“This is a dedicated and utterly professional undertaking”
Jonathan Woolf, MusicWeb-International
“Pianophiles should be grateful that these magnificent recordings have survived and have been so expertly restored”
Jed Distler, Classics Today
Founded in 2015, Sonetto Classics has already scored two major “scoops”, the most newsworthy being perhaps previously unreleased recital material by the enigmatic Hungarian pianist Ervin Nyiregyházi (1903-1987), whose artistic legacy is much more extensive than is generally realized. However, what may ultimately prove to be the label’s most widely admired “find” is the searching keyboard artistry of British pianist Norma Fisher. Both their stories, and other exciting musical ventures, are explored here in conversation with Sonetto Classics founder Tomoyuki Sawado.
Interview
Q: Sonetto Classics is more than just a historical label, no? You also help promote and sponsor young artists, such as the pianists Angelo Villani and Chiyan Wong. Can you tell us more about that?
TS: I have been involved in several Nyiregyházi projects since 2003, and these helped me greatly to connect with people in the international music community. When I moved to London, in 2008, the Japanese impresario and critic Jun Kinoshita encouraged me to talk to Michael Glover, a co-founder of the International Piano Quarterly. When I saw Michael in London, Angelo Villani, a pianist who was a big admirer of Ervin Nyiregyházi, joined our meeting. Unfortunately, he had suffered from a hand injury for decades, so had to work at Tower Records instead of playing the piano. One day he asked me if I could produce his debut album, and I came up with a concept album inspired by the Inferno from Dante’s Divine Comedy, since Dante’s 750th birthday was approaching. In addition to Dante, I think one can hear some Nyiregyházian elements in the album. In order to release it, I started Sonetto Classics with Jeremy McGahan, an experienced businessman who managed a couple of Angelo’s recitals. Angelo Villani Plays Dante’s Inferno was Sonetto’s first album, and it was critically acclaimed in the UK and Japan, giving Angelo an opportunity to play recitals in Tokyo. I will talk about Chiyan later on, since this is related to how I met Norma Fisher.
Q: Can you tell us more about your own background?
TS: I am Japanese and obtained a PhD in bioscience at Tokyo University of Science, then worked for nine years as a post-doctoral fellow in the US. In 2008, after being offered a faculty position at the Institute of Cancer Research (part of the University of London), I relocated to the UK to work with my own team here. I left the ICR in 2014 and currently work as a medical writer for pharmaceutical companies in the US and EU.
As to my musical background, I started playing the piano at age four, and began listening seriously to records around age ten. One day my father played the LP Nyiregyházi Plays Liszt for me, and I was stunned by the intensity and power of his performance of St. Francis of Paola Walking on the Waves. I was also fascinated with his incredible life story. Although I didn’t listen to other discs by him at that time, his unique Liszt stuck in my ears.
Q: Your Ervin Nyiregyházi releases are deservedly attracting considerable interest. I think even many dedicated pianophiles and collectors were unaware of the Takasaki Art Center College (TACC) archive, which is now wholly owned by Sonetto Classics.
TS: In 2003, I started collecting music memorabilia in the US, and the first artist I looked into was Nyiregyházi. One day, Kevin Bazzana, a renowned Glenn Gould scholar, contacted me because he wanted to use one of my collections in a book he was preparing, the first full-scale biography of Nyiregyházi, eventually entitled Lost Genius. We then started discussing the biography project on a daily basis. Eventually I came to realize that he was struggling to collaborate with the Takasaki Art Center College (TACC), which had brought Nyiregyházi to Japan in 1980 and 1982. Nyiregyházi thought that the TACC would be the best place to promote his legacy, and so his personal archive was donated to the TACC posthumously. The TACC also added recordings and films they produced to this archive. It was the largest archive dedicated to Nyiregyházi, so Kevin was eager to access it.
I went to Japan in 2004 and again in 2005 to ask the TACC to give us permission to access their archive. Unfortunately, the president was not collaborative, though a monk who was present at our meeting offered me his support. This man, named Sekikawa, was one of the two monks who travelled to Los Angeles to invite Nyiregyházi to play in Japan in 1980; he also played a central role in Nyiregyházi’s return to Japan in 1982. I interviewed him and acquired several recordings and other materials from the Japanese archive, and with these Kevin was able to complete the Japanese chapter of Lost Genius. The book was first published in Canada in 2007, and editions followed in the US, Germany (as Pianist X) and Japan (as Ushinawareta Tensai). At this point, I thought my work on Nyiregyházi was done, except for sporadically running my own Nyiregyházi webpage (www.fugue.us).
In 2012, I started hearing rumors that the TACC, by then called the Sōzō Gakuen University, was struggling financially, and in 2013 it was ordered to close by the government. I started researching the fate of the Nyiregyházi archive and soon found out that it had been seized by a creditor who presumably did not appreciate its musical value. Therefore, I contacted the lawyer who was working on the bankruptcy process, in an effort to save the archive. Due to legal complications, it took me another three years to gain ownership of the archive, but finally, in the summer of 2016, I was able to have it sent to the UK, with the help of Jun Kinoshita, who did all the necessary logistical work in Japan. This happened around the one-year anniversary of Sonetto Classics.
Q: What do the many reel-to-reel tapes consists of – are these concert performances and/or private recordings?
TS: The archive I received was huge. I remember being shocked when I saw a gigantic pile of boxes, including a collection of 120 reel-to-reel tapes, comprising all of Nyiregyházi’s public and private performances in Japan, live recordings from concerts in California in the early 1970s, and dozens of tapes of his studio sessions for the International Piano Archives in 1978 (some of which were released by CBS Masterworks). The archive also contains dozens of film reels, hundreds of unpublished photos, letters, notes, magazines, and, most important, thousands of original compositions. Later, one of Nyiregyházi’s closest friends, Ricardo Hernandez, donated a couple of original tapes of Nyiregyházi recitals to the archive.
Q: Can we look forward to many additional Nyiregyházi releases?
TS: We have so much unpublished material, but it is financially challenging to release historical recordings, as the market is not large. And free clips on YouTube surely discourage people from buying our CDs. Always, bad money drives out good. Still, we have managed to release two Nyiregyházi albums. The first, Nyiregyházi Live Vol. 1, captures his first comeback recital in 1972 after decades of silence. The reel-to-reel tapes we used were owned by Nyiregyházi himself, and the sound is very realistic.
The second album, Nyiregyházi Live Vol. 2, comprises his third comeback recital in 1973, and his last recordings, made privately by Ricardo in 1984; this album also includes a photobook documenting his 1982 Japanese tour. I have no plan to initiate Nyiregyházi Live Vol. 3 now, but his second comeback recital at the Old First Church in San Francisco is always in my mind. The next Nyiregyházi-related project will probably be in collaboration with Muse Press, a music publisher based in Japan with which I have been working on a couple of projects.
Q: Your website makes an appeal for various lost or missing materials. Has there been any progress here? Is it certain they do survive and what other recordings by Nyiregyházi might possibly be extant?
TS: Honestly, I do not know if any more lost Nyiregyházi recordings will ever emerge, except for the soundtrack of the 1930 feature film Lummox, copies of which are known to survive. There are a couple of recordings that we were very close to acquiring, though.
When Sekikawa and his TACC colleague visited Nyiregyházi in LA in 1980, Nyiregyházi took them to a local church and played for them the first movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata on an old upright piano. The performance was recorded on a cassette tape. I asked Sekikawa about this tape but he could not locate it, and it was not included in the archive I acquired in 2016. I believe that someone who used to work for the TACC still has a copy of it, and I am optimistic about acquiring it one day, as I know that the TACC usually generated multiple copies of its materials.
For years, I’ve been looking for the two analogue masters of Nyiregyházi’s recital at the Old First Church in San Francisco in 1973. It was arguably the most important recital Nyiregyházi did in his late years. It is also very special to me: the live recording of St. Francis of Paola Walking on the Waves that I heard in my childhood was from this recital. His performance was famously recorded using a Sony portable cassette recorder by an audience member, Terry McNeill, who was an associate of Gregor Benko, the founder of the International Piano Archives.
Not many people know, however, that there was a second recorder running in the venue. Christopher Burt of the Old First Church recently told me that he recorded the concert using a Wallensack reel-to-reel tape recorder placed at the edge of the balcony. I believe that Chris’s reel-to-reel tape, not Terry’s cassette tape, was used for the 1977 Desmar LP Nyiregyházi Plays Liszt. (I have asked Gregor about this, but neither he nor Ward Marston, the engineer of that LP, had a clear recollection of which tape was used.) It is clear that a part of Terry’s cassette recording was used in a double-CD album released by Music and Arts in 2008, but the sound was artificially distorted by someone. I’ve asked both Gregor and Terry if they know where the cassette tape is, and they do not. A few years ago, I tried to contact the last documented owner of the original Wallensack tape, Mark Smith, who was a music director of the Old First Church, but unfortunately he had already died. No one, not even Mark Smith’s partner, seems to know where this tape is.
Q: Did you yourself ever meet Nyiregyházi or have the good fortune to attend any of his recitals? TS: Unfortunately, no. I was still a child when he came to Japan, and so did not have a chance to hear him. I’ve spoken to several Japanese people who heard him live and some of them described to me how beautiful and dense his sonority was. While I did not hear him live, I saw brief footage of his Takasaki recital that aired on NHK-TV in 1982, part of a New Year’s Eve program reviewing musical events of that year. The film footage NHK used was from an unfinished documentary produced by the TACC with Hisao Kurosawa, Akira Kurosawa’s son and producer. All of this film material is now in our Nyiregyházi archive, but a lot of work would need to be done before we could release it.
Q: Nyiregyházi was apparently a quite prolific composer. Are their chamber music and/or orchestral works among his oeuvre? Can you tell us more about Nyiregyházi the composer?
TS: There are thousands of his compositions in the archive, and it is impossible for me to investigate all of them myself. But I’ve seen several chamber pieces, like violin sonatas and string trios, and I think there may be at least a few orchestral works. Most of the pieces are for piano. They tend to be heavy, a bit strange, monotonous, and very Wagnerian. Some pieces are nice, like Death Is the Cool Night, Life the Sultry Day—we have the recording of him performing this work in 1982.
Q: Have any pianists expressed an interest in examining his works and/or performing or recording them?
TS: The German pianist Stefan Abels recorded several piano works that can be heard on YouTube. You can also find a couple of live recordings made by the American pianist Michael Sayers, again, on YouTube. A promising young talent, Kit Armstrong, played Soldier of Fortune at the Lake Constance Festival in 2017. A few years ago, a Brazilian pianist wrote to me that he planned to record pieces by Nyiregyházi, so I sent him many scores, but I do not know if he is still working on this project.
Q: Are there plans to publish any of his scores?
TS: In 2019 Carl Fischer published 36 pieces by Nyiregyházi, edited by Kevin. There are also a couple of publishing projects in our pipeline. Nyiregyházi wrote a massive symphonic poem for piano entitled The Picture of Dorian Gray, which he considered his greatest work. The music was lost for many decades, but I recently discovered it in my archive. Muse Press is interested in publishing it, so I gave them a file a couple of months ago. The second project concerns Liszt’s B-minor sonata. In interviews made in the 1970s and1980s, Nyiregyházi left interpretative suggestions for the sonata, in so much detail that we could create a sort of “Nyiregyházi edition” of the piece. Kevin and I have worked for years and have almost finished it, but haven’t given it to Muse Press yet—I need to return to this project.
Q: One of the most interesting “finds” of Sonetto Classics concerns pianist Norma Fisher. Although certainly known in the UK, she is a new name for many pianophiles. How did you become aware of her?
TS: Just before I started Sonetto, Angelo and I worked with a young pianist, Chiyan Wong, to prepare his first full concert in London. Every week or two I would go to the Royal Academy to attend Chiyan’s practice sessions and give him interpretive suggestions. He once said my suggestions reminded him of words he received from “an English lady” who was his piano teacher in his teens. “It’s like déjà vu to me,” he said. I thought it was an interesting coincidence, but did not ask her name. One day I discovered that his playing of Wotan’s Farewell and Magic Fire Music had drastically improved in a week, so I asked him what happened. Chiyan said that he saw the “English lady,” Norma Fisher, to seek her advice. I was curious about Norma and checked a few YouTube clips uploaded by one of Norma’s sons. When I listened to her performance of Brahms’s Op. 21 No. 1, I felt like wearing a perfect bespoke jacket made by the best tailor. The playing was incredibly natural and delicate, yet there was a sense of authenticity and integrity underneath. The following week I went to see Norma and asked her to make a new album with Sonetto. She was moved by my proposal but did not give me a clear answer, repeating “Never say ‘never’.” At the next meeting she told me that she had stopped playing in the 1990s due to focal dystonia in her right hand, and was now focused on teaching. She had been quiet about her condition for many years; even close family members did not know about it until recently. Therefore, instead of making new recordings, we started assembling recordings she made for the BBC beginning in the 1960s. It has been very fun, because she is not only an great pianist and teacher but also a warm-hearted, wise, wonderful human being.
Her first commercial album, Norma Fisher at the BBC Vol. 1, was released by Sonetto in 2018. It was critically acclaimed globally, so we soon started making the second album, Norma Fisher at the BBC Vol. 2, which was released in 2019. The response was even greater. We were awarded the International Grand Prix du Disque from the Franz Liszt Society in Budapest—an award previously given to artists like Busoni, Horowitz, Cziffra, Arrau, Bernstein, and Karajan. I am sure that our new album, Norma Fisher at the BBC Vol. 3, will please real piano-music enthusiasts as much as the two previous ones.
Q: How many more volumes can we hope for?
We have enough material to release a few more BBC albums. Also, Norma made broadcast recordings in Germany in the 1960s. She and I have already listened to them and agree that some of them should be released. Our next album could be from these German sources.
We could release a lot of recordings by Norma, as she appeared in many BBC programs spanning more than three decades; however, the BBC did not preserve most of her pre-1980 recordings. In 1972, the BBC invited Norma, John Ogdon, and other leading English pianists to record all of Scriabin’s sonatas to celebrate the composer’s centenary, and Norma recorded the First and Fifth Sonatas and four études from Op. 42. Only the recording of the First Sonata has survived in the BBC archive, however. Norma has an air-check tape of the actual broadcast, but the final part of the Fifth Sonata is missing, and I’ve been looking for an intact version of this recording for years.
A few years ago, Norma gave me a cassette tape of Schumann’s Papillons and Brahms’s Op. 116, but the tape was damaged and the first part of Papillons was missing. She wished to include these in her second album, and indeed the performances are exceptional. But I decided to wait until better source material emerged. In 2020, her husband Barry discovered a dozen reel-to-reel tapes in their house, and the pile included an intact version of Papillons and Op. 116! The condition of the tape was excellent, and so now listeners can enjoy these superb recordings in Norma Fisher at the BBC Vol. 3.
Q: Your production standards are truly outstanding, with extremely detailed documentation and acknowledgments. Sonetto Classics is really a “team effort”, no?
TS: I myself handle many areas of our CD production, from graphics to basic remastering, but need experts in order to elevate the quality. For example, the cover image of Norma Fisher at the BBC Vol. 1 was taken by Richard Kalina, a top photographer who has worked with people like Princess Diana and Sir John Major, and he did a brilliant job. My long-time collaborator Kevin Bazzana is the editor of Sonetto’s sleeve notes, and his involvement is a key to achieving high quality. Andrew Holdsworth is our engineer, and his skills and sensitive ears always help me. Jeremy handles legal and financial issues, which are not among my specialties. All of our CDs have been manufactured by Robin Springall of Repeat Performance Multimedia, whose client list includes Paul McCartney, Elton John, Eric Clapton, and Wigmore Hall. He saved our projects many times at the very final stage of CD production. It is certainly a team effort, since I would not be able to achieve a high standard on my own.
Q: What future projects (i.e., other artists) do you hope to showcase at Sonetto Classics?
TS: While Norma and Nyregyházi will remain two main pillars of Sonetto Classics, I’ve done several small ad hoc projects, including filming and writing. Some may eventually grow into a major project.
I’ve met many young talents through Norma and other friends. I currently have no plan to work with them, but may suddenly want to record, for example, the complete solo works of Ignaz Friedman or Nyregyházi’s Picture of Dorian Gray with one of them. I just don’t know what will happen. It all depends on whether I encounter a talent who really motivates and inspires me to do something exciting.
Q: One last question: How did you decide on the name Sonetto Classics?
TS: The name was suggested by Angelo, along with dozens of gothic horror-like ones, which were not to my liking. But when he mentioned “Sonetto Classics”, it sounded just right, universal, and clean to my ears. “Sonetto” is spelled in Italian, because it is originated from Sonetto del Petrarca by Liszt and Dante’s Sonetto. The logo was designed by me. I inverted the G and F clefs to make “SC”, the abbreviated form of Sonetto Classics.
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