Photo credit: Janet Donovan
“For me, coming here is like coming home because we have known each other for a long time although I won’t say how long. Actually, we have never really lived in the same city at the same time,” said Sabine Lovatelli of her long time friend Aniko Gaal Schott who hosted a party in her honor at her Washington, DC home. “But still there was a friendship developing over all those years and we kept track and contact throughout these years, so I’m very glad to be here.”
Sabine Lovatelli and Aniko Gaal Schott
Sabine Lovatelli is a Brazilian philanthropist and arts patron. “When I came to Brazil in ’71, I was imported by my husband who was Brazilian-born. After a while I felt that I wanted to be more a part of the city where I was going to live. I analyzed the market a little bit and realized that there was very little classic music at the time. So I said, ‘Well, I could try and do a concert once in a while.’ Lovatelli turned to music as a way to integrate into her new home country. “I always wanted to do something which would let me participate more in this country where I was going to live all my life. I analyzed what was missing, and definitely there was classical music missing here,” she explained.
Sabine and Aniko
“It was a modest idea and I wanted to start chamber music or something, but there was such a lack of this all that I immediately got in contact with these big orchestras,” Sabine explained. “There was The National Symphony, there was Rostropovich touring nearby, so I said, ‘Okay, I will take two concerts.’ The next one was the Cleveland Orchestra with Lorin Maazel, then there was New York and we had Pittsburgh, we had Philadelphia. We had all the American big orchestras and also, the European. Once you have done a few, the others come by itself because then we were known. Then, after a while I thought,’Well, this is a non-profit organization.’ We wanted to do more and get to the youth and educate people more to get committed to the music and, so we started to do open air concerts with these big orchestras – in the park of Sao Paulo, free of charge. Then we did master classes with the visiting artists to give lessons to the young Brazilians. We started introduction courses for our audience in order to be prepared for what they were going to listen to.And, little by little, I liked it, I liked what I was doing and I was following the instinct of what was needed. So that’s probably was the success of it because we didn’t insist on anything. We just went the way that people wanted to go. It went on and we had lessons and then we started to get young people to qualify for scholarships in Europe and we did a lot of contacts in Europe with schools and festivals and I can say that we sent like over a hundred and fifty people to study in Europe already.”
Lovatelli’s latest adventure is theater, so she built one in Carcoza, a state north of Rio. “It’s called Bahia and the very south of that state is the place called Mancuso. We have a house there and many friends have houses there also and this whole theater is in the middle of a golf course – between number, hole number four and hole number five – and it’s fun because it’s a small city. It’s like a time machine going to Mancuso. Nothing has changed in like a hundred years ago and people like to come there. They can play golf, they can go to the beach because it’s there. And, they can listen to good music.”
Then we all enjoyed caviar and champagne.
