1. You interpret music across several centuries, but it seems that you are closest to the Early Music. What is the source of this interest? Were you influenced by any of your teachers?

Thank you for the opportunity of having this interview. I am delighted to perform with Musica Florea in Prague! We shall offer the modern world premiere of Vaňhal’s Keyboard Concerto in A Major, IIa:A1.

About my interest in what we now identify as Early Music: I cannot remember a time when W. A. Mozart or J. S. Bach were not a part of my life. My mother was a flute player; my father, writer Dan Tsalka, a passionate music lover and intellectual, and my grandfather a fine baritone. There were quite a few professors who were a source of inspiration during my formative years: the late Prof. Harvey Wedeen, the former chair and founder of the piano department at Temple University (Philadelphia) comes to mind. In 2001, he heard me perform a concert in Florence and invited me to apply to study piano under his guidance. He generously arranged for me six years of full fellowships and teaching assistantships, which allowed me to complete two Master’s degrees and a Doctoral degree in piano, early keyboard performance, and chamber music.

At Temple University, I also had two fantastic, inspiring professors of Early Music: Joyce Lindorff, my main harpsichord teacher, who taught me many of the instrument’s secrets and the immense value of scholarship and research. It was through Prof. Lindorff that I arrived to the Daniel Gottlieb Türk project, which resulted in my recording of thirty of his forty-eight sonatas in important keyboard collections of the USA for the NAXOS/Grand Piano, and a critical edition for Artaria Editions (New Zealand), published together with a frequent collaborator, musicologist Dr. Angelica Minero Escobar.

Prof. Lambert Orkis, who enjoys a fantastic career playing and recording in the finest concert halls, was another highly important mentor at Temple University. Apart from being a superb chamber musician, he is a phenomenal fortepianist, possesing immaculate technical control, beautiful colours and a strong sense of form in his interpretations. He also performs a great amount of contemporary music, always at the highest level. He was an exacting teacher who never settled for anything short of excellence and the pursuit of the ideal in musical interpretation.

Other Professors who were important mentors were Dario di Rosa (I studied under his guidance for two years in Trieste, Italy), Dina Turjeman, David Shemer, Malcolm Bilson, Charles Rosen, and musicologist Allan Badley. I

attempt to emulate their knowledge, kindness, and love of music in both my performances and teaching. There were, incidentally, also quite a few deliciously horrendous professors along the way—they taught me how NOT to be a mentor and what NOT to try and achieve with my own students….but that, of course, is another story.

2. For me, the biggest challenge is always to explain to a potential listener why this music is still “alive” and why it has the power to engage them. What are the biggest qualities of it for you?

I have always relished the idea of locating fascinating repertoire, unknown to the public, and offering its members the opportunity to hear it for the first time, and to form their own perspectives concerning that music. As a scholar and interpreter, I have made a humble contribution to our understanding of the diversity of keyboard repertoire of the Classical and Early Romantic Eras by locating, editing, publishing articles and recording CDs with unknown works by composers such as Daniel Gottlob Türk, Johann Baptist Wanhal, Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf, Ferdinand Ries, Joseph Anton Steffan, Eucharius Florschütz and Ignaz Moscheles.

I am fortunate being able to sense in a performance the mood of the public and transmit my musical thoughts and feelings to them. In turn, I receive their life-giving response and energy! I have never felt the need to explain in words a musical composition to the public, although I enjoy presenting lecture-recitals very much.

I consider music performance almost a sacred act, in which one is provided with the opportunity to create beauty and transcendence for the community at large. The interpreter grapples with the highest philosophical and artistic questions: morality, beauty, the value of friendship, the existence of the divine, the meaning of one’s life…The power of music performance is that it can enlighten those and other spiritual questions without the limitations of the spoken word.

3. What impulse led you to play the fortepiano? How easy, or difficult it is for professional pianist to master historical types of instruments?

Having played, recorded, and taught on a wide variety of historical keyboards and their reproductions for several decades, I conclude that one should not approach these instruments with any preconceptions. I firmly believe in sustaining a concentrated, intense dialogue with each new instrument I approach.

Listening to the technical and expressive possibilities of each individual instrument and adjusting one’s own interpretative abilities to these parameters

yields the best possible results. This is especially the case with original instruments, which are immensely beautiful and individual in many ways. There is also the question of defining the character of each historical keyboard: In the case of the clavichord, for example, there is a marked difference between tiny triple-fretted instruments built during the Renaissance and the massive models built in Scandinavia until around 1840. Both types are clavichords, but they belong to two different musical universes! I find this is also the case, to a certain extent, with historical pianos. I therefore attempt to discover the beauty and possibilities in each individual instrument.

About my love affair with the modern piano: after having studied it in parallel to early keyboards for many years, I have found that acquaintance with both sonic worlds promotes openness—and leads one in a path of discovery and constant renovation. I do not think that I am anything special: I discovered one pathway to bring back to life traditions that have been somewhat neglected by often over-specialized, scientific approach to music-making in many schools and conservatories. During the eighteenth century, of course, musicians did not specialize in either the organ, harpsichord, clavichord or fortepiano. Composers were improvisers, and most could play string instruments and any of the keyboard instruments available at a given location. At the same time, they were superb Kapellmeisterer, chamber musicians and conductors. I am convinced most would have been delighted to have the opportunity of playing a modern Fazioli! I attempt to teach the pathway of openness and endless possibilities to my students. I believe that early keyboards bring a lot to my modern piano-playing, and vice versa.

4. Our local virtuoso Petra Matějová tunes the pianos herself. Do you also have a specific habit?

Concerning tuning: I can decently tune early keyboards, and often find myself in the position of tuning my own instruments and those where my students practice. At the same time—I am by no means a professional tuner.

During the pandemic, I was in charge of the only functional harpsichord in the South of China. It was then a necessity to become intimately acquainted with its varying moods in the sub-tropical weather of Shenzhen, and to tune the instrument almost on a daily basis. The young lady I was tutoring, now a former student, Ms. Veronica Man, was the first high school student in Mainland China to graduate as a harpsichord major. She now continues her studies as a harpsichord major at the Royal College of Music in London. I am very proud of her achievements!

I believe tuning and restoration is an art form, and have great respect for tuners and persons who maintain historical keyboards. If a tuner can be provided—that

allows me to continue with a detailed preparations for the concert (an affair which always demads my complete attention). You mention Petra Matějová: I heard several recordings by her, always excellent! I respect her work ethic and professionalism.

5. In general, the basic trio of Czech composers Dvořák – Smetana – Janáček (and Martinů) is well known worldwide. How does a musician get to the works of lesser-known composers, such as Wanhal (which are usually unknown even to our audience)? What was your case?

As a scholar and interpreter, I have made a humble contribution to our understanding of the diversity of keyboard repertoire of the Classical and Early Romantic Eras by locating, editing, publishing articles and recording CDs with compositions by essential, but somewhat unknown composers of those eras, among them Daniel Gottlob Türk, Carl Ditters von Dittersdorf, Ferdinand Ries, Joseph Anton Steffan, Eucharius Florschütz, Ignaz Moscheles and, of course, Johann Baptist Vaňhal.

In August 2013, I recorded for the NAXOS/Grand Piano label two sets of Vaňhal’s multi-movement keyboard capriccios in Berlin: Op. 31 and Op. 36 (originally Op. 7). Their elegant but energetic—at times even symphonic—compositional style seemed an ideal medium to introduce modern audiences to the beautiful expressive diversity of the composer´s keyboard works. Back then, no other recording of Vaňhal’s numerous keyboard sonatas, capriccios, fantasias, or variation sets has been released by a commercial label!

Vaňhal was, of course, one of the leading composers in Vienna during the second part of the eighteenth-century. His compositions were performed throughout the world and numerous printed editions of his works appeared in his lifetime. Boldly original and possessed of formidable powers of invention, Vaňhal was highly regarded by his professional colleagues, including Haydn and Mozart both of whom performed his works.

During the late 1770s Vaňhal reacted to the depressed financial capabilities of the Viennese nobility, who could no longer afford to keep their own private musical establishments, by composing fewer symphonies and string quartets. In the 1780s he began to publish for Artaria, Hummel, Eder, and Sauer numerous keyboard compositions, songs, duos, and trios of various difficulty. These publications were mostly purchased by an expanding middle class. Vaňhal’s solo keyboard works (approximately four hundred) include simple one-page lessons, intermediate-level sonatinas, brief programmatic compositions and ambitious sonatas, fantasias, sets of variations, and capriccios conceived for the professional player. These works

were often dedicated to students and patrons. He was a popular teacher, for he had numerous students, ranging from wealthy noble patronesses to serious pupils who later became famous players, such as Carl Czerny and Ignaz Pleyel.

6. You chose the Piano concerto in A major by yourself. Why? How did you find this composition? What is so special about this piece? (And maybe Wanhal style in general?)

In the last forty years, an intense effort has been made by marvelous musicologists such as Allan Badley, Paul Bryan and Alexander Weinmann to reevaluate the important contribution of Johann Baptist Vaňhal to the Viennese Classical Style. Vaňhal, of course, resided in Vienna for most of his adult life, and was central, together with figures such as Haydn, Gluck, Dittersdorf and Hoffman, in the stylistic development of the most important secular genres of the time: The string quartet, the symphony, the concerto and the sonata. We now know much about his symphonic style. Many of his works in this genre have been recorded and published in the last ten years by labels such as NAXOS and Chandos. He was also highly prolific as composer of sacred music, creating circa fifty masses, numerous psalms, cantatas and motets.

I have had the pleasure of discussing Vaňhal´s keyboard works repeatedly with musicologist Prof. Allan Badley, whom I consider a dear friend, and with the Director of the Johann Baptist Wanhal Association, Pavel Svacinka.

Although Vaňhal began to publish various fortepiano and violin concerti in the 1780s, quite a few of his earliest concerti for violin, flute, harpsichord, organ, cello and bassoon, composed for patrons such as Count Clam Gallas and Count Ladislaus Erdödy, are now lost or in incomplete manuscript format. We are aware that he composed more than fifty concerti, but the enormous challenge of creating a comprehensive catalogue and scholarly publication of the surviving works remains. While it is clear his concerti were performed throughout Europe and admired by composers such as Haydn and Mozart, not much evidence remains concerning the actual performances of the works. This, as musicologist Allan Badley notes, is more the result of our limited understanding of the complexity of the era, and not a reflection on the popularity of the composer during his lifetime, particularly after 1775.

The Keyboard Concerto in A Major, IIa:A1 was first published in Vienna in 1785 by Hoffmeister, probably after an initial successful performance. Its three movements exhibit many of the stylistic traits, which characterized Vaňhal´s concerti in the middle of his career: Its first movement is in an expansive sonata/ritornello form, a lyrical, almost rhapsodic slow movement follows, and a fast, buoyant final rondo “alla Boema” closes the work. In a similar fashion to

Mozart´s piano concerti at the time, which Vaňhal undoubtedly knew and admired, the tuneful immediacy of the musical language appeals not only to the aristocracy, but also to the middle and even lower classes of the city.

Musica Florea and I will be offering the modern world premiere of this marvelous keyboard concerto! We are thankful to count with a scholarly edition prepared by Czech researcher Martina Pospíšilová in 2013. That means audiences in Prague will be the first to hear this work in modern times.

7. How does it happen that a world-class artist, teacher and festival director gets acquainted with a small orchestra from the Czech Republic?

Thank you ever so much for these lovely compliments! Thanks to my father, who was a renowned writer in Israel, I came in close contact as a child and a young man with philosophers, painters, poets, and musicians commited to Western Culture. The grand figures of the past were very much present in discussions at home. Those early conversations impressed in me the importance of diligence and excellence, the love of beauty and gratitude for our artistic legacy. Success was rarely measured in “career” terms, for which I am most thankful.

I am familiar, naturally, with Musica Florea, a most wonderful ensemble: Their recordings of Jan Dismas Zelenka, Antonin Rejcha, Jan Václav Hugo Voříšek, J.S. Bach (specifically, a recording of “Erbarme dich, mein Gott,” from Matthäus-Passion, BWV 244, alongside Magdalena Kožená) have been a source of consolation and inspiration for me during the pandemic years. I am intensely looking forward to collaborating with Musica Florea, under the baton of Maestro Marek Štryncl, and to perform in one of Europe’s most beautiful cities, Prague!

8. You perform and teach all over the world – do you have anything like a stable home?

For the last five years I have been teaching in Mainland China. Last year I was finally able to resume my concertizing activities around the globe in full swing, something for which I am most grateful!

At CUHK-Shenzhen, School of Music, we have an outstanding piano and keyboard department, led by the distinguished pianist, Prof. Krzystof Jablonski. It is a large department, which includes wonderful performers and pedagogues from Mainland China, Italy, Korea and Japan/U.K. We have just received a double manual Mietke harpsichord, built by Maestro Bruce Kennedy—most probably the finest instrument of its kind in Mainland China. I hope to achieve much with this instrument! CUHK-SZ, School of Music, has also recently opened doctoral degrees in piano performance. I am intensely

looking forward to supervising the projects of piano doctoral students in Shenzhen and hope to be of service to the next generation of musicians. Shenzhen has become a home away from home—I am thankful for the many wonderful experiences I have had there since 2019. I am fortunate to have next to me my Spanish/Mexican wife and two wonderful Dragon Lee cats, who fill my life with laughter and joy.

At the end of the day, I must say I remain intensely European, and my permanent residence is in Spain, where I keep many of my early keyboards. I also have grown to love Mexico and New Zealand, where family and friends keep always an open door for us. I would love to believe that this wonderful world is my oyster!

Many thanks for these intriguing questions, and for your great interest. I am very much looking forward to the concert in Prague!