Culture That Made Me: Cork conductor Gerry Kelly on Bach, La Bohème, and Timmy the Brit
Gerry Kelly leads the Cork Pops Orchestra in a series of concerts for schools. Picture: Eddie O'Hare
Born in 1953, Gerry Kelly, grew up on the grounds of Clongowes Wood College, Co Kildare. His father, the arranger and composer TC Kelly, was music master at the college. Gerry studied as a cellist at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen, West Germany. In 1978, he joined Cork School of Music where he lectured for 30 years. In 1991, he co-founded Cork Pops Orchestra with his wife, Evelyn Grant. They have four children, all professional musicians. The Cork Pops Orchestra concerts for schools, run at Cork City Hall, Tuesday-Friday, November 12-15 See: www.corkpops.ie.
My earliest musical influence was the Spanish cellist Pablo Casals. He lived into his nineties, until the 1970s. He was born in the previous century. He played for Queen Victoria. He was highly sought after as the first major cello soloist. I was fascinated because he sacrificed part of his career by refusing to perform in Spain during General Franco’s regime, cutting off his nose to spite his face. This influenced my own political outlook on life.
Another notable, influential cellist was Mstislav Rostropovich, who I heard performing Dvorak’s cello concerto in the Gaiety Theatre with the then RTÉ Symphony Orchestra. Rostropovich gave a live performance at the fall of the Berlin Wall. He had escaped from the Soviet Union to the West during the Cold War. He was a friend of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's. Rostropovich defected because he had connections to the English composer, Benjamin Britten. Rostropovich was a top guy.
On arrival in Cork my interest in folk music was influenced by Timmy “The Brit” McCarthy, the set dancing enthusiast. Timmy was involved in a group called The Red Abbey, a precursor of Triskel Arts Centre. I met him in a pub one evening. He'd never encountered a classical cellist before. He said, “I want to get you involved. We need jazz musicians, poets, writers, and traditional musicians to work together on this project.” I said, “Count me in.” And so the Cork Folk Festival was born, 45 years ago. He galvanised people. He even had my wife Evelyn Grant, and one of my brothers, who's a quantity surveyor, off set dancing in Knocknagree. He had this amazing personality.
I read JRR. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings when Jean, my daughter, was born. Evelyn was in the Steiner hospital in the German town Herdecke. She ended up there for a couple of weeks. I had to get a bus and a train to go in to see her every day. I read the book while commuting. The funny twist to this is that when they made The Lord of the Rings film that girl, Jean, was the harpist on the soundtrack. You couldn’t make it up. It's like I brought it on myself by reading the book.
My father wrote and arranged music for the RTÉ Light Orchestra, now the RTÉ Concert Orchestra. Through this I met many of the European musicians who joined during the Cold War. Most of them spoke German with one another even though they were on opposite sides during the Second World War. I assumed they were chatting about Bach, Beethoven and Brahms and was rather surprised when I did some work with the orchestra later on, and I had learnt German, to discover that the main interest of discussion during the break was how their international soccer teams were doing!
I studied with a French cellist called Paul Tortelier in Essen but he and I didn't get along. We didn’t click. There were reasons. There was bullying in the class. There was a suicide in the class. The class were terrified of him. It doesn't mean he wasn't a great musician. He was a very good musician. He was a huge influence. His study and interpretation of the six Johann Sebastian Bach suites, which is core music in the cello repertoire, was impressive. I still play his edition of the Bach suites.
When I finished my studies in West Germany, I got part-time work in an opera orchestra, Deutsche Oper am Rhein. You were playing a different opera every night. It was amazing – to be in the middle of an orchestra playing, say, Verdi's Rigoletto or Puccini’s La Bohème. A terrific experience.
Verdi's Rigoletto is a great piece of music. It's a tragic story about this guy, the court jester. The count has his wicked way with his daughter. She ends up getting killed. All these operatic stories are crazy, but they're interesting at the same time. When you're playing the cello in the middle of an orchestra like that – you're surrounded by all this colour, all this singing – it's amazing.
Puccini’s La Bohème is set in Paris. She's dying of consumption. There's a poet and a writer, all living in a garret in Paris. Obviously, it doesn't work out because they don't have enough money, and she dies in the end. So it's all very tragic! The way the music is written is so imaginative.
Madame Butterfly by Puccini is another tragic story. An American lieutenant arrives in Japan, meets a lady. She gets pregnant. He comes back again in a boat, but he wants nothing to do with her. A timeless story.
The melodies are so strong. The orchestration of them, and the way it captures the emotion, is stronger than words. You can almost taste it. When I play something on the cello, I can convey subtlety that I couldn't express in words.
The prelude from Bach’s first suite is well known. You'd even find the cellist Yo-Yo Ma, who has played for several American presidents, doing it with a breakdancer. It's an interesting piece of music. It'll calm a person down – both the player and the audience. If you start a concert with the prelude from the Bach suite, it gets everybody chilled. It has that power.
In musical theatre, I always ended up with bad guy roles. I was the bad cop in West Side Story, Officer Krupke, the detective antagonising both sides. West Side Story is the best of the musicals I’ve done by a long shot. I was in a production in the Cork Opera House. It's based on Romeo and Juliet. It has great drama and the music in it is stunning. You've got this Latin music – because of the Puerto Rican gang – contrasting with more classical-sounding music. It’s brilliant.
I saw Cónal Creedon’s play After Luke at the Cork Arts Theatre last month. I know Cónal well. He was so moved by what the guys did with it. It was so well acted – there’s three main actors in it, a father and two sons. And it was so well directed. There was a young director named Leon Danza behind it. It would blow your mind. I had to see it a second time.
