Her latest Cd is very much like her : unexpected and passionnate. Sonia Wieder-Atherton has adapted for two cellos a series of Monteverdi Duets. They are like torches along a passage, beacons lighting up a quest. As an echo to these lyrical expressions, a series of contemporary works. Some of which were dedicated to her. Masterfully interpreted, they sketch a self-portrait. From the childish wail (Pilinszky Janos, by György Kurtag), on to a freed and sensual joy (Lame, by Franco Donatoni), a yearning for stability (immer) or the obession with sound (Invece) by Pascal Dusapin. As many stages in her own life.

Télérama : you were born in 1961 of an american father and a french mother. What memories did you keep from your childhood in the United States ?
Sonia Wieder-Atherton : The street noises of New York. Different acoustical impressions, from block to block, when going for long walks. The most particular accent of african americans, both singing and swinging. And also the way they move. This still haunts me, so much so that when I play the cello I often visualize tap dancers, their energy generates continuous and smooth movements, never loosing a beat, yet seemingly effortlessly. These images immediately impact my playing.

Télérama :Why did you choose the cello ?
Sonia Wieder-Atherton : As a little girl, I strived to produce sounds, lively sounds, loaded with resonance. My parents had a piano, but once I'd strike a key, the resonance would die of its own accord. in 1967, when we were back in France, I tried the guitar for a couple of years, without ever being pleased with my self. When I was 9, I was literaly hit with Vivaldi's Sonata in mi minor the first time I heard it. in a trance I pointed my finger : "this is it". I forget the name of the player, but I still see the red record sleeve.

Télérama : How was your first encounter with a cello ?
Sonia Wieder-Atherton : feverish and gluttonous. I was captivated by the quality in tone, by the way you actually closely hug the instrument. The sound will change if you embrace it differently. There is a strong aspiration towards unity with the instrument that drives you to actually become one with the cello. A bity like a Zen Master drinking tea who manages to erase the boundary betwenn his hand and the cup. ... These are the words that come to my mind now. Then, I knew one thing only : I would get up in the morning two hours earlier to play the cello.

Télérama : a fixation ?
Sonia Wieder-Atherton : No, a vital need ! But then I had a real fixation. I had barely delved into the musical world, but already the voice of Maria Callas obsessed me. She did not hesitte to declare that a sound musn't always be beautiful, that it can be a cry, a croak, a wail, a moan. One could conceivably "voice" the cello.

Télérama : Do you sing when rehearsing before a concert ?
Sonia Wieder-Atherton : Dear me, no ! I can't sing. My voice is badly set, it's a head voice. my only path to musicality is through the cello.

Télérama : At 16, at the Paris Conservatory, you are tought by Maurice Gendron, who had played under Karajan's direction, brushed with Britten, created Prokofiev's Cello Concerto, whom Poulenc, Hindemith had dedicated works to. What kind of a pupil were you ?
Sonia Wieder-Atherton : Impossible, complicated, excessive. My relation with Maurice Gendron was all passion. On the one hand, he was pushing me to question his teaching ; on the other hand, he couldn't bear my not trusting him blindly about his touch, his bowing, which probably summarized a whole life of research. I questioned him tirelessly. I was in his class to learn : I already reacted as a musician, eager to let out what was boiling inside me, oppressing me.

Télérama : How did it end between the two of you ?
Sonia Wieder-Atherton : When I was just about 18, I dared say to this great master : "I can bear your anger against me, because I love you. But I can't help your being angry with me. Would you rather I switched classes ? " He postponed his answer to the following morning : "I'd rather you went someplace else ..." . So I finished my studies in Philippe Muller's class. I came to him a very badly shaken and torn pupil. He was clever enough to accompany me, rather than try to build anew, start from scratch. I passed Maurice Gendron in a corridor the day after my receiving the First Prize. he called me to him : "come here ! Remember the compulsory contemporary piece at the exam, the terrible harmonics toward the end of the second page. look at my touch. Do as I do and you'll never be in trouble again. Now ... Go ... ". That was all. And it moved me so.

Télérama : in 1980, you decide to go to Moscow's Conservatory. Why ?
Sonia Wieder-Atherton : Still this quest for the song of the instrument obsessed me. I had began to modify my bowing by looking on photographs, at the way Gregor Piatigorsky, Rostropovitch and Pablo Casals would position their hand. In these pictures, I seemed to hear sounds coming from beyond. So I attempted to produce them myself. I invented a contraption to weigh down my shoulder in order to determine exactly when weight would influence the course of the bow, to produce fortes in energy or in a natural unconstrained carelessness. I would fantasize that if my arm were cut off right then, the fall of this weight would cleanly sever the cord of the cellos. I wondered how to channel into the music this formidable strength. In Moscow, Natalia Shakhovskaia straightened out my chaos. This former pupil of Rostropovitch's had 40 years of teaching behind her, but she would listen to you as if it was a personnal gift to her. Only you and your playing would exist. She would then take you on an inside journey, with the only help of music. Effortlessly, she would orchestrate your uncertainties, hunt down your limitations. She would not let go of me : "Sonia, how can you build such a tension toward the culmination of a partition. We know something is about to happen ... We long for it to happen ... We await it ... But right when everything should burst out, there is this holding back within you ... Some kind of fear". To force me over those saillant points, she would expel everyone out of the class. For a formidable face-to-face with myself, with the music. I can still hear her resounding voice : "Again ! Again !"

Télérama : An american childhood, an adolescence in after-68 Franc, then on to the Soviet world. It must have been quite a shock ?
Sonia Wieder-Atherton : I cannot reject all of communism. At the Moscow Conservatory, whole classes of pupils would stream to exhibitions, would rush concerts, the price of a ticket was so affordable then. They would know all of Godard's movies, would share the latest novels released in the West. Embracing the life of a soloist was within the grasp of any talented individual, regardless of fortune and origin. In France, it would require some financial means. At the Conservatory, people would remain uncompromising, upright, righteous even. Of course, the classes would be bugged by listening devices installed by the Party. But the weight of communist oppression was not brought to bear on music classes.

Télérama : In 1982, after two years in Moscow, you went into graduate studies at the Paris Conservatory. Then in 1986 you won the Rostropovitch competition. Competition though, seemed far from your mind .
Sonia Wieder-Atherton : I'm not interested in playing better than the others and in proving it through winning awards. At the time though, I probably needed to mark the end of my student days, my entering a new adult life as a performer. Looking back, I see this competion, which I entered, as a rite of passage.


Télérama : Very quickly, you fearlessly delved into comtemporary music.
Sonia Wieder-Atherton : But I'd always been immersed in it. As an undergraduate at the Paris Conservatory, Jean-Paul Rieunier, then in charge of Comporary Music, has noticed my interest. Very soon, I played all the creations of the pupils in Composition Class, but also those of the greats : Ligeti, Stockhausen, Berio. At 17, I performed live on the radio, at the creation of George Benjamin's Duet for cello and piano, George Benjamin himself playing the piano part. This tought me to rush head-first into unchartered territories. I said yes to some compositions, no to others. Surfing naturaly, choosing among all Living Music has to offer, prevented my locking myself into a weird and monumental relationship with contemporary music. Very often, as performaers start to play, it seems as though - and this applies to the Public as well - the whole corpus of contemporary music weighs on their shoulders. You must either love it all or hate it with a passion. What's with this stupid globalization ?

Télérama : How do you balance between contemporary and classical ?
Sonia Wieder-Atherton : Without ranking, even if classical music remains my main path, Schumann, Brahms, Beethoven are my daily staple. I cannot work on a contemporary piece all day long. I turn to other languages. I kind of like this thought of Marguerite Dumas's, who, as a filmmaker, would say that the best way to shoot summer in to shoot in the wintertime : it is through its absence that the object of your desire most strongly reveals itself.

Télérama : Does your work with today's composers change the way you look at older masters ?
Sonia Wieder-Atherton : I turn back to them with still greater respect. Once, as I was working with Henri Dutilleux at his "Three stanzas on the name Sacher", my touch slipped a little. At the end I apologized. "No, No, no problem, he answered back right away. On the other hand, in the second bar of the second stanza, I require that the F sharp be at exactly the right height. This is fundamental". Through this single sentence, born of his careful listening, the composer opened a new world for me. This F Sharp assumed the guise of an enormous red flag, from which I had to reorient my whole vision of this piece. When shortly afterwards I took up the Schumann Concerto again, I looked at the partition quite differently. This sudden sforzando, quite offset smack into a diminuendo, was this the moment when everything changes, Schumann's red flag ?

Télérama : Red again, . as the cover of your childhood Vivaldi record ?
Sonia Wieder-Atherton : who knows .

Télérama : Comment expliquez-vous que la seconde partie du XXe siècle se soit de nouveau intéressée au violoncelle ?
Sonia Wieder-Atherton : Au début du siècle, hormis Kodaly, des créateurs aussi importants que Bartok ou Stravinsky n'ont rien écrit pour lui. Je pense que Pablo Casals, dans les années 50, a remis cet instrument au soleil, avec les Suites de Bach, que personne ne jouait plus. Alors les compositeurs ont redécouvert tout un univers de timbres, proches de la voix, l'acoustique très percussive d'un pizzicato, l'ampleur inouïe d'un trait d'archet ou la profondeur d'un minimalisme vibrant.

Télérama : Vous semblez toujours prête à vous risquer dans des aventures, comme lorsque vous avez composé la musique du film de Chantal Akerman Histoire d'Amérique, en 1989.
Sonia Wieder-Atherton : Chantal Akerman s'est inspirée de textes de juifs de l'Est, très pratiquants, qui débarquaient à New York, et ne comprenaient rien à ce pays de sauvages. Leurs monologues, à base d'interrogations, étaient filmés dans un terrain vague, face caméra. Je trouvais merveilleuse et dangereuse à la fois la manière dont une musique pouvait faire tanguer une image, la déstabiliser. Alors, prudemment, je traficotais un scherzo de Mendelssohn, un mouvement de Prokofiev. Je procédais par élimination, dans un souci de transparence.
En même temps, en cherchant des chants pour accompagner ces juifs, je me suis plongée dans la littérature musicale hébraïque, hassidique, construite en trois parties : un dialogue respectueux de l'homme avec Dieu ; puis une sorte de tutoiement plein de colères ; enfin, un retour au calme. J'avais tellement accumulé de matériel inutilisé que je me suis lancée dans un cycle de Quinze Chants juifs, qui m'ont donné l'envie de tenter une Lecture musicale de l'Ecclésiaste, avec Sami Frey en récitant. Cela m'a pris plusieurs années, durant lesquelles certains ont cru que je m'éloignais du classique. Ridicule. Je ne renonce jamais à ce que j'aime, ne procède jamais par soustraction, mais par addition. Je vole du temps au temps.

Télérama : Au point de commencer à explorer de nouveaux horizons autour du Bassin méditerranéen : un programme prévu pour tourner cet été dans les festivals.
Sonia Wieder-Atherton : J'ai beaucoup parcouru l'imaginaire du nord de l'Europe, à partir des danses populaires profondément ancrées chez Schubert et chez Brahms. Et je me suis aventurée jusqu'aux pays de l'Est où Bartok et Kodaly ont glané des mélodies folkloriques judeo-slaves : mes racines. Maintenant je me tourne vers le monde arabo-andalou, turc, ottoman, plein de mélopées envoûtantes, de noubas. Ce parcours mêlera encore trois créations de Georges Aperghis, Ivan Fedele et Pascal Dusapin aux ouvres de Granados et d'Albeniz.

Télérama : Donnez-vous des cours ?
Sonia Wieder-Atherton : Parfois, quand je suis en tournée, je passe quelques heures dans les conservatoires. J'écoute. J'aime entendre l'éclosion d'univers sonores, assister à l'ouverture de natures musicales. Je vois ces élèves comme de jeunes peintres n'ayant que trois couleurs sur leur palette. Je leur donne quelques conseils. Pour qu'après mon départ ils disposent de dix couleurs. Qu'ils les mélangent. Qu'ils se risquent à salir leur palette.

Propos recueillis par Bernard Mérigaud
Photos : Claude Gassian pour Télérama


Télérama n°2677 - mai 2sd 2001