Last week I played two concerts with a wonderful orchestra, Northern Lights Symphony Orchestra and conductor Adam Johnson. The programme was wonderful. We started the concert with Sibelius’ Serenade in G Minor. This piece was new to me, but then, I felt it had been whispering in my ears for a very long time. Quintessential Sibelius, very similar start to the Violin Concerto, an orchestral whisper before the most beautiful lyrical melody rises from the violin. The orchestration is so sparse and yet so effective. Colours of yellow, red and green a mash of autumn colours rise up in your eye, and you feel that Sibelius yearning of beauty and loneliness inside of you rising and rising. At times it reminded me of the violin concerto, other times Symphony number five and in the darkest moments, seven. Finland and its landscape were always present, in every harmony I could see a forest, it was almost like the imaginary flying I so often dream of. To me Sibelius is an imaginary flying into nature, a lonely yet profoundly beautiful flying. I guess that is the reason why I fell in love with his music before I even knew what love really was.
Although Sibelius’ serenade is a short piece, emotionally it was an important pillar in this, otherwise spectacular programme. I came offstage after the first piece and my thoughts were already engaged with the great and glorious mountain I was about to climb, Brahms’ Violin Concerto in D Major. I have to say, it is one of the most beautiful pieces ever written for the violin. It combines the best of Brahms, the lyricist and Brahms the symphonist. Nobody, maybe apart from Beethoven, has written for the violin so beautifully and yet so richly for the orchestra. The orchestra is like a magnificent body that stretches and expands and creates a wonderful bed for the solo violin to indulge in the most beautiful melodies. But the violin is an extension of the orchestra, the voice that brings their voices to a climax, and sometimes is the voice that emphasizes their mood. The violin is not a lonely instrument wrapped in its own self obsessed virtuosity, but another entity in this great orchestral sonority that takes more from the rich texture than from the virtuosic side.
This has always been the point that fascinated me in this piece. In a way, you have to rise up to Brahms’ genius, you have to understand him, you have to be more than a good violinist, more than having clean intonation and tonal projection and fast finger work. You have, more than anything else, to understand your role in relation to the orchestra. You are another member of this wonderful chamber ensemble. You have to understand that at times oboe or flute is just as important as you, and you have to let them shine and give them space and enhance their lines by bringing out your own line which can be just a note. And then, there are times where the violin has to be an absolute proof of virtuosity and power. You have to shake everybody’s bones with your chords and your cadenzas. There is this dual character of the solo part that makes this concerto such a difficult and challenging mountain to climb.
I had practiced this concerto for years while I was a student and I had produced a good rendition of the piece with a few good orchestras. When I started preparing it for these concerts something strange started to happen. I found it very difficult to practice it, because I felt I knew it so well, and yet I didn’t. In front of me lay a new score. I saw so many things I hadn’t before. I had been so focused on the violin part and my understanding of Brahms’ music in the past few years has changed, or better, been completed with new insights. I wanted the concerto to feel more human, less of the hero, and more of the nature lover, the poet of music, who spent his days walking in the woods and telling his friends during the time he spent in Pörtschach writing the concerto: "the air so bristles with melodies that one has to be careful not to tread on them."
It was this delicacy and sensitive nature of Brahms that was so inspiring to me. I don’t think there are many violinists that don’t feel humble in front of this work, and yet, it gives you so much, so much beauty to look for and such richness of structures to delve into. Another important aspect of the interpretation was timing, the piece needs to have space and time, everything needs time to express itself to the maximum, every little idea needs attention and time, every line the violin shares with the winds or strings, they need to have enough flexibility to stretch together and never feel in a rush. But try and tell that to yourself while the adrenalin is pumping and your heart is beating fast, it is the hardest thing to achieve in a performance, space and time contract in our heads and Brahms’ disappears. It was one of my biggest fears and main goals to keep myself steady, enjoying this music like a nature lover rather that a sportsmen concerned with technical details. But, coming to the technical details of the performance, one should never neglect them, because without accuracy, there is no beauty.
Yes, Brahms loved nature and he loved time and space, and he wrote beautiful songs and waited 20 years and only finished his first symphony at the age of 45, all this tells us that he expected so much from himself. He wanted so much, he condensed everything inside to come out with the essence of himself. It is our responsibility to want to deliver these magnificent works to our best abilities. Without technical details one can never achieve a great melodic line, or a beautiful phrase. It took me years to capture the first theme of the 1st movement after the scary cadenza style entrance of the violin while the woodwinds are exchanging thematic ideas. Without rhythmical precision, this passage would be a mess, without a good legato and perfect string crossing, this passage would be impossible and by the time you land on the most sustained idea, and is your turn to take central stage, you are already overwhelmed with everything, your bow might start to shake, the vibrato might be really shaky and nervous, and again, Brahms’ has disappeared and a frightened you is running the show.
The point I am trying to make is that, beauty is the highest technical challenge for any instrument, especially when you are dealing with the uncompromising Brahms. You can not allow any memory slips, any disruption of the line, any component going out of control, because in order to reach beauty you have to have concurred all your fears, all your weaknesses, you have to, like Brahms, have condensed yourself to the lightest and yet strongest instrument of delivery you can be. Only then, you might have just captured a bit of his genius, only then you might have come a little bit closer to a truthful interpretation, only then you are a real translator.
What I realized practicing this concerto after years of practicing and working on it was that there is never a second time, every interpretation is a first time, because we are always scraping the surface, and every time we scrape we find a new dimension, every time we discover something new, be sure there is another discovery waiting to be made the next time we work on them, one we never considered before. So, for all of those who think that if they have played a piece before and have unearthed their secrets, brace yourself, you are on for a huge surprise…
