"It is in vogue to compare
good music to good wine," says 21-year-old Ilya Gringolts, "but
I think that is inappropriate because once you have tasted the wine,
you have 'gotten' the taste, no matter how good it is. I'd say playing
good music is like reading a great book–each time you read it you
gain more understanding by reading between the lines. Each word can
have a double or triple meaning and you will never reach the bottom.
"That's how it is with good music—it is completely boundless
and that’s why, in the case of Bach’s solo violin works, it
is still being played more than 300 years after its creation."
With the recent release
of his Bach (Deutshe Grammophon)—featuring Partitas Nos. 1 and
3, and Sonata No. 2—this young Russian prodigy has shown that he
can indeed read between the lines and infuse these paramount solo violin
works with remarkable verve. His unorthodox approach, often aggressive
and sometimes sublimely lyrical, has sent some critics into a spin,
especially those expecting a more honeyed interpretation of these polyphonic
masterworks.
"There's something
distinctly Glenn Gould-esque in [Gringolts'] approaches to Bach: His
terse turns of phrase and his overwhelming focus on rhythm and line
rather than depth of tone or texture," the Rough Guide opined
recently of the Gringolts recording.
Others find Gringolts' unique
emphasis on rhythm refreshing in its raw musicality. "Above all,
Gringolts invests his interpretations with uncommon attention to the
rhythmic complexities in these works . . ." notes music critic
Michael Liebowitz of Classics Today. "But [he] is too fine
a musician to let these pieces become mere motoric exercises of virtuosity.
. . ."
During a midnight phone
interview from his Swedish hotel room, an exhausted Gringolts fights
off jet lag after a daylong recording session to discuss his approach
to Bach, as well as the role of Russian composers in his career and
his intense love of modern music.
Throughout the interview
he is bright, self-effacing, amiable, and blessed with a dry wit that
is rapidly gaining him popularity with audiences, conductors, and the
media.
The Big Arc
In June, before returning
to Europe and Russia for the summer, Gringolts (who now calls New York
his home) performed a program of Bach solo violin works—his first
ever all-Bach recital—at the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.
"It was quite strange," he says. "I was quite tired afterwards,
but having listened to a recording of the concert, I can say that the
overall effect was quite nice. I have a nasty habit of hating everything
I do afterward, and this wasn't really an exception. Still, an all-Bach
recital is a huge challenge, especially a solo violin performance, and
I'm glad I did it. "There will be more occasions in the future
to do it."
Beyond the rigors of the
music, he adds, performing alone onstage requires a degree of mental
preparation not needed in duo, trio, quartet, or other settings. "It
has its downside and its upside," Gringolts says of his solo work.
"The downside being that you are in the spotlight and all the pressure
is on you and you’re the only one responsible for all that is going
on."
He adds with a chuckle,
"The upside is that you are in the spotlight, you are the only
one responsible for everything you do . . . It can be a very liberating
experience because you are given much more freedom.
"At the same time,
you are standing there like a big magnet and attracting all of the attention.
"So it's very straining
and quite liberating at the same time."
For his recent Bach disc,
Gringolts selected both "big" and "small" pieces:
Partita No. 1 in B minor, with its achingly beautiful Sarabande, stands
as one of the major works, a towering monument of Baroque polyphony;
Partita No. 3 in E major and Sonata No. 2 in A minor are more relaxed
though certainly not without their weightier moments. Yet he approached
all three pieces from the same relative perspective, keeping "the
bigger canvas" in mind at all times.
"The thing about Bach's
violin fugues—which are a strange creation because you have just
four fingers instead of, in the case of the organ, ten or even a pair
of feet—is that they are very limiting," he explains. "So
it's already amazing what Bach did with his polyphonic writing for four
fingers, and much has been said of that. But once you master all the
huge technical difficulties that have to do with having just four fingers
to deal with the polyphony, you have to think of the form. When you
have four or five voices available, you can elaborate and get more versatile,
more diverse throughout. If you write a fugue for organ and play it
through using different registers and different colors, then it will
come through and it will be beautiful.
"With the violin you
don't have as many colors at hand or as many means to create them. This
means that you have to eliminate coloring altogether because otherwise
with Baroque music, and the violin specifically, one is prone to ruining
it. In other words, the more colors the less shape. When you look at
the Baroque violins and see how poor in color they are, you realize
that is not a bad thing.
"Most critics emphasize
the sound, but I think that in Baroque music one should take this emphasis
off the sound. Once you do that, the most important thing that is left
is shape."
That bold approach has allowed
Gringolts to build "the big arc of the fugue" based on harmony.
"That is the key for a successful construction [of a Bach fugue]."
Since the violin is primarily
a singing instrument, he adds, the polyphony of these pieces presents
a special challenge for string players. "In a way, you are twisting
the nature of the violin to play the kind of stuff that Bach wrote,"
he says. "You have to be able to imitate polyphonic writing that
is best suited to the harpsichord or the organ and make it sound un-violinistic,
so that all the voices come through equally."
In practicing Bach’s
solo works, Gringolts sets up an ongoing series of rehearsals during
which he analyzes the individual voicings in order to bring out separate
lines. "It's just great," he says. "It's like an organist
working with register. It's a huge challenge but to me it's fascinating."
He speaks enthusiastically
about this process of examining the labyrinthine contrasubjects that
have mesmerized audiences but daunted so many string players over the
centuries. As he speaks, his earlier comparison of great music to great
literature makes perfect sense, with the fabric of musical subplots
emerging in seemingly endless combinations.
"In some parts of the
fugue these contrasubjects are even more important than the omnipresent
main subject, which you can get tired of," he says. "So at
some point you start bringing out these contrasubjects, which you don't
normally hear sometimes on the violin.
"That requires a lot
of skill, a lot of right-arm flexibility, a lot of practice in that
way."
It also requires a lot of
research. "For me, researching is what leads to the authentic interpretation
because you don't want to make the composer turn in his grave,"
he says. "If you love the music then you should have some sort
of respect for it and the more respect you have the better. If you perform
contemporary music, research is really not required—you can just
pick it up. The further back you go the less reference you have.
"My goal always has
been to get as close as possible to a composer's intentions—that
is my credo. While having my own ideas, I always check on the authenticity—and
here again, that's not a good word, since it's hard to establish what's
authentic and what's not after several centuries or to get as close
to the source as possible.
"Still, the more I
learn about the piece, the more I learn about myself as a player,"
he concludes. "I discover myself through this music, through any
music that I perform."
Lucky Star
Gringolts has had plenty
of time to prepare for these challenges. He started playing the solo
Bach works at age 13 and in some ways the pieces are milestones, revisited
again and again, in his own personal journey toward understanding music
and the violin. "Coming to terms with these Bach works," he
says, "you could dig forever and never reach the bottom."
Yet his journey—marked
by a combination of good luck, hard work, and sheer talent—very
nearly derailed at the start. Gringolts grew up in St. Petersburg, the
son of an amateur violinist, and took up the instrument at age five.
After a year of instruction, his teacher sent the child home with the
message that Gringolts had no talent and should not be wasting the teacher's
time.
"I have told this story
so many times that it's probably not even true. In fact, it was probably
the other way around," he says with a laugh. "The teacher
that I found after that episode was a very lucky find," he says
of Tatiana Liberova. "Our collaboration lasted a very long time."
Under Liberova's tutelage,
Gringolts entered a special music program for children at the St. Petersburg
Conservatory. He continued studying with Liberova for another ten years,
winning the 1995 Yehudi Menuhin International Violin Competition before
leaving for the Juilliard School at age 17, where he eventually began
studies with Itzhak Perlman.
"He's a constant source
of encouragement," Gringolts says of his new mentor. "Even
when I was having a bad lesson, with him, I always had the hope that
things would get better, which is not always the case with teachers.
He always made me feel good about my playing and I think that's something
he has carried over from Dorothy DeLay—the warmth, the hospitality,
her ability to make you feel good about your playing."
Indeed, Gringolts' first
meeting with Perlman was a lucky break. In 1997, a cousin living in
Ottawa showed a videotape of Gringolts in concert to a close friend
who is a violinist in Canada's National Arts Centre Orchestra. The friend
then showed the tape to the orchestra's conductor, Pinchas Zukerman,
who mailed it to Perlman. The following year, Perlman invited the then
16-year-old Gringolts to attend his summer music camp, where the maestro
readied the youth for the prestigious Premio Paganini Violin Competition
in Italy. Gringolts took first prize that year (1998) as well as a special
prize for the best interpretation of Paganini’s "Capriccio."
Despite his competitive
successes, Gringolts has mixed feelings about the experience. "I
always had pressure from my parents and my teacher, but even at that
age I knew I would be in music one way or another," he says of
life as a prodigy. "I really couldn't do anything else, and it
wasn't as though I didn't like it, although I didn't know why I did
since I couldn't really analyze anything at that age.
"But you know, competitions
are not necessarily a good thing. I'm happy to be done with them once
and for all. The sad truth is that you can't skip the competitions these
days because they lead to contracts and engagements. I had to do it.
And many of my friends have to do it now. And that's the way it is,"
he adds with a sigh.
"Ultimately, you have
to keep in mind that you might not win and still have the courage to
do it again. "You have to believe in yourself."
Mood for Moderns
Earlier this year, and in
a nod to his Russian heritage, Gringolts released his major label debut—a
widely acclaimed pairing of Shostakovich's Violin Concerto No. 1 in
A minor and Tchaikovsky's Concerto for Violin in D major—with Itzhak
Perlman conducting the Israel Philharmonic. Gringolts has described
the concertos as representing two sides of the Russian soul: "[The]
Tchaikovsky is a romantic hymn from the age of innocence," he notes,
"with many beautiful melodies. The Shostakovich is an expression
of pain and solitude, of torments of the soul."
For his next recording,
Gringolts will feature Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev's First Violin
Concerto, Finnish composer Jean Sibelius' oft-recorded Violin Concerto
in D minor, and four Sibelius humoresques. U.S. audiences will have
a chance to preview his Prokofiev performances when Gringolts returns
to the States for a series of dates this month that will take him as
far afield as Buffalo, New York, Fargo, North Dakota, and Eugene, Oregon.
More U.S. dates are scheduled for the spring.
"I have been catching
up lately on Prokofiev, but there is a lot of Russian repertoire that
I haven't played," he says. "Still, I am hoping to perform
a lot of Prokofiev because he is increasingly becoming one of my favorites.
Almost everything he wrote is good music, which is not the case with
most composers. Often you have to write a lot of trash to produce a
jewel. For me, his music is a great combination of humor and lyricism.
He's like the Mozart of the 20th century in a way; so classically oriented
yet so avant-garde at the same time. That's such a great combination.
Possibly only Stravinsky and Bartók could match him in that respect,
though neither of them had the lyricism that Prokofiev had and that's
important to me."
But Gringolts also remains
committed to new music. Earlier this year, he premiered the solo violin
piece "Pulsar" by Augusta Read Thomas, 39, a professor of
composition at Northwestern University. The work, commissioned jointly
by BBC Radio 3 and the Royal Philharmonic Society, debuted at Wigmore
Hall in London. "That was the highlight of my contemporary music
experience for the year," he says.
Read, who couldn't attend
the concert but heard a recording of Gringolts' performance, is no less
enthusiastic about the results. "I thought he did a splendid job—musical,
sensitive, and elegant," she says. "He is a wonderful player
and I felt very privileged to compose for him."
Gringolts is seeking more
commissioned works and feels a duty to promote new music as well as
preserve the past. "We have to perform that stuff or else the music
will get stale," he says. "We need to remember that 100 years
ago people performed mostly that music that was contemporary to those
times—'old music' wasn't performed at all with the exception of
Beethoven and a few others that you just couldn't keep out of the program.
But nowadays there is so little contemporary music that it’s just
a shame. People are afraid of it somehow–they seem to think it’s
difficult to understand. But you really have to get people used to it.
In Finland, a country that spends a lot per capita on the arts and has
one of the fastest growing orchestral music scenes in the world, each
concert has a premiere or a new work. The audiences go to hear the contemporary
works rather than the warhorses that are performed every now and then.
And that is the new perception of music that you have to breed. It will
not come by itself."
"The best fingerings for these are the ones
that can be done semi-automatically, so that I can continue to monitor
my sound."
Zazofsky agrees that warm-up
sessions are a good time to explore new sounds, and he warns against
relying too heavily on vibrato. He starts his warm-up with slow scales,
looking for maximum sound in terms of clarity of tone with the least
effort. "If you start practicing after a really good nap, your
muscles are nice and relaxed. That's when you get your best sound,"
he says. "When you've had a good rest, you get your natural arm
weight. I try to get that feeling all the time. Listen to each string
without vibrato. A beautiful sound has to be that of bow against string.
Vibrato is a color, an enhancer. Vibrato won't make up for sound that’s
lacking. We really have to produce sound with the bow, so don't go automatically
to vibrato.
"I carefully listen for the core of the sound
when I warm up. I like really slow double stops, fingered octaves, fourths,
and fifths, which stretch the left hand and let you hear the overtones
really clearly. In the double stops, I aim to allow the instrument to
ring as if I were playing on open strings. Also, you want a slow bow
with enough pressure to produce a big sound, right on the edge of becoming
scratchy."
Hagner reminds us always
to keep the musical context in mind when considering vibrato. "Something
marked dolce is very different from espressivo in
terms of vibrato," she says. "I think dolce means
a slower, more relaxed kind of vibrato. If something is espressivo,
though, you press your fingers more on the fingerboard, and increase
your vibrato speed."
In your search for your own great sound, it might
be helpful to keep this thought from Kavafian in mind: "In terms
of sound, your imagination is the most important component. Keep an
open mind and explore every possibility.
"A person's imagination
is his or her biggest asset."
What
Gringolts Plays
With support from the Chicago-based
Stradivari Society, Ilya Gringolts plays the 1723 "Kiesewetter"
Stradivari, on extended loan from Clement Arrison. The award-winning
bow maker Howard Green, an English craftsman now residing in Aberdeenshire,
Scotland, made Gringolts' primary concert bow. (Itzhak Perlman introduced
Gingolts to Green.)
Photo of Ilya Gringolts: J. Henry Fair
