Sulara and Johann on a less travelled path
When violinist Sulara Nanayakkara left the United States in 2019 after completing a postgraduate degree in music in Philadelphia, he was forced to discard many of his clothes so he could carry heavy books of sheet music back. He had spent most of his monthly stipend from his scholarship at Temple University on music. Classical music fans in Colombo will benefit from this vast library of music and obsessiveness on August 13 when he and pianist Johann Peiris collaborate in an eclectic and rich program that runs from Mendelssohn to Hindemith, from the Armenian composer Komitas to Paganini.
At rehearsal: Johann and Sulara. Pic by Thehan de Silva
As a student at Temple, Sulara would hear fellow students in practice rooms mostly playing Sibelius and Tchaikovsky and other mainstream composers and decided to go the less travelled path. Paul Hindemith, who died in 1963, is a musician’s composer and is part of a concert by pianist Ramya de Livera Perera and the cellist Dushyanthi Perera on August 22. No wonder the Japanese diplomat and musician Shinichi Murata describes the classical music scene as unusually diverse and ambitious: In Colombo, Hindemith is almost the flavour of the month.
Although Sulara and Johann perform regularly with the Chamber Music Society of Colombo and Sulara was its solo violinist for the Mendelssohn D minor violin concerto in December, August 13 marks his debut as a recitalist in Colombo. For Johann, this performance at the Lionel Wendt auditorium will be exactly a decade since he was part of a similarly diverse program in a piano duo with his elder brother Eshantha. Johann and Eshantha’s concert in 2014 included Shostakovich’s rousing Concertino for two pianos as well as ceremonial music adapted from Balinese gamelan orchestral arrangements by the Canadian musicologist Colin McPhee in the early 1930s.
Johann’s experience ranges from being an accompanist at the Manhattan School of Music summer festival when he was completing a master’s in sociology at New York University to recently collaborating with soprano Dhanushi Wijeyakulasuriya in performances of Schubert lieder in Colombo. His soulful playing of Schubert’s much loved Impromptu No. 3 in G Flat Major was a highlight, especially the use of tempo rubato. The words mean ‘stolen time’ in Italian, and Johann’s pacing seemed even more melancholic and yet on occasion urgent and insistent.
Sulara, 32, and Johann, 34, credit their instincts in programming in large part to studying in the US. There is certainly plenty of American can-do spirit – and youthful derring-do. For Paganini’s violin sonata number 12 in E minor, the left hand is plucking on the violin strings while the bow is used for percussive effects. “It’s violin pyrotechnics. It’s like driving a motorcycle on one wheel,” says Lakshman Joseph de Saram, concert master of the CMSC. These passages are theatrical and would draw in any audience. Sulara is aware of the difficulties, but says, “If I don’t take the risks now, then when?”
Lakshman described the program as “a fascinating smorgasbord. There cannot be a dull moment.” Krunk (The Crane) by the Armenian priest Komitas, who lectured about his country’s music in Europe’s capitals before he died in 1935, is moving and instantly likeable. Yet, it is little known outside the country. To obtain the sheet music, Sulara asked an American friend, just returned from playing in Armenia, who then exchanged a composition of his for Krunk. The Nigun from Baal Shem is sacred Jewish music, which Sulara says is a “wordless prayer… you are longing for something.”
Two compositions a hundred years apart – by Felix Mendelssohn and 20th century composer Paul Hindemith – constitute the heart of the program. The Mendelssohn Violin Sonata in F major is a boisterous romp yet surprisingly was never published in the composer’s lifetime. At a recent rehearsal, the sonata was played with such exuberance that it seemed as if the duo had multiplied into a chamber music ensemble. The violin sonata was revised by the legendary Yehudi Menuhin in 1953, working Mendelssohn’s reworking in 1839. It was performed by Menuhin and the great violinist David Oistrakh, who taught Eduard Schmieder, one of Sulara’s teachers at Temple, but still rarely features on concert programs. “For musicians, there is a strange affinity to a lineage of pedagogy, a particular school of thought people like to draw from,” says Johann.
Hindemith turned his back on the music of the Romantic era with a less sentimental, pared-back style called the ‘new objectivity’. Hindemith was a violinist first, but as a Guardian article observed, “his versatility was such that he reputedly could play each of the standard orchestral instruments to a professional standard”. Sulara recalls that another favourite professor of his at Temple, Meichen Liao-Barnes, peppered her lessons with questions to have her students think about the choices they made. Hindemith’s music is arguably a similar kind of multiple-choice quiz. The first movement of Hindemith’s Violin Sonata in C major sounds like the soundtrack of a chase through a street bustling with traffic. While his music grows on you, some in the audience may be left in sympathy with the Balinese musician who complained almost 100 years ago to McPhee, the author of a superb comic memoir, A House in Bali, that western classical music sometimes went “up and down, up and down for no reason at all.”
Johann says this is part of the challenge of presenting less familiar repertoire. “Some of these pieces are not very hummable. That’s the risk we take,” he says, but is confident they can draw the audience in. Among Johann’s teachers in New York was concert pianist Adam Tendler, a champion of dissonant contemporary classical music. As Hindemith put it, “What concerns us all is this: how and what must we write in order to gain a larger, different audience?”
At an enjoyable, expansive rehearsal in a room with a silent, rapt audience of portraits of men and women by the 43 Group, the modernist art movement, the talented duo showed they have both the skill and passion to make good on their gamble.
The violin and piano recital on Tuesday, August 13 at 7.30 p.m. at the Lionel Wendt Theatre is a fundraiser for CFS Prithipura Home Wattala.
| A much needed helping hand | |
| Prithipura Home, which serves 60 differently abled children and adults, many of whom have been with the home since their families abandoned them as children, now finds itself squeezed from all sides. Prithipura Home’s support from the Social Services Department amounts to less than a month of its annual expenditure. Corporate donations, meanwhile, have never been a significant support for the home which also frequently houses abandoned children – one 12-year-old boy was left in a paddy field and handed over to them by the courts – and is duty bound not to refuse them even though its budget is in straitened circumstances.“Ad hoc donations have dropped drastically,” reports Devika Anthonisz, President of CSF Prithipura Home. “Dry rations donations have fallen as well.” The August 13 concert at the Lionel Wendt auditorium is a much-needed fundraiser against this gloomy backdrop for Prithipura. The home faces unusually difficult times. The families of the residents can’t support them at all. The drop in interest rates and hike in expenses mean the home is looking at the bleak prospect of dipping into its savings from previous years to cope. “This is what makes the fundraiser so critical,” says Anthonisz.
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