Moments that say more than a list of dates.
At Meadow Brook, Isaac Stern arrived for a concert without his violin music. The young Pommier was sent to fetch it from a hotel twenty minutes away. He drove right up to the edge of the stage, and the audience of 10,000 gave him an ovation.
When a soloist became unavailable shortly before a Northern Sinfonia concert, Pommier was not troubled. He said simply, “So, we play together,” sat at the keyboard and played the concerto while conducting the orchestra himself.
Sofia, the interval of his first Ravel G major. A man comes backstage and speaks to him in French. Pommier knows the face from his childhood summers at Prades: Eugene Istomin. Istomin asks him to play for him at Bulgaria Hall, and forty years of friendship follow.
In Moscow the seventeen-year-old played Mozart and Rodion Shchedrin. He did not win first prize, but Nikita Khrushchev liked both very much and came to give him a kiss. Michel Béroff, who studied with Pierre Sancan too, told the story sixty years later.
Istomin dreamed of playing in China. Pommier put him in touch with André Malraux, who raised the matter with Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong.
Rachmaninov wrote his Second Sonata for enormous hands. Pommier's were not. He rewrote the fingerings to fit, and the solution impressed Istomin, who had once called him as demanding and restless as William Kapell.
For some of his recordings he left the studios behind and worked at the Abbaye de Fontfroide, the Cistercian abbey near Narbonne, a short drive from where he grew up.
His father took him to the Prades festival concerts as a small boy, and there he played for the pianists who came: for Horszowski, for Haskil, for Kapell. The one man he never played for was Eugene Istomin. They would meet only in Sofia, more than ten years later.
After Istomin had heard him at the Bulgaria Hall the two had lunch, and the young Frenchman was taken along to the party given for Istomin at the United States Embassy. He remembered the atmosphere of that evening better than anything said in it: you could imagine, he said, that there were microphones everywhere.
At Meadow Brook, Istomin, Stern and Rose each brought his best student: Zukerman, Harrell and Pommier. The young musicians and their elders lived together as one family for a month. Pommier's job at the Trio's rehearsals and concerts was to turn the pages.
Istomin never stopped praising his gift for learning and memorising any score at speed, the breadth of his repertoire and his conducting. Eugene Ormandy had left Istomin a pair of cufflinks; Istomin gave them to Pommier. Playing a concerto with Pommier on the podium, he said, was one of his greatest pleasures.
The lessons ran both ways. Istomin said Pommier resembled William Kapell: as demanding, as quick, wanting an explanation for everything. And the young man pushed his elder in return, urging him to take better care of his hands, to write his fingerings down, and to widen his recital programmes.
When they met, Pommier had never heard the Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninov concertos Istomin had recorded a few years earlier. He found the records and put them on, and they left him speechless. In the Rachmaninov, he thought, Istomin had reached the very limit of what virtuosity can do.
Istomin's last large undertaking was a tribute to Paul Paray. In June 2000 Pommier came to Budapest and conducted: Paray's Fantasy with Istomin at the piano, then the Second Symphony and the Symphonie d'archets. In the same sessions Istomin recorded Beethoven's Third Concerto and Mozart's K. 271 under his baton. Almost none of it was ever issued.
A young woman plays Chopin in his class at Codarts in Rotterdam. It is virtuosic, and the piano will not sing. When she finishes he asks what is the matter, then asks whether she is afraid, whether she takes herself seriously. She shifts on the stool, listens a moment to the silence around the instrument, and begins again. This time the sound fills the room.
When the student had played a second time, he turned the moment into the lesson. What happened just now, he asked the room, and who can explain why the piano was willing to sound this time. He did not wait for an answer: the question, he said, cannot really be answered. There is a dimension that surrounds everything, and only attention lets us bring it into what we do.
He arrived in Newcastle in 1975 as a guest conductor, to prepare concerts in France, and the orchestra had never heard of him. In those first years he had barely more than the simplest English. It made no difference: within minutes the players could see that he was assured and completely clear about what he wanted, all of it said with his hands.
1999 was to be his last official year with the Northern Sinfonia. Four of the orchestra's players did not accept that, and found a way to bring him back: Musikè, his travelling summer school for advanced students and young professionals, which they set up in Durham. He and four fellow soloists taught violin, viola, cello, oboe and piano and played chamber concerts for the students. It ran again in 2001 and then every year for a decade.
He was relentlessly demanding of his orchestra, and his players thought he was right to be. He was also a Languedocien among the British. If he ever thought he had given offence he would apologise at once, with his ready smile.
At the modest regional conservatoire of Poitiers, a student sat his piano leaving examination in front of a jury of three of the brightest young pianists in France: Michel Béroff, Jean-Bernard Pommier and André Gorog. The student was Jean-Pierre Rousseau, later the head of the Orchestre Philharmonique Royal de Liège and of the Radio France festival in Montpellier. He wrote the memory down again on the day Pommier died.
Two performances survive only as INA archive tapes, played once in a France Musique retrospective and nowhere else: Liszt's Totentanz with the Orchestre de Paris under Serge Baudo in 1981, and Rachmaninov's First Piano Concerto with the Nouvel Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France under Stanisław Skrowaczewski in 1982. Neither was ever issued commercially.
He came to teaching late, and for most of his life kept it private: a few people came to his house from time to time, and that was all. Then Rotterdam asked him to help build up its conservatory, and he said yes; it was his first commitment to an institution. Then David Lively invited him to the École Normale. What moved him, he said, was the invitation itself.
Asked why he was playing all thirty-two sonatas, he said he did not really know. An artist does not choose everything in his life; a piece comes to you, and an invisible guide takes your hand and leads you to it. And then it is like a mountain. The mountain is there. You go because it is there. If it were not there, you would go somewhere else.
Did he have favourites among the sonatas? It is like a family, he answered: it is hard to prefer one child to another, and yet life makes you live with one more than with another. All his life, he said, he had made a point of playing the unknown part of the corpus, because he had always had it in mind that one day he might play the whole of it.
He had always played everything from memory. He once put the question of playing from the score to one of the pianists he called his gods, and the man became almost furious: he had printed a small flyer to hand to his audiences, explaining that he did not want the fear of a memory slip to stand between the music and the people who had come to hear it. If anyone complains that you have the score, he said, give them their money back.
In the Paris bistro Au Clairon des Chasseurs nobody thought it odd that one of the regulars should sit down at the piano and play. A typically French boy, small, black curly hair, sharp brown eyes, dressed like anyone else, collar open and sleeves rolled up. He was eighteen, and a few weeks earlier Khrushchev had embraced him in Moscow.
For seven weeks after the Yom Kippur War broke out the Israel Philharmonic played on air force bases and in hospitals, with Mehta, Stern, Zukerman, Barenboim and Danny Kaye. The young French pianist was among them, and nothing would persuade him to leave the country while he could still be of use there. Some works had to be dropped because players from the percussion section were at the front.
At the end of a long Soviet tour the Dutch violinist Theo Olof walked on the frozen Neva and got lost in the Hermitage. Back at his hotel he met the young French pianist Pommier and had dinner with a Romanian opera bass. The three of them talked in Russian, because Russian was what they had in common.
Asked what keeps a musician growing, Olga Martinova spoke about the soil that feeds you, and then named her life partner as that soil. They had spent hours and hours playing together and talking about music without end, and she laughed at the idea that they always agreed. At the end of the day, she said, the music itself shows what has to be done.
Istomin went to Bulgaria for two weeks in 1963 as a cultural ambassador. Out of that fortnight came three friendships that lasted the rest of his life: with the conductor Jerzy Semkow, with the ambassador Eugenie Anderson, and with the eighteen-year-old Jean-Bernard Pommier.
In 1986 Istomin founded the William Kapell Competition and gathered a jury from the American piano world: Ax, Kuerti, Orozco, Graffman, Magaloff, Browning. The one Frenchman on the list was Pommier, twenty years after he had been the boy turning pages at Istomin's trio concerts.
His first teacher, he told his Russian hosts in 1962, was Madame Kozlova, Russian by birth and trained at the Kharkiv Conservatory. It was with her, as a small boy, that he first played in public, in Mozart's A major Concerto. He went on returning to the Soviet Union for twenty years.
In 1983 five of Pierre Sancan's former pupils met at La Roque d'Anthéron to play a concert in honour of their teacher: Abdel Rahman El Bacha, Michel Béroff, Jean-Bernard Pommier, Jean-Philippe Collard and Emile Naoumoff. A photograph survives of the five of them standing with Sancan.
Thirty years on, what came back to the people who had made his records was not the career but the rooms: the Debussy solo piano taped at Abbey Road, the Mozart concertos made in Warsaw, and the small studio he was allowed to fit out for himself in the Abbaye de Fontfroide.
His father Robert Pommier was organist at the Madeleine in Béziers. One Sunday after the service the family left without the youngest boy and looked for him everywhere. Then the father heard the organ start up, climbed back to the loft, and found the four-year-old with his hands on the keys.
The very next day his father took him, the eighth of his children, to Mina Koslova, a Russian Jewish pianist who had taken refuge in Béziers during the war. From four to eleven she made him work three hours every day at her house. At seven he gave his first concert with her at the second piano, in the two-piano version of Mozart's K. 488. He said he owed her everything.
The piano he played his Beethoven cycle on was his own: a Steinway he had chosen in Hamburg in 1989, ahead of Alfred Brendel, who had been looking at the same instrument. He enjoyed saying so, and said it with a certain mischief.
At the second of his eight Beethoven evenings at the Salle Gaveau a writer noticed, down in the hall, the pianist Michel Dalberto sitting among the audience to listen. A sign, he wrote, that does not lie.
Claude Bolling wrote his Sonata for Two Pianists for two players from different worlds: a jazz pianist and a classical one. The classical one was Pommier, ten years after Moscow. On its release the broadcaster and critic Frank Ténot called the record the historic meeting of the classical piano with the jazz piano.
Introducing a Toulouse evening pairing Pommier's playing of Fauré, Debussy and Ravel with readings from Colette, the actor Olivier Bellamy said the concert had been Pommier's own idea.
In his memoirs the violinist Alexander Schneider, who had organised Casals's festivals, named two places in France where he most enjoyed playing sonatas with Eugene Istomin and with Jean-Bernard Pommier: the little chapel of the Château de Reux in Normandy, where he ran a festival every year, and Les Treilles, near Tourtour in the Var.
In January 1997 the Filarmonica di Torino moved a subscription concert to the Auditorium in Piazza Rossaro, and a few regulars arrived out of breath from the Conservatorio just in time. On the podium was Jean-Bernard Pommier; at the piano, in Mozart's Concerto K. 467, was Eugene Istomin, who had come backstage in Sofia thirty-four years earlier. La Stampa's headline said it in five words: the pupil conducts the master.
The Turin players had said it the year before: of the conductors they liked best, two names stood out, the beloved Carlo Maria Giulini and Jean-Bernard Pommier, the pianist who had proved a revelation on the podium. On 20 June 1997, rehearsing Brahms at the Teatro Regio, the eighty-three-year-old Giulini was taken ill. The orchestra called Pommier, and on 25 June he conducted the concert at the Lingotto that closed the season. La Stampa's headline the next morning called him the true soul of Brahms.
During Daniel Barenboim's Beethoven cycle with the Orchestre de Paris in the winter of 1977, in which Pommier played the piano concertos, Le Monde asked the Prime Minister, Raymond Barre, about the concert he had been to on the Thursday evening. He had loved it, he said, and the pianist had brought out the Mozartian accents of the First Concerto.
For the twentieth Rencontres musicales d'Évian, Marta Istomin, the festival's general director, asked him to build an orchestra of young musicians. He gathered about ten friends, principals of the national orchestras and senior teachers, among them Maurice Bourgue and Bruno Pasquier, and instead of coaching the eighty students from outside they played among them, as professionals. Bourgue said he had found again the thrill of his twenty-eight years, when he joined the Orchestre de Paris. Five years later the same idea, and some of the same friends, became the Musikè academy.
The boy who had played for Horszowski and Haskil at Prades came back in August 1975, at thirty, to conduct the closing concert of Casals's festival with the Northern Sinfonia: Mozart's Haffner Symphony, his Piano Concerto K. 459 and Haydn's Symphony No. 99. Le Monde, noting that he was until then known mainly as a pianist, singled out the programme for two rarely played and admirable scores.
According to a programme note in the Turkish magazine Jazz Dergisi, Claude Bolling first wrote a short duet to play with his friend, the classical pianist Jean-Bernard Pommier. It went down so well that Pommier asked him to make it into a concert piece in sonata form: the Sonata for Two Pianists, one classical and one jazz, which they recorded in 1972.
It doesn't make the career easier, as it pushes one to refuse any compromises. Like him, I have had to pay a high price, but I have absolutely no regrets.De liefde maakt alles goed. Maar vergeet niet dat liefde altijd begint met respect.Love makes everything right. But don't forget that love always begins with respect.
Er is een dimensie die alles omgeeft. Maar alleen via aandacht kunnen we die dimensie betrekken in ons doen en laten.There is a dimension that surrounds everything. But only through attention can we bring it into what we do.
Ze zijn verschillend en moeten dat ook zijn, maar tegelijkertijd vullen ze elkaar ook aan omdat de muziek zelf altijd het uitgangspunt is.They are different and must be, but they complement each other, because the music itself is always the starting point.
Ben je bang? Neem je jezelf niet serieus?Are you afraid? Don't you take yourself seriously?
The most important thing is what Istomin embodied and continues to represent: an artistic consciousness of great rarity.There was a benevolence in him, a deep attention to others, in music and in life.Steinway grands are unique because of their amazing tone and technical perfection. I wish to play them as often as I can.le concert de l'artiste, préparé avec amour et angoisse, l'angoisse de l'inconnu car il ne sait pas où sa musique va le conduirethe artist's concert, prepared with love and with dread, the dread of the unknown, because he does not know where his music will take him
Je suis un régionaliste convaincu.I am a convinced regionalist.
J'ai toujours gardé un pied dans la région.I have always kept one foot in the region.
Abstractie is alleen maar een definitie die altijd wordt geformuleerd in relatie tot iets concreets.Abstraction is only a definition, and it is always formulated in relation to something concrete.
Lesgeven, dat is vooral een heel rijke band met jonge collega's. Het maakt de cirkel van het muzikantschap compleet.Teaching is above all a very rich bond with young colleagues. It completes the circle of being a musician.
Maar het leven beslist uiteindelijk. Van het leven moet je de mogelijkheden aangereikt krijgen.In the end it is life that decides. Life has to hand you the possibilities.
You know, we talk a lot, but I hope you can understand something, because I can't always understand what I'm saying.I try to understand not what he expects from me, but what he expects from himself.I try to explore with them what their quest is, their daimon, their inner necessity.Bach went to see Buxtehude. Beethoven went to see Haydn. Beethoven went to see Mozart. This notion of transmission is absolutely crucial.Something new can't come to you if it can't find the support of what preceded you.He had the same philosophy as Casals, or Serkin: either you have talent, or you don't.He put me in touch with the great American pianists and the entire American musical world. He also wanted us to listen to each other as often as possible.Я восьмой ребенок в семье сельского органиста маленького местечка Безье.I am the eighth child in the family of a village organist, in a small place called Béziers.
Мой отец был простым тружеником, но все в нашем роду увлекались музыкой.My father was a plain working man, but everyone in our family loved music.
Моей первой учительницей была мадам Козлова, русская по происхождению, воспитанница Харьковской консерватории.My first teacher was Madame Kozlova, Russian by origin, trained at the Kharkiv Conservatory.
Je suis parti pour revenir et je reviens pour partir.I left in order to come back, and I come back in order to leave.
Je lui dois tout.I owe her everything.
Pour Beethoven, la survie est plus intéressante que la vie.For Beethoven, survival is more interesting than life.
J'ai vu petit à petit le message du temps se transformer dans la musique.Little by little I watched the message of time change inside the music.
J'ai dirigé toutes les symphonies et ouvertures de Beethoven, mais le respect du piano commande de faire abstraction de l'imaginaire orchestral.I have conducted all Beethoven's symphonies and overtures, but respect for the piano means setting the orchestral imagination aside.
Au XXIe, la crise globale des valeurs ouvre un champ de sensibilité beaucoup plus fragile, et peut-être plus proche du trésor artistique.In the twenty-first century the global crisis of values opens a far more fragile field of sensibility, and perhaps one closer to the artistic treasure.
Rien ne m'a vraiment éloigné de France si ce n'est qu'après Berlin et Moscou, je suis parti aux Etats-Unis pour travailler avec Eugene Istomin, un ami de Pablo Casals, que j'avais connu au Festival de Prades, où je me produisais enfant.Nothing ever really took me away from France, except that after Berlin and Moscow I left for the United States to work with Eugene Istomin, a friend of Pablo Casals whom I had known at the Prades Festival, where I performed as a child.
Politiek hoort te gaan over harmonie. Over het scheppen van voorwaarden voor alle mensen om die harmonie in zichzelf te vinden.Politics ought to be about harmony. About making it possible for everyone to find that harmony in themselves.
There is an invisible guide which takes your hand and brings you to a piece.Beethoven is still describing, very accurately, what a human being is.A musician's life is a big puzzle, and every day you start again, looking for the place of one little piece.We gaan niet copiëren. Deze samenwerking tussen orkest, dirigent en solist is uniek.We are not going to copy. This collaboration between orchestra, conductor and soloist is unique.