His Cello Walter Grimmer will not be at the Meeting in the Café, he will then pick up his violin-maker Peter Westermann. A desired instrument, whether it is, he says, his third Westermann-Cello in fifty years, only three months old: “Since there is to adjust is still trifles.”
But a case he has brought, again and again, he pulls something out of it: the program of a concert, he has played in 1961 in Biel, under the leadership of the then young Armin Jordan; cost of the most expensive cards of 3.45 Swiss francs. Or a photo of the conductor Carlos Kleiber, “it repenteth me that I was in the Bernese Symphony orchestra, he has conducted”. Or an almost touchingly grateful letter to the Basel composer Klaus Huber, which he premiered some of his works.
Huber is dead, like many, has had to do with Grimmer. But if he tells you, in short, phrase-free sentences, then you are alive again. His first teacher, Franz behind the man who taught him in the screed of the Schaffhausen music school: “A dry type, old school, extremely serious.” Pablo Casals has shaped him, in the course, Grimmer has lost his fear of ugly tones, “because you can play without them, no beautiful sounds”. And then Enrico was there Mainardi, with whom everything had begun, in 1947, in the Schaffhausen Minster, where Grimmers father was a Minister: Mainardi played Bach there, “and everything was clear for me”.
Exotic tours
Walter Grimmer was, so Cellist, the most famous of his Generation in Switzerland and is the most versatile. With 26 years of Paul Klecki for the Berner Symphony orchestra as a solo cellist, and three years later a chamber orchestra came up with the Camerata Bern hired him; he also played in the legendary Bern string Quartet, and also as a soloist, he was asked soon international. His Repertoire was broad, in addition to the classical nuclear plants, he performed much Contemporary, often in close collaboration with the composers. He tells the story of Helmut Lachenmann, who insisted on a precise implementation of his instructions; or, by Hans Ulrich Lehmann, who told him that he should not practice so much.
Also of tours, he tells, like most of the exotic led him to the Fiji Islands or to North Korea. And then by his students at the Bern College of music and later in Zurich (where he himself had studied, in the case of Richard Sturzenegger). He had been a strict teacher, says Grimmer, “also old school”. the music is now loading times, no self-service, “I think it’s superficial to say: You can do it one way or the other, or quite different. It is to be a teacher because you want to know anything from him.”
“The printed requirements, we no longer had to scrape off with a razor blade, so you saw them.”Thomas Demenga
He apparently was able to convey what he knew; at any rate, many of his students have themselves become successful musicians. The Tonhalle-cellist Rafael Rosenfeld, and Benjamin Nyfenegger, for example, have studied with him. Or Thomas Demenga, was one of his first students, on the phone, but still very carefully to Grimmers “System” reminds: bow strokes and fingerings had been with red and blue pencils in the notes is written, “the printed requirements, we no longer had to scrape off with a razor blade, so you saw it”.
Grimmer grin when you talk to him about it: “Today, I use Tipp-Ex.” But it is actually important that only the information for one’s own Interpretation would be in the notes – which he had of Maurice Gendron learned another important teacher: “Is there something else at play, so to speak.” The steering, while you have to go in the music but on the Whole: “It’s the truth.”
because Of the Urtext!
He then pulls Schubert’s string quintet from his pencil case, he together with the young French Yako Quartet at the concerts to his 80. Birthday list and also on CD and install. “Urtext” is on the envelope, but Grimmer shakes his head, “Schubert’s manuscript is not received at all, this is just the reprint of the first edition.” And this first edition, which would have created a miserable copyist, “look: Here should be, instead of a repetition of a first and second circuit quoted!”
Actually, it would be more logical. And Grimmer is going to play the piece in any case. He is happy because he finds the Yako Quartet so electrifyingly good, because its almost new Cello will be used. And also, because he’s not giving many concerts: “at some point, it is of even less,” he says, and it sounds as if it’s just right how it is.
concerts: Sat, 2. March, 19.30, Behind Dorfstr. 10, Pfungen; Thu, 7 March, 19.30, Florhof-Gasse 6, Zurich; Sa, 9. March, 19.30, Helvetia Platz 6, Bern.
(editing Tamedia)
Created: 01.03.2019, 06:24 PM
