BY STEPHANIE ESLAKE
When guitarist Harold Gretton tours to Australia from his home town of Kehl on the German border, he’ll be coming home.
The Australian-raised muso lives in Europe with his wife Veronique and this weekend they’ll perform as Duo Amythis in a Melbourne Guitar Foundation concert. The couple will give an Australian premiere of a work by Johannes Möller among a program of Bogdanovic, Phil Haughton, Percy Grainger and – of course – Spanish classics. Harold talks natural talent, musical partners, and historically informed interpretation ahead of the gig.
You’ve studied in Canberra, but are now positioned in Munich. Can you talk us through your decision for moving and what it feels like to to make an overseas tour…to your homeland?
It’s wonderful to be back in Australia – it still feels like coming home! I did a bachelor degree and PhD in Canberra, and Véronique did her Bachelor and post-grad in Maastricht. We both finished our solo degrees at the same time and had no desire to pursue further solo study. We saw the opportunity in Strasbourg to study together as a duo with the wonderful Duo Melis, and it seemed like a perfect way forward. One practical consideration was that Véronique spoke German and I could get by in French, so the French-German border was a place we could both find work. Three years later we finished our degrees, but were pretty settled with work in the region, so stayed on. We still live in Kehl, the German border town. I am working in Stuttgart now, and Véronique is working at the Clara Schumann music school in Baden-Baden.
What it’s like to stay with one musical partner for so many years and perform in so many places? Do you find that, while once musically independent players, you’ve become something of a single unit?
Véronique and I are very different players with very different training and backgrounds. Strangely, we find this is exactly what makes our duo work, even if rehearsals aren’t always easy. Playing together with one duo partner for such a long time is also important for any professional duo: often in guitar, chamber music is seen as a sideline activity to a solo career, but this is problematic. When we prepare a program as a soloist we rehearse it day-in day-out over the course of months, in order to get it up to a professional standard. Why would a duo be any different? If anything, it’s more difficult, because not only do we need our individual parts to be polished, but also to be sure that the two parts sound as one in performance.
Any guitarist knows how difficult it is to play just one note exactly together with another guitarist. Every single note is like that in a duo performance, and after you’ve thrown tempo rubato, broken chords, and tone-colours into the mix, daily rehearsals over the course of months are a must.
The rewards make the effort worthwhile though: so much is possible in a guitar duo that simply doesn’t work on one guitar. Arrangements can be richer, more lyrical and more colourful. Once the hard yards of gruelling rehearsals have been overcome, the result it so much more than the combination of its parts. For the audience, the performance is richer as well, with the interaction between performers adding an extra dimension to their experience.
You’ve studied historically informed interpretation – why is this important to you in music making, and how can we hear it in your upcoming concert?
My PhD was focused on developing a process of historically informed interpretation, using Fernando Sor as a case study. It’s all pretty intuitive: if you start a new piece, you look up the composer, read about him or her, look for primary and secondary sources about how the music has been played, how the composer might have played, how people might have preferred hearing it, etc.. There’s no moral imperative to follow the composer’s wishes though, our job is simply to create an engaging performance, relevant to whatever audience we have in front of us.
Why do the research then? Well, take Danny Boy. Once we had the bare bones of the notes under our fingers, we started playing along with Grainger’s own recording. What a nightmare! His performance is absolutely sublime, but playing along with him, it’s as if he has no sense of pulse at all. We persisted over the course of about a month, finding solutions to problems like how to make a guitar duo sound like a piano playing a broken chord, and getting to know Grainger’s special approach to tempo flexibility. Once we took the recording away, we were left with a liberating freedom, inspired by Grainger’s own performance practice, but departing from it. It’s a freedom we would never have felt had we listened to more recent recordings or just put the metronome on! We kept our own culture and approach, but dramatically enriched it by learning from the composer’s. This is is the heart of a historically informed approach. The aim is not to imitate old performance practices, but to learn from them, ironically enabling us to make this old repertoire sound new and fresh.
As an award winning guitarist, are there particular aspects you’ve worked to perfect or do you think a good musician simply requires natural talent?
Talent is overrated – hard work is the key! Plenty of books have been written about it, and the rule of 10,000 has become a cliché. What a good musician needs above all is plenty of music (going to concerts and an upbringing in a family that values music), and good support, principally from his or her family, but also from a teacher who, in early stages is a role-model, and at later stages becomes a mentor and friend. Open-mindedness and a range of influences is also important in modern times. As Viotti said to Baillot: ‘Learn from everyone, imitate no-one’.
See Duo Amythis perform via the Melbourne Guitar Foundation 7pm August 22 at St Mary’s Church, Melbourne. More info here.
Image supplied.
