Geoffrey Thomas

Main-Echo, Aschaffenburg, 3.11.2009
Mythos Genie trotz mancher Instant-Sonate

Anekdotenkonzert:
Der Budapester Pianist Geoffrey Thomas in der Aschaffenburger Christuskirche auf
den Spuren Joseph Haydns

Aschaffenburg. „Wie zum Teufel haben Sie das geschrieben, Haydn?“ fragte Geoffrey Thomas ein ums andere Mal in seinen kleinen Szenen, die er zum Lebenslauf des großen Musikers und Komponisten zusammensetzte. Denn nicht historische Fakten standen im Zentrum des Programms „Joseph Haydn – Leben in Noten und Anekdoten“ in der Aschaffenburger Christuskirche, sondern die Frage nach dem musikalischen Genie, das der Budapester Pianist mit den amerikanischen Wurzeln in wenigen Einzelsätzen aus den Sonaten Haydns anklingen ließ. Ein amüsantes Spiel um Musik und ihren Schöpfer.
Fürst Esterházy mit dem Gebaren des Oligarchen Roman Abramowitsch? Haydn als Straßenmusiker in der U-Bahn? Und dann als Pop-Star in London? Da wurde nichts ausgelassen, um die Musikerexistenz plastisch und dennoch mit wenigen Requisiten zu schildern.

Der zum dritten Mal in Aschaffenburg gastierende Geoffrey Thomas hat für sich eine kreative Nische aufgetan: „Theater of Music“, eine Mischung aus Spielszenen und Musikeinlagen, die den kreativen Prozess von Händel, Mozart oder hier Haydn in ihrer historischen Lebenswelt aufzeigen. Dabei darf es ruhig Spaß machen, da ist der Amerikaner mit den Wurzeln in der E-Musik des Barock offen. Es soll auch albern sein, zum Lachen animieren und auf leichte Art Geschichte vermitteln. Dennoch gibt es einen ernsthaften Roten Faden in diesem biographischen Ablauf, nämlich die Frage nach dem musikalischen Genie: „Ist Genialität erlernbar oder muss man als Genie geboren sein?“ formuliert Thomas als durchaus der eigenen Biographie entlehnte Überlegung.
Zuerst einmal gab der Bewunderer Haydns zu, dass nicht alles das Etikett „geniale Komposition“ trägt, was der österreichische Komponist geschaffen hat. Kurz angespielt ist manches als „Instant-Sonate“ erkennbar – „einige Läufe, einige Akkorde, dazu Wasser und ab in die Mikrowelle - fertig“. Aber der Pianist spielte auch anderes, den Haydn nämlich, der nicht nur seine Zeitgenossen unterhielt, sondern bei seinen Kollegen Hochachtung weckte und ganze Generationen von Musikern in Europa beeinflusste. Dieser Weg von der Instant-Sonate zum Meisterwerk, die schier unerschöpfliche Kreativität des „Papa Haydn“ darf seine Zeit der Massenproduktion im Dienste der Fürsten Esterházy nicht verleugnen.

Eine neue Sonate zum Frühstück, etwas Kammermusik zum Essen, dazu 100 Opernaufführungen im Jahr – unfassbar, was der musikverrückte Fürst von seinem Hofkapellmeister verlangte. Natürlich hatte der Komponist auch seine Musen. Thomas versuchte die ausdrucksstärksten Adagios mit empfindsamem Spiel in diese emotionalen Begegnungen einzubetten, eher romantisch Stimmungen als Impetus des Kompositeurs zu deuten.
Das sei „genial und originell, echter Schöpfergeist“ im Umgang mit der Sprache der Musik. Eine Sprache, die überall verstanden wird, auch im vergnügungssüchtigen London: „Die ganze Welt kennt meine Sprache“, sagt der sprachenunkundige Haydn. Und Thomas ergänzt für sich als Ziel, „diese Sprache zu studieren“.
Daniela Tiggemann
Mitarbeiter Nr. 282

Women Found Handel Attractive: Sonatas and Stories - Geoffrey Thomas

Leicester Early Music Festival, Leicester Cathedral

Leicester Mercury

27th May 2009

There must be many accounts of Haydn’s life and music, but few interpretations can provide as engaging a portrait as that provided by actor and pianist Geoffrey Thomas.

Thomas’ dry acting style and vocal delivery provided an intriguing, lively and humorous picture of Haydn’s life through words, interspersed with excerpts from some of Haydn’s many piano Sonatas.

The music itself was played with feeling and intensity where a movement was played in full, while for more illustrative purposes, a more relaxed and perhaps even playful style might be adopted where a brief excerpt was used.

Using a small number of props and limited space around the piano, very effectively, Thomas drew the listener into Haydn’s early life as a chorister, his attempts at busking, early composition and accompanying, his marriage and his daily routine, culminating in an inspiring performance of the Adagio e Cantible from the Sonata in E flat Hob XVI/49.

The story continued with Haydn’s move to London, his years in Vienna and his death.  Interspersed with a bright performance of the Sonata in E flat, Hob. XVI/52:  A fitting reminder of the real legacy that this great composer has left us, which concluded an engaging evening of informative entertainment.

Konzerthalle Ulrichskirche, June 20, 2009, 19:30

Handel program with the kammerchor cantamus halle and the Männerchor bouquet vocalis Halle under the direction of Dorothea Köhler

Klosterkonzerte Maulbronn, July 26, 2009, 18.00

Händels Duelle

Does the word creativity raise images of half-crazed geniuses who cut off their ears, paint masterpieces, party like mad and die of drug overdoses? These stereotypes may make good movie plots, but do they correspond to reality? Is this really what creativity is like? Let’s examine some of the myths. Continued…

Below are some comments about the performance of Handel’s Duels at the Handel House in Halle on September 28, 2008.

When we talk about your concert, we can’t help gushing. When you combine good music with such charm and knowledge, then you can be certain the public will buy it. I’ll say it again: it was an experience. Who else could manage to use classical music to bring tears of laughter to listeners?

Dorothea Kölhler

Director of the Halle Kammerchor Cantamus

Former Director of the Stadtsingechor Halle

The last and a very happy event was the Sunday Matinee with Geoffrey Thomas. He performed the “Handel’s Duels” play from his “Theater of Music”, a one man with a harpsichord and a clavichord show. Geoffrey talked about Handel’s life, impersonating various figures with rapidly changing costumes, and he would illustrate the events with musical pieces. The audience went delirious when he took on the roles of the Cuzzoni and Faustina, Handel’s two prima donnas, and their rivalry was aptly depicted in the Presto from the d-minor Suite. The subsequent Sarabande from the g-minor Suite was Geoffrey’s illustration of the Cuzzoni singing, and one suddenly understood that actually this dance piece was composed as an aria. The combination of lightness and humour with music made the performance a fitting end to an event that had given us concerts from some of the world’s greatest masters of the clavichord, and I don’t spread my praise loosely.

Michael Zapf

Former President of the German Clavichord Society

You brought us great pleasure with your Handel programm, many thanks once again.

Lothar Bemmen

President of the German Clavichord Society 

If you want your results to be creative, it stands to reason that the process of getting there should be creative. Put another way, uncreative practice will yield uncreative results.A recent conversation with composer Charles Young led me to a more creative practice method. The conversation was not in fact about practicing, it was about composing. Charles stated that his starting point was to generate gestures based on the emotional, physical, mental and attitudinal affects he was after. I am very kinesthetic, so the idea of gestures was very appealing. When I write gesture, I mean that quite literally. I mean moving hands, arms, feet, whatever to find shape and character. As a composer the gesture will suggest musical ideas. As an interpretive performer you reverse engineer; you attempt to find the gesture underlying a musical idea.If you introduce improvisation into the mix, the process becomes much more dynamic. Instead of focusing on notes and parroting back a musical text, you can become consumed with the underlying gestural dynamics. This is fun, it’s creative and it will move you forward much more quickly. 

Twyla Tharp, the choreograph, has a brilliant book called The Creative Habit. Can’t recommend it enough. The book includes a number of exercises, one of which was to list the fundamental skills in your art form.  Here is my list:

Skills List   

Accompanying Affects   Analysis   Arranging   Articulation   Arpeggios   Chord recognition   Chord voicing  Clefs   Composing   Conducting   Copying scores   Concentration Counterpoint   Dancing   Dichords   Dictation   Ensemble playing   Ethnomusicology  Figured bass  Form recognition   Formal analysis   Harmonizing   Heptachord shift in real time Imitation   Improvising   Interpretation   Listening   Memorizing   Notating    Pitch vowels   Polyrhythms   Orchestration   Octaves   Repertoire   Satztechnik   Scales Score reading   Separating all parts Sight-reading  Sight singing   Singing   Solfège  Style recognition   Rhythm skills   Touch   Thinking multiple parts   Transcribing   Transposing   Tuning   Variations   Vocal coaching   

Wind and string players spend endless hours maintaining and improving their tone. The great Dutch cellist Anner Bylsma once told me that a string teacher can forgive a student who has better technique, but will hate a student who has better sound.

Very few keyboard players pay such close attention to their tone. After all, the glorious sound of a French horn or the haunting tone of an English horn are completely unattainable on any keyboard instrument. But, careful focus on tonal quality brings unexpected benefits on the keyboard. Clearly, having good tone will make your playing more pleasing to the listener, but it will also improve the quality of your practice. You can solve many technical problems more effectively by paying attention to tonal quality. Getting the correct notes is a fairly low order problem for the perception. Playing the notes with the idea timbre and color is a far more intriguing problem for the perception. As a bonus, the right notes will come.

Just Concentrate! How many times have you said that to yourself? Has it actually ever worked?

Just Concentrate! is the sort of thing the inner coach is always yelling at you. The inner coach is a notion developed by Marianne Ploger. If, like me, you have a constant inner dialogue, you are sure to have some version of the inner coach. The inner coach wants to get in the pool with the swimmer and try to help her swim. That’s not where the inner coach should be. The inner coach needs to be outside the pool to teach and give helpful feedback after the performance.

Just Concentrate! is not a very helpful visual metaphor. It suggests contraction, furrowed brows, intense stares and physical rigidity. It does not suggest poised awareness of the present. It does not suggest the spiritual flexibility that enables the performer to respond to the moment, to create something afresh.

A fundamental reason my inner coach has yelled out Just Concentrate! so often is that my mind wanders. What Buddhists call the monkey mind has taken me on a largely irrelevant mental journey instead of attending to the business at hand, which is playing music. Perhaps the greatest joy you can have as a performer is at the moment when you are riding the crest of time, when you are in a state of flow, when you are not divided.

How to enter this state is the critical question. The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle, a book recommended to me by Marianne, is providing direction. The first question that truly shook me was this: can you turn your mind off? My personal answer is, regrettably, no. A second observation that struck me was the simple fact that we can only be in the present moment; the mind can of course race across the universe of time and space, but we live, willy-nilly, in the eternal now.

I now understand, for the first time, why archery could be a Zen practice. What one would consider to be a physical activity – archery – is in fact a highly mental and spiritual exercise. The practice of being present is the key underlying skill.