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The world’s busiest violinist offers his thoughts on a life in music, including how to play naturally, getting on with conductors, dealing with nerves and social media, and avoiding caffeine and sugar Augustin Hadelich is one of today’s supreme violinists, perfectly balancing intellect, emotion and soul, all with a vast palette of sound and superb taste. It’s not surprising, therefore, that he’s also the busiest, according to Bachtrack, or that he references Norbert Brainin and David Oistrakh among his influences. I interviewed him for the front cover of the March issue of The Strad, and even in an hour over Zoom, he had so many interesting and thought-provoking ideas that I had far too much material for the print article, so here are the quotes I couldn’t fit in. Norbert Brainin ‘Norbert Brainin always suggested the most natural way to play and the most natural phrasing. For the greatest pieces of music that’s enough, and it’s better not to do too much. It was something I’d never heard before because there were a lot of artists at the time whose playing was all about interpreting, and the music became more and more over-interpreted. Working with Brainin, I started to become aware that a lot of that didn’t make sense. Why are they doing this? Sometimes there’s no reason. They might do it because it sounds pretty good and it’s nice to listen to, but it can take away from the impact of a piece to add extraneous ideas that aren’t necessary.’ ‘If you find the most natural way, the most natural interpretation, arising from how the piece was written, it can feel almost like the piece is being created at that moment, in the performance. At the time I didn’t understand what he was saying, at least not in these terms, but now, 25 years later, I do.’ David Oistrakh ‘A family friend gave us all his old records and there was a huge Oistrakh collection, and I kept listening to it. I was really taken by his sound, which is so warm. He didn’t interpret too much. There is an interpretation, but it’s never, “I’m going to do something different here, and I am going to do something crazy here.” It’s never about him. Even at that age, I was struck by the fact that when I heard Oistrakh play, I heard Brahms, Tchaikovsky and Sibelius – I didn’t hear Oistrakh. It was modest but also beautiful and naturally musical. That resonated with me.’ Finding an individual sound ‘A lot of young players these days make very fast progress because they can watch all the great violinists and how they play online - there are so many performances. Back then, I tried to sound like the recordings I liked, but I couldn’t see how they held the violin and the bow. I was trying to do similar things with the sound, and musically, but since I couldn’t see what they did, my approach to bow technique is totally different. That’s how it used to be. That’s why violinists played more differently from each other in the past and we see a little less of that now. Little children can already see all the violinists play, and so there is less of a search for your own solution.’ Learning music ‘When I learn a new piece, it’s a combination of working on the violin part right away, because I want to know what it feels like to play, but also looking at the score. I play the violin part and then in the breaks look at the score. I also listen to recordings at the start, just to get an idea, but then I stop listening as I work on it myself and want to develop my own ideas.’ ‘You get better at looking at scores the more you do it. Eventually, you can imagine what it sounds like and even though you’re seeing so many systems, your eyes jump to the important bits.’ ‘Most teachers don’t teach score analysis. I have learnt a lot from the conductors I have played with over the years. I would look at their scores to see how they mark them up. Some people mark a lot and some people less. With some conductors you can see on their score how they go about it. Experienced conductors are able to see the most important information in the score much more quickly – what matters structurally and harmonically.’ Sound production ‘Power comes from the weight of the bow. You’re just guiding it, using the weight of the bow and arm rather than pressure and force. It’s much harder to control the bow when you press, especially as you get older, so a bow technique based on pressure tends to have a more bright, even aggressive quality, whereas if you use weight, even at its loudest, it is easier to keep the sound full and beautiful. It’s important to develop a technique that can last, not one that’s only good for young people. When you’re young, you don’t get injured and you have incredible control over all your muscles.’ Performing with orchestra ‘Concertos sound better when it’s not a one-way street, with the conductor just following the soloist. It goes both ways. When I’m rehearsing with an orchestra, I say what I want but I’m also reacting to the conductor and musicians. At this point, I probably have strong opinions about most pieces, which I don’t want to change radically, but it ends up sounding different with every conductor because once you open yourself to being influenced by what you hear, you can’t help but play differently. The tempo might flow differently or you might end up playing with a different kind of intensity or character, as you respond to the sound around you. ‘That is what should happen. If it doesn’t work well, and it’s still not working at all in the concert, you might have to compromise. You can’t just do your own thing and leave them in the dust somewhere. It still needs to work as a piece, as well as you can make it. Sometimes that means you don’t end up playing the way you had planned, but just making sure that certain things are together and make sense musically. The worst thing you can see as an audience member a conductor and violinist having a musical fight on stage.’ Chamber music ‘In chamber music you start off with strong ideas and lots of hope for what you want the piece to be, but then you face other personalities who have other ideas. You have to learn how to give in sometimes, and how to compromise and work with someone who might have a very different idea of the piece. Sometimes, later on, you realise they were right! But even if they were wrong, you have to make the best of it. In this way, having significant chamber music experience makes it far easier to navigate the collaborations with different conductors and orchestras.’ Being on stage ‘At some point, I became really self aware, listening to myself very closely, and I had to learn how not to be that way on stage. I try to focus on living the piece emotionally. If it’s a lyrical passage, I might imagine myself singing it while I’m playing. It’s a way to get into the flow, to get carried away by the music. I try not to have thoughts like “This note was a little out of tune,” which is a very harmful mind-space to be in during a performance.’ ‘I also try not to look back after something went wrong. I think, “Okay, well, that happened,” but I try not to dwell on things, but to keep going. There are certain very complex pieces where you can’t switch your mind off and you have to remain incredibly aware of every little thing, but usually for most repertoire, a strong performance is one that’s played with at least a certain amount of abandon. When I manage to do that it’s by experiencing the piece emotionally myself. Then the audience can feel what I feel, too.’ ‘I imagine myself singing the line, and I start getting carried away by the music. I don’t think anyone’s ever noticed this except some sound engineers, but during long orchestral tuttis, like the Beethoven Concerto, I sing along with the bassline. First of all, it’s relaxing in terms of nerves, but it also feels that when I finally come in, I have already been part of the piece - I’ve already started and I’m just continuing. It’s a totally different feeling mentally.’ Dealing with nerves ‘I used to get very nervous. I still get a bit nervous before performances, but I’m much better at handling it. One of the things that has helped me is paying attention to my breath while I practise, breathing a certain way with a phrase if I’m worried that I’m going to feel nervous doing it. If I feel unsettled or nervous or stuck, focusing on the breath, which is connected to the phrasing, can somehow help me get moving with the music. The worst thing that can happen to performers is to get into a restricted mindspace where you feel very nervous, your bow starts to shake, you think about it and you panic. That hasn’t happened to me in many years, and being conscious of my breathing is something that has helped.’ ‘I think the Adrenaline helps me play better, and these days I look forward to that feeling. Walking on stage feels like home. It didn’t always feel this way. It used to be more of a scary place and people sometimes had to push me out to go out. Over time it’s become easier and now it’s a happy place for me. When I’m there it’s so intense and I feel alive. My heart is still pounding, but I’m enjoying it!’ Strads ‘For many years I played violins that didn’t have great projection, which helped me develop my sound, but was very challenging. You learn to be very efficient and optimal with what the violin can produce, to get the most out of it and not leave anything on the table.’ ‘After I won the Indianapolis Competition, I played the 1683 Strad that used to be Josef Gingold’s. It is beautiful and warm, but not loud, especially the middle strings, so when I played with orchestra, it was tricky to make the balance work. It helped me develop my bow technique, because I had to play with a lot of bow, but the bow had to be really straight when I was moving it fast. Also, with a violin that doesn’t speak easily, you have to be very precise with the bow. ‘I loved the sound of that Strad and liked playing it for the right reasons. The wrong reason would be to say, “I need to play on this because it’s a Strad and I need to be playing a Strad.” People think of it as a sign of pedigree to be playing a Strad. That’s the wrong way to think about it. There are Strads that don’t work as well as others, for various reasons. Maybe they never did, or the condition of the violin is not so great. You might think, “Oh, it’s just me. I’m not playing well, but the violin must be great,” but sometimes it is the violin. Modern instruments ‘It’s the wrong mindset to think that you have to play a Strad, ‘del Gesù’ or Guadagnini. There are soloists who don’t and still make a good sound. It’s so much about the player. If you find a modern instrument, commit to it and adapt to the same extent that you would with a Strad, because if you have the same belief in a modern instrument, sometimes that can work very well too.’ ‘I’ve seen a lot of modern violins that are special, but I have noticed that some luthiers focus on making violins that are extremely loud and easy to play, because buyers are sometimes impressed by that when they first try an instrument. They think, “Oh, wow, this violin plays itself.” But that is not always the best criterion to select a modern violin. Modern violins tend to be playable anyway, in a less complicated way than an old instrument that has been through a lot already, but if your only criterion when you select it is volume, then once you’ve played on one for a few months, you might find that you are missing color and complexity in the sound.’ Guarneri ‘del Gesù’ ‘I’m incredibly happy with the violin I have been playing for the last few years, which is Henryk Szeryng’s ‘del Gesù’, which he played for many years. It’s the last violin that ‘del Gesù’ made before he died in 1744. There are many myths, because there’s not much known about him, so people sometimes even make things up. The label says 1745, but he died in 1744, so some say that his wife finished it, because she was also a violin maker. It’s a gorgeous violin that has a wonderfully interesting, rich and satisfying sound. I get as much back as I put into it. It has power when you need it, for the big concertos, but also the warmth and sweetness that you need for more intimate pieces and chamber music, and it has a very big range.’ Staying healthy ‘Some people would probably say I’m not living a healthy lifestyle – I eat an enormous amount of pasta and bread and pizza! You learn the things you have to do on concert days to be in good shape: to rest enough, get enough sleep, eat well and eat enough to give you the energy for the concert. I cut out things that might interfere with my playing. I don’t drink alcohol and I often don’t eat desserts because of the sugar high followed by the sugar low, which can have an effect. I don’t eat or drink anything with caffeine. This helps me handle jet lag as well.’ ‘Violin is one of the more unforgiving instruments. It reveals what state your body is in. I might think that I’m feeling okay, but then I play the violin and I realise I’m actually really tired – my reactions are slow and I’m missing things I don’t normally miss. I can always feel if I’ve not slept enough the night before. I have friends who drink coffee before they perform, but for me, when I walk on stage, my heart is beating fast and the last thing I need is coffee in my system. It takes a long time for the body to get rid of caffeine –12 hours later you still have small amounts in your system.’ Careers ‘Everyone’s career is different and it’s more true now than it was in the past that people find their own unusual paths. Some people’s careers move very fast, some have a more steady progression. My career has a certain trajectory, and it’s not necessarily helpful to compare your career with mine. When you look at my career now, it might look like a normal solo career, but it wasn’t at the start. It is necessary to think creatively about the programmes you play and how to grow in all kinds of directions that interest you, and basically figure out who you are as a musician. A career can happen around that, or as a result of that, rather than thinking, “I want to do it like this” and thinking there is some sort of path.’ Social media ‘Social media is a tool that we can use to keep connected with supporters, fans and other musicians, so it’s useful in that way, but it can also have a mentally harmful side. I was talking about this with my students, and they were surprised that it was the same for me. They thought it was just them. They were saying, “I’m always depressed when I look at my Instagram feed and see what all the other musicians are doing. But surely, someone who’s playing a lot of concerts wouldn’t be?” But when I open my Instagram feed, I also instantly feel like I’m missing something. Even if I’m playing somewhere I really want to be, I look at what other people are doing and feel like I am missing out.’ ‘People talk a lot about how harmful it can be mentally for teenagers always to have the impression that everyone’s life is so perfect. We need to remember that what we see is always a very idealised version of everyone’s life. So one has to have a realistic view of what things are really like and focus on your situation and not look too much at others. Look at what you can do yourself and how you can grow.’

Timothy Ridout's new CD celebrates the musical influences of Lionel Tertis, prompting me to find out more about the man who transformed the viola, and wonder what he might think of today's musicians I had a fun gig last week, interviewing viola player Timothy Ridout at the launch of his wonderful new Lionel Tertis-themed CD. Tertis (1876–1975) arguably invented modern viola playing, pushing the technical limits and perceptions of the instrument, inspiring swathes of new repertoire and sowing the seeds for the golden age of viola playing that we are now enjoying, of which Ridout, still under 30, is a stellar example. In preparation, I had the pleasure of going down a Tertis rabbit hole. This included reading Tertis’s own autobiography, My Viola and I, a charming (if sometimes a little pompous) collection of stories about his childhood, key moments and subjects from his artistic life, and a whole section of technical advice, much of which is deeply unfashionable now, but music to my reactionary ears. ‘You must play and interpret with the utmost intensity of feeling, be it fortissimo or pianissimo, appassionata or cantabile, all the time and every time. In no other way can the inert instrument be brought fully to life and made to transmit the reality of your sentiments’ – Lionel Tertis Tertis’s parents emigrated from Poland and his father Alexander was cantor of Princes Street Synagogue in Spitalfields, which might explain his lyrical, instinctively expressive playing. This is a quality Ridout shares, so it was unsurprising when he explained that as a child his main musical outlet was singing, until his voice broke, when his attention shifted to the viola. You can hear Tertis’s gentrified East End accent in this short but wonderful Desert Island Discs from 1962. Coming from this poor background, Tertis describes the many gigs he undertook as a pianist, from the age of 13, to make money to pay for his training – whether in mental institutions or seaside retreats (playing to hundreds of East London school children as they ate lunch on holiday in Clacton-on-Sea), possibly instilling in him the importance of communicating with an audience. Viola as a solo instrument Although he came to the viola relatively late, and initially only to fill a hole in a quartet at the Royal Academy, Tertis became a fierce advocate quickly: ‘In those days when it was the rarest thing to hear a viola solo, the upper range of the instrument was completely unexplored. Players of that time rarely climbed higher than the second leger line in the treble clef! To counteract this neglect of the higher registers I resolved to give demonstrations to show the improvement in the quality of those higher tones that could be achieved by persistent practice in them. As a student at the R.A.M. I was able to accomplish this by playing the Mendelssohn and Wieniawski D minor concertos (of course a fifth lower but exactly as written for the violin) at two of the fortnightly students’ concerts there. The morning after my performance of the Mendelssohn, I met Alfred Gibson who was for a time the violist of the Joachim Quartet. Evidently he had been present at the concert for he greeted me with a menacing look and exploded: “I suppose the next thing is, you will be playing behind the bridge! The viola is not meant to be played high up – that is the pig department!” I felt like replying: “It probably is on your viola but not on mine!” However, that would have been rude coming from a student to a Professor of the Academy.’ He certainly doesn’t come across as meek, mild, or backward in coming forward, as this memory of one rehearsal with Henry Wood proves: ‘At one point in the work the first oboe and I had to play one or two B flats in unison. Wood turned suddenly to me and said: “Intonation! Intonation! Your B flat is sharp!” To me that accusation was a red rag to a bull. I exploded with rage. All my life I have concentrated on true intonation, and I flattered myself on being pretty good at it. The orchestra stopped, and I played a succession of B flats all down bows – crescendo, forte, fortissimo. Then I bellowed: “That’s my B flat, and there’s nothing wrong with it! Ask your oboe-player about his B flat!” At this H.J.W. retorted, in his high-pitched counter-tenor voice: “HOITY TOITY!” Things calmed down after that, the rehearsal continued without untoward interruption and I forgave what I considered a gross indignity.’ Kreisler Tertis adored Kreisler – he describes following him around ‘like a dog’ – and took him as a role model for what the viola might do expressively and technically. He was therefore delighted to be invited to play Mozart’s Sinfonia Concertante with Kreisler and offers a lesson in generosity for us all: ‘At the first performance of the Concertante at the Carnegie Hall with Kreisler, he insisted that I should go on to the platform before him, and when I demurred he said: “You are my guest” – that was typical of his lovely nature. A similar example of his characteristic kindliness was, I remember, when he remarked to me, “Whenever I attend recitals of my fellow artists, I never take notice of their faults – if any, I let them go in one ear and out of the other. But their good points I enjoy, and endeavour to grasp these and learn from them.” Indeed, never once did I hear him say a derogatory word concerning any artist.’ Orchestral playing In 1938, having published an article in The Daily Telegraph criticising ‘the mass-production and consequent deterioration in quality of performance’ of London orchestras, due to their exhausting schedules, Tertis had a run-in with Thomas Beecham that led to him becoming a quasi-consultant to the conductor, attending rehearsals to critique the balance and working on the string parts: ‘I set to work, concentrating on achieving unanimity in fingering and phrasing – an important factor in expressive string playing, especially in a body of players performing the same melodic phrase. One day when I was carrying out my duties at an orchestral rehearsal at the Albert Hall, with my beloved Kreisler playing Tchaikovsky’s concerto, I suggested that at a certain point in the score the orchestra had been too loud, and that Kreisler should play up. Immediately Kreisler turned to me and said: “I agree,” and then quite meekly: “I will try – I will do my best.”’ Later on in the book, Tertis even comes up with a ‘Revolutionary Seating Plan for a Symphony Orchestra’, to improve the balance between sections and the natural disadvantage that the strings have in pointing in the wrong direction. One can see the logic, but good luck with that. John Barbirolli actually tried it with the Hallé in 1964 and was clearly not impressed. For players, the practical meat of the book is his treatise on playing at the back of the book, although many of them have become fairly unfashionable. A few tips: Intonation ‘The certain road to never-failing perfect intonation is listening of the most concentrated kind. There is a vast difference between listening and listening intently. It is the latter which is absolutely imperative… You will notice how much richer is the sound of a note that is absolutely in tune. A note infinitesimally flat or sharp lacks the rich, round, penetrative, luscious sound that only a note perfectly in tune will give you.’ Vibrato His views will probably be seen as controversial by today’s young players, although I’m with him on this one: ‘The vital factor about vibrato is that it should be continuous; there must be no break in it whatsoever, especially at the moment of proceeding from one note to another, whether those notes are in the same position or whether a change of position is involved. The vibrato in the note you are playing must start at the very beginning of that note (or possibly infinitesimally before the bow touches the string) - and must join the following note without stopping. In other words, KEEP YOUR FINGERS ALIVE! A phrase is spoilt by allowing them momentarily to go dead, i.e. by the cessation of the vibrato. Let me explain what I mean in a slightly different way: if the finger momentarily ceases to oscillate at the end of the note you are playing, the sound becomes dead, and more so if the note following it is not immediately alive for the first split second that the finger contacts the string.’ Dynamic range And his views on dynamic range echo a comment Alfred Brendel made in this article for BBC Music Magazine: ‘Understand and make the difference apparent between piano and pianissimo. Ensure that there is a positive distinction between mezzoforte, forte and fortissimo. The words crescendo and decrescendo mean increasing and decreasing the tone gradually. They do not mean sudden loudness or softness. Remember that in pianissimo playing you must also use all the intensity of feeling you have within you to express your emotions. It is more difficult to do so when playing pianissimo than when playing forte.’ More unfashionable thoughts on following the composer’s intentions: ‘Do not feel absolutely bound to abide by all the printed nuances you find in the work you are playing. An alteration here and there that really appeals to you is not a crime and will provide a change from other interpretations and show your own individuality. He even has a view on fashion: ‘Long hair and locks over the right or left eyebrow are nauseating to look at and utterly useless in furthering musical capability.’ He concludes with this rallying cry: YOURSELF ‘Does it not stand to reason that to bring to life a viola, violin, cello or double bass (all of which are inanimate lumps of wood with appen-dages), in order to reproduce the emotional sensibility of which you are capable, you must bring into force all the vitality your body and soul possess? ‘You must play and interpret with the utmost intensity of feeling, be it fortissimo or pianissimo, appassionata or cantabile, all the time and every time. In no other way can the inert instrument be brought fully to life and made to transmit the reality of your sentiments; but above all, understand the difference between sentiment and sentimentality – and avoid the latter like the plague. ‘Do not forget that your playing will reflect your innermost self. ‘Therefore, to make your power of expression worth listening to, it is necessary to mould your mind and action through life to all that is of the utmost sincerity. ‘The interpreter of music in its highest form must rise in his music-making above the levels of the everyday world, its commonness and its vanity, and hold himself apart, in an atmosphere of idealism. ‘I repeat my maxim quoted at the beginning of this section of the book: “The gratification of interpretative art lies in the fulfilment of its immense responsibilities.” Added to which I say with all the vehemence and certainty I can muster: the result will be the enhancement of your quality of tone production.’ High ideals, indeed. I wonder what Tertis would make of the musical world today. Surely some things would shock him – that many of his complaints about orchestral schedules and renumeration have not changed and that playing in some cases has become less sincere and individual. For certain, though, he would be delighted to hear Ridout’s album, including as it does so many of the works he himself inspired, transcribed and performed, with Ridout’s beautiful playing gratifying as it does so highly, the ‘interpretative art’.

FROM THE ARCHIVE Steve Reich’s quartet Different Trains has the power to reduce an audience to tears, but how does it feel to perform and record the work? It’s thirty years since I played Steve Reich’s shattering, seminal Different Trains as a student, and I’m excited to have the chance to repeat the experience later this month in Edinburgh. In search of useful information, I went back to an article I wrote for The Strad for his 70th birthday in 2006, in which I interviewed the composer himself as well as some of the chamber musicians who have played the work. On Reich’s 87th birthday, here is the article as it was originally published Counting; bars and bars of the same figure followed by a sudden tempo change; more counting: these are my primary memories of my first rehearsal of Steve Reich’s quartet Different Trains as a student. But by the third rehearsal, something mysterious had happened. The counting had stopped. The numbers of bars and the tempo shifts started to seem inevitable and we all instinctively knew where we were and where we were going, driving by the piece’s heart-racing rhythms and hypnotised by the antique voices and sound effects of the backing track. By the end of the concert, we were emotionally drained but totally exhilarated. The Minimalist composer celebrates his 70th birthday this month, but Different Trains has barely reached the age of 20, and it is already regarded as a seminal work. Its impact is as great now as it was the first time it was performed by the Kronos Quartet in London in 1988 (and recorded by the group the following year); and two recordings, by the Duke and Smith quartets, have been released in the last year. Despite its technical and physical challenges, it binds both audiences and performers – student and professional alike – in its spell. The work’s emotive power is manifold. Firstly, there is the range of sound qualities afforded by its layering of four quartets on top of each other – from reflective and delicate to a driving wall of sound. Add to this agitating, almost irritating, sound effects of trains and their various whistles. Combine these with recordings of elderly people recalling the past, shadowed by the musical notations of their inflections (an innovative technique at the time it was composed). And then there is the magnitude of its subject matter – the Holocaust – tackled with a lack of sentimentality that makes it all the more overwhelming. No wonder the piece still has the power to reduce an audience to tears. What was it like to be involved in the birth of such a work? Joan Jeanrenaud, former cellist of the Kronos Quartet, for which the work was written, remembers the recording sessions, with Reich present, soon after the quartet players saw the piece for the first time: ‘It was an intense time in the studio. We had to figure out a lot – how to articulate things to make them sound the right way, or how to imitate the voice on the pre-recorded material. Steve was interested in a clear, precise sound, which we talked about a lot.’ First violinist David Harrington recalls the impact of the first performance: ‘To hear it come to life was an amazing experience. By the time we premiered the piece in London, we’d played all of the four different parts, but we hadn’t been able to feel its impact the way we could in front of an audience, and that was an overpowering experience. I’ll never forget the sound of the train horn that first time I heard it in concert. I’d never heard anything like that in a concert hall before; or the sounds of the voices of the survivors. Emotionally it was a huge experience.’ The initial performances were not without technical hitch, however. Harrington remembers one disaster averted: ‘Once, in 1989, we were playing it in Nebraska, and there was something going on with the electricity that made the pitch of the tape go down very slowly over the course of the piece. Over the 28 minutes we also adjusted our pitch down, and it worked out, but that was the last concert we played to which we didn’t bring our own sound engineer.’ Since then, technological advances have made performing the work easier, as Harrington points out: ‘The issues around playing it live have changed. Initially, when we played it in the late 80s and early 90s, we used wedge monitors, and sometimes we had to have them so loud in order to hear that it affected the sound in the hall. Now we use in-ear monitors, so the audience is able to hear it in a cleaner, more pristine form.’ These technological developments also make the piece more accessible to performers. Reich explains this phenomenon: ‘The younger the groups are, the easier it is for them. That’s true for all music. When Bartók wrote his quartets, there were two or three string quartets who would dare to play them. Now, there are only a few string quartets that could dare not to play Bartók. Why? Because the solutions to the technical problems of one generation are learnt by the succeeding generation at a very young age – from their teachers, recordings and performances.’ Such advances mean that it is now the physical aspect of playing the work that is the hardest. Jeanrenaud describes the challenge: ‘It’s a very tiring piece, especially when you’re recording it. You have to do a lot of repetitive things with your hands. If you’re going to play a pattern 20 times, you have to learn how to pace yourself and know where you can release your hand. If you were to keep pressing the whole time, you would get really tired. So be aware that if your hand starts to revolt or hurt you must stop, because otherwise you will get tendonitis.’ Harrington seems to have come pretty close himself: ‘I recall clearly the pain in my left hand at the recording – the fourth finger particularly. Over a period of ten hours a day, playing one particular figure (C to F on the E string) became really painful. I had to try the second and third finger sometimes, to relieve it. For many years after that, when we played it live, I’d get an incredible pain in my hand – probably just a reminder of the recording session.’ Apart from not doing damage to yourself while playing the piece, there are other technical issues to tackle – intonation and rhythm, in particular. Nicholas Pendlebury, violist of the Smith Quartet, discovered this when the quartet recorded the work: ‘It’s very tricky to get intonation right. You get one quartet down and think it’s absolutely right, but then you add in another and because of the way the harmony works you find that little notes don’t quite fit, so you have to go back over all of it. It’s the same with rhythms – there’s a lot of hocketing between the quartets, and you can be absolutely together with a click track, but when you take the click track out it doesn’t sound quite right. John Metcalfe, violist of the Duke Quartet, had a similar experience: ‘We had to be meticulous about each of the separate quartet parts. They had to be as in tune and together as we could possibly make them. If you start layering tracks on top of something that is out of tune or where the ensemble isn’t great, you’re going to be in trouble. It magnifies exponentially.’ Despite the repetitive nature of the music and the fact that the performer is locked in to the backing track, it would be a mistake to approach the work in a non-musical way. Jeanrenaud explains: ‘I’ve always found it a challenge to play along with something that’s pre-recorded, but to make it sound like it’s breathing, like a Brahms piece. The viola and cello imitate the voices a lot and that’s where you can find a more expressive quality; and even in the motor rhythm there are things you can do to make it feel as if it is moving forward.’ Pendlebury agrees: ‘It’s not like playing a piece of Mozart, where you can change tempos and nuances – because you are governed by what’s already put down. But the most important thing is that you react to what the voices are doing, particularly in the solo lines, which mime the voices. There are many ways in which you can interpret these and use the bow for emphasis. It’s about listening and trying to copy the way they say things, to get across the emotion. That’s the challenge.’ For Metcalfe the process involves a different quality of attention from other types of music. He says, ‘It’s like meditating, in a way. When you’re playing the large chunks of semiquavers you have to get into the groove of doing it; you need to find another kind of way of concentrating, so that you feel that you are on the inside of the music and not having to think the way that you would in, for example, the Ravel Quartet.’ What is the emotional impact of this process? The Smith Quartet has performed it in various non-standard locations, including suspended above Cologne railway station, in the Düsseldorf sidings from which Jews were transported to the concentration camps, and at Auschwitz itself, which Pendlebury describes as ‘harrowing’. He says, ‘You get very emotionally involved, because of the subject matter; and because you’re living with these voices and every time you hit the play button they are retelling their accounts. Metcalfe describes the feeling: ‘If you’re aware of what it’s about while you’re playing, it can be overpowering. You know what the samples are – they’re printed in front of you – but if you’re actually imagining what the person saying those words experienced, it’s incredibly strong.’ Reich himself witnessed this power during a rehearsal in Seattle once: ‘I was with a group that was rehearsing with just a boom box and a cassette tape, and no microphones – they were just playing acoustically. They played it quite beautifully, even though it was quiet. When it was all over there was silence and everybody was in tears. It was one of those incredible moments.’ The audience reaction to Different Trains can be just as obvious. Pendlebury remembers playing it at the West Cork Chamber Music Festival and looking out to the audience to see people in tears. He adds, ‘We don’t usually get tumultuous applause afterwards, because you can’t.’ The work doesn’t always go down well, though. Jeanrenaud recalls one unsuccessful outing: ‘We were on as part of a chamber music series and we quickly realised that this was not a good way for us to be presented, because you get audience members who are expecting Beethoven and Mozart, and they get Different Trains. At the interval someone in the audience came to the presenter and said, “Don’t you ever do something like this to me again.” Its reception has a lot to do with the audience and what they are expecting to hear.’ Reich himself is in no doubt as to the significance of the work, though. He admits, ‘It’s undoubtedly one of the greatest pieces I’ve ever made. We don’t always get what we think we deserve, but I’ve been very fortunate, in general and with this piece in particular.’ Finally, if you are thinking about taking the plunge and playing the work, Metcalfe offers some advice: ‘Different Trains will take any amount of energy or emotion that you can put into it and will always yield results. It’s not something of which you can say, “We’ll knock that off in an afternoon.” In pure playing terms that might be the case, but the subject matter makes it a much more profound experience than that. Be prepared to be surprised and rewarded.’ Steve Reich on Different Trains Reich took as his starting point the train rides he made between his separated parents in New York and Los Angeles as a young boy. He then realised the parallel between his own journeys and those of Jewish boys in Nazi Europe at the same time, as he explains: ‘If I had been born in Brussels or Rotterdam or Budapest instead of New York, I wouldn’t be here today. The lightbulb went on and the piece suddenly gelled.’ He went about collecting sound clips; interviewing his governess, Virginia, who had accompanied him on his journeys, and a retired porter, Lawrence Davis, who worked on the New York-Los Angeles Pullman line; researching recordings of interviews with Holocaust survivors of his own age (Rachella, Paul and Rachel); and gathering train sounds of the time. ‘I went through all this material, and when I heard something that caught my ears I would record it into the sampling keyboard, trying to write down the exact pitches of the speakers’ vowels.’ Next began the process of composition: ‘I would take the melodic shape of the speaker’s voice and double it with a real instrument. Every time a man spoke the cello would double him, and every time a woman spoke the viola would double her; so the speaker determines the melody and I’m the faithful scribe.’ Surprisingly, Reich hadn’t been keen to write for string quartet: ‘I am not interested in string quartets at all. I’ve never written a string quartet and I will never write a string quartet. Where are the extra viola and cello? The minimum requirement is two violins, twoviolas and two cellos.’ Therefore, to create the sound he wanted for Different Trains, he wrote four full quartet parts, three of which are pre-recorded, above which the amplified live quartet performs. This article was first published in The Strad in October 2006

I’m back from a visit to Stockholm for a BBC Music Magazine Musical Destination piece focused on the opening of the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra and the arrival of its new Chief Conductor, Ryan Bancroft. While there, I went full culture tourist and here are some of the highlights… Opening night in Stockholm For the first concert of his tenure, Bancroft conducted Sven-David Sandström’s 1994 The High Mass, a visceral, intense work, modelled on the structure of Bach’s B minor Mass, but with a sound world evocative of tectonic plates moving ineluctably onwards while siren sopranos howl the existential narrative, supported by a huge choir. It’s a powerful piece and I’m not sure why it hasn’t had many performances. It’s supposedly regarded as too conservative by Sandström’s fans, but it’s hardly easy listening, and the performance touched on the transcendental, the audience maintaining a stunned silence at the end. I whizzed round the Nationalmuseum, which has some nice pieces and an interesting exhibition on gardens in art. There were a gratifying number of paintings by female artists – hard for me to know whether the Swedish have always been more enlightened in this way, or whether it’s part of the general reframing of the history of art. Either way, ever on the look out for violins, I was happy to discover this beautiful painting of violinist Sigrid Lindberg by Hildegard Thorell. Sigrid Lindberg by Hildegard Thorell From top left: Judith Leyster, Boy Playing a Flute, early 1630s; Cornelis Bega, The Duet, 1663; Anne Vallayer-Coster, Portrait of a Violinist, 1773; Thomas Bosschaert, Paul de Vos, Amor Triumphant Amidst Emblems of Art, Science, War, 1645–1650; Lucas van Valckenborch, Double Portrait of an Elderly Couple; Jeanna Bauck, The Danish Artist Bertha Wegmann Painting a Portrait, 1889 I also visited the Vasa Museum, home of the ship that sank on its maiden voyage in 1628, less than 1,500m from dock. It’s a story as full of hubris and vainglory as that of the Titanic – built by King of Sweden Gustav Adolph to invade Poland, it is packed with iconography glorifying him, even including statues of cowering Polish fighters. The craftsmanship is staggering, as is the sheer scale – and the thought of spending years at sea in such a confined space. There was some fascinating scientific analysis of the surfaces to extrapolate how the boat would have been painted, as well as an explanation of the effects of environmental factors on the materials – it seems that sewage dumped into the Stockholm docks actually helped preserve the wood for the 333 years it remained underwater, until it was lifted out in 1961 (maybe some hope for future archaeologists around the coast of England). Remains from Vasa A special highlight of the trip (of any trip!) was my tour backstage at Drottningholm Palace Theatre. You may know it from Ingmar Bergman’s charming film of The Magic Flute, although I only discovered on the day of my visit from Wikipedia that this was actually shot on a replica set – for obvious reasons, I suppose. Built in 1766 for Queen Lovisa Ulrika in the grounds of the royal summer palace, and championed by the dramatics-loving King Gustav III, the theatre still has cutting-edge theatre technology of the time that allowed for complete scene changes within six seconds (and we think we’re so clever these days). The building was abandoned to storage after Gustav’s death in 1792 and, like the Vasa, was only brought back to life centuries later, in the 1920s. It’s very moving to imagine the troupes of actors who would have spent their summers living there, all piled into a few rooms, making theatre, and to think that Mozart himself would have been familiar with such a space – even if many of the sets and mechanisms are replicas to preserve the originals. We now take so much effort to play music on instruments that are correct for the time, so I wonder what we would learn about his operas by staging them with the original theatre technologies – an interesting experiment, perhaps. Backstage at Drottningholm Palace Theatre The palace itself was closed for celebrations of the 50th anniversary of King Carl XVI Gustaf’s coronation, but I stayed for an afternoon concert of songs recently rediscovered by Anna Paradiso and Dan Laurin in an old copy of Musikaliskt Tidsfördrif, a music book published by Olof Åhlström several times a year between 1789 and 1834. Much of the music was written by female composers and it was aimed at the middle-class market, to be performed at home salons, often by female amateurs. There was some very pretty music by Elisabeth Olin, Mathilda Gyllenhaal D’Orozco and Caroline Ridderstolpe, as well as Åhlström, Christoph Gluck and Carl Stenborg, and it opened a window on a fascinating aspect of social history. Musical Pasttime in the Breakfast Room Last but not least, I visited the opera house for Massenet’s ballet Manon – a fairly disturbing plot about terrible people (it was hard to root for the heroine, even surrounded as she was by ghastly men) but the music was beautiful (which made the scenes of coercion all the more upsetting). I’m an infrequent visitor to the ballet and not a fan of old-school rigid ballet style, but Kenneth MacMillan’s choreography was elegant and human, and reminded me very much of Gene Kelly, one of my idols. Manon at the opera house

Have you ever wondered about the origins of your stringed instrument? I visited the Bavarian town of Mittenwald to explore the roots of my own Sebastian Kloz and revel in some niche violin tourism I recently returned from a trip to Mittenwald, in the Bavarian Alps, on the trail of music and violins for the November issue of BBC Music magazine. It’s a beautiful little town, nestled between titanic mountains that loom at the end of most streets, with the pure turquoise Isar river running through, a stunningly-ceilinged Catholic church in the centre and pretty houses painted with the distinctive regional ‘Lüftmalerei’ (literally ‘air painting’). Men and women go about their business wearing their lederhosen and dirndls in a non-ironic way, tourists wander through the streets eating ice cream, and groups of hikers and cyclists recharge in cafés and bars. For me, though, the trip was more personal than touristic. My violin was made there in 1758, given life by Sebastian Kloz (1696–1775). (Since around 1795 the name has been written as Klotz but I’ll use the original, as per the label.) Sebastian was the most successful son of Mathias Kloz (1653–1743), who brought violin making to the town in the first place. Ever since I bought my violin 30 years ago from Norman Rosenberg (who aptly described it as ‘a nice little fiddle’) I’ve always wanted to visit. Like a descendent on the trail of their own ancestors and origin stories, I was excited to see the town and investigate my violin’s origins – a musical version of the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are?. My first stroll took me to the centre of town and to the statue of Mathias, next to the Church of Saint Peter and Paul. It was built in 1746 and it delights me to think of Sebastian watching it being built. I stroll the streets, spotting violins in the murals and the giant violin sponsored by local associations. I have a Wiener schnitzel outside at the Gasthof Gries, listening to a German guitar duo singing Neil Diamond songs. The next day, I discover that I had been eating my schnitzel practically outside the home of Sebastian himself. I have an appointment with Anton Sprenger, a luthier and descendant by ten generations of Mathias Kloz, and when I knock on the door of his workshop, he shows me the house a few doors down where Sebastian most likely made my violin. Inside his workshop, Sprenger offers me a whistlestop version of the Kloz story. Mathias probably went to Venice aged 14 to apprentice in lute making and then worked in Padua for six years with lute maker Pietro Railich (there is an employment reference dating to 1678). He came back to Mittenwald in the 1680s, bringing back the Cremonese inside-mould technique, and set up a workshop. At the time hundreds of new churches were being built, leading to a boom for new instruments. Kloz and his sons would hawk their instruments around churches, royal courts, monasteries and convents, coming back with lists of new customers. Mittenwald was also well-placed as a stopover on the trading route between Nuremburg and Venice. While Stradivari (1644–1737) in Cremona was evolving his instruments to be more powerful, Kloz instruments suited more intimate spaces but remained popular – it is even thought that Mozart might have played an Aegidius Klotz as a 13 year old, which now belongs to the Mozarteum in Salzburg. Another natural advantage for violin makers in Mittenwald is its proximity to the local Karwendel forests, which provide dramatic scenery along the train route as well as a ready source of quality tonewood. My next stop was Mannes Tonewood, a relatively new company, which sells local spruce. In tracing the origins of my Sebastian Kloz, you can’t get much closer to the original source than a tree cut down from the same forests – literal roots. With a little latitude you can even imagine that some of the earliest rings of the wood coincided with Sebastian Kloz walking the mountains. The Church of Saint Peter and Paul is a Baroque extravaganza of gold and cherubs, with a ceiling by Matthäus Günther. Churches don’t usually offer violin geek spottings, but this is Mittenwald, and perched in one corner is a rather uncomfortable-looking angel playing a Baroque violin. Although Mathias Kloz’s statue is right next to this church, he himself worshipped at the more simple St Nikolaus, dating to 1447, down the road, where there is a plaque in tribute, and his remains apparently lie behind the altar. The burial ground surrounding the church also offers a dictionary of German luthiers’ surnames, peppered with generations of Hornsteiners, Neuners and Jaises. Indeed, it is Georg Neuner, Assistant Headmaster, who gives me a fascinating tour of the Musical Instrument Making School, founded in 1858 by King Maximilian II, which in recent years has broadened to include wind and brass. Having recently interviewed staff and graduates of the Newark School of Violin Making, it was interesting to compare. The course content and teaching style in Mittenwald are traditional in their rules and technical disciplines, where Newark teaching is much freer, and yet the school in Mittenwald is modern in the equipment and technology it offers, not to mention the teaching spaces themselves. Students at Newark, which is facing huge challenges at the moment, might weep at the resources, and maybe more so at the fact that the region underwrites the school in the acknowledgement of its cultural and economic value. My trip coincides with Saitenstrassen (literally Strings Streets), a music festival offering a rare combination of folk and classical music, which pops up in the buildings and streets of the three towns in the valley. I visit the big tent for the opening night gala, a quintessence of Bavarian culture – beer served in gigantic steins (even to kids), an all-meat menu, potatoes, lederhosen, dirndls and a range of Bavarian folk music, complete with alpenhorns. In the next couple of days I get to sample the range of music, from solo Bach in a tiny church played by Esther Hoppe, to a variety of bands strategically placed all over the town. On my last day, I’m excited to meet Matthias Klotz, a direct descendent of Mathias and Sebastian, who gives me a tour of the violin making museum. Across two floors, the cases tell the story of violin making in the town, from Mathias and his sons, through the rise and fall of the merchant-manufacturing system that had makers in their front rooms across the town making parts for two big export companies, to Maximilian’s foundation of the violin making school in an attempt to restore the town’s violin making skills and reputation, and bringing the story up to date with today’s makers. There are cases of violins from across this entire history, including a violin and viola by Sebastian, and a few photographs of documents pertaining to the story, including his name written in a 1733 tax document, which I find strangely moving. In the absence of any more personal relics from 300 years ago, it will have to do. Pinchas Zukerman once told me in an interview about his special ritual when he goes to Cremona: ‘I open the window and the violin case in the hotel and say, “Welcome home”. I pick it up and it goes, “Hey, thanks for bringing me home. I really sound better now!”’ I didn’t bring my Sebastian Kloz to Mittenwald – the vagaries of air travel with an instrument put me off – but I did take some photos to show to anyone who was interested, including two of his descendants. I breathed the air and saw the building and mountains Sebastian would have looked at every day. I feel I know who my violin is just a little better.

Two Australian orchestral violinists have found millions of fans for classical music with their hilarious and geeky videos. I went to the London leg of their world tour to find out their secret Two queues wrap around the entire block of a magnificent art deco building in East London. Stretching as far as the eye can see, the neat crocodile is perfectly behaved and wildly diverse: small kids with their parents, huddles of trendy teenagers, middle-aged couples – every size, shape and colour. The bouncers seem a little bemused, more used to rock-gig and club-night audiences. A curious local steps up to ask one what’s on. ‘Dunno mate. Two violinists,’ he answers, shrugging. This was not some fever dream brought on by the relentlessly gloomy classical music news I absorb on Twitter. It was TwoSet Violin’s show at the Troxy in Limehouse last night. If you don’t know who TwoSet are, presumably you haven’t been anywhere near the internet for the last few years. They are Brett Yang and Eddy Chen, barely-30-something friends from maths club and youth orchestra, who as violinists in Sydney and Queensland Symphony Orchestras, respectively, started making comedy classical music videos in 2013. They found that the geekier their content, the more fans they won over, so the further they went – ranging from silliness and jokes about violin practice, tiger mums, technique and the fictional prodigy Ling Ling to in-depth analysis of performance styles and serious topics such as teacher instrument commissions. Within ten years they have built a following of 7.5 million followers across social media and 4 million on YouTube (their tagline: ‘We play violin. We love classical music. We love to Practice’). They crowdfunded their first international tour in 2017 and returned to London for one night only yesterday on their 30-stop, mainly sold-out world tour, the ambition of which would put most pop stars to shame. And so they make their entrance in rock style – a warm-up band (pianist Sophie Druml playing Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz), flashing arena lights and the obligatory few minutes late. Their first question to the delighted crowd is suitably nerdy: ‘Who here has practised today?’ Most hands stay down (mine included) to much hilarity. From there they move through some of their favourite YouTube themes – Violin Charades, Perfect Pitch, Spot the Piece, the audience screeching along interactively (the first time I’ve ever heard ‘Hilary Hahn’ used as a heckle). Just as they’re about to play the Handel–Halvorsen Passacaglia, a masked man from the ‘classical music Academy’ appears on screen and orders them to ‘cease and desist’, putting them through some gruelling musical tests to prove their talent. It’s a cute device that leads to more music (all beautifully performed, even while hula hooping, blindfolded or running around the stage) and smuggles in some key subtexts about music, such as the importance of communication and playing together. They even manage a dig at YouTube for their false copyright infringement bans. Throughout, they hold the audience in the palm of their hands – pin-drop quiet during the music, delirious during the comedy (although inevitably there were too many video screens in the way for my liking). They do it without any arrogance or conceit, though, constantly mocking themselves and each other, as well as the vagaries of violin playing, the establishment ‘Academy’ itself, and viola players (obviously). But classical music is supposed to be so boring and elitist and exclusive etc etc, isn’t it? So how do they manage to engage such a large and diverse audience? They may not be presenting three hours of Bruckner or contemporary music, and the audience is self-selecting as violin geeks, but even so, they have created a universe where classical music really matters. This is down to Brett and Eddy themselves – funny, smart, knowing, creative, irreverent, passionate and authentic. They manage to tap into aspects of classical music that sometimes get lost in more earnest conversations – the sheer fun of learning the violin, with all its challenges, and the feelings of striving, focusing on minutiae, being part of a community and caring about something deeply. Their gamification of classical music might upset purists, but it perfectly suits digital natives and belies a profound knowledge of classical music – as well as being a whole lot of fun. When I was Editor of The Strad, getting into nitty-gritty detail for the geeky audience was always a joy, but I found more light-hearted aspects harder to pull off well. Somehow, in their videos and stage performances, Twoset have found the sweet spot. What can the classical music world learn from TwoSet? Certainly, on a technical level, their digital activity around videos, social media, fan clubs and merchandise is a case study in how to monetise classical music without compromising on quality or values (see also Ray Chen, with whom they worked from early on). At a more philosophical level, though, classical music people might learn to have more faith in their own product. TwoSet prove that classical music doesn’t have to be dumbed down. Quite the opposite: harness the detail, the depth, the passion, the challenge, the aspiration. And for politicians? I’ve never been in such a well-behaved, joyful audience, so if you want a happy, well-adjusted population, give them music education – and hire Twoset as your consultants. As they take their final crowd selfie from the stage, rather than the usual ‘cheese’, we are exhorted to shout, ‘Go practise!’ Buoyed by reconnecting with my inner string geek, I might just follow their instruction – after all, I’ve got my 40 hours of practice to fit in today.

The legendary German violinist discusses her approach to performance and shares her hopes and fears for the future of classical music I recently interviewed Anne-Sophie Mutter for BBC Music Magazine, marking her 60th birthday in June. She was full of humour and honesty, including the bombshell opinion that violin playing and teaching is in crisis today. You’ll have to buy the issue to read about that and the rest of the interview, including her memories of Henryk Szeryng and Mstislav Rostropovich, but there was so much great material I didn’t have space for, so I’m publishing the quotes I couldn’t fit here. On being in the moment ‘Making music is like meditation. If you’re lucky enough, you find the flow like a great athlete, which is nothing but losing yourself in the moment – time, the room and the audience becoming one. Then you are truly present in the now. Every musician has that in a lucky moment on stage. It’s nice to cultivate it in everyday life if you can. When you have children, particularly when they are small, you do all these things together and playing like a child is being in the moment. That’s refreshes your memory about how great it can be as a grown up to play like a child and be in the moment. ‘What is your ultimate goal? Is it fame and fortune? Is it always playing the right notes? Is it to please everyone? Forget all of the above’ ‘It has to do with your philosophy of life in general. What do you want to live by as an artist? What is your ultimate goal? Is it fame and fortune? Is it always playing the right notes? Is it to please everyone? Forget all of the above. Art is not about looking for comfort. It has to do with self-doubt, renewing yourself, being open to every possibility of perceiving music, pursuing music, having great joy on stage, sharing music. That should be above anything the goal: communicating, being there in the moment, giving it your all.’ On her first teacher, Erna Honigberger ‘I was so fortunate that in the Black Forest, where I grew up in the 60s, we had this fabulous ex-solo violinist who came from Berlin to this remote area of Germany because her son-in-law had a job there, and she followed him and her daughter. So there was this fantastic pupil of Carl Flesch teaching in the Black Forest, in the woods, literally. What a coincidence! I bonded with her right away. She was not very young any more when I met her, but she became a kind of supermum for me. It was all extremely playful – really playing the violin and not studying. She was fabulous at finding the right repertoire – Kreisler and Sarasate – and she had trillions of animals: I kid you not – turtles in the living room. ‘We would have lunch together. I already loved to eat back then, so she pushed all my right buttons. I was nine when she died, sadly, but by that age I was fully immersed and wanting to be – and thinking I already was – a violinist.’ ‘I’m not spelling out a word or a sentence. Each sentence has a purpose, an ending and a musical climax which has to do with harmonic progression’ On phrasing ‘I feel like a sculptor when I’m playing because every note comes from somewhere and goes somewhere. I’m not spelling out a word or a sentence. Each sentence has a purpose, an ending and a musical climax which has to do with harmonic progression. While I play it, I’m in the moment, but I’m sculpting what is coming in the future. ‘The funniest thing that ever happened to me was once when I played The Four Seasons and someone came backstage and was furious and said, ‘It was totally different from your recording.’ I was thinking, ‘Gee, that’s a great compliment,’ but he was not kidding. He literally wanted his money back. I suddenly realised there might be listeners out there who will be dissatisfied because I’m definitively not going to replicate what I thought about an interpretation some years ago or even a week ago.’ On developing as a musician ‘The crucial points in my early years, once I was fortunate enough to be part of Aida’s class, were repertoire development, finding the right instrument and pushing myself out of my comfort zone. I did that with chamber music at a relatively early stage with Mstislav Rostropovich and Bruno Giuranna, which was difficult for me. I had no idea you know how to go about that kind of chamber music. Then I pushed myself out of my comfort zone with contemporary music. ‘Having children was very important for my development as a human being. Then, of course, there was the horrible period when I became a widow, which was a crucial chapter in my life. Shortly after that, I decided to start my foundation to help young string players. I probably wouldn’t have done that if I hadn’t become a widow so early. In the 1990s I started to push my pro bono work. That came out of a feeling that I needed to invest myself into society more, to look more closely where music was needed, where my tiny little efforts were needed. Much of that was fostered by Aida and grew out of my passion for music.’ ‘I find it astounding how much reality and our perception of it as a performer sometimes differ. That is one of the most important subjects to address with a young musician’ On hearing ourselves ‘We all think we play a certain way or go about an interpretation in a certain way, but what actually arrives at the listener’s ear is something totally different. I find it astounding how much reality and our perception of it as a performer sometimes differ. That is one of the most important subjects to address with a young musician. What you perceive as your output is not necessarily is what arrives at the listener’s ear. That’s why a kind of out-of-body control is necessary while you play. In my opinion, it’s important to record yourself – not excessively, but you have to get to know yourself on tape and learn to close the gap between wish and reality. ‘It has always been like that. I’m turning 60 and still, although not as often as when I was young, I’m sometimes surprised to hear a recording of myself and think, ‘Oh, gee, that sounds very different from when I was on stage,’ particularly the perception of tempo. I have learnt through experience to close that gap, but I know from experience that it takes a while. It’s important to understand that it’s totally normal that your personal, subjective perception is different from the objective outcome, or what arrives at the ears. On dealing with pressure ‘I saw a fantastic documentary on Netflix about sports coaches and there was one who said something that helped me a lot: ‘Pressure is privilege.’ What a wonderful way to turn it around. He explained that if there’s pressure, it’s a privilege, because people expect you to do something wonderful, and that is a privilege. In order to bring the best you have psychologically, emotionally and physically to the stage, you need to get your things together. You might need people to help you with that – definitely with physical exercises and if needed, also with a coach who helps you to tackle whatever stands in your way of blooming on stage. Maybe you will be able to unleash more of your potential.’ ‘Stay authentic to who you are. Otherwise it gets very stressful keeping something up that doesn’t illuminate who you are in your most inner self’ On social media ‘I have been told various times in my life that there are certain times in the day and in the week one should post because there are more people on then and I’m like, ‘Okay, fabulous to know, but forget it!’ I post when I want to share something with my friends. I’m definitely not professional about it. I do what I want. I cannot give any advice. I grew up in the wilderness and I’m a little bit wild and not really a great advisor when it comes to what one should do. I’m so fixed on what I want to do as an artist and as a human being in society that posting is the end of my rope. The only advice I could give if I ever dared to give advice to anyone is to stay authentic to who you are. Otherwise it gets very stressful keeping something up that doesn’t illuminate who you are in your most inner self. Don’t push yourself to something because your assistant tells you you have to post in the evening at six o’clock in order to be successful.’ On the pandemic ‘It affected freelance artists, and not just musicians, very badly. It was very depressing to see that over and over again. We were dismissed. It felt like in the 1800s, when the King of France or Austria would just dismiss the composer. I was surprised this happened. I was in very close contact with the cultural minister, fighting as much as I could, particularly for musicians, and also, pointing out that on a given day, a concert gives jobs to so many different fields of professions. It’s not only one violinist standing on stage or an orchestra; it’s many people whose lives depend on that particular concert happening. ‘With us not being able to perform, it also sadly affected many other professions and made them miserable. Together with other musicians I went to court, because in our Bavarian rights there is a chapter which states that our right to have access to art is unchangeable. It’s one of the basic rights. Sadly, we were not successful, but we fought in every avenue we could. At least we were able to go to old people’s homes and orphanages and we played in churches during church services, just to be there for people, and to communicate musically with our friends. ‘We need more musicians in politics. We have a generation of politicians now who have no emotional connection to music and I’m very fearful of that’ ‘What did we learn from it? Don’t trust politics. Maybe we need more musicians in politics. We have a generation of politicians now who have no emotional connection to music and I’m very fearful of that – not because I think the world needs more professional musicians, but because I think that music touches something in all of us, in the listener as much as the child who plays, no matter how perfect or imperfect it is. It touches something in us which needs to be touched, which needs to be taken seriously. If I could wish for anything it is that every child has access to an instrument and to music, making music together as much as having sports lessons.’ On music in Germany ‘It’s true that we have 80 opera houses and that these and also the radio orchestras are still heavily subsidised by the state, but I’m old enough to know how it used to be 40 or 50 years ago and how it has diminished, particularly school education, but suddenly presenters wonder about the future of classical music. It will always exist, but with musicians having such a small niche, where only people who have had musical training will be interested in going to a concert. It’s sad.’ ‘In order to attract an audience, you also need musicians who have to say something and can say it with great confidence’ On excitement in music ‘It goes both ways, though. Let’s face it, in the past as well as in the present, there have been very boring classical concerts. There is no doubt about that. We have to get rid of that and bring excitement back on stage. I’m confident we can do that because there are musicians out there who play their hearts out and play with such passion and joy and are totally crazy, and that’s wonderful. In order to attract an audience, you also need musicians who have to say something and can say it with great confidence. There is a young generation out there who has to say something very loudly and very clearly.’ ‘Very often, my non-musician friends would come back after the performance and say, “You know, I was asleep during the Haydn and Beethoven, but the Widmann, wow, that was exciting.”’ On new music ‘I’m always astounded but also relieved and inspired to hear comments about contemporary music from audience members, very often non-musicians. Recently we did a few quartet evenings with Haydn, Beethoven and Jörg Widmann – his Sixth Quartet, based on Beethoven, which I commissioned. It’s terribly difficult, incredibly complex, and exhilaratingly fantastic at the end, but Jesus, it takes everything out of you. Very often, my non-musician friends would come back after the performance and say, ‘You know, I was asleep during the Haydn and Beethoven, but the Widmann, wow, that was exciting.’ That gives me great hope in contemporary writing. You find a certain part of the audience being touched by it, invigorated by it. ‘Thomas Adès is a phenomenal musician, pianist and conductor, and an incredible composer. I was present at the premiere of his Exterminating Angel, a few years ago, and the Violin Concerto is sublime. I’m blown away by his Air. There’s a mixture of excitement, gratitude and a lot of fear. It’s definitely not easy for me, but I have found great joy in knowing that there’s a lot out there I don’t know and that I’m not good at. I want to learn and I think it’s perfectly fine to accept the fact that life is about learning. It’s okay not to be good in everything but to try. I just love overcoming obstacles.’

Newark School of Violin Making has an alumni list that reads like a Who’s Who of the violin world. As it celebrates its 50th anniversary, could this national treasure be at risk? If you were to ask most string players about the great violin making traditions, they’d probably go straight to Italy – probably Cremona – and then maybe France or Germany. Britain might not even feature in a list. And yet a violin-making school in Nottinghamshire, UK, has been turning out some of the world’s leading luthiers, restorers and experts for 50 years now. The Newark School of Violin Making celebrated this milestone with a party this weekend, and I was commissioned to interview alumni and staff for the anniversary booklet (which will be on sale soon). If the school were in Italy or Germany, there would be a museum in the town to tell its story and the tourist board would bring journalists to write about its success. There would be violins in shop windows and violin-shaped candy in newsagents. As it is, it has faced numerous challenges in recent years and student numbers have dwindled. Victim of the current national pastimes of shooting ourselves in the foot and under-valuing our cultural heritage, this relatively young but highly influential Newark tradition is at risk. The school’s ethos seems to be quintessentially British in positive ways, too, though – a little eccentric and amateur (in the best possible senses of both words), self-deprecating, anarchic, perhaps a little chaotic. Teaching styles over the years seem to have been quite loose, fostering passion, enterprise and individuality, setting it apart from more regimented and conformist lutherie traditions elsewhere in Europe. Its internationalism is also remarkable – since the 1970s, its reputation has drawn students from around the world, who have gone back out again to create a significant impact in various areas of the business. According to Helen Michetschläger’s research for the booklet, 77 per cent of students have gone on to work in 37 different countries. Talk about soft power. The founding of the school seems to have been an example of when two people in different places have the same idea. In 1971, the then Principal of Newark Technical College, Eric Ashton, wanted to expand its offering, including a new instrument making course. Meanwhile, Maurice Bouette, who’d studied violin making at evening classes with William Luff, which he eventually took over, and who also traded in tonewood, saw the need for a violin making school in England. He answered an advert for the position in The Strad and the school opened its doors – those of a disused school – in 1972, to 12 students. Bouette taught alongside another Luff student, Glen Collins, and the largely self-taught Wilfred Saunders. In 1978 the school moved to larger premises of a former Westminster Bank building. From the outset, Bouette’s goals were pragmatic (another great British tradition). He told Mary Anne Alburger in her 1978 book The Violin Makers – Portrait of a Living Craft: ‘I do expect everyone who leaves to be able to get a job and earn a living, and this has proved to be the case. I do not think that many are going to make their livings solely by making instruments, as they have to be exceptionally good to do that, but there are a few who will. I think also that with an increasing number of good instruments available, the world will become more selective about what it accepts and finally only the best instruments will be welcomed. These must sound good, look classical and be well finished, so that they look beautiful, with flowing lines; this will always give them the edge over something mediocre.’ Looking at the rise of modern making in recent years and the influence of Newark students, these words certainly seem prescient. Rather than there being a consistent party line in teaching, ideas about construction and style have always varied across the faculty, with students hearing opposing points of view from different teachers. This might feel confusing, but it encourages independent thinking and individuality – it seems that the ‘Newark style’ is for there not to be a ‘Newark style’. Julie Reed Yeboah (1976–1979) told me, ‘Places like Mittenwald were very strict but in Newark we were given more freedom – probably more than we should have had, but it was a great learning experience. We learned from each other. Everyone had something to bring to the table. The teachers all had their own styles so we just kind of had to figure everything out ourselves, looking at photos and seeing as many instruments as we could to get ideas. Three years is not long to put all that information into your head, but we all went out into the world and could start from there and move our way up.’ The atmosphere in classes seems to be supportive and communal (some competitiveness inevitably notwithstanding), with students sharing their own research, often across the year groups, which worked on different floors of the building. In pre-internet days well-worn instrument drawings and Strad posters were passed around like lads’ mags. Student-led activities such as the Annual Fiddle Race for teams to make an instrument in 24 hours, various musical groups and visits to auction houses have encouraged team work and knowledge sharing. This emphasis on sharing knowledge has been pivotal in the business worldwide, according to John Dilworth (1976–1979), who said, ‘In the post-war period violin makers in the UK were pretty isolated and didn’t communicate with each other to any great extent. They were so insecure that the idea of telling their secrets to somebody else was out of the question. It was all hard-earned personal experience. Now there’s so much good-quality expertise and information available, which has had a fantastic effect. Newark has certainly been a vital part of that. In the old days, you might go and work for a little firm somewhere and probably never meet another violin maker your whole career. You’d just sit in a basement shooting fingerboards until your fingers dropped off. Newark followed a different concept, bringing apprentices or trainees together in one place in the spirit of sharing everything.’ Another key point has been the diversity of age and nationality in the student cohorts (inevitably with a gender imbalance, although over time it has evened out and in recent years has been around 40 per cent female). Students straight out of school bumped up against older people with skills and knowledge in different fields, quite unlike lutherie schools in Europe, which only take school leavers. Andrew Finnigan (1989–1992) remembered, ‘One man in the year above me had been a well-known architect in Munich. It was always interesting to listen to these people who had experience in other areas of the arts and crafts. It affects the conversations you have, compared with being with a bunch of 18-year-olds.’ The social craic seems to have been an important part of the experience, too, including at the infamous 28 Parliament Street, which housed some of the future illustrious makers of our day, many of whose names were traditionally scratched into the dining table there – a cultural artefact which is now housed in the school. Reed-Yeboah remembered: ‘The house was pretty rough and ready. It’s never easy to live with other people because everyone has different levels of cleanliness. Varnish would explode on the stove and nobody would clean it up. We were all thrown together – all from different countries, with different ways of being, and it was great. I still have long-lasting friendships with most of the people I met there. We were good friends and we took care of each other.’ One of the main factors in the school’s success has been the involvement of the great violin expert Charles Beare. He served on the advisory board from the outset (alongside Yehudi Menuhin, Bernard Shore, Desmond Hill and Lionel Tertis) and his involvement was always both practical and inspirational, whether through his visits to mark exam instruments, raising funds, providing instruments to copy or inviting students to his shop, and especially in offering them jobs that would set them up for life. Perhaps this was a generous and wise vision of the future of violin making and an understanding that luthiers are a vital part of the musical ecosystem. It may have been a pragmatic way of ensuring there were reliable craftsmen to service instruments he was buying and selling. Most likely it was both. Certainly, engagement with the trade, through Beare as well as Bouette’s own contacts, has been incredibly important, and the occasional celebrity visits from the likes of Yehudi Menuhin and the then Prince Charles have always added a bit of glamour. Sadly, though, in the last few years, potential nails in the coffin have come thick and fast. There have been technocratic blows – for example, in 2016 an Ofsted report on Lincoln College, the parent organisation, downgraded its status, without even examining the violin making school, so that international student visas were cancelled, although this was eventually overturned. In 2017, what had been a vocational course that was open to anyone with passion and some skill became an accredited BA degree course, changing its fundamental nature, attracting the concomitant fees and making it harder for older students to apply. Then, of course, the double whammy of Covid and Brexit, the former creating disruption to the course and the latter making it more expensive for students to come from abroad and to get work to fund their course. I’ve not visited Newark yet, but I came away from my research and interviews feeling envious of the students there and the education they received – I’ve always loved the idea of making violins (even though a week-long course in Cambridge proved that I had no natural talent whatsoever). I just hope the school survives, reputation in tact, in order for it to continue to be a choice for future luthiers, keeping alive this very British, anti-traditional tradition.

On the next stop of my Interrail trip, I head to Baden-Baden to hear Kirill Petrenko and the Berlin Philharmonic play Strauss From Bach in Leipzig to Strauss in Baden-Baden was quite a journey – four and a half hours by train (coincidentally, the length of Die Frau ohne Schatten, which I was going to see), passing through historic music hotspots on the way, including Erfurt, Eisenach and Mannheim, and imagining composers doing the same by carriage. Musically, the voyage seemed much further, though. Baden-Baden is one of those magical place names that has always kindled my imagination – whether through characters in novels visiting the spas or casinos, musicians summering (Clara Schumann, Brahms, Berlioz and Pierre Boulez all lived there), my late widowed German refugee grandmother returning to take the waters, and even the line in the ‘Triplets’ song from Bandwagon (‘Every summer we go away to Baden Baden Baden). It feels like little can have changed since Clara Schumann and Brahms might have strolled down the Lichtenaler Allee, along the little Oos river, on their way into town. Today, people still promenade, eating ice cream, although most wearing elegant puffer jackets and smart trainers rather than gowns and suits. The town retains its character and charm, with plenty of the original grand buildings and casinos, and old houses set on the hill, even if it’s a little run-down around the edges. There seems to be quite a mix of nationalities, but especially Russians – in the 19th century it was quite a centre for the Russian aristocracy, as well as writers including Turgenev, Tolstoy and Dostoevsky. For visitors who had arrived in the town via rail in the early 20th century, perhaps the greatest shock today would be that the railway station into which they rolled now serves as the Festspielhaus itself, its majestic neo-Renaissance building redesigned in 1998 to encase one of the largest opera stages in Europe. The beautifully adorned original ticket office opens into light and elegant public spaces which lead to an unfussy and comfortable hall that seems to work acoustically for both opera and symphonic works. This was my first time with Die Frau ohne Schatten. It turns out that reading the Wikipedia entry does not prepare one for a plot that is highly convoluted, or a plot device (the eponymous shadow) that is complex and contested (it seems from subsequent Facebook conversations that friends who have seen the opera many more times than I are not much the wiser). A potted summary of the four and a half hours, from what I managed to process, is that the Empress, who lives in a netherworld between humans and gods, must go to earth to find a shadow, or else her husband, the Emperor, will turn to stone. She and her Nurse go to the other side to buy one from a human couple, but after various twists and turns that teach her about love and compassion, she ultimately chooses not to take their shadow away from them. The Emperor has already been turned to stone, but miraculously he becomes flesh again, she finds her shadow and they all live happily ever after. On one level the whole opera is about making babies and women’s purpose lying therein (although the men are as much defined by their having children). Lydia Steier’s production superimposes a hot modern topic by setting the human couple’s home as a designer baby shop, with couples stopping by to choose dolls from the windows and taking them away in plastic bags. There are other somewhat jumbled viewpoints on the theme: the Empress is dressed as Ginger Rogers, presumably some idealised stylisation of womanhood; there is a boarding school full of lonely girls and an old-fashioned maternity hospital for unmarried young mothers; and the set is very, very pink. Throughout, a young actress mirrors the emotions of the action on stage – I’m not sure whether she’s the Empress’s alter ego, or the baby the Empress hasn’t had yet, but at various points she’s called to feed from the (plastic) breast of the Virgin Mary and fling mud around the stage (I hope she gets a good holiday now and possibly therapy). Does the shadow have to represent having a baby, though? There seem to be other interesting possibilities. In some psychoanalytic sense we all have a shadow, whether that is our unconscious or our secrets, and it’s better to come to terms with it – better out than in, as it were. Philip Pullman’s stories have another version of this with his ‘daemons’, animals that attach to humans as a reflection of their own inner being. Structurally, though, the opera reminds me of stories such as The Wizard of Oz, It’s a Wonderful Life, or even High Society, where the protagonist must go on a journey to a different life to discover that they always had what they needed in the first place – the old ‘there’s no place like home’ trope. Once the Empress has found her empathy and love for humanity, which she couldn’t have as a half-spirit, she finds her shadow and everything comes right. There are many people better informed than I to explore the subject, so leaving the narrative aside, the music is of course fabulous. It never really gets anywhere but it sweeps you up in its unending waves. This was also my first time hearing Kirill Petrenko, whose appearances in London are like hen’s teeth, and that the four and a half hours passed in no time must surely be down to his pacing of the many ebbs and flows, and the clarity of the textures he created with the Berlin Philharmonic. Just occasionally his hands would teasingly show above the parapet of the pit, flashing in the light. The next evening, I got to see him in his full glory in more Strauss – Four Last Songs with soloist Diana Damrau and Ein Heldenleben – but I kept coming back to those hands, by turns delicately rippling like sea anemone as he stood otherwise still, listening to his players, encouraging them, but then bursting with extreme energy and seemingly chaotic movement when rallying more complicated textures. All this poetry and drama happen on the podium, and when he turns around at the end he smiles gently and walks off stage grinning to himself as if he’s just heard a good joke, rather than having conducted supreme performances. It’s not hard to see why players and audiences alike seem to adore him – the opera audience only stood to ovate and cheer when he was finally brought on stage. With Four Last Songs and Ein Heldenleben I’m back on home turf after the opera ([gratuitous plug alert] my orchestra is playing the Four Last Songs at Queen Elizabeth Hall on 17 May) and I found more to love in the music – unsurprisingly, everything seems more compact and the thematic material stronger (confession: I don’t always have patience for Strauss’s meanderings). It was also wonderful to watch the Berlin Phil in flow – given full rein by Petrenko, their playing is fearless and vital. This isn’t whipped-cream or schmaltzy Strauss – the sound quality itself is almost austere, but all the more vivid and human for it. The orchestra was led here by Vineta Sareika-Völkner, former leader of the Artemis Quartet, who recently took on one of the three joint concertmaster positions, the first woman to do so. She dispatched the concerto-like solo part of Ein Heldenleben with consummate ease and beautiful tone, and her solo in Beim Schlafengehen (‘While going to sleep’) was quite literally heavenly, climbing ever higher and nearer to the inevitable – a piercingly exquisite moment. Several friends have told me this would be their choice for their last moments on earth, and I understand why – comfort, beauty, transcendence. Perhaps, in some respects, Bach and Strauss aren’t so different after all.

Hearing Bach’s St John Passion in the composer’s own church was a concert of a lifetime I didn’t think Bach would stick a knife in my guts and twist it, but that’s what happened last night in the Thomaskirche in Leipzig. Maybe it was because I’d confused myself about which church it was in and ended up running there with two minutes to spare. Maybe it was because I’d come to Leipzig specially and for a few moments I thought I’d missed it. But mainly, I think it was down to Bach, the Gewandhaus Orchestra and the significance of the venue – Bach was Kantor there from 1723 to 1750. The silence of the cavernous space was rent by the throbbing double bass heartbeat, the piercing oboe suspensions twisting above, violins roiling like an ocean beneath this mighty but agile man-o’-war, Andreas Reize’s no-nonsense pace signalling the inevitability of both music and narrative. Even as it took me a moment to adjust my hearing to the distant sound from the back of the church, my response was visceral, eyes automatically lifting to the vaulted ceiling up to which Bach himself must have looked, stomach churning and eyes stinging. And so it went on, aria after aria for two hours without interval (in the 1724 version) making me oscillate between emotion and awe. I think of the St Matthew Passion as having more memorable tunes, but this was a reminder that every aria in St John is a little masterpiece, the cumulative whole superbly varied and paced – and both draining and uplifting. The soloists were first rate, Julian Prégardien controlled but compelling as the Evangelist and Tobias Berndt beautifully rich, and it was worth the trip to Leipzig alone just to hear the infinity of colour and meaning Andreas Scholl can create in one long-held note. The fast music zinged, the pretty numbers charmed, the dramatic arias punched, and apart from the exquisitely refined playing throughout, the whole thing swung – phrasing just slightly off kilter, but perfectly formed, full of life and breath. It’s the hardest thing for classical musicians to do well, trained as they are to keep time, but with these orchestral players it seems to be in their blood. We talk about authenticity in music, but this is hyper-authenticity. It’s one thing to research traditions from original documents and listen to people who have come before, but this playing has been handed down through generations of Leipzig musicians, and it sounds like it. This was brought home to me by my visit earlier in the day to the museum in what was once the home of Mendelssohn. He moved to Leipzig to take up the position of Musical Director of the Gewandhaus in 1835 and became a hugely influential figure in the city’s music life. It’s well known that he revived Bach, conducting the first performance of the St Matthew Passion in Berlin in 1829, but the exhibition is at pains to point out that it was actually his great-aunt Sara Levy, who had studied with Johann Sebastian Bach’s son Wilhelm Friedemann, who had introduced Mendelssohn into the ‘Bach cult’. That’s some lineage. Mendelssohn only lived in the house for the last two years of his life (he died in 1847) but compared with the Beethoven Haus (see my previous article), there’s more of a sense of the Mendelssohn family actually having lived there, given that he was an adult, with several rooms reconstructed from paintings, some of the original furniture and a beautiful staircase. There are also some accomplished paintings from his European travels, and the obligatory quills. Now, I know that yesterday I was writing about how much I love Beethoven, but the truth is that if I had to answer the question about who I would choose to have dinner with, it would always be Mendelssohn – his sweetness, warmth, intellectual curiosity would make him a perfect companion. All of these things come through in the exhibits, which include English translations of letters between different members of the family. One obituary of him, written in the English magazine The Musical World is particularly moving, declaring England’s particular loyalty to him and concluding, ‘In every relation of life Felix Mendelssohn was loved and honoured. As he had no real rival in the glory of his fame, so had he none who envied his popularity. His hand was ever ready to assist the needy artist, and his tongue was ever lavish of praise, even when praise, without suspicion of envy, were that possible, might be withheld.’ It ends rather hysterically: ‘His death is a universal calamity, without remedy, without hope. Mendelssohn is dead!’ The exhibition gives an honest picture of the family dynamic, and devotes, quite rightly, a whole floor to Fanny. Her mother taught her the piano at first and noted her ‘Bach fugue’ hands. Fanny and Felix had the same training, and Fanny was every bit her brother’s equal both as a performer and composer, but it seems that her father stopped her from taking music seriously. Even in the context of the times, there is a fairly damning letter in which he admonishes her that ‘Music may perhaps one day be his profession, but for you it can and should only ever be an embellishment.’ He praises her for ‘taking the pleasure in the applause he has elicited, and which in his place you would also have been able to earn for yourself. Persevere with this disposition and demeanour; they are feminine traits, and only what is feminine is becoming to a woman and rewards her endeavours.’ I had to stifle a groan reading it in the museum. Rather more surprising to me is the fact that Mendelssohn seems to have agreed with his father and although the two siblings were incredibly close, both personally and musically, he could be very negative about her. In one set of correspondence between them, she tells him she’s going to go ahead and get her choral music published even though he’s been rude about them and battered her confidence. He subsequently sends back his approval. Another interesting insight is her diary entry saying, ‘Felix cannot bear the slightest contradiction, which is why we have sometimes acted harshly towards one another… on the many occasions when I have spent short periods of time with Felix, I have always felt – as well as my love for him and my delight in his talents – a strange agitation and dissatisfaction, which may result from the fact that people have to be so careful about what they say to him in order not to hurt his feelings, which can easily give rise to a feeling of anxiety which ought to have no place in the company of one's nearest and dearest.’ The museum itself came about largely through the energies of Kurt Masur, who was Kapellmeister of the Gewandhaus Orchester from 1970 until 1996, and whose funeral was held in the Thomaskirche in 2015. An exhibition on the third floor of the Mendelssohn Haus tells his story (including his political engagement in intervening to negotiate during anti-government protests in 1989) and displays his musical scores. The first thing one sees getting off the train at Leipzig Bahnhopf is the bright lights of a sign for the Gewandhaus and Thomanerchor. With a musical history this rich, it’s not surprising that the city feels such pride.

For the first stop of my Interrail trip, I make a beeline for Beethoven’s home city of Bonn and find him around every corner I love Beethoven. I hate kitsch. I’m pretty sure that Beethoven would have despised kitsch (the tinky-tonk bit in the Ninth Symphony notwithstanding). And yet I love Beethoven kitsch. Somehow, in this syllogism, I am reduced to absurdio. And so, for the first stop on my coming Interrail jaunt, which was precipitated by an impulsive buy in the train company’s half-price sale last year, I find myself taking five trains to get from London to Bonn, the birthplace of the iconic kitsch-whisperer. I arrive in the evening and go for a leisurely walk beside the relaxed Rhine, along which, a helpful sign explains, Beethoven sailed for his first public concert in Cologne in 1778. I walk past MS Beethoven, which offers river cruises, and pass the Beethoven School, a Beethoven car park sign, a Konditorei selling Beethoven chocolate and a sculpture that takes the claim that Beethoven was ugly rather too literally. I arrive at my hotel to find a display of his scores in the entrance. At every corner of this pretty-if-uninspiring city, images of the famous head loom, pop and sell. And I am absolutely here for it. Actually, I’m here to see the Beethoven-Haus, where he was born in December 1770. I’m at the front of the queue for tickets when the booth opens at 10am, and I am not disappointed. Three floors of one of the city’s few original unscathed houses display paintings and cases holding objects, manuscripts and letters. An accompanying app audio tour goes into more detail and offers useful context. There’s not an overload of musicological or historic detail, but it’s a good balance between being general enough for average tourists and detailed enough for nerds. For me, it’s enough just to be in a space that he once occupied and breathed within, even if it was only one of several of his family’s homes before he left the city for good at the age of 21. My imagination does the rest – picturing him being bullied by his father, carrying his viola to rehearsals, scribbling his scores, monitoring his housekeepers’ budgets. It’s enough just to stare at the various portraits of him in the first room and envisage them alive. A mask made when he was alive is especially vivid, showing all his pock marks and his scarred chin, as well as his miserable expression. (The guide points out that the process of making the mask would have been fairly unbearable, so it's possible that affected the facial expression that has defined our popular conception of him as a grumpy old man). The letters are mainly facsimiles, as the originals are presumably too fragile, which is understandable, although lessens the impact on the imagination somewhat. For me, it’s the thought of him actually touching something that brings him to life. Fortunately, many of the objects are the real deal, including his eyeglasses, the last quill he used, and various musical instruments, such as the viola he played in Bonn’s court orchestra, and the complete quartet he was given by Prince Lichnowsky, which he refers to in his Heiligenstadt Testament. There’s also a photograph of his nephew, in whom you can recognise the cleft chin, which is rather moving, given the nature of their fractured relationship. By the time we get to the second floor the theme is ‘The Blows of Fate’ and we hear accounts of a treatment that involved having bark rubbed into his arms, causing blisters, and his frustration at not being able to use his arms for days – although it seemed to work. We see the surprisingly large hearing aids that were designed for him by Johann Mälzer, who also designed his metronome. His death mask is well known, but still has the power to shock and move. I certainly learnt some new things – including that he wore glasses, had incredibly messy writing that would entertain a graphologist, and kept a tight rein on his staff. His idea of a working day seems pretty inspirational: an early breakfast, followed by some work; a walk; correspondence; lunch at a coffee house; another longer walk; and an evening spent in an inn or at a concert. As I drank my apfelsaft in front of his imposing statue in the main square, I tried to imagine what he’d have thought of the gold statue atop a bar across the square and all the garish versions of him about a town that is cashing in, albeit relatively tastefully, on his name. One of the points the exhibition made was that he was an acute businessman, so maybe he’d approve of the commercialism and try to get his cut. He certainly didn’t lack self-worth, so maybe he’d lap up the attention. Of course, it’s not really the kitsch that I love. It’s what it represents, which is that a composer and his music are so popular and well loved that they have transcended the usual boundaries and exclusions of classical music to sell bread and shirts. If he can do it, then it is possible. As for me, in the act of thinking and imagining him, I feel he has become more present to me, and I will wear my favourite Beethoven t-shirt with pride, although, reader, I did not buy any Beethoven chocolate. Next stop: Leipzig. Bach and Mendelssohn, here I come!

Artificial intelligence impersonations of human writing are very good – and that’s why this writer isn’t afraid of them There’s lots of talk these days about ChatGPT and whether Artificial Intelligence will replace writers. Like many of my journalist colleagues, I’ve tinkered with it. Its various answers to the question ‘what is the future of classical music writing?’ are not actually that off-kilter (see below). On the other hand, it variously describes me as a cellist, founder of Sounds Like Now, editor of Primephonic, jury member of Young Musician of the Year and ‘known for her insightful writing on classical music and her expertise in the field’, so what does it know? Am I frightened for my career? Well of course in the days of nihilistic cost-cutting bean-counters, we should all be worried. On the other hand, of all industries, the creative ones know the value of humanity – of having a real, flawed human brain at the drawing board. That’s their whole point, after all. The answers the ChatGPT generates are impressive in their content, synthesised from real writer’s ideas and words, and it’s all perfectly well written. And that’s the problem with it, because humans don’t write perfectly well. We all have our quirks and tics, and that’s what makes writing interesting. Back in the day, I used to edit The Strad’s CD review section and would commission 30 or so reviews from a wide pool of writers. I could invariably identify each reviewer’s work without seeing their name. They each had their own idiosyncrasies – whether it was their use of specific adverbs or adjectives, their over-enthusiasm or under-enthusiasm, a reliance on historic context to fill the word count, a fixation on vibrato, their choice of Oxford commas or not, how they reacted to new music, how they liked to generate lists etc etc. When I first took it on as a green editor, I scrupulously ironed these all out, deleting all the extremities and specificities that stood out. No doubt the writers would get their proofs back (yes, we had time to send them out in those days) and not recognise their own words. As time went by, I realised how wrong I was and learnt to be more laissez-faire. Of course, there has to be a certain consistency in a publication, to which end a house style is essential, but maybe it is exactly the individual characteristics that make writing compelling, and the differences between them that keep readers’ attention and loyalty. The ChatGTP style is all smooth consistency and no character – bland, bland, bland. Now when I edit interviews, I cherish scrupulously the words and phrases that stand out and observe respectfully the nuances of a speaker’s tone. In all art, there is a precarious balance between consistency and technical perfection on one hand and uniqueness and creative freedom on the other. I’ve always been the first to whinge if a violinist plays out of tune or I don’t like their vibrato, and yet these days, I would much rather listen, for example, to Joseph Szigeti, for all his wobbling and shaking as he got older, than some technically perfect, sonically pure rendition. His humanity and personality speak to me beyond any flaws in his violin playing. I am grateful for this change in perspective, which is undoubtedly one of the benefits of ageing. Charlie Chaplin was a notorious perfectionist, retaking scenes hundreds of times sometimes, but he was keenly sensitive to the importance of the bigger picture. In an interview in 1921 he explained: ‘I want every bit rehearsed thoroughly, all the technical details worked out very carefully. Then, when all those bits of business have been gone through thoroughly, I say, “Now we’ll act it.” But I don’t want perfection of detail in the acting. I’d hate a picture that was perfect – it would seem machine made. I want the human touch, so that you love the picture for its imperfections.’ Art is defined by the human touch. I’ve recently been interviewing players of the Academy of Ancient Music for the CD booklets of their Mozart Piano Concerto project with Robert Levin, which they’re continuing after a 20-year hiatus. In my interview with violinist Bill Thorp, he described Levin coming back to the project after all these years, saying, ‘He played with all the fluency, facility and inventiveness that he always has done, but there was an added dimension that made it even more moving. Maybe one’s life experiences go into one’s playing, so it’s not surprising that with age and experience there’s more depth. Just as old instruments sound better because of their age, players can move you more as they get older, because they can say more. I find Bob’s playing even more touching now. What is music, after all? It’s about life, experience and emotion.’ To illustrate the latest release, the AAM have commissioned an animation from André Beukes that also rather beautifully demonstrates the point. At the start, we see a young Robert Levin at the keyboard, playing the slow movement of K467, one of Mozart’s most sublime movements. As time and music pass, the supposed camera pans round him and an older man emerges, slightly more hunched and careworn, but just as intent on his work. The film is made of 1,500 drawings – some descriptive and clear; some messy splodges and abstract colour washes that look like they took seconds. Our eyes piece them into a story that is both specific to the project, but also gets to the very heart of the matter. Life, music, humanity – full of splotches, voids, mess and inconsistency amid moments of extreme beauty. That’s the point, and ChatGPT will never get it.