The author wishes to thank Barbara School for her help with the French-English translation. To contact Sandrine Erdely-Sayo, email her at: sandrine@erdelysayo.com. Her CDs can be found at Tower Records or online at her website: www.erdelysayo.com |
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