BOLLETTINO SIAE, Year 68th - Nr.4
(Società Italiana degli Autori ed Editori - Roma)
July-August 1996 (page 192):
Interview to Sergio Calligaris,
by Virgilio Celletti

One composition by Sergio Calligaris, when the presence of piano involves him also as performer, puts the listener in front of an alternative: whether appreciate Calligaris as an author more than as a concert performer. Such a dilemma is more than justified, because since a long time these two activities aren't combined any more: but in the past it was normal they to be together and, in some cases, at exceptional levels. It's even superfluous going back all over a list of names which could start from Mozart and Paganini and come until Busoni. In any case it's about a return to the past. Well: Sergio Calligaris, celebrating this year his 45th anniversary in this let's say double activity (he made his début in his native Rosario being only ten years old with his ballet L'eterna lotta - The eternal fight - for piano and orchestra) is in some ways an artist of the past living nowadays. With great outcome he brings back the romantic role of the author-performer, except leaving all the space they demand to linguistic updating, evolution also technical and great expressive originality above all.

This double role is inside his own biography, initially alternating both the activities and later only combining them. Born in Argentina at the beginning of Forties, Calligaris lived for a long time in the United States and since 1974 is Italian citizen. In his early youth he devoted himself to composition, putting into practice what he learnt from the enlightened teaching of Father Luis Machado: but then the concert performing attracted him and brought him to perform at the most prestigious halls in Europe, Americas and Africa: the same countries, including Soviet Union, where his compositions will be performed, after a couple of decades, by the most important concert institutions and festivals. Very important was also his recording activity (many records of him were awarded by specialized magazines) as well as didactic carried out both in the United States (The Cleveland Institute of Music and California State University in Los Angeles) and in Italy (State Conservatories in Naples, Pescara and L'Aquila, where he's been currently teaching). And it was just a didactic need which urged Calligaris to go back composing, towards the end of Seventies, with Il Quaderno pianistico di Renzo (Renzo's Piano Notebook), which became a sort of backbone of his all following output. Both author's poetic and maestro's effectiveness nest inside it, as well as the expressive strength of who's stood as an author and a performer. And it's just about this last aspect that we wanted to consult him.

VIRGILIO CELLETTI - Do you believe that composers-performers, authors performing their own music are an extinct kind, or you side with those who consider that you bring back by surprise the role belonging in the nineteenth century (let's limit to piano) to Chopin or Liszt and in our century to Rachmaninov or Prokofiev?

SERGIO CALLIGARIS - I must say first of all that neither I have intention to compare to Rachmaninov or Prokofiev, nor I wonder whether it's right that others do it; but no doubt that some works of mine (for instance the Piano Concerto op.29 and the Sonata Fantasy op.32 included in a recently published CD) are distinguished by a piano high virtuousity. In other words, if the author wants to perform pages like this, after composing them, he must possess specific qualifications as performer. Struming piano inside one's own four walls is a thing, facing up to a great symphonic work in a big concert hall is another, in front of eyes (and especially ears) of audience and critics.

CELLETTI - Therefore you distinguish also between a performance in public and one made, for example, in a recording room?

CALLIGARIS - Well, not really; but I'm glad of course that these two performances are both live, how they say, because they're absolutely demonstration of what one can play. There's no possibility to make corrections, remakes, manipulations. But what I wanted to say is that both works are pianistically arduous. Then the author can't escape from these alternatives: either he entrusts them to a fierce enough performer, or he has to be himself a true pianist, who already played the whole high-level repertoire and in this case he also acts as icebreaker in the sense that he offers in person a first performance of demanding pages indeed.

CELLETTI - In short, just as Rachmaninov made, when he recorded himself, for the first time, his own concertos…

CALLIGARIS - If you really care about this analogy, I surrender. Rachmaninov's concertos are really difficult works, like these mine. Compared to him, however, I can luckily rely on an exceptional sound fidelity, like in this case.

CELLETTI - But isn't there also who mantains that the composer not always is the best performer for himself…

CALLIGARIS - Yes, there is, but only when the author isn't at the same time a concert performer undoubtedly good. One thinks immediately about Debussy and Ravel. Rachmaninov is the prototype of the opposite situation. Great pianists who played his music while he was still alive could have made it excellently, I can't deny it, but the author version exactly reflects what he had in mind, also thanks to his transcendental technique. And that's the practical rendering of how he physically, mentally and spiritually thought those pieces. Many times we composers write at our desk: when we go to play, our body gets the upper hand over us and makes us to play the piece, especially in terms of dynamics, in a slightly different way as one can read in the score.

CELLETTI - If an author is also himself an excellent performer, what does it change in his opinion about another's performance?

CALLIGARIS - The true composer-performer has a great respect for the performer. And who only composes must have even more, because the musical language is dead without a performer. We must convince ourselves that the human being who lets our creation live is also entitled to defend his own personality. He'll never destroy a composer's personality, but he can certainly enrich it. He's entitled to play my Concerto with his own technique: and me, in front of a professional high-level performance, I'll never allow myself to change anything. Basic criteria of a composition must be safeguarded, but hints form part of performer's discernment. All those things, just to get it quite clear, that Horowitz defined "what isn't written".

Virgilio Celletti