Last week I went to Colmar in eastern France to hear my friend Vadim Gluzman play the Brahms Violin Concerto with the National Philharmonic of Russia under Vladimir Spivakov.
It was a quite extraordinary experience for me. I’ve heard Vadim, and the Brahms, many times. But never before from the second row of the audience, just a few feet from the stage. The organisers of smaller events seem to think that guests and VIPs (I am definitely the former) have to be given seats in the front or second rows.
In fact, it can be quite distracting for the soloist or orchestra members to have friends right in front of them, in clear eye contact. I’ve always been in the body of the hall, perhaps the middle of the stalls, for Vadim’s concerts. And I told him firmly afterwards that that’s where I want to be in future, as I could have a heart attack if the Colmar experience was repeated…. We laughed a lot about it, but the experience was of an intensity I have never felt before. I could actually at moments hear the shivering noise of the bow on the strings, as distinct from the note that was produced.
I had to keep remembering to breathe, and I realised why some musicians annotate their scores with “breathing marks”. I could have used some.
Spivakov is a violinist who has become a conductor, and Vadim told me that radically changes their interaction, because the conductor knows intimately what the soloist wants from him and the orchestra at every moment.
It was a wonderful evening, well worth the trip. Because “To Colmar” was not down the road, it was across the full width of France, from the Channel coast (to be precise, 7 kilometres inland), where my house is, to just by the German border, two days each way with my leisurely driving, and a total of 1300 kms, around 800 miles.
I avoided all toll and expressways, and main roads as far as I could, and wandered through “la France profonde” – literally deepest France, but also, particularly in French political terms, the essential France, far from the bling, intellectualism and posturing of Paris and the other big cities. And thereby hangs a further post.
