If I were ‘king for a day’ …
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Mike Smith chats with Australian pianist Geoffrey Saba about all things musical
MS: Do you come from a musical background?
GS: No, there was no musical tradition in my family and we didn’t have a piano for about six months after I began to learn, so I practised at a neighbour’s house. I loved listening to the radio and imitated playing the piano on the kitchen table, and I started piano lessons at the age of seven or eight. I grew up in the Queensland country town of Toowoomba in the 1950s, and the best source of quality |
music-making was the ABC concert series of five or six annual concerts, including a visit from the Queensland Symphony Orchestra. ABC radio was a formative influence on my musical appreciation too, and I recall having an advanced knowledge and love of Schubert’s piano music by my early teens. I was always determined to be a concert pianist.
MS: What formal study did you do after you left school?
GS: I was awarded the University of Queensland Music Scholarship, and I decided to go to the University of Melbourne, where I studied piano with Raymond Lambert. He taught me the importance of reading a score with precision. At the end of my first year I decided to work with Ada Corder, who taught me the importance of demonstration at close quarters. Although severely hindered by advanced arthritis in her hands, she could demonstrate and explain any colour and touch on the piano. She knew how to make the piano sing.
MS: And after Melbourne?
GS: I won the first Australian Musicians’ Overseas Scholarship, and went to London. Being based in a great musical metropolis like London was an education in itself, as I was able practically every night of the week to hear and watch one fine pianist after another – an essential impetus to musical development.
MS: Do you prefer live performance to recording?
GS: Any performer (pace Glenn Gould!) prefers to face the audience rather than to have to suffer endless re-takes in the studio in search of a manufactured perfection. I believe that the record industry has affected the way in which audiences listen to concerts; having heard the perfect ‘performance’ on record, they want it in the concert hall. Performance style has adapted as a result, and spontaneity, the art of living dangerously on stage, has suffered. Recently there has been a move back to issuing ‘live’ performances on record, which is a good thing, though nothing can replace the experience of being in the audience. Boulez’s famous dictum fifty years ago, ‘The concert is dead!’ has been proved wrong.
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