"Prof. NATRA ’s extensive contribution, great importance, and far reaching influence on the classical music world in 20th and 21th centuries will no doubt be documented by many of my peers. I would like to call your attention to his mission as an educator of performers.
Young prodigies of music are often encouraged to practice many hours, and develop their musicality through intuition rather than through knowledge. Throughout my career as a performer and professor, I have met very few performers who have delved into the world of music theory and history. Even fewer have tried or succeeded in creating a bridge between that body of knowledge and their performance skills. It is understandable — many of us study with instrumental teachers who did not create that liaison themselves; and theorists and musicologists often lack the skills to build these links for their young, and often uninterested performance students.
I met SERGIU NATRA when I turned 13, after having had already a year of theoretical studies alongside my violin schooling. He was recommended by my violin teacher at the time, the great Ilona Fehér. To this day I remember arriving to his modest yet highly atmospheric apartment in Ramat Aviv, close to the Tel Aviv University.
I expected to be grilled on technical harmony and structural issues; instead, Prof. NATRA asked (in his soft, tender voice) which piece I was leaming at the time. We pulled out the music and started discussing spots in it, but his focus was different than what I have heard until then. He was asking: “how does this element influence your interpretation and performance of this passage, this phrase, this movement, this piece?”.
From that day on, and for many years, we worked on many pieces, some that I was performing, some that I already knew from listening, and some that Prof. NATRA introduced to me, always expanding my horizons.
Every lesson had a new discovery, and we were always moving ahead. We worked on literally every genre and piece — solo, orchestral, chamber, choral, opera. Even violin showpieces — Ravel’s Tzigane, a seemingly standard violin bravura that is meant as a crowd pleaser, became a study in harmony, as one day he pulled a music book in Romanian, and explained to me the “Gypsy Mode”, a scale in which the piece was written, and how Ravel used it to create the teasing sensation that runs throughout this piece, much like the gypsy it aims to portray.
Beyond the profound effect of making my own playing grow in depth, knowledge, effectiveness, and communicability, I know that it was this knowledge I have amassed from Prof. NATRA that has served to jumpstart and shape my own university teaching career, from my first teaching position at McGill University, through the Universities of Toronto, Ottawa, and Michigan, as Well as the Eastman School of Music. Prof. NATRA has mentored many more performers in his career, and all have gone to become leading musicians throughout the world.
I was fortunate to meet Prof NATRA recently, back in the old apartment where I used to have my lessons. 91 years old, as lucid as he has always been, outstanding memory for details, and his energy as vibrant as ever. He has always been, and will always continue to be, an unending source of musical and human inspiration for me.
Yehonatan Berick
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Professor of Violin, Head of String Sector, School of Music, University of Ottawa, Canada.
He is soloist, recitalist, chamber musician, and pedagogue, throughout North America, Europe and Israel. He has performed, among others, with the Quebec, Winnipeg, Windsor, Ann Arbor, Jerusalem and Haifa Symphonies, the Israeli, Cincinnati, Montreal and Manitoba Chamber Orchestras, in France, U.K., Germany, Sweden, Finland, Colorado and USA.