honesty she ties herself in knots think-
ing about this.
“I have many Ukrainian friends. I’m
actually teaching a Ukrainian musician
in a couple of days. Any person who is
my age, anybody that has come into
their own post-Second World War or
Cold War, we sort of can’t fathom the
severity and length and proximity of
this. Are we ever to get past this kind of
atrocity?” She lands herself safely on
the position that a blanket ban of Rus-
sian musicians is unfair and only
explicit Putinists should be kept out.
“Obviously Gergiev — one of the
greatest musicians in the world — he is
one of those people. So I think if that is
something that you can’t have an asso-
ciation with, I think that is absolutely
the right of the festival and any orches-
tra in the world. But I think there are
nuances and degrees. Do I think thatSheku Kanneh-
Mason
The 23-year-old
cellist is teaming
up with his older
brother, Braimah,
a violinist, and the Brazilian guitarist
Plinio Fernandes to play a selection
of string music, including the Bach
Trio Sonata in C major. Book fast —
since he won the 2016 BBC Young
Musician of the Year award and
played at the royal wedding,
Kanneh-Mason has been in demand.
Cadogan Hall, London SW1, Jun 1Jess Gillam
Jess Gillam
is the first
saxophonist to
reach the final
of BBC Young
Musician of the Year (in 2016).
The 23-year-old Cumbrian will
play new pieces and established
works, including music by Björk.
Wigmore Hall, London W1, Jun 2Laura van
der Heijden
At Aldeburgh
Festival, the
25-year-old cellist
will join the Doric
Quartet to play Schubert’s
String Quintet in C major.
Aldeburgh Festival, Jun 5Martin James
Bartlett
The pianist, 25,
will perform
a collection of
pieces including
Rachmaninov’s Where Beauty
Dwells. He broke on to the scene
as the winner of the BBC Young
Musician of the Year in 2014.
Wigmore Hall, Jun 7Alexandra
Whittingham
Videos by the
classical guitarist
have more than
32 million views
on YouTube. Here, she will join
forces with the Vida guitar quartet.
Royal Birmingham Conservatoire,
Jun 12Tom Borrow
The Israeli pianist,
22, will join the
Paris-based
quartet Quatuor
Arod for Dvorak’s
Piano Quintet in A.
Cheltenham Music Festival, Jul 13BOOK NOW — YOUNG
MUSICIANS ON TOURRussian musicians should be prevented
from playing around the world? Abso-
lutely not.”
Less solemn, perhaps, is her view of
what she calls “candy”, meaning pop
culture. She went into education
because she wants children to hear
what’s going on, to cry — as she once
did while playing the third movement
of Beethoven’s Archduke Trio — at the
sheer depth of the experience.
When it comes to pop, she’s mel-
lowed. She’s not trying to stop people
listening to anything. “I think that
many things can coexist. What I would
like to achieve is that people also know
how to experience something else.
They also know how to delve into a
longform work that takes two hours to
get to the crux of, and the beauty of it.”
In the end, as with all art, you either
feel it or you don’t. Her attempts to
explain begin to sound religious, but
she is not a believer. “Not only did I not
grow up in a religious environment, but
my dad was an altar boy. His priest was
drunk most days. My dad had a very
negative memory of religion. My mum
had to leave the Catholic church in
order to marry him. So that was kind of
the home religious environment.”
Yet it becomes clear from everything
she says that music is a form of religion.
“When I was a teenager I was searching
in the violin for an equation that made
five plus five plus ten definitely equal
exactly 20. I was looking for so much
precise detail and information with
regard to my playing that I just felt
would fix these issues. And I couldn’t
understand when they wouldn’t. What
I was missing was a kind of humility to
the level of the volume of tiny little
things in your body and your brain that
go towards doing something like play-
ing the violin.”
This is what drives her to educate.
The frustration she feels when people
don’t get it, don’t realise that music
captures the irreducibility of our expe-
rience. Children can see this.
“When you put all these things
together you see they’re not all control-
lable. It’s why it’s possible for a nine-
year-old to play things in a way that
most 20-year-olds can’t.”
She returns to talking about the
Simpson piece that she’s playing next
week. “The scale, intensity, difficulty
and emotional weight of the concerto
is incredible. Mark brings all he has to
all he does. He feels and expresses so
deeply, thinks so carefully and pours
this into his compositions. It’s a truly
magnificent work — I love playing it and
can’t wait to bring it to Scotland.’
Our interview ends exactly the way
it did when I spoke to Benedetti ten
years ago — with me feeling, in spite of
everything, a lot better about the
world. cThe Scottish premiere of Mark Simpson’s
Violin Concerto with RSNO is at Aberdeen
Music Hall, May 26. rsno.org.uk
22 May 2022 9