This will be the first of a sereis of email conversations I’ll be having with pianist (and Naxos recording artist) Ralph van Raat. After contacting Ralph about this project we quickly become friends and found ourselves chatting about more than the music. Here is the first round of questions I had / have for Mr. van Raat. enjoy!

-What do you have going on this summer musically?

Usually, I spend my holidays mostly by learning a lot of new repertoire for the coming concert season. I deliberately (and almost traditionally) reserve a period of several weeks in this period without any concerts or other engagements, to fully concentrate myself at making a good start with all those new works. Obviously, the process of learning new works continues throughout the whole year, but then all the attention has to be divided between many things, such as concertizing, lecturing, and practising. It always turns out to be an absolutely amazing and enjoyable experience to put aside these things for a while and just plunge into all those exciting new projects! Another exciting thing is the recording of two new CD’s for Naxos, right at the end of summer, which I am greatly looking forward to.

-Where will you be taking your Holiday?

Holidays will take me this year to a rather quiet place in southern France - a very small village near Avignon - where there is, in fact, no piano or whatsoever. I used not to take holidays and continue to work for many years, however, retreating into silence, quietness and into your own world of thought for a while, with many books and good food, turns out to be very inspiring and refreshing, too…

-You’re a Pilot? When did aviation start to interest you and how did this interst develop?

It is almost hard to remember when aviation started to interest me, as my interest (like with music) started before I was born (at least - that is the way it feels!!). It had always been a dilemma for me in what area to try and pursue a career - aviation or music. At 14, I took a glider flying course. I was at high school, and mostly had time for my interests (playing the piano and flying) during the weekends. I noticed that, despite my enthusiasm for flying, the passion for music won more often. Unfortunately I had to make a decision how to spend my time, and after two years I chose to spend as much time as I could on a music career. However, the dream of flying never let go of me. Once I studied at the conservatory, I was happy to win some competitions not only because it helped my career, but also because I thought that it would bring the prospect of being able to fly more close: at least as a passenger, travelling to foreign concert venues, but perhaps even for private flying, some day….And sometime ago I decided to make that dream come true and plunge into a PPL course.

I can say, that it is the best of life, combining the worlds of music and aviation. I mutually learn from them: music has to do with a lot of mental and practical preparation; with finding a balance between reason and emotion (i.e. taking passion into control); and with the final performance as a critical moment where all knowledge comes together at once. With flying, I recognize many of the same issues and processes. You prepare your flight carefully, the route, the circumstances such as weather, your fuel etc. Then the flight itself can be seen as the performance, where it comes down to passion, skills and knowledge, like in a concert. During a flight, you have to take many things into account in order to arrive where you want to arrive, such as the action of wind. That is very similar to adjusting your musical performance to the acoustics of the concert hall and the ‘mood’ of the audience, in order to shape the ‘destination’ (or goals) of your concert performance. So in fact, flying for an hour does not feel much different that playing the piano for an hour!

-Do you look at very much art? Do you have any favorites in the world of the Visual Arts?

In fact, I have always been very inspired by the analogies between visual arts and music especially from the end of the 19th century up till and including today. To me it seems that in any period of time in history, there never has been a closer correlation between those two. In fact, especially more “difficult” abstract music (such as the compositions by Webern and Schoenberg) can be much better understood by looking at the visual interpretations of very similar artistic views in works by painters such as Kandinsky. Personally, I am very fascinated by post-impressionism, which is characterized by painters such as Cézanne. They were especially interested in the different emotions and effects of colour, something that interests me in music a lot. Also, they tried (with pointillist techniques) to create a larger whole by using minute streaks of paint. In music, one also strives to make one coherent story of seemingly loose entities, which are the individual notes, until something recognizable appears. It is especially in this perspective that I find ideas for playing and interpreting music in visual arts.

To Be continued…..

Schoenberg’s polyphonic tone poem Pelleas und Melisande (1902) is often compared to Debussy’s opera based on the same text by Maurice Maeterlinck. According to Schoenberg, the 1905 premiere of his work in Vienna, which he directed “provoked riots among the audience and even the critics. Reviews were unusually violent and one of the critics suggested putting me in an asylum and keeping music paper out of my reach. Only six years later, under Oscar Fried’s direction, it became a great success, and since that time has not caused the anger of the audience.”

Next, the1909 masterwork Erwartung is a monodrama for soprano and large orchestra with text by Marie Pappenheim, a young medical student who was commissioned by Schoenberg himself. Consisting of the interior monologue of a woman who has killed the lover with whom she is expecting a tryst, the action takes place between twilight and dawn near and in a forest. It begins with her search for him, her discovery of his still-bleeding corpse, and finally her realization that “light will dawn for all others, but I am all alone in my darkness,” a line set to the only tonal music in the work (borrowed from one of Schoenberg’s early songs). Among the work’s most innovative features are its continual variation of orchestral textures-not only are the instrumental combinations new, but the instruments themselves are required to produce new sounds- and the constantly changing tempi.

Robert Craft, the noted conductor and widely respected writer and critic on music, literature, and culture, holds a unique place in world music of today. He has twice won the Grand Prix du Disque, as well as the Edison Prize for his landmark recordings of Schoenberg, Webern, and Varèse. He has also received a special award from the American Academy and National Institute of Arts and Letters in recognition of his “creative work” in literature. In 2002 he was awarded the International Prix du Disque Lifetime Achievement Award at the Cannes Music Festival. In addition to his special command of Stravinsky’s and Schoenberg’s music, Mr. Craft is well known for his recordings of works by Monteverdi, Gesualdo, Schütz, Bach, and Mozart. He is also the author of more than two dozen books on music and the arts, including the highly acclaimed Stravinsky: Chronicle of a Friendship; The Moment of Existence: Music, Literature and the Arts, 1990-1995; Places: A Travel Companion for Music and Art Lovers; An Improbable Life: Memoirs; Memories and Commentaries; and “Down a Path of Wonder”: On Schoenberg, Webern, Stravinsky, Eliot, Auden, and Some Others (2005). He is in the process of recording the complete works of Stravinsky, Schoenberg, and Webern for Naxos.

From the beginning, Anja Silja’s large and varied repertoire, including nearly every major soprano role in opera, has shaped her unique career. Born in Berlin, she began her vocal studies at the age of six, gave her first performance at the city’s Titania Palace at the age of ten, and made her stage debut at the age of 16 in Brunswick as Rosina in Il barbiere di Siviglia. She was invited to Bayreuth in 1960 and sang Elisabeth, Venus, Eva, Elsa, Freia, and Senta in Wieland Wagner’s productions, roles she subsequently performed at major opera houses throughout the world. She is especially acclaimed for her interpretation of Emilia Marty in Janáček’s The Makropoulos Case, and, recently, for her Kostelnička in Jenůfa, which she has sung in Glyndebourne and Zürich, at Covent Garden, and at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Ms. Silja has performed in Erwartung with James Levine in Berlin, Madrid, with the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra at Carnegie Hall, and at the Verbier Festival.