The sound collector
Luxgallery meets E. Catemario
Luxgallery met Edoardo Catemario, Italian world-wide famous musician who, with his guitar, trod the most important stages in the world charming adults and children with the power of his notes. Innovator and non-conformist, Catemario made the search for the perfect sound his personal mission, between emotion and neo-platonic approach.
Extremely versatile guitarist, goes breezily from the romantic repertoire to the baroque one, to the historical XVIII century up to the contemporary and vanguard music. His repertoire includes a great variety of solo pieces, as well as almost all of the repertoire of the chamber music and 42 concerts for guitar and orchestra.
Collector of ancient instruments of high quality workmanship, that he regularly plays, Edoardo Catemario owns precious guitars among which stand out instruments of great masters of the Spanish school built between 1890 and 1940: Garcia, Simplicio, José Ramirez I, Pascual Viudes, Ibañez, Nuñez, Galan and in the interview he explained the reasons of his extraordinary passion.
How did you come to choose the guitar as your instrument?
I don’t know why I decided to play guitar. Perhaps for the fragility of this sound, that needs to be built with precision and where the mistake allowance is very low. After all, it’s an instrument with a 1,3mm string and not to catch a string means to make only a 1,3mm mistake. This is why all the guitar students need to begin from a medium-high level and they need to be great virtuosos. The guitar is an instrument based on virtuosity and only from a very solid technical basis can derive samples of beauty. In fact, when you play an instrument something must click at the physical and auditory level and this is what happened to me with the guitar, all the rest followed.
How can one become a musician?
I was born in a family where my father could play 16 different instruments, all very badly by the way. Thus, when I began to try to play guitar he stopped me and told me: “We already have enough amateur in the family, if you want to play one of these instruments then you have to learn it”. This is how my story began. A story throughout which I studied piano with perhaps the greatest musicians of the time in Naples, very old and who allowed me to build up a very solid and technical background and to have very stable basis, essential condition to be able today to play with the music and to choose what I actually want to do.
So, what kind of music?
Baroque, contemporary or of the Renaissance is not a big deal, my career in fact led me to teach chamber music as well as to play guitar because it doesn’t make a big difference. Actually, the guitar lends itself to an aesthetic project that makes an absolutely natural sense in my mind and I don’t do but consciously taking already existing ideas and communicating them to others. The power of music is exactly that of opening doors that we usually keep shut to protect ourselves from suffering and this is why, sometimes, people are touched by a classical concert: suddenly the evocative power is so strong to bring them in contact with the deepest layers of themselves. Music is not the meaning, it is the evocative, the self.
What is the audience that gave you greater satisfaction?
I was lucky, I had extraordinary demonstrations of affection in very different situations. The audience at the Musikverein of Vienna standing and applauding. The emotion that you feel in front of such a selective audience is incredible, so that the sixth time they called me back to the stage I had tears in my eyes. Incredible also the experience I had few months ago at the Sidney Myer Music Bowl of Melbourne, where I played in front of 13,500 people, a stadium-like support, the first time in my life. At the same time I will never forget when I played in Chile. It was 1991 and to fight was still worth it, thus we created the “rainbow music train”, with which I ended up in a place that, in my imagination, was close to hell: a mine. Well, the miners, who could not pay me, gave me a mural where it was represented an angel dressed up in the Italian flag, playing the guitar and each string ended on a village of the Andes. Perhaps it is because the guitar speaks to the heart of people that I had a fortunate career.
What is the opera that you prefer?
The one that I still need to learn.
..and the artist?
There are really many, I like everything, both what I can and what I cannot play. Among those that I can interpret the favourite is Bach, the last chance of humankind to hear and understand in the same way with the same percentage. In Bach reason and feeling go together and this is an asset of the late Baroque that was never reproduced. Besides Bach I like the great Viennese classics, over all Schubert, and then there is the Italian opera, Puccini, or the contemporary South-American like Piazzolla.
So, I basically like everything and this is demonstrated by the fact that I have played very different genres: from the ultra-contemporary to the minimalist up to the most classical of the repertoires. What I don’t like, I don’t interpret.
What is the historical instrument that you like the most? And, thinking of your collection, to which are you more bound and which are you more proud to own?
I am a sound collector. I choose my instruments for the sound, not for the brand, and this is a huge difference. So, I would like to stress that mine is not a collection of instruments. All that becomes part of my collection won’t be sold because it means they are works of art that I like. Of course, there is a guitar to which I am very bound, we are tied together since 1988 and with it I won the most important awards. Today a great part of musicians is re-discovering the magic of the vintage instruments, but twenty years ago, when I started, a colleague much more famous then I was back then told me: “Why do you waste your money to buy an old instrument?”. He couldn’t see the quality of the sound object. An old instrument, instead, has a range of qualities that a modern one doesn’t simply because it hasn’t been played enough and therefore it has many structural faults.
Francesca Zottola
Cult Products, Luxgallery For Young Artists, Music, Stories Of Achievements,
Tags: Andes, Bach, Contemporary music, Edoardo Catemario, Galan, Garcia, Ibañez, Italian opera, José Ramirez I, mural, Musikverein of Vienna, Nuñez, old instrument, Pascual Viudes, Piazzolla, Puccini, Schubert, Sidney Myer Music Bowl of Melbourne, Simplicio, Viennese classics, vintage instruments
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