inarCASSA, Year 31 - Nr.4
(Editrice inarCASSA - Maggioli Editore)
October/December 2003 (page 86):
Sergio Calligaris
The logic of the form
by Paolo De Bernardin

A grand piano dominates the scene at the pianist and composer Sergio Calligaris' living room in Rome. Sit at the keyboard, the artist seems to fondle the keys with his fast hands that run and cross. The sound, flooding the room and the flat and the stairs and the entire building, is a real amalgam of fluidity and moods, of feelings that can overwhelm. One is wrapped up in that incredible cascade of notes apparently simple and spontaneous, but in fact result of years and years of study and continuous and incessant practice.

What delights my ears is Une barque sur l'océan, from Maurice Ravel's Miroirs, and expresses an incessant fluidity. Like a drawing of sound, where the hands cross along five octaves with an impressive speed to bend into little ecstasies of liquid reflections and inner reflection. Cadenzas and flows, dominant notes that martial advance and luxuriant arpeggios that wrap up the surrounding world, colours that intersect and pursue themselves, immortal fantasies of an extremely refined piece of Ravel bristling with difficulties and entirely played by heart.

When one plays in a expressive or brilliant manner - Maestro says - all seems spontaneous, but it isn't so. All is perfectly calculated. Every pianissimo or crescendo or diminuendo or rubato is mathematically studied and willed. Behind each note there's a physical movement. I don't work on the sound in itself, but on the movement producing that sound. The simple work on the sound would deceive, if one wouldn't remember those precise movements to do with the hands. Differently, the sound wouldn't come out always in the same way. The playing is like scratching the key in every note, getting its essence out of it. The hand contracts, but the neck and the head and the entire body remain in a total relax, right because all the force concentrates in the hands and, without proceeding in this way, then the body strains itself. If the hand is weak, tendinitis arise. The lacking force would have to be found at loins and then pathologies like scolyosis come out.

Is it therefore pure energy, result of concentration, that has to be directed on the hands?

That's it. I've been trained in a so called pianism of strength. The wrist blocked without articular movement, with the relaxation of the trapezoidal part of muscles and the fixedness of the diaphragm. The 'cupola' of the hand is sturdy, like steel, as a real bricklayer. It's a vice of grip that approaches the keys. This allows a high speed because the hand is so toned up in muscles with very demanding daily exercises that the playing technique becomes very agile. One day a colleague in conservatory tried to make a cutting remark saying 'You play on whatever piano, no matter its brand. You might play even on stones'. I don't know whether it was a scornful remark but I consider it a pleasant compliment. I can have in front of me a Bechstein, a Pleyel or a Yamaha piano, a grand or a upright piano, but it's always the same approach to the keyboard. It's the style of the Juilliard School in New York. There, pianists have a technique of steel, they have a habit of strength in fingers and in the steel wrist because this way, when for instance you have to perform a touch as a 'pianissimo', you don't do that with the weight of your hand but with the speed of lowering of the key and, to say that as Pogorelich that I really appreciate, 'the hand is armed even before getting to the key'. For this reason, when I study or work, I prefer these very tough, very heavy pianos. An example. Concert grand pianos have keys which weight is around 53 or 54 grams each. I study on a piano which keys weigh 85 grams. And this entails a considerable toil which isn't achieved simply in pressing one or few keys at a time and slowly, but in performing an exercise of speed. If you aren't trained nor accustomed to the keyboard, then it makes you very tired. Just look at Vladimir Ashkenazy: if you see him close up, he has big hands, as a bricklayer. They're coarse, muscular hands, like mine, not chubby. Sturdy as Horowitz', Richter's, Gilels' ones. Or as the great Arthur Rubinstein's. Coarse hands that confront the keyboard with fingers perpendicular to the keys, never cajoling. They're tough and apparently stiff but they can fly upon the keyboard with a huge adaptability. This is a training to acquire through years. However, I've never taught my pupils the technique, although I'm a maniac of technique. Because that type of technique, either you learn it when you're very young, or you can't do it subsequently, because it's very demanding. It's a muscular technique that one has to possess and that's that, but only if acquired in youth, because it's made of muscular contractions.

Maestro Calligaris' history has a résumé of fifty years and develops from the far Rosario, Argentinian province, to continue in America and Europe in prestigious theatres and concert halls, to eventually come to Italy, where he taught in several national conservatories and has been carried out his composing art, rich of about firty works. Grandchild of people from Friuli emigrant to South America at the beginning of the twentieth century, Sergio Calligaris has always lived in music since his childhood. His history sounds almost like a fairy tale, a magic spell.

My father was a very brilliant engineer and he played as an amateur, but very well, piano, violin and classical guitar. Every day, in spite of his business commitments, he trained piano with all sorts of scale. My mother was more a wife than a mother and was always close to him, making me independent and self-confident. Her free time was for my father and not for me. She belonged to the world of classical ballet. And it was right a ballet which drove me to writing music. When I was a little boy I had two passions making me joyful, the ballet and the trains. The sight of a steam train in the night, with the fire feeding its bowels and giving it its power made me literally crazy. With the mecano toy that my father presented me I had built a sort of imaginary little theatre for ballet. I was eight years old when an evening, while I was toying with it, something that deeply fascinated me was broadcasted in radio. I didn't know at all what it was. It was a sort of love at first sight that struck me so much that even today, listening to that music I feel the same emotions. It was a page from Alexander Glazunov, the ballet "The Seasons". That Adagio of the Autumn movement, with its melancholy influenced my entire life. Even now I have in front of my eyes that situation. My bedroom, my mecano toy, my position, the radio place. Even today I get the same effect. Later on I discovered the magnificent composition technique of that ballet and its counterpoint, its modulating harmony. Since then I began scrawling music on pieces of paper. I was ten years old.

But it was three years already that you had been taking piano lessons.

The pentagram is like a cobweb - said my first piano teacher - and the little notes like little spiders that climb up". My teacher began my first lesson by saying so when I was seven. But since I wanted to play at once, I slipped away. My mother, who never got angry, that time tweaked my ear and carried me back to Miss Adelina D'Aloisio's home - this was my teacher's name - forcing me to go on. I want to play, I was always saying. And after one week I was already able to play the Clementi's Sonatina, even adding my own notes. My teacher, very honestly, moved back and told my mother that she wasn't on a level with me, because I was a sort of sacred monster, an enfant prodige.

Calligaris' first work was a ballet, composed when he was ten years old and played with the accompaniment of an orchestra. At twelve years of age he played very difficult pages, from Rachmaninov to Mussorgsky. At age fourteen he made his début at the Colon Theatre of Buenos Aires. Fifteen-year-old he had the honour to perform the South American première of the Toccata for piano and orchestra of Ottorino Respighi, under the baton of Simon Blech, favourite pupil of the great conductor Hermann Scherchen. All that even before his doctorate in high composition gained at age sixteen, an important goal that opened him the gates to the United States. Specialized in dodecaphonic counterpoint in Cleveland, Ohio, Calligaris was already lecturer at the age of twenty-one, and after some time he embarked on an European tour with the impresario Hans Hadler of Berlin, in a playbill with high-level names as Kempf, Fournier, Solti, Argerich and Weissenberg.

Maestro, how does your love for an author rise in you, your choice of a score? From the technique? From its own difficulty?

I really can't explain it. It's something instinctive. Usually, the most cerebral people are the most emotional. When I play, I never let myself go. All is pondered. Moreover, as a good Latin American, I've a 'sangre caliente'. Therefore I write according to a mathematical calculation. Don't forget that the training takes place since the chilhood. My Maestro, Luis Machado, was assistant of Paul Hindemith and situated me in this absolutely mathematical mental structure. My other teachers were Domingo Scarafia, Jorge Fanelli, Adele Marcus, Arthur Loesser, Guido Agosti, Nikita Magaloff. Maybe it's due to my family roots from Friuli, maybe to my great love for the Slavic and Russian school. It's a cerebral way of composing, but when I'm inside it I forget all technicisms and been dragged by my passion. Being technically disciplined represents the reaction of the high, emotive side of our brain.

When you compose or perform, do you feel like a figurative artist who moulds a statue or paints a picture?

No, I don't. When I play, I imagine nothing. I don't feel like a sculptor or a painter. But rather like a mathematician, an architect. It's the form and the logic of form what I'm interested in. I deeply love nature and, by observing it, I light up, as in an ecstasy, with musical ideas. Thanks to my absolute pitch ear I can transcribe all that occurs to me. The logical symmetries of the form, the proportions that are inside a score are the essence of the artist, architect and musician at the same time. One day Michelangelo Zurletti wrote about me: "Finally this symbiosis, existing between elegiac and telluric moments, maybe turns into an architecture devoid of any compromise, in its severe simplicity. Perhaps the extreme duality between the elegiac element and the dithyrambic one settles them".

Paolo De Bernardin

Paolo De Bernardin (Cupra Marittima, 1948).
After classical and university studies, he left the study to devote himself totally to music.
Disc-jockey in the first half of the Seventies, compère and announcer in some local televisions.
Co-founder of one of the first local radio stations in Italy (Radio 102, San Benedetto del Tronto, 1975).
Editor in the magazine "Popster", he founded in 1980 "Rockstar", where he was chief editor until 1993.
He contributes to several newspapers and magazines ("Free Magazine", "Etnica & World Music", "Edizioni LU", "Olis", "Musica" , "La Repubblica" , "Il Quotidiano.it", "Urban" and "Inarcassa") and to Edizioni L'Espresso, where he's the author of "One hundred years of Afro-American history".
Since 1998 he's the author and artistic director of the Festival "Radici" of San Benedetto del Tronto and contributor to "Il Violino e la Selce", directed by Franco Battiato.
He has contributed to RAI since 1978, as a speaker in various programmes in all its radio networks (from "Stereonotte" to "Archivi del Suono", from "Masters" to "Jingle Bells", from "Biblioteca di Musica Leggera" to "L'altra musica", from "Il Cammello di Radio Due" to"Il Terzo Anello " di Radio Tre, from "Rai International" to "Notturno Italiano") and its television networks ("Discoring", "Rai Educational", and as speaker at Rai Sat "Satisfaction").
He also contributes to the network In Blu di Blu Sat 2000 as speaker at "Crossover", "Jazztime", "Wonderful Land".
Since 1996 he has contributed to Selection of the Reader's Digest, where he published "The World's Tour in music", since 2002 to Inarcassa and since 2003 to Club Tenco.