Blogs | Elbow Music

Casals: ‘I am a simple man’

I just came across this lovely BBC documentary about Casals. I could do without seeing the researcher, Robert Baldock, playing Bach and making coffee, but there is some lovely film of Casals teaching and playing, and walking around the square in Prades, his adopted home town and where he set up his festival. There are also charming interviews with some of the legends of another era, whom one rarely sees speak, such as Zara Nelsova, Alexander Schneider (‘I was a cook – I only

Ariane Todes

The unbearable lightness of being Gary Hoffman

Gary Hoffman is one of the music world’s best-kept secrets, a fine and uncompromising cellist whose rare appearances mesmerise. For him, being a musician involves a daily struggle, but he wouldn't have it any other way, as he explains I wouldn’t call Gary Hoffman a great cellist. Not after our conversation at the recent Amsterdam Cello Biënnale. He told me in no uncertain terms what he thinks of the expression: ‘These words are thrown around. Everybody’s “great”. Are they all

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Eugene Drucker on Beethoven

I recently interviewed Eugene Drucker about his Southbank Centre concert with the Emerson Quartet on Sunday, 16 November, which you can read about here. But he had so many interesting ways of explaining Beethoven’s groundbreaking and difficult Op.130 and Op.132 Grosse Fuge that I ran out of space, so here are some of the broader concepts he talked about, which didn’t fit the piece. Out of this world ‘Because Beethoven was completely deaf he had been forced to imagine and crea

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Who are the most popular string players in the US?

The Baltimore Symphony Orchestra has handily published this wonderfully detailed data about the concerts played in the 2014–2015 season by the top 21 US orchestras. The reason, they say, is that ‘numbers can occasionally provide context for ongoing conversations in classical music or highlight trends’. As they point out, there are obvious trends about the lack of female composers, which must be addressed. But for our string-nerd purposes, I’ve looked at the soloist column of

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Written by Mrs Bach?

A new documentary suggests that Mrs Bach was behind the greatest works by her husband Johann Sebastian. But does it ring true? You know that if classical music makes the pages of the infamously scurrilous Daily Mail there’s got to be a good story, so it’s not surprising an iconoclastic new film, Written by Mrs Bach, made it in. Undoubtedly the idea that Bach’s second wife Anna Magdelena wrote much of the great master’s music is a good story. Add to that possible marital infid

Ariane Todes

The return of Kyung Wha Chung

The legendary violinist Kyung Wha Chung makes her much-awaited London comeback this December, after more than a decade away. On a recent visit she told me about her absence from the stage, her hopes for the younger generation of violinists, and the secret of happiness There is only one violinist I wanted but failed to get on the cover of The Strad when I was editor there: Kyung Wha Chung. Growing up, I knew her as one of the towering violinists of her generation (a towering g

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Should classical players cross over?

While I’ve been researching my article on violinists who’ve crossed musical borderlines, for Sinfini Music, I found myself debating with myself (a bad habit). What gives violin stars the right to pick up another genre? Of course there’s no such thing as rights when it comes to music, but there is a certain sense of appropriateness (or appropriation). I wouldn’t go on stage at the Festival Hall and play the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto if I didn’t have complete control of the n

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Everything you need to know about violin playing (but were never taught)

Musical timing and closure, hearing and thinking for ourselves – just some of the things that teaching often fails to help us with, according to Burton Kaplan This summer I spent two weeks at the Magic Mountain Music Farm Practice Retreat, run by Burton Kaplan. My article about the experience is out now in the September issue of The Strad, and I've written a blog about the experience of being offered such a learning opportunity as an amateur. But in the two weeks of twice-dai

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Brahms as I’ve never heard him

Last night's Proms concert with the Budapest Festival Orchestra was ravishing, but raised an uncomfortable question I have a friend who travels to Budapest annually specially to hear the Budapest Festival Orchestra and conductor Iván Fischer. I always thought it was a little obsessional, but after last night’s BBC Proms concert, I understand why. What I listened to was possibly the finest orchestral playing I’ve ever heard. They played two Brahms symphonies – nos. 3 and 4 – w

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A plea on behalf of amateur violinists

Two weeks at a violin practice retreat were life-changing for me, but left me wondering why there aren't enough places for amateur players to fulfil their musical aspirations For two weeks this summer I was taken seriously as a violin player. I was staying at the Magic Mountain Music Farm Practice Retreat in beautiful upstate New York, a course run by Burton Kaplan, and my article about my experience has just come out in the September issue of The Strad. By way of background,

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A Gershwin tribute to Leopold Auer

While we're on the subject of Leopold Auer, it's not possible to mention his roll-call of students without referencing this wonderful song by the Gershwins, sung by the Funnyboners: Auer even gets a reference: We really think you ought to know That we were born right in the middle Of darkest Russia. When we were three years old or so, We all began to play the fiddle In darkest Russia. When we began, Our notes were sour Until a man (Professor Auer) Set out to show us, one and

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Leopold Auer weighs in on the vibrato debate

Responses to my post about Menuhin's vibrato drew a mixture of responses. I’d remarked on it being ‘perfectly shaped’ and ‘fluid’ and many loved it, but some people disagreed, saying it was too tight and fast, and hated it. I wasn’t sure what to think, so I went to the magical library that is the internet to find out. Where better place to learn about vibrato than from Leopold Auer, the legendary teacher of Mischa Elman, Nathan Milstein, Jascha Heifetz and Toscha Zeidel, amon

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The best vibrato ever?

I came across this footage of Menuhin playing Bach's 'Air on the G String'. Just look at his left hand – is that not the most perfectly shaped hand, the most fluid, beautiful vibrato you have ever seen? To quote Jack Lemmon in Some Like it Hot: 'It's like Jell-O on springs!' No comment on his right arm and bow changes, though – maybe that's why he's not looking very happy! #menuhin #bach #vibrato #violin #playing #view

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Perlman discovers klezmer

I came across this lovely film while on my research into classical artists who have explored other genres. It's beautiful to watch the interaction as Perlman meets these klezmer musicians for the first time. At this point he's only been learning about klezmer for a couple of weeks, and at first he makes awkward jokes about playing classical repertoire, including a joke about his Strad ('When he made this fiddle did he ever imagine it would play klezmer?'). He looks pretty unc

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Violinist Joshua Bell performs with Anoushka Shankar

I'm currently researching an article for Sinfini Music about violin stars who branch out into other styles, and came across this wonderful footage of a concert at the Verbier Festival, which I was actually lucky enough to go to back in 2007. Joshua Bell teamed up with sitar player Anoushkar Shankar, and the results were mesmerising. Maybe the inflections and language aren't quite how someone born in the tradition might speak them, but you can't deny Bell's commitment to the m

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James Ehnes on violin obsession and existential crisis

My latest interview for Cozio, with violinist James Ehnes, has just gone live, so please go and visit. He had so much to say about his experience playing some of the finest violins ever made that I couldn’t fit all of it into the interview there, so I saved some of the more philosophical questions for here. I’ve previously made the point that I don’t think everyone deserves to play a Strad and that in my experience there are many people playing them who definitely don't. How

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The shortcut to perfection? Or tendinitis?

The British Pathé YouTube archive is proving to be a charming source of films about the violin, in all its forms. Here is a soundless video from 1926, 'Trained Fingers', starring the dashing Albert Sammons. You might start to feel a little queasy around 1:24, when the special Ostrovsky training device comes out and Sammons puts his fingers in. The invention for double-stops looks a little less torturous, but does it really beat good old scales? Or is it tendinitis waiting to

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An innovative solution to peg turning

I just came across this delightful footage on the British Pathé YouTube channel. It shows a class of 'budding Kreislers' from 1940 learning on a special instrument designed by John Brown, with mandolin like tuning pegs to make it easier for them to tune: rather like the systems that have recently come on to the market. The bows too are designed to make it easier for children to learn the correct position. 'They are becoming masters at what is known as technique,' says the ann

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Charlie Chaplin's perfect film about the First World War

Amid the commemorations of the start of the First World War, you might like a bit of respectful levity, so here is Charlie Chaplin's Shoulder Arms. It's one of my favourite films, made at a point where Chaplin was peaking, with a perfect balance of sheer inventiveness and just the right amount of sentiment. Before he was a little too nasty and liable to kick people in the ass and leer at ladies; after he increasingly tended to the cloying. But in 1918, when he made Shoulder A

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Charlie Chaplin and his violin obsession

The great screen comedian was an accomplished amateur violinist who composed many of the scores to his films At the height of his success, Charlie Chaplin harboured a fantasy about his violin. In 1920, shortly before the release of The Kid, he told a journalist: ‘I once had a day vision. I saw at my feet in a huddled heap all the trappings and paraphernalia of my screen clothes – that dreadful suit of clothes! – my moustache, the battered derby, the little cane, the broken sh