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The London Symphony Orchestra’s early evening concert format is a welcome development in the city’s entertainment landscape, for music lovers and novices alike Tonight I experienced my first Half Six Fix with London Symphony Orchestra at the Barbican – only a year after it was introduced as part of Simon Rattle’s new directorship as a way to encourage new audiences. Half Six Fix does what it says on the bottle – starts at 6.30pm and lasts an hour, in this case perfectly balancing Stravinsky’s Le chant du rossignol and Debussy’s La mer. As part of the experience conductor François-Xavier Roth informed and charmed from the podium, offering interesting context to both works, singing Charles Trenet’s version of La mer and telling Satie’s joke about the piece, whose first movement paints dawn to midday – ‘there’s a good tune at around 11 o’clock’. His comic timing proved as good as his musical one as he asked us, ‘You weeel corrrect my Eeenglish, no?’ Another innovation in these concerts is offering the audience Encue, an app that allows you to read the programme notes in real time on your telephone, using the Barbican’s wifi. I was slightly dreading this, being a phone-phobe when it comes to concerts. My discomfort increased when I got to my seat and noticed the elderly gentleman sitting next to me looking angrily at my phone, just as I would have done had I been sitting next to myself. As it was, the white text against a black background was discreet and I managed to shield my phone from him with my ticket. The programme notes proved useful in the Stravinsky, as they described the plot about the nightingale and the emperor. In the Debussy they felt a little redundant, essentially relating the music – as Elvis Costello once put it, ‘like dancing about architecture’. I imagine this would be the case even to a novice. In fact, I didn’t see many people using Encue, just as I didn’t see many people with drinks, which are allowed in the hall, but maybe old habits die hard for regular listeners, and I was in the nice stall seats with a press ticket. Two large screens on either side of the stage showed close-ups on orchestral soloists, which provided valuable detail, although the default screen was a swirly LSO pattern when it would have been nice to see Roth from the front sometimes. The players were in black and white rather than DJs, which didn't affect me either way. But then, as a boffin I realise I’m not the target audience for these concerts, and whatever takes the edge of the strangeness of the experience for people who aren’t is a good thing. The timeframe of one hour in the early evening is an excellent development – for post-work music lovers and wary newbies alike, as is the possibility of Wildcard tickets for £10. Having artists such as Roth (and Simon Rattle and Gianandrea Noseda) communicating so well with the audience is a major boon. I’ve long argued that artists are the best people to advocate for classical music – much better than journalists and academics. I’m not sure I’d use Encue again myself, but it didn’t bother me as much as I thought it might. And as the merry crowd dispersed and I made my way home through the dusky Barbican complex at 7.40 I heard a bird singing away amid the concrete. Was it a nightingale? The next Half Six Fix is on Tuesday, 13 November. #view

Amateur musicians are a vital part of the classical music world, but don’t always get the recognition or opportunities they deserve or need. It’s time for the music establishment to bring them into the fold Last week I played the violin with Nicola Benedetti. Well my whole band, Corinthian Chamber Orchestra, did, but I got your attention. And she certainly got ours. I’ve never seen us collectively more alert, focused and responsive in rehearsals – and quiet. If those sound like prerequisites for any orchestra, let me explain. Corinthian Chamber Orchestra is one of the many amateur orchestras in London. We like to think we’re one of the best, but that’s not for us to judge, and there are many other wonderful ones, some of which I also play in. Generally we play well and our concerts are usually exhilarating, but essentially, we do it for the sheer love of it and no one is going to confuse us with the London Symphony Orchestra. My colleagues are doctors, lawyers, classical music industry people, teachers, administrators, nurses, teachers and IT specialists, among many other professions. Many studied at music college and could have become professional musicians (I studied at postgraduate level at the Royal Academy of Music, for example). Instead, we all have day jobs, but put on six concerts a year, each with an intense series of rehearsals. Many of us play chamber music and work with other groups, and some of us go on summer chamber music courses and take lessons. ‘We want to be the best we can be’ Over the last few years our most regular conductor has been Mike Seal, ex-CBSO violinist who is now storming a career as a conductor. He explains, solves, reveals, cajoles, bullies and inspires. Most importantly, he accepts nothing less from us than the very best we are able to give. And that’s exactly what we want. We want to be the best we can be. And yet, among the UK classical music establishment, it sometimes feels like amateurs are the metaphorical profligate uncle – the lazy one whose bad manners and drinking habits might set a bad example to the children. On a very practical level, few classical music organisations engage with adult education. (In the US they seem to call it ‘lifelong learning’, which is a much more positive way to frame it.) While there are many initiatives to get young people into concert halls and to be able to play an instrument – which is obviously a supremely vital task in today’s educational environment – there’s hardly any offering for those at the other end of the age spectrum. In some quarters, there’s an active snobbery about amateurs. We were all utterly grateful that Nicola Benedetti was open to playing with us and valued running through the Mendelssohn Concerto with us before a bigger gig – and that she did so with her characteristic grace and commitment. Indeed, we provide several concerto slots a year for young soloists and orchestral players who otherwise might not have so many opportunities. And yet I’ve heard of performers being instructed by agents not to play with amateur orchestras. One up-and-come conductor asked for his name to be taken off the list of conductors of an amateur orchestra’s website (unlike the likes of Colin Davis and Martyn Brabbins, neither of whom ever felt their reputation sullied by working with amateurs). ‘We are on the same journey as professional musicians – we’re just taking the scenic route’ So there are two things I’d like to change. The first is the underlying attitude. Amateurs have enormous value to offer the classical music world, and this should be respected. What we do is no different from professionals, except in strength of focus, perhaps. We all want to express ourselves through music – to improve and learn. Maybe our parameters are narrower than those of hotshot players. Maybe we take more time to fix things – and less time to forget how we fixed them. Maybe we expect to enjoy the process more than professionals (is that a bad thing?). Maybe our intonation, alacrity, range and listening skills aren’t quite as refined. But essentially, we are on the same journey as professional musicians – we’re just taking the scenic route. Our amateurishness is not contagious, but maybe our passion, knowledge and enjoyment are. I’ll never forget playing quartets with some star students of the Verbier Academy as part of the Amateur Chamber Music Week there. They had been shanghaied into playing with the grown-ups and were not enthusiastic. But within a few minutes of starting to play and rehearse Brahms quintets, their demeanour changed as they realised we actually knew what we were doing – and probably had more knowledge about chamber music than they did, for all their concerto practice. We earned their respect. Secondly, I’d encourage the classical music establishment to incorporate amateurs, just as they do children – whether conservatoires, orchestras, venues or other organisations. Conservatoires could offer lessons, chamber music coaching, masterclasses, lectures and orchestra rehearsals to adults, maybe not in a rigorous daily fashion – we are often busy, after all – but as part of their ‘outreach’. They can only benefit by it. They make money, their students get teaching experience and audiences and they welcome in potential donors and patrons. This is further advanced in the US, where Juilliard offers classes for adults. In the UK, as far as I can tell, Trinity Laban and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland have made steps, but there’s a long way to go in refining their offering to a range of needs. I can only see advantages to such organisations being more inclusive. The classical music world is a giant ecosystem in which everything feeds into every other part. Rather than being out on a limb, amateurs should be at its very heart. 17 ways amateur musicians contribute to the classical music world: We go to concerts We offer solo performing opportunities for young stars, orchestral players and international celebrities who need try-out gigs We support venues by booking concerts in them and usually filling them up We promote classical music to our non-music friends who might never have engaged before We commission composers and perform new works We raise money for charity We hire music from orchestral libraries We buy gear – strings, music, accessories, cases, sheet music We buy instruments – old and new. (Judging by some of the intense conversations I’ve had about modern instruments, there seems to be more openness and enthusiasm towards them in amateur orchestras than among professionals) We benefit local schools by paying to rehearse in their halls. (We’re usually desperate to find good rehearsal spaces. Are you listening, whoever is planning Simon Rattle’s new concert hall?) We offer an alternative outlet for conservatoire students who choose not to become professionals We pay musicians for lessons We influence young musicians – whether as parents, relatives or friends We support young conductors, both through concerts and masterclasses We offer chances for recording engineers to practise their skills We support young players by going to their concerts, spreading the word and lending them instruments We support the local economy. (Rehearsals usually end in the pub.) Related articles A report from the Verbier Festival Amateur Chamber Music Week Colin Davis and his generosity towards amateur musicians You’re never too old to learn #view

The recent Amsterdam String Quartet Biennale explored various aspects of the string quartet format, including the many life lessons it offers us Four people whose lives are intricately entangled – musically, geographically and financially: not The Beatles or Rolling Stones, but your average string quartet. Rather than rock music and drugs, their lives revolve around arguments about bow direction, use of vibrato and how to interpret Schubert’s accents. Audiences may not witness such rehearsal-room conflicts, but they experience the resulting on-stage dynamic – the glances, the bodies swaying together, the mirrored hand gestures and, of course, the music. Observing this intense human interaction at close quarters is part of the magic and compelling intimacy of chamber music. Last week’s inaugural String Quartet Biennale in Amsterdam, 27 January to 3 February, offered the chance to revel in this chemistry, but also to get closer to understanding the way a string quartet functions and the importance of the musical form. More than 20 groups from across the world converged in the various spaces and halls of Amsterdam’s modern Muziekgebouw, and concerts, discussions, classes and events ran from 9.30am to 11.30pm every day. These examined every aspect of the form – philosophical, historical, musical and social, and in ways that were often quirky, challenging and original. This eclecticism is at the very heart of the philosophy of its founder, Yasmin Hilberdink. When she decided to start the festival, building on her experience of ten years booking a chamber music series at the small hall of the Concertgebouw, she took inspiration from an unusual source, as she told me: ‘When the Rijksmuseum reopened after its refurbishment in 2013, it reopened in a different way. It was the same paintings, but they were presented differently – they were telling a story. Previously when I went, there would only be five other people there, but afterwards, it was full, because they was a nice café, they communicated well, and they were telling a story in a way that I understood it. I realised it’s not the art form itself that is old-fashioned or dying. That’s what groups worry about – will string quartets exist in 50 years? It’s all about how you tell the story.’ ‘Be very careful with non-vibrato playing. It’s in fashion at the moment but there are very few places where it’s justified’ There were plenty of stories to follow – with the breadth of groups involved, you could observe the full life journey. For student groups, there were daily foyer performances before concerts and masterclasses across the week, including one with retired piano legend Alfred Brendel. Here one witnessed the level of self-examination and criticism required to succeed. He exhorted one young quartet: ‘Schubert was the discoverer of fever – you don’t play fever’; ‘It should break their heart’; ‘You sound like a machine – don’t lose the spirit’; ‘Think of a slow wind that goes into the trees’. The intense attention to detail was an insight into how musicians think, and how young groups have to be flexible, humble – and tough. (In passing he also brought up a current scourge of string playing, for which I was personally grateful: ‘Be very careful with non-vibrato playing. It’s in fashion at the moment but there are very few places where it’s justified. Keep the difference between non-vibrato and pianissimo. Senza vibrato is not eerie, it’s dead.’) At the further end of the career journey, the Emerson Quartet performed both on its own and supplemented by other players. After 40 years as one of the pre-eminent American groups and coming off a heavy touring schedule, its famous brassy, energetic sound was evident (since 2013 with the added refinement of British cellist Paul Watkins), but the players seemed a little tired. Even so, their experience and communication skills rubbed off on collaborators Quartetto di Cremona, violist Laurence Dutton eyeballing his younger colleagues to musical unity. The gripping human alchemy of chamber music also came through with the addition of cellist Gary Hoffman in Schubert’s Quintet in C, his sensitive playing softening the performance. Each day of the festival was bookended by early Haydn and late Beethoven, the two most revolutionary sets of the whole literature. Not only did Haydn invent the quartet form, but within each quartet he also created and played with more ideas than other composers riffed on over a lifetime (back to comparison with The Beatles). By contrast, Beethoven seemed to deconstruct the form and take it in new directions that even now sound as if they’ve just been invented – even by comparison with the many modern works on offer at the festival. (In his talk on late Beethoven, illustrated with his own recordings, Alfred Brendel described these works as synthesising the past, present and future.) So on one night we had the Signum Quartet finding the otherworldly, slow-motion beauty of Beethoven’s op.132 Heiliger Dankgesang, and the next afternoon, coming back to this sound world in a performance of Jörg Widmann’s complete string quartets. Talking before the performance, Widmann described the pressure he felt from Haydn and Beethoven as he wrote his first quartet in 1997, throwing away 200 openings. The one he kept consists of a terrible cracking noise followed by a quiet, fragile tone, representing the weight he felt on his shoulders. From this gesture onwards he succeeds in simultaneously honouring the tradition while teasing it apart and finding fresh beauty, tonal qualities and narratives. Occasionally, textures that Haydn might barely have understood suddenly resolved into a bare chord that somehow contained the essence of his forefathers, yet without parody or distance. The players were called to bow the sides of their instruments, whip their bows or finger the strings, exaggerating the intrinsic theatre of the quartet dynamic and its gestures – particularly in the whacky horror of the Third Quartet, ‘Hunting Quartet’. As well as the sheer technical dexterity and accuracy required, the members of the Signum Quartet proved to be superb actors. Of course, striking string instruments in unusual ways is not in itself revolutionary – as we were reminded by a performance of Crumb’s iconic 1970 Black Angels by the Quiroga Quartet. Written in response to the Vietnam War, representing the battle of good against evil, Crumb uses all sorts of musical symbolism and references – pitting the numbers 13 and 7 against each other and including the Dies Irae melody and a fragment of Schubert’s ‘Death and the Maiden’. He has the amplified quartet bowing wine glasses, banging gongs and even playing the cello upside down, all of which were achieved with utter commitment by the players, and in contrast to their emotionally vivid and flexible performance of Schubert’s original work in the first half. ‘If you want to be a musician you have to learn how to count and you have to count for the rest of your life’ In the regular 11.30 Masterclass strand, there were fascinating insights into the working life of a quartet. The Emersons’ Philip Setzer read through Webern’s Six Bagatelles with students, showing both the players and audience how to read the composer’s detailed markings, with nice stories about his own mentors, including Samuel Rhodes (‘If you want to be a musician you have to learn how to count and you have to count for the rest of your life.’) To a packed audience that followed the music on handouts, he demonstrated the care with which Webern’s composite rhythms have to be put together, but made a case for the music being played romantically: ‘Just because it’s abstract doesn’t mean it should be emotionless and cold. You have to get it lined up and figured out intellectually and mathematically, but that’s the same with a Bach fugue, and you don’t play that without emotion.’ The Doric Quartet gave us a rare glimpse into the process of the first rehearsal, approaching Beethoven’s op.130 quartet as if for the first time. They start by playing it slowly to understand the harmonic shape and find the tension and release. This slow practice is essential, as the viola player Hélène Clément explained: ‘It means we know as a group what we want to listen to, which in concerts gives us the ability to be flexible but unified, because we’re listening to the same thing.’ She also revealed the secret to their work together – they don’t ever comment on each other’s individual playing, only on the demands of the music, which must take remarkable self-discipline. Another string quartet life lesson came from cellist John Myerscough: ‘It’s easy to think you’re playing too quietly, but if every time you think you want to get louder, you get quieter, you will save the world.’ There was also an interesting discussion about how they were using ‘transitional’ bows to play Beethoven, of the sort that would have been used around 1800. As they played the same passage with both modern and transitional bows, the difference in the clarity of articulation was plain to hear. ‘The string quartet represents the ideals that we recognise as those of the Enlightenment: four equals who debate freely and fraternally’ The 10.15 Coffee Talk strand also offered interesting perspectives. One with American music writer Alex Ross and Quiroga second violinist Cibrán Sierra Vázquez set out the many benefits and models that the string quartet offers: social justice, diversity, intimacy, teamwork, pedagogy and even democracy. Vázquez explained: ‘The string quartet represents the ideals that we recognise as those of the Enlightenment: four equals who debate freely and fraternally. Previously it was a democratic tool to educate audiences and to open up the secrets of language and knowledge, but now promoters regard it as candy for a small number of elite listeners. That is not in the music and was not in the head of Haydn or Schoenberg. It’s the most democratic tool to bring cultures together and to educate musicians and citizens in the ways of debating and living together – a tool to create a better society.’ Asked what the digital revolution means for string quartets, Ross acknowledged that many composers were incorporating technology, but argued for the humanity of the format: ‘Something about the form stands apart because of its intimacy. It’s about a group of people in a room responding on ancient instruments in a contemporary language. The string quartet is not an escape from contemporary society, but it is an alternative, rooted in purely human, face-to-face, intimate communication. There is a quality intrinsic to the form that is antagonistic to the life we live now, and it is to be treasured.’ Vázquez commented on his experience in a quartet and teaching groups: ‘A string quartet is a school of how to behave in society. Everyone should learn to play in quartets. No other pedagogical tool is as powerful. The three other players are mirrors of your self. You have to know how to give and take criticism. The possibilities are so exportable to other situations, but it’s a tool that’s misregarded.’ Over the four days I spent at the festival, nearly every event I attended was full and there was a good buzz, whether for performances of the classics or cutting-edge contemporary pieces, young or established players (and not entirely due to the Amsterdam tradition of offering free wine at the interval). This is the first music festival to focus on the string quartet genre for such a length of time, with such depth, breadth and imagination and if its conclusions are anything to go by, the string quartet might just save humanity. The next Quartet Biennale runs 25 January – 1 February 2020 All photos copyright Ben Bonouvrier #quartets #view #review

The internet offers musicians fantastic opportunities to build their reputations and legacies, as well as selling their music. They should take more advantage of it When it comes to music, I’ve often been a late adopter. Innate scepticism leads me to disregard trends and the latest ‘big thing’. So while I vaguely remember Dmitri Hvorostovsky winning the Cardiff Singer of the World Competition in 1989, for the next 30 years I barely noticed him. Then he died. Since then, I’ve spent a large proportion of time crying over YouTube videos of him. Even to a novice opera buff, the quality of his voice, the endless musical lines, the sincerity and empathy of his communication are clear. Who could fail to fall in love with his Prince Yeletsky in Queen of Spades as he tells Liza that he loves her (it being opera, apart from the heroine herself, of course)? Or be wracked by the conflicting emotions of Renée Fleming rejecting his Eugene Onegin? And who does not feel the gamut of feelings on watching his surprise appearance at the Met in May 2017 – his voice and spirit intact despite sharing space with the killer tumour only months before his death. But this post isn’t about Dmitri Hvorostovsky, or about the pains and pleasures of finding an artist to adore unconditionally. It’s about content – because that’s my line. I learnt several things as I trawled the internet looking for articles about Hvorostovsky. First: Russians are obsessed by opera and by their national operatic heroes in a way to which no other nation comes close. Nearly everything I found – celebrity television shows, interviews, articles, blog posts, biographies – was in Russian, despite him living in London for many years and being an international star. There were only a few English interviews and more than once, I had to resort to YouTube’s own English captioning to get the jist of an interview (advice – don’t bother). Secondly, it’s obvious that when an artist is gone, they leave behind their recordings and videos, and in that respect, they are immortalised. But what hit me is how the details behind their craft – their artistic choices, creative struggles, physical regimens, psychological conflicts, pedagogical theories and interpretative journeys – are so often left to chance. Certainly I have found this with Hvorostovsky, for whom I have found only a few scattered comments revealing his very considerable knowledge and insight. Yes, there is journalism. Specialist magazines may have asked him good questions but these articles are largely hidden in the recesses of their archives. When I was Editor of The Strad, I treasured the old bound volumes, going back to 1890, with biographical detail of the string stars of yesteryear, but it was considered too expensive to digitise them, so they’re now largely inaccessible to the public. And anyway, it’s only in the last few decades that interview techniques have really dug into the profound questions about performance and learning. There are opera blogs and a few broadsheet interviews online, but few go deep enough into the detail for my liking. On Hvorostovsky’s own website there is a section on videos and a news section which referenced then-current stories. But to find a collection of good, relevant articles about Hvorostovsky and his work, I’ve found the best place to be a Facebook fan page where even now, his admirers are collating and translating every bit of information they can find. The internet has transformed the possibilities for artists to communicate directly with audiences and would-be audiences, and I don’t think they have caught up. Many players have good social media feeds, posting fun photos, videos and comments, which is great (there are some very personal videos that Hvorostovsky posted to greet his fans). But this is the tip of the iceberg of what is possible, both for musicians’ personal ‘brands’, but also for the general discourse about classical music. Hearing great musicians talking about their craft can inspire and educate the players who come after them while also giving non-players deep insight into what they’re listening to. For good examples of this, watch Itzhak Perlman, Ray Chen or Jacob Collier. We need more of this. Just imagine if we had written records of how Paganini practised, Maria Callas learnt her vocal technique or Rubinstein voiced his chords. (We can certainly be thankful for some wonderful insights from various letters and documents left behind by the likes of Mozart, Beethoven and Schumann.) My Hvorostovsky obsession has reminded me that for all artists, creating good content is an essential marketing tool. It creates a permanent and meaningful legacy. But for the truly great artists? It is a moral responsibility. Five tips 1. Write Don’t wait for The Times or Washington Post to call you up for an interview. Write your own Q&As, articles, opinion pieces, analyses, diaries. People call these blogs, but I hate the word – it’s all ‘content’. If you don’t feel you can write, find someone who can. There are plenty of us around. 2. Go high It’s great to put out fun/quirky/charming/quick posts that might go viral, but why not vary it with some meaty, in-depth posts about what you’re doing and what your musical philosophies are. Talk about a piece you’re working on and what you’re discovering as you go through the score. Discuss what you learnt from listening to an old recording of a favourite player. Remember a joke your teacher made that made you think about something in a completely different way. Explain your choices as you work on a project. Consider anything that reflects on your specific passions, knowledge and talents. You may not get as many instant likes and retweets as the shorter posts, but you’re reaching an audience that cares about what you have to say, and communicating your unique musical essence – to bookers and agents, as well as to listeners. 3. Videos Videos are great, and increasingly becoming the norm in marketing, but people don’t always have the time or space to watch them, so make sure there are good subtitles, and maybe even transcribe the text under the video so they can get the sense quickly. You can also reuse this text in other ways for your marketing and press releases. 4. Media Collect any media interviews in one place on your website and make sure it’s up-to-date. Collate any good quotes from these interviews to make it easy for readers (and journalists on the look-out for good copy). 5. Website Longer, more meaty posts can go on social media feeds, but make sure to post them on your website, so they don’t get missed in the current. Steven Isserlis is partial to wonderfully long essays on his Facebook page, which then go on his website. Consider the different strengths of the channels, whether Instagram, Twitter, Facebook or anything else and what sort of content suits each. Have some sort of strategy for there sorts of things you put where, and how they relate to your website, and also where you focus your energy, especially if you're doing it all on your own. I will be writing more about good content in the coming weeks. If you would like to discuss any of these ideas or find out how I can help you, contact me here. Favourite Hvorostovsky resources An interview with Bruce Duffie, transcribed from a radio show in 1993, with lots of interesting detail about his work. A Telegraph interview from 2002 – more commentary than interview. A charming, if slightly bizarre, interview with Hvorostovsky making pasta while being quite frank about how he found his voice and developed his career – and his thoughts on the Russian music education system (from 2000). A slightly awkward interview, but revealing – including how he learnt from his father that what you have to say as an artist is more important than how you actually sing, and the rather awfully ironic memory of colleague Leonie Rysanek discovering she had terminal cancer. He starts to go into his technique for being able to sing a line for half a minute, and how he knows how to project his voice, although it’s a shame they don’t press him for more specific detail. A short interview for La Scena. Lovely two-part interview, with good questions and the time and space for him to go into fascinating detail about his thought processes, and to discuss what he perceived as his own weaknesses, and his relationship with Russia. Photo of Hvorostovsky in Eugene Onegin at Royal Opera House, 2015: Bill Cooper #view #content

Wigmore Hall’s new photography policy offers a sensible way forward in today’s visual culture and more venues should follow suit There are few things as likely to light my fuse as the blue glow of a phone screen during a concert. Recently at the Royal Opera House a lady in front of me took out her phone to photograph Rigoletto mid-aria and I nearly choked on my own outrage. Yet, if you look at my social media feeds, you’ll see they’re full of slightly fuzzy photographs of soloists, bands or actors acknowledging applause, usually taken on my phone from somewhere at the back of the hall. Cartier-Bresson it isn’t, but these snaps capture something of the moment and serve as a visual focus for my posts, which sometimes spark interesting conversations with music friends and colleagues around the world. I’ve always had strict rules with myself about this. For classical concerts, I only get my phone out once the final applause has started, leaving it on airplane mode in my bag during the concert so I can spring into action. I try not to distract anyone else during the performance or lose my own presence in the music. As soon as I have an adequate image I get back to loud clapping and forget about the phone. I may take a few shots during rock gigs, but only as surreptitiously and quickly as possible. So I was happy on a recent visit to Wigmore Hall to see their new policy, which is clearly signalled in a series of projections on the back wall before the concert and again after the interval: phones must be switched off and no photographs except during applause. Allowing photography at the applause stage seems a sensible, pragmatic development. The fact is that many people expect to be able to take photographs these days – maybe not your average Wigmore Hall visitor, but young, social-media-savvy people who might not have been there before to learn the conventions. Other venues may put up no-phone signs but people ignore them, whether to photograph or go on Facebook (as I discovered from the the man sitting next to me at the National Theatre’s Follies). Like it or not, visual imagery is central to today’s culture and story-telling, and venues have no choice but to accept that. They can, however, lay down reasonable boundaries to make sure that phones-as-cameras don’t impinge on the musical experience, and educate audiences to responsible behaviour. After all, it’s in the best interests of venues and artists alike for punters to take photographs and post them to social media – it’s basically free marketing. I’d argue that more people should be doing it more often. My photos may not be slick and posed, or show the artist to their best advantage, but they are a record of the event, and given that few venues regularly hire professional photographers, often the only one. They might not directly sell another ticket or a CD, but they get names into the ether and start conversations that will. For any cultural organisation that wants to be more open (and which doesn’t?), it’s essential to make this sort of interaction easy, without annoying anyone. The Wigmore’s policy does just that and I welcome it – maybe other venues will follow suit. #comment #wigmore #view

The charismatic, idealistic, often contrarian and utterly unique violinist is 95 years young today. In celebration, here is an interview I did with him to mark his 90th birthday, for The Strad’s August 2012 issue. The afternoon I spent with him in a Paris café, trying to get him to answer questions rather than turn them back into questions for me, create some intricate wordplay or go into a philosophical reverie, was one of the most exciting I’ve ever spent. On learning repertoire I was never a workaholic, except when I had to work really hard, for example when I agreed to record the Paganini caprices. I had never played them all, so I would come home and practise until 4.30 in the morning and then get back into the studio for 9. To learn a Paganini caprice overnight takes an eternity! Funnily enough, I had more problems with the ones I knew better than with the ones I had just learnt, because I really had to practise them. The lesson is that you should never rest on your laurels. Everything you do, whether in your fingers or your mind, has to be continuously polished. On performing A concert is an event for me. I don’t play one concert exactly the same as another. Today people might be playing in Tokyo one night, then flying to LA, then to Paris, and then to New Delhi. I call this the ‘jet lag’ way of playing. How can you live music in that way? I’m not accusing anybody, but it makes it so that you’re trying to play evenly – not too much of this, not too little of that – and that influences the whole interpretation and expectations. People engage you if they know you’re reliable. What does that mean? Do you want music that’s reliable? Do you think Schumann wrote his music for someone who was reliable? On making a career Today you have to have the stamina to make the kind of career that is expected of you if you’re ‘successful’. What does it mean to be a ‘successful’ musician? You can play a hundred or a thousand concerts, as long as there are two or three occasions that you remember yourself. If it meets what the audience wants, you made a good marriage, but it’s more important that there is something that remains in your mind. On managers There was always business. Sol Hurok was the great European agent: he was my manager and brought me to America. He didn’t have 150 artists on his list, but the artists he had were all individuals. When Horowitz, Piatigorksy and Milstein were youngsters, they left Russia and came to play in bars and whorehouses. They came with their friend Alexander Merovitch – he was their manager because he believed in them. He lived with them, suffered with them, played pranks with them. Those managers don’t exist now. You have people with business sense, who treat their artists like potatoes. It’s terrible, and people go along with it. But I see a new generation of younger people who are beginning to play for themselves. That gives me hope. On conflict in music When people say, ‘This quartet is wonderful – the players all sound the same,’ it’s terrible. What is democracy? It’s not that everyone should think the same – that’s a dictatorship. A real democracy is where people are individuals, and because of that they have an interest in living together and they find things to agree or disagree with. When you play together you shouldn’t follow each other – you should each be yourself and get together somehow. Look at the Amadeus Quartet – each one of them was a completely different person, but what they did together was the most beautiful thing you can think of. People talk about peace as if it’s something you put on a table. It’s not. Life is a conflict – there is conflict every second. Of course, conflict where there’s killing is bad, but conflict in itself is a great thing if you live it and feel it, and see the contrasts. On today’s stars When you think of the period between the First and Second World Wars, there were many wonderful players, each one a monument in themselves: Elman, Kreisler, Heifetz, Milstein, Menuhin, Busch, Sammons, Oistrakh, Francescatti, Huberman, Enescu, Szigeti – and that’s not all. Each one of them playing the same music would be a completely different work. Today you have marketable potential if you fit into a certain format that one can sell without too much of a problem. Sometimes you see one or two artists launched like that and after a couple of years you don’t hear of them, and it’s very cruel and very bad. On emotion in music I don’t think players allow themselves to suffer, or get upset about things that don’t concern them personally. If you make music but you don’t have the emotion to move people, what’s the point? In masterclasses, I try to make students understand that they shouldn’t only be motivated by perfect technique. It sounds like a cliché to say music is the most important thing – it’s so obvious. Technique should be about gaining the ability to play what you are feeling and what you want to give, to create a situation where when you play, you forget about your work. If someone comes to me after a concert and says, ‘You must have practised a lot,’ it means I must have played badly. On teaching Everyone has talent – all children are gifted in one way or another, until they are educated. Education has become an industry and it leads towards dislocation. I remember talking with Nathan Milstein, who was a good friend. He was an Auer pupil and told me that Auer never talked about anything technical. Maybe that’s the best way to teach – to bring out what is inside the pupil, not to say, ‘That’s the way to do it.’ I don’t like the word ‘teaching’ – it’s pretentious. I don’t consider myself so grand to assume that I can teach you what to do. Photo: Ben Bonouvrier Ivry Gitlis performs Saint-Saëns’s Rondo et capriccioso: Bach's Chaconne: #gitlis #violin #teaching #interview

New research shows how music education benefits not only the recipients but also the teachers. So why is this lesson so slow to sink in? A new report by London Music Masters into ‘The impact of community engagement for professional musicians’ highlights the fact that musicians who do this work experience high levels of satisfaction. Obvious? Sure. But the research, by Royal College of Music academic Sara Ascenso, goes much further in detailing and categorising the many specific types of satisfaction, and raises important questions for the music world. The benefits are personal, and run very deep. Maybe this is obvious, but community education has often been seen as something that orchestras ‘have’ to do to get funding, or some sort of moral obligation of ‘giving back’. What emerges here is how many of the musicians surveyed feel that they themselves are benefitting – literally being given to – through this work. As London Music Masters’ Executive Director Rob Adediran pointed out at the launch meeting at Wigmore Hall in October, it can’t be called ‘outreach’ any more because the term is one-sided and therefore inaccurate (as well as rather condescending) – hence ‘engagement’. The research was done among 15 musicians from the London Philharmonic Orchestra and London Contemporary Orchestra, from 26 to 57 years of age, with years of professional experience as classical musicians ranging from 4 to 35. They had taken part in London Music Masters’ innovative scheme to bring players into school situations, as well as other community music projects. The musicians were interviewed at length about their community engagement. The information they shared and the benefits they detailed were broken down into three categories – skills, identity and well-being. Sub-categories were individual meaning, meaning for society, personal skills, interpersonal skills, musical skills, teaching skills, cognitive skills, feeling good and functioning well. Specific benefits they discussed included improved teamwork, communication, perspective, tolerance, flexibility, readiness, understanding of child psychology, improvisation, musical communication, class management, focus, joy, gratitude, engagement, social well-being, etc etc. Beneath this good news, there was, though, a subtext about the life of the orchestral member. Players spoke of how education work allowed them to feel creative and heard in a way that they didn’t within the orchestra, and a rare sense of connection with their audience – highlighting how unexpressed and remote some orchestral players feel. One orchestral player told Ascenso: ‘Prior to me getting involved with these projects [...] I was always too conscious, I’m a perfectionist therefore in my work and my performance, I need everything to be spot on and then when I give a reason for anybody to – to say anything bad... So when you are with children and you understand that you just have to let go and stop being that... you can’t be too serious but you need to find the balance. And all of a sudden, you do need to find some room for mistakes, and just be yourself. So that’s very powerful.’ Another said, ‘A lot of the time orchestral players hide behind their part, you know. They hide behind their desk, they play the notes. But actually you don’t have to be an individual to be in an orchestra but to work with children, you have to be an individual... it’s a challenge, but it’s freeing!’ This subtext was picked up at the launch event, where after watching this video, and hearing some of the interviews, there was a heated discussion among the invited music education people about this sense of dissatisfaction. This led to another discussion about the hierarchy in the music world whereby educational work and teaching are far down the status ladder. This is undoubtedly and disgracefully true. Some of this comes from outside the profession: teaching is too-often still regarded as something that people do if they haven’t quite succeeded as players, however good the teacher and the massive their impact. There may also be political reasons for this status, and the lack of adequate renumeration, and these will get worse with the creative arts falling off the EBacc syllabus. But some of it also comes from within our own musical ecosystem. It still seems that young musicians go to conservatoire to learn to be performers. They might take a module of pedagogy along the way, and even undertake some educational projects, but by and large, their time is spent practising and playing. Then they go out into the big wide world and realise one of the ways they can make money is to teach, so they do that. But it’s by default, and most likely, through instinct and without solid knowledge, especially for the very tricky process of starting up youngsters. If they had a good teacher they might draw on those techniques, if they can remember them, but the chances are they will, at least in the beginning, be a little haphazard. It’s not surprising that so many of the conservatoire professors I’ve interviewed talk about how much emergency repair work they have to do on new students (read Diana Cummings’ opinions on the matter here). Some countries have this sewn up. One of the orchestral musicians interviewed in the paper put it: ‘We go on tour so much, and you just get the feeling that music education is so much more important, a journey, and just like that people are just much better educated with music and that sort of thing, I think it’s really lacking here.’ Certainly many Russian players have a solid background of pedagogic method behind them that they are able to pass on. Venezuelan El Sistema students learn to teach each other from an early age, and I understand that professors in Italy teach in front of the whole class so that the ones who are watching learn the pedagogic techniques without the pressure of being under scrutiny themselves. In an interview I did with Itzhak Rashkovsky, he explained that at the Rubin Academy, teaching was embedded in the programme for two years. So why can’t these things happen in this country? Why is there a perception that you only learn by practising and having lessons, when players in this research, and so many musicians I’ve interviewed, say that they become better performers through teaching? Some of it might come through the institutions themselves, where there is so much for students to do and to take part in that they simply don’t have the time for extra pressures. Maybe it also comes from professors, who would rather students practised six hours a day. I've never understood this paradox – teachers don’t seem to want their students to train properly to do what they themselves do. Whether it’s an orchestral player doing educational work, a new graduate teaching a classroom full of beginners, or the most celebrated professor in the world, teaching is surely one of the most important professions there is and we need to build proper pedagogy into the music system in a more comprehensive and progressive way. Not only would we guarantee future generations of players and audiences, and raise current performance standards, but as this research shows, everyone would benefit. Win–win. Something needs to change. But what? And how? #musiceducation #view

Car boot sales offer a brilliant lesson in salesmanship, and for this rookie also raised questions about buying and selling violins I’m not a natural sales person. I have an English coyness in talking about money and I don’t like asking for things. Put those together and you get an awkward bargainer. But as someone wise once told me, life is fundamentally about selling – whether it’s yourself, your opinion, your writing or your playing. It doesn’t matter how good you are at something, you still have to sell it. As cynical as that sounds, it helps to know and understand that. So it was salutary to take myself out of my comfort zone and learn a trick or two at a car boot sale. I did my second one yesterday, at the Capital Car Boot Sale in Pimlico, having relieved my mother’s cupboards of random plates and jugs, some prints and silly tsatskes – all in the name of decluttering. There’s a certain amount of ritual to the occasion. The serious dealers descend as soon as you arrive, as you unpack, and it’s like an animal feeding frenzy – I’m sure that’s part of their strategy, to get you off balance. They pick things up and hassle you for a price while you’re still tearing off paper, and go into the car boot while your back is turned. They look unimpressed by everything, and have hard eyes. They know what they’re looking for and how much they’re prepared to pay for it. The first sale I did, I was under the impression that it was weak to be the first to suggest a price, so initially I asked them what they wanted to pay for things. I’d feebly add a pound to their offer and they’d be satisfied and walk away with a great bargain. Then I tried the other way, starting off at what seemed to be a high price and get them to haggle down, which seemed to work better and at least made me feel like I had some control. I was getting the hang of it. After the first frenzy, things settle down and become a little more relaxed and friendly – it is mainly the quirky and less valuable things that are left. People pass by and maybe stop and talk, and occasionally pick up something they like. Things I learnt about the process: The trade experts know exactly what things are and how much they need to pay to make their margin. They’re not playing games or haggling for fun. I was only selling old pots and cloths and things, among which were no potential Ming vases, so my ignorance didn’t matter. But if I had thought any of it was valuable, I should have done proper research about values and sale prices. Knowledge is power. Due diligence is essential – no one is going to do a rookie a favour. The good stuff goes immediately. No one wants broken things. I had a few beautiful Noritake cups and saucers and an old Meisen-looking plate, all with tiny cracks. The traders put them down as soon as they saw them – they wouldn’t touch goods that were damaged. You know when someone wants something – their eyes fall on it immediately and they look at nothing else. They make the decision very quickly. Usually they don’t even haggle if they want it. People who spend the most time at the table, picking different things up and chatting, are the least likely to buy anything. It may be fun to talk to them, but there may not be much point. Most people who say they’re going to come back for something, don’t. Crowds attract crowds. You can be alone with the tumbleweed for an hour and then as soon as a few people stop by, there will be a massive crowd. People don‘t really like haggling – many walk straight on when you name a price, so it’s best to set a realistic price in the first place. It’s surprising how even the most obscure paraphernalia has value for someone – maybe there really is a place for everything. One lady took away a pile of old embroidered damask pillowcases that had been in the family for a few generations, and was incredibly excited about having them on her bed. She was so thrilled by them, and I was so pleased to see them going to a good home, that I gave her a pretty fair price. So I guess it pays to be nice. With half an hour to go to the end, dropping prices made no difference and sounding desperate really didn’t help! Obviously, buying a piece of tat at a car boot sale is very different from investing a lot of time and money in an instrument that you’re going to spend the rest of your life with, but I’d be interested to know if there are similarities. Are any of these phenomena familiar to my violin dealer and player friends? Any other tips about buying and selling? #instruments #view

In this interview I did with Itzhak Perlman for The Strad’s Violin Heroes supplement in 2009, he remembered and analysed the violinists who had influenced him growing up, starting with – who else? – Jascha Heifetz. Like many people, I’m sure, as a child I listened obsessively to Perlman LPs, especially his Bruch G minor Concerto and his encore pieces, and I’m sure my love of the violin, as well as the ideal of sound and style I hold in my ear, are directly thanks to him. In the interview he talks about how he felt when he talked to Heifetz: ‘I would be sitting there, and every now and then I’d say to myself, “I’m talking to God.”’ And that’s exactly how it felt interviewing Perlman. ‘I have a hundred violinists who have inspired me. What is also important is when they inspired me, though. When you’re younger you get inspired by one type of artist, and as you grow up you become more aware of what other artists have to offer. The first person in my evolution is Jascha Heifetz: he is probably my number one hero, if you wish to rate them. All fiddle players, me included, consider him to be God, the king. In my day there were a lot of kids who were trying to imitate him. When someone’s playing is that powerful and characteristic, there are so many things you can hear that are open to replication. He was the first one that people really tried to copy. Heifetz lived in Beverly Hills, and every time I would go to Los Angeles, I would call him up, and he would say, “Why don’t you come?” So I would go to his house for about an hour and we talked. I would tell him that his incredible style and the dominance of the way he played was a curse to students. He asked why, and I explained, “Because everyone is trying to imitate you and they can’t.” When people imitate someone they don’t try to give the essence of what this person is about – they take the dominant traits and try to characterise them, so it becomes a caricature without the content. That’s what happened with him. I was never in that situation. In fact, I would always fight with my fellow students, saying, “Sure he’s a good fiddle player, but what’s-his-name is more profound.” But as I grew up I realised he was an amazing artist. Heifetz was a great colourist. He used colours everywhere he could in a piece. Of course it always sounded like him: he was not someone who would say, “I’m going to do the music and sacrifice my personality and make sure that it’s all correct.” When you heard Heifetz play, you heard Heifetz play. You didn’t hear Beethoven or Bruch; you heard Beethoven played by Heifetz, or Bruch played by Heifetz. He’d play little pieces that I would listen to, thinking, “This is such an amazing piece.” Then I’d buy the music, look at it and think, “That’s nothing. That’s a nothing little piece. How come it’s so great?” It was great because of what he did with it. He transformed a simple piece into something that was amazing, something that was unique in style. Heifetz was the first modern player. There are some old recordings of people such as Ysaÿe, Sarastate or Joachim from a long time ago, before the Kreisler era, and you hear a particular way of playing. Then there was Kreisler, who was good but still in the old-fashioned way of playing. Heifetz was the first one to play in the grand heroic tradition. He was an individualist. I admired people like Milstein, Elman, Kreisler, all of whom had totally different styles, but Heifetz created a tradition for himself. However, if you hear his early recordings, he sounded like the players of his day, until he was about 16 or 17, and then he developed his own style and it was off to the races. My first teacher, Rivka Goldgart, was a great Russian traditionalist and she told me I had to do what Heifetz did – scales every day. When he stopped playing, he would still play scales in the morning. As a result, when he played there was nobody with such perfect intonation, in addition to everything else. That was because he was sworn to this routine, until the end of his life. I remember once I was speaking with him and told him that I loved the Elgar Concerto. He said, “I love the Elgar, but my real love is the Walton.” He was very involved in the writing of the piece and he would talk about that. I would be sitting there, and every now and then I’d say to myself, “I’m talking to God.” He had problems socially – he didn’t feel comfortable. I’m sure he felt great warmth towards people but he didn’t show it. If you talked to him he would be very cool. We had a fine relationship but it was very proper, businesslike, not touchy-feely – that wasn’t him. Heifetz was not actually my first hero, though. That was David Oistrakh. I was absolutely crazy about him and the way he played. If I was every close to trying to emulate someone it was Oistrakh, although that only lasted for a couple of years. I had a Fritz Kreisler era, too, for a few months, when I would only listen to him. He was an incredibly intimate artist. I think of listening to him in a room where there’s a fire going, reading a book. I would imagine him as too intimate to play with an orchestra – for me he was best in violin-and-piano repertoire. When you listen to recordings of Kreisler, even scratched 78rpm records, you can hear the shimmering tone he had. I was enamoured with that. I had an Isaac Stern period, where I stopped vibrating, because his vibrato was very economical. My Zino Francescatti phase didn’t take very long because he over-vibrated and he was a great artist, but I didn’t go with that. I had a short bout with Nathan Milstein, with his cool way of playing, the way he used vibrato and his incredible cleanliness. There was something about his vibrato that made his playing sound very elegant and sparkling clean, so I went through that. You try to do things that are typical of the player. I saw him once and we started to talk about Heifetz, and I said, “Heifetz has these incredible recordings.” Milstein replied, “Forget the recordings – you haven’t heard him if you didn’t hear him live. The recordings didn’t even do him justice.” And this was a person who was his classmate. The important thing about having heroes is to get something and then to make it your own and go on. The people who get stuck with a Heifetz thing are never quite themselves, like in the Jewish story called The Dybbuk, about a person that goes into somebody else’s body – the Jewish version of The Exorcist. Sometimes when you have someone like Heifetz going into your every way of playing it’s almost as if you can’t excise this person. Some people had that happen to them. Each great player had their own kind of characteristic: for example Heifetz was fiery, with a lot of slides and energetic vibrato: Kreisler had his burnished, intimate style. These players were on my way to my ear education and that’s the best thing about listening to people. You get more background. At the Perlman Music Program one of the things we do is to play videos of old artists, just to see what people did historically. Today young kids tend to listen to what’s going on at the moment, so we always try to play videos. Kids now also tend to move a lot, but if you watch a Heifetz or Milstein, they don’t move very much. It was very grounded and music just came out. It’s nice to educate kids by playing my heroes for them. Sometimes they say, “That’s nice,” or sometimes they say, “That’s weird,” but it’s important, otherwise you get stuck and the style becomes less and less important.’ Photo: Lisa Marie Mazzucco #perlman #heifetz #milstein #francescatti #oistrakh #stern #interview

Alexey Stadler‘s unexpected Proms debut last night was such stuff as careers are made on Performing at the Proms on a day’s notice is the sort of thing that features in students’ nightmares (probably with no clothes on), but 25-year-old cellist Alexey Stadler handled last night’s unexpected debut at one of the world’s most prestigious music festivals, in place of an ill Truls Mørk, with poise and guts – even performing a movement of Bach as an encore, spurred on by a delighted audience. He had plenty to feel confident about, though – this was an intelligent performance of Shostakovich’s First Cello Concerto, with long lines and beautiful phrasing. If it was under-rehearsed, there was little evidence – although he had performed it in June with the San Francisco Symphony and Vladimir Ashkenazy. He played close attention to the orchestra, especially in a beautiful duet with the clarinet in the slow movement. Stadler holds his cello quite low, reminiscent of Rostropovich, but as yet he lacks the weight of sound and depth of vibrato of that master. There might have been a little more ugliness and anger in the characters of Shostakovich’s acerbic concerto, but no doubt that will come with age. Indeed, the Bach (the Sarabande from the Suite no.2) suited him better, beautifully conceived, simple and unmannered, but expressive and meaningful. It certainly made me want to hear more from him, and I’m sure we will. The Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under Vasily Petrenko gave a disciplined but warm-sounding performance of Rachmaninoff’s Third Symphony, which was all the more enjoyable for building steadily and not being pulled around too much, and there were glowing solos from concertmaster Thelma Handy. I enjoyed Emily Howard’s Torus for the impression it gave me of a moving canvas with sweeps of orchestral string textures and colours, overlaid with beautiful wind and brass details. Reading the programme later I realised that wasn’t the composer’s intention at all, and it was all about maths, but nevertheless the work was compelling. Photo: BBC/Chris Christodoulou #cello #proms #shostakovich #view

Violinist Gilles Apap has one of the most original voices today, crossing easily between classical and folk styles, often in the same piece. But he found this voice himself – despite his teachers, rather than because of them – and recommends that young players do the same It’s not easy being original in the world of classical music. Most of the music you play was composed hundreds of years ago and has been performed millions of times by other – better – players. You’ll have spent much of your youth listening to teachers explaining ‘the way’ to do things, and hundreds of hours in practice rooms trying to do what they say. When you make it into the profession, you find that classical music lovers are used to hearing things a certain way, whether that’s informed by academic research, taste or tradition, and aren’t always open to divergence. So to go your own way takes imagination, an unconventional bent, a certain sense of whimsy, a hint of wilfulness and even a touch of provocativeness. Meet Gilles Apap. I first came across the Algeria-born, French-bred and California-living violinist in 2006, when a YouTube of him performing Mozart’s Third Violin Concerto went viral. It showed him improvising his own cadenza to the last movement, complete with a variety of jazz and folk themes, whistling and blues singing. It was fresh and wonderful, and the fact that it was going viral indicated that he had created something truly original. It even became the subject of some academic research. His quirky, entrancing folk playing didn’t undermine what was elegant, personal Mozart playing. Ten years later, for all this internet fame, Apap is still rather a hidden gem of the classical music world. Surprisingly, he had never performed in London before May, when he came to Cadogan Hall with the Bristol Ensemble. I wasn’t able to make the concert but I sat in on the rehearsal. Apap is one of the most free players I can think of – physically, as well as mentally – seemingly with no extraneous tension in his lanky body, his head often raised from the chin rest, cocked both to hear what his colleagues are doing and as if he is about to speak. His playing certainly speaks. His Mozart has old-school charm – meaningful with inflection and nuance; always spontaneous and charming; nothing ever dull, repetitive, ugly or aggressive. Other recordings of Bach, Ravel and Vivaldi online also demonstrate his beautiful sense of expressive phrasing and rich use of colour, even on his no-name violin, although they probably don‘t satisfy the historically informed or the technical pedants. Then there is his folk playing. For the Cadogan Hall concert he was playing his new cadenza for Mozart’s Fifth Concerto, which is even broader in the styles he covers, and includes a brilliant skit on one of Mozart’s themes in Swedish fiddle style. There are gypsy and Indian sections, each seemingly in perfect idiom, as if he were born to the languages. At the end of the rehearsal, he led the orchestra’s players into an improvised jam session, the looks of embarrassment on some of the players’ faces reminding one how unusual this is for classical musicians. I was able to have a short chat with Apap the day after the Cadogan Hall concert. These days, his main commitment is with the Nordic Chamber Orchestra, with which he tours twice a year, while his home base is Santa Barbara, California. With the Nordic Chamber Orchestra, he has just finished a documentary about the Beethoven Violin Concerto, which, surprisingly, he has just learnt and performed for the first time. He’s not going to get too folky with it, though, he says: ‘I’m doing it as pure as I can. I didn’t feel like I should be doing my own thing because the concerto is an old-fashioned thing that I’ve loved since I was a kid, with the Kreisler cadenza.’ The Beethoven is close to his heart, as his mother used to play him Menuhin’s recording, which made him determined to meet the great violinist, and which ultimately set him on the road to being a violinist. ‘My mother used to put on the vinyl of Menuhin playing the Beethoven the whole time when I was little. That’s what got me into the violin. When I was 21 I started practising the Bartók Solo Violin Sonata because I wanted to go to the Menuhin Competition to meet him. I’d never done a competition in my life, but he gave me a prize.’ (Apap won the Contemporary Music prize in the 1985 edition of the contest.) ‘I put my hand in a heavy door and slammed it. I didn’t want to play. I didn’t want to be on stage‘ This turn of events is surprising given that Apap hadn’t played the violin for three years at that point, revealing the conflict he felt around performing: ‘When I was 18, I hated being on stage, so I put my hand in a heavy door and slammed it. I didn’t want to play. I didn’t want to be on stage. The doctor said I wouldn’t be able to play the violin again, but when I was 21, I played again. Life goes on.’ He also had record contracts with Sony and EMI, but not for long: ‘I cancelled all of that. It was too much weirdness. I came home and forgot about it.’ His Mozart cadenza wasn’t always well received: ‘Doing what I do takes a lot of guts. I’ve been booed a couple of times. Oh my god. It was a full house. They weren’t expecting it. Me too!’ So he stopped playing his cadenza, until Menuhin himself encouraged him to start again. Nor is it just the classical music world where his boundary-crossing has been questioned. He tells me of a gig he did with the celebrated gypsy violinist Roby Lakatos, taking the guest spot in the Monti Czardas: ‘After we played, his musicians were laughing, and I was curious, so I said, “Roby, what’s going on?” He said, “We’re not supposed to play like that. At gypsy school, we learn to play to a certain standard. You play like an old gypsy and they teach you not to play like an old gypsy.”’ ‘I don’t want anyone else to tell me how I’m going to play, and I don’t like telling people how to play’ But then Apap never had much time for what was taught at school. His biography lists violin teachers, but he claims to be mainly self-taught: ‘I never really studied with anyone. I did it by myself. I wanted to learn it. I wanted to feel it. I don’t want anyone else to tell me how I’m going to play, and I don’t like telling people how to play. I’m 53 – it’s getting there, you know. I let everything happen naturally – by musical instinct. I had a really brilliant teacher, but I never listened to her. Nothing she said made sense. It didn’t register. It’s like listening to your dad. I was with my dad the other day and he said, “Put some shoes on, you’re going to catch a cold.” I said, “Dad, how long have we known each other? I’m 53 years old. I just realised that I never listened to you once in my entire life.”’ His attitude is refreshing in an age where, within the string community, who you learn with is a vital element of your musical CV, with certain teachers acquiring a cult status, however well they actually teach. His approach places the musical responsibility squarely on the student, rather than the teacher. And while lip service is often paid by teachers about teaching students to teach themselves, and the best teachers indeed do this, the model of students doing what they’re told persists. ‘If you don’t hear the sound coming out, if you don’t cultivate that – articulation, phrasing, music and culture, and all that – no one is going to teach it to you’ Apap is insistent about this: ‘Who is going to help you but yourself? If you don’t hear the sound coming out, if you don’t cultivate that – articulation, phrasing, music and culture, and all of that – if you don’t teach that to yourself, no one is going to teach it to you. You have to hear it yourself.’ And maybe it‘s through these explorations that players can find their own distinctive mode of communication. He has some harsh words about the younger generation. ‘When I see these young guys playing nowadays I’m bored to tears. You can sound like everyone else if you work twelve hours a day and you have a little bit of talent, but every one is going to sound the same.’ It‘s a common refrain – Viktoria Mullova said the same thing here. But what advice does he give young players to avoid this boredom? ’I listen to all the great players who come to me for advice and it’s always hard to tell them, “Be yourself. Become yourself. Take charge.” There is a moment where you have to let it go – all the anxieties, all the things you learnt. There’s a moment where your self has to decompose. That’s why I’m doing what I do – because I never listened to my teachers.’ The same approach applies to the physicality of playing. I ask him how he has come to be so relaxed in his playing: ‘I don’t know. I had a big gig with the Munich Symphony and someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Man, you’re so easy and relaxed when you play,” and I was thinking, “This is the hardest thing I have to do.” It’s just feeling the motion. It’s like painting, and like your arm is a brush. When you have this knowledge between your fingers, your body lets go. I teach myself and try a lot of physical things to feel things differently. It’s all in the legs. It’s just a matter of balancing. But the main thing is, don’t listen to nobody!’ Even if this sounds a little esoteric, there is a certain discipline to it: ‘You’ve got to focus your mind. Your brain has to be so free. It’s really hard to understand yourself, the motion, to make the violin easy.’ How does he practise? ‘I take one little segment and jam it, and then jam it into another segment. I visualise everything, and put in a little bit of this and a bit of that. At the moment I’m learning Bartók, Beethoven, Bach, and a Haydn symphony. Every week I have to memorise two hours of music, and I don’t have the time. The body and the mind have to be relaxed. You have to have a good surrounding – you can get energy from everything that goes on around, especially people, but then you have this time by yourself, and it has to be very efficient. That’s why I visualise. I take one little spot and I visualise it, without my instrument. It’s really hard to focus all the time, and to listen to yourself. Sometimes I listen to myself and think, “This is beautiful.” And then I go, “No, this is not, your mind is not on it.” It’s hard to get into a mode where you’re really free and in tune. That moment, even if it’s just five or ten minutes, is the most important part. There’s nothing else.’ There is another key to the expressivity of his playing: ‘I teach myself with my voice the whole time. If I do something by Bach, I always see it as a voice, rather than as a line.’ ‘There is a moment where you have to let it go – all the anxieties, all the things you learnt’ There is a passion other than music in Apap’s life, one that may explain his laidback California dude style: ‘When I go home, I go surfing every day. A regular day would be like two hours in the water in the morning.’ It’s easy to see how he could relish the freedom of the waves, a world away from the personal demands of playing the violin, and the professional demands of conforming to certain musical and business models. He is a sort of musical visionary, and deserves wider acclaim. Despite what the classical music establishment might consider being non-conformist or radical, and whatever one might think about him inserting his tunes into a Mozart concerto, his playing is as old-school as it comes. It’s what I would call ‘the Nigel Kennedy Paradox’: scratch the surface of players who are outwardly unconventional and progressive, and you often find deeply old-fashioned innocent musical souls who are able to communicate in a very direct, honest way. Apap just doesn’t fit into any neat boxes, and maybe we’re still living in a world where that matters. There are some small signs of progress in the boundaries between classical music and other genres being broken down, but it‘s not happening quickly enough. Would a major London orchestras programme one of his Mozart concertos? I’d like to think so, but I‘m not sure. In the meantime, Apap leads a fairly anonymous life for much of the year: ‘I live in a place where nobody knows what I do. They know I love to surf and play old time music and take care of my bees.’ And maybe that’s just how he likes it. #apap #jazz #folk #interview

I’ve interviewed many wonderful musicians over the year, have learnt much and had my thinking challenged many times. Here are just a few of the highlights, with links to the full articles: 1 Being an amateur is something to aspire to: perfection is over-rated The late Peter Cropper, former leader of the Lindsays ‘I didn’t start practising until I was 18, and I had a lot to make up. I think that’s why the quartet was successful for the four of us – because we were four amateurs, and amateurs love things much more than professionals. Hans Keller said that there isn’t such a thing as a professional quartet, because quartet people love playing quartets. We did it because we loved it, and I think it came across. I don’t say it was always immaculate. Who wants perfection? Perfection is sterile. We’re human beings.’ 2 We need more global alliances in classical music, especially between music colleges Pinchas Zukerman, violin and viola ‘How can we bring up the standards? Let’s create global coalitions for music education, not just according to country, but bringing everyone together through technology. We’re forming all sorts of alliances, but music schools still feel isolated. One music college doesn’t talk to another. It’s enough already! In medicine, doctors share information about the same patient, but we can’t do that in music. Why are we so isolated?’ 3 Performers can’t demand an audience not cough Viktoria Mullova, violinist ‘The atmosphere in concerts is so stiff. It’s not like when you listen to jazz or pop music. The audience is becoming older and older. People are scared to cough. It’s terrible. What if you want to cough? You don’t do it on purpose. What can you do? I don’t consider myself so important that people can’t even cough. If you can magically provide the kind of sound that fascinates everyone so they start not even breathing then that’s great, but you can’t demand that.’ 4 Being a musician is easier when you’re young Alexander Pavlovsky, first violinist of the Jerusalem Quartet ‘We were 22 when we first played Bartók no.6 and we had fewer questions. I’m not saying it was wrong – it was different. At that age you have passion and endless energy and fewer questions for yourself, because life is easy. Today you know life, the profession and your instrument better, but you have a thousand times more questions. Unless you find a good answer for these questions you can’t be peaceful. They are always on your mind. At the same time you also have much less time to answer them, because you are learning so many new pieces to play for a season. We were given some good advice, that the stage between ages 30 and 40 is a very interesting transition, but it’s also very dangerous. Many musicians and ensembles stop playing and disappear.’ 5 You can learn a lot just by watching and copying other players Paul Silverthorne, violist ‘There are things you can only learn by catching a feeling from another player. When I left the Medici Quartet, I played with the London Sinfonietta, with Nona Liddell, and I used to marvel at her bow arm. It was totally relaxed and yet she made a massive sound. There was no point asking her how she did it. The only way I could pick anything up was by sitting next to her, imagining what her arm felt like and trying to make my arm feel like that.’ 6 The best way to learn jazz violin is not to listen to jazz violinists Regina Carter, violinist ‘The interesting thing about learning this music is that there are no books one, two and three saying, “This is how you bow a swing passage” or “This is how you get the sound.” You just have to listen and copy the sound. For example, as violin players we’re taught to use the whole bow, but with swing or bebop especially, you have to use less bow and be very light on the string. You have to figure out bowings for yourself because some of those lines are not what you expect them to be. You have to figure out how you want to use vibrato, or not use it. I love Ben Webster and the big vibrato he has on his horn so I copy that by slowing it down, or sometimes I’ll use a faster vibrato to get an effect, but the regular vibrato we learnt in class doesn’t work.’ 7 Young musicians should spend less time online. (And maybe some others of us, too!) Thomas Demenga, cellist ‘Young people spend too much time with their media. In my time I practised a lot at one point – five or six hours a day. If you don’t do that you don’t develop ability in your hands. It’s like training for sport. Every sportsperson, dancer or circus artist who has to do something difficult has to practise, practise, practise. There’s no way round it. Before auditions my students get scared and then it’s amazing what happens. They play better, even if it’s a week or two where they really go for it. I don’t understand why they don’t do it all the time. I feel stupid saying that it’s because young people waste a lot of time on the Internet and Facebook, but I have children aged between 11 and 25, and I see what happens. They sit in front of their screens for hours every day. You have 50 people who want a tutti job in a second-tier orchestra and these organisations can choose from all these fantastic players. It’s a competition.’ 8 Contemporary and classical music should be viewed as fundamentally the same John Woolrich, composer ‘Many performers don’t come across contemporary music of any kind, even straightforward contemporary music, and they don’t know how to put the notes together in a musical way. The assumption is that contemporary music is different from Brahms, but it’s not. It’s the same in respect of considering a way of shaping it, slowing down, speeding up.’ 9 The world doesn’t need more violinists Shmuel Ashkenasi, violinist ‘I tell my students that the world doesn’t need another violinist. We need artists, poets, people who move us. I try to influence at least the people in my sphere to take chances and to find their voice, while being faithful to the score. I believe it is possible. I recommend anyone who doesn’t truly love music to look elsewhere for a career, because if you don’t have that love, you don’t have the rewards. All you have is a commercial profession. But even if you love it, you have to eat, so you have to make compromises and sometimes it’s painful.’ 10 We might never understand what a composer is actually trying to do but we have to try Catherine Manson, violinist ‘It’s wonderful that composers set out these complex riddles for us, and they still want us to look at them and to figure them out, and to keep them company. Maybe there’s no answer, but it’s our duty to try to get as close to it as we possibly can and to pay them the respect of trying to solve their puzzles.’ 11 Bach’s violin sonatas and partitas reflect the social hierarchies of the time Gil Shaham, violinist ‘I remember reading an article about the traditional Baroque suite. The author explained that the king and queen, or the couple with the highest rank, would dance first: an allemande, courant, or loure, maybe – a stately dance with movement focused on the arms and legs. Then more of the nobility would join in for a courant, a less-formal running dance. By the time you get to the sarabande, a sensual dance where one would use facial expressions and other parts of their body, or a gallant dance, formality relaxes. Finally, everyone dances a gigue. After reading this article, I found I heard this music differently.’ #view