Interview, Avi Avital on The Art of the Mandolin

Israeli mandolinist Avi Avital is no newcomer to the world of recording, with albums of Bach and Vivaldi transcriptions to his name as well as appearances on aria-albums by Christian Gerhaher and Juan Diego Flórez. What has been absent so far, though, is an album of mandolin repertoire itself - a situation Avital addresses with his latest release, the aptly-named Art of the Mandolin. I caught up with Avi to ask him about how transcriptions came to play such a big role in his musicmaking, and about the different ways various composers have approached the mandolin.

Much of your initial study of the mandolin was under the violinist Simcha Nathanson, who seems to have treated the instrument very similarly to his own. How much technical “un-learning” did you have to do when you came to pursue your studies in more depth with “native” mandolinists?

Yes. It was a big and formative shock, but one that I brought on myself when I graduated from the Jerusalem Music Academy. In the liner notes to the album I’ve only mentioned one of my teachers in Israel, but at the Music Academy where I did my Bachelor’s it was the same situation – I was studying with a violinist there too. So all my teachers up until I was 23 years old were violinists, teaching violin repertoire for me to play on the mandolin. I never actually held a violin myself all this time.

The great advantage of this was that my teachers had no preconceptions. And this allowed them, and me, to make the leap out of the relatively constrained tradition of mandolin-playing itself, which was formative for me as a musician. Nevertheless, when I was 23 I said to myself that although I was now about to embark on my dream of being a professional mandolin player, there was a piece of the puzzle missing – namely, to study with a traditional, or as you say a “native”, mandolinist. I found this person in Ugo Orlandi – a great scholar and player and educator about the mandolin, someone who has dug through the archives and libraries in Italy and beyond to find rarities.

Undoubtedly I learned a lot, but the first couple of months were difficult. Although all the other students were much younger than I was, for the first month my teacher insisted that I had to adjust my hands and posture into a completely different technique – which meant that I was playing, say, a simple G major scale in front of all the other students! I have no criticisms of Ugo; this is exactly what I wanted, after all: to learn that completely different, and traditional, approach. I was old enough to then decide what elements to take from this approach into my own half-formed musical persona.

So yes, I did re-learn – and I also learned the traditional repertoire written for the mandolin by mandolinists. Ugo was a great help, and a wonderful musician. At the same time, I did come to realise that my more autodidactic musical upbringing – free of being conditioned by the expectations of what the mandolin was and its traditions – was actually a good thing in many ways, in terms of repertoire.

The evolution of any instrument is always a kind of triangular relationship. You have the composer, who always writes music at the limit of the available technique and pushes things forward; the instrumentalist, who will develop ever better technique in order to cope with the demands of the repertoire; and the instrument-maker, who will improve the instrument – the strings, say, or the bow.

The example I like to give is that if you had a time-machine and you took a keyboard player from Bach’s era and gave him a Rachmaninov piano concerto, he wouldn’t be able to play it and the instrument would break! But the mandolin is interesting in that it has become relatively stuck in this respect. Being mainly an instrument for amateurs, and not one that was often considered by big-name composers as a concert instrument, its evolution was limited. This is why I feel that my first fifteen years of playing violin repertoire for the mandolin was much more demanding technically and musically than the equivalent mandolin repertoire.

Although plenty of violinist-composers and pianist-composers have become well-known over the years, mandolinist-composers seem to have struggled to extend their reputation beyond the ranks of fellow mandolinists. Why do you think this is?

This is something I wondered about when I was choosing the pieces for this album. I knew I wanted it to be all pieces written for the mandolin – hitherto I’ve mostly performed arrangements. Within that, though, there is a distinction between the repertoire of mandolinist-composers and that of non-mandolinist-composers; and for me it was much more interesting to see how a composer who is not from the mandolin “world” sees this instrument. These composers would always have a reason for choosing the mandolin, whereas mandolinist-composers would write for it simply because they were mandolin players themselves.

It’s not actually a bad thing per se that the mandolin is this charming, accessible “amateur” instrument that everyone can play. But these same qualities that make it popular also at the same time distance it from the concert hall and the more “serious” approach to music. This is the nature of the instrument, and it means that even experts like Raffaele Calace, who was active around the turn of the last century and was described as the ‘Paganini of the mandolin’, are only really known by other mandolinists. It’s a similar issue to the one that faced the classical guitar for some time – it was relatively confined to its own community, with guitar competitions and guitar concert series and guitar symposiums, and that happens with the mandolin as well. So despite the contributions made by people like Calace, and their importance in the mandolin canon, I decided not to include pieces of this kind.

You refer to the mandolin’s particular prominence in Naples – perhaps a clue to the puzzle of those of his keyboard sonatas that are speculated to have been originally written for the instrument. But what was so special about Naples – why did the mandolin become so common there?

It’s an interesting question. The mandolin as we know it today is derived from the Neapolitan mandolin, but at the time when this instrument evolved there were a variety of plucked string instruments in Italy that were known as mandolins. The Venetian mandolin had six double strings, or sometimes five, and was tuned in fourths rather than in fifths like the Neapolitan mandolin. There was a Cremonese mandolin, a Milanese mandolin… almost every region in Italy had its own plucked string instrument with a soprano range.

This variety is still in evidence to this day. These days we call something a mandolin if it has four double strings and is tuned in fifths, but the shape is not standardised. If you go to the USA, you’ll find flat-backed instruments with f-holes and a curl on the body, used for bluegrass. This shape, and the slightly more nasal tone that it produces, are the desired aesthetic for this kind of music. If you go to Brazil, it’s used in Brazilian choro music. They too use flat-backed instruments but they’re a little different, and today it’s common to add a fifth double string. And then if you go to Italy, you’ll find bowl-backed instruments that we associate with Neapolitan song; they have a brighter and more Mediterranean sound. The mandolin has always been varied, but from the Baroque period on, the instrument that we know today – metal strings, tuned in fifths, and other characteristics – is based on the Neapolitan mandolin.

I don’t know why it “clicked” with Naples; all over the Mediterranean you get variations on this plucked string instrument that play prominent roles in their respective traditions. I think it must have just fitted particularly well there.

Several of the pieces featured on this album feature a variety of different plucked instruments – including substantial works by David Bruce, Paul Ben-Haim and Hans Werner Henze. What do you think draws composers to this combination of plucked sonorities?

I certainly know what David Bruce’s thinking was, because I asked him! But for Paul Ben-Haim and Henze, who are from more or less the same period of time, I think it’s an attempt to create or imagine a chamber music format for the plucked string family. You have the string quartet, or the wind quintet – so what would be the equivalent of that for plucked strings?

For Paul Ben-Haim, choosing the harpsichord, guitar and mandolin; from his perspective, he wanted to be the forefather of a new Israeli contemporary music for the twentieth century. He’s as important for Israeli art music as Bartók is for Hungary and Dvořák for the Czech Republic. In his way, he tried to create a new art-musical language that was connected to the local culture. There are references to Middle Eastern instruments, even while using Western ones (for instance in many places in the Ben-Haim sonata, the harpsichord sounds like a qanun and the guitar sounds like an oud). There’s also a Biblical connection; in the Jewish tradition, the first instruments introduced in the Bible and played by King David are plucked string instruments. David’s harp, Yuval’s kinnor, which is a plucked instrument – Ben-Haim is striking a very ancient string in this piece.

For Henze, it would have been totally different – when he was writing his piece for harp, guitar and mandolin, he was using delicate instruments that aren’t very loud. And I think he developed the idea from there, with a sound that’s sometimes small and music-box-like. The first movement strikes me as being made up of a series of episodes from different music-boxes – very mechanical and sometimes out of sync, sometimes they break and all the springs fly out, but sometimes also they come together in music that’s almost childishly delicate. So Henze conceives of these three plucked instruments in a completely different way to Ben-Haim.

The trio by Ben-Haim draws on eclectic musical influences to reflect the melting-pot of modern Israeli society in pursuit of a new, uniquely Israeli, musical language. Are there other Israeli composers who have made similar efforts, that listeners curious about the music of Israel should seek out?

Definitely. Paul Ben-Haim came from Germany to what was then the British Mandate of Palestine; he was educated in Munich and was teaching there when he had to flee. He came to Israel, together with many other artists who had also been educated in Europe, and they had this identity clash – how to exist in this new land while composing as if they were still in Munich, which wasn’t an option for most of them. This was a very common practice in the twentieth century; you see a lot of composers who are binding their own cultural heritage into art music.

At least, that was the tendency early in the twentieth century. After the War, of course, it became very different; the avant-garde came to the fore and nationalism was a dirty word, with composers distancing themselves from anything that would evoke this kind of sentiment. But now I think in the twenty-first century when we have a multitude of genres and sub-genres and languages, there’s a bit of a return to folklorism – not nationalism as such but drawing on folk traditions. I think one can hear this in David Bruce’s piece. It’s not bound to any specific folk tradition but it evokes something of that kind in the imagination.

Coming back round to the question of other Israeli composers – there was an important school of composition at Ben-Haim’s time, and he ended up being seen as its leader. Marc Lavry is another – he wrote quite impressionistic music. His most famous pieces have titles like Three Jewish Dances, Yemenite Wedding Dance, The Galilee, Jerusalem, The Judean Desert - all very impressionistic topics. Others include Joachim Stutschewsky, and Tzvi Avni who is of a slightly younger generation of composers.

One of my favourite albums of classical music is by Pnina Salzman, who was an Israeli pianist in the twentieth century; she recorded an album called Pnina Salzman plays Mediterranean Piano Music, and it’s all piano music from this school of composers. It really gives you a view them, trying to create the eclectic musical language of the new Israel. I’d say the main players in that school were Paul Ben-Haim, Avner Dorman, Stutschewsky, and Avni, and Lavry might perhaps fall under the same heading too.