Destiny—or just plain
luck—plus a lot of talent and a searching intellect has helped
the young British violinist Daniel Hope make a relatively effortless
rise to the top of the violin world.
Or so it would seem.
One thing is clear: Hope
collects new accolades at an impressive rate. In May, he won a coveted
Classical Brit Award for best young classical performer of the year;
in March, his recent Berg/Britten CD, his Warner Classics debut, won
a Deutsche Schallplatten award and wowed the critics ("I do not
think I have heard a finer account of the Berg Concerto," wrote
one); and, two years ago, he became the newest member—and the
youngest member ever—of the venerable Beaux Arts Trio.
I catch up with the congenial
Hope, 30, a day before he's due to play with the Trio in the Bath
Music Festival in southwest England. It's a lovely June afternoon
and the sun is shining brightly as we sit at a wooden table underneath
an umbrella in the extensive gardens behind the Royal Crescent Hotel.
Bird calls and the gentle clatter of waiters moving plates punctuate
our conversation. The red-haired Hope is dressed casually and his
manner is equally relaxed; he laughs frequently and uninhibitedly.
If Hollywood ever decides
to make a movie about Hope, his terrific back-story will be irresistible.
His novelist father, Christopher Hope, was a critic of the apartheid
regime in South Africa and was placed under house arrest for his dissident
political views. In 1974 the family, including six-month-old Daniel,
fled to England. Getting established as a writer in a new country
took Daniel's father some time, so his mother, Eleanor, began looking
for work as a secretary. "She had three job interviews on the
day we were to go back [the day before the family's visas were to
expire]: One was for the Archbishop of Canterbury, one was for a stockbroker,
and one for Yehudi Menuhin," he recounts.
She took the job with
Menuhin, eventually becoming his manager. Hope laughs when I suggest
that but for the success of that last interview, he may well have
ended up as a stockbroker: "My mother always says that's what
I could have done!"
The family moved to Highgate
in north London to be near the Menuhin household. Daniel grew up playing
with the Menuhin grandchildren, and seeing (and hearing) such musical
visitors as Ravi Shankar, Stéphane Grappelli, and Mstislav
Rostropovich. In this kind of environment, it was hardly surprising
when at age four he announced his intention of becoming a violinist:
"I knew that was it, absolutely, and nobody was going to tell
me to the contrary."
Menuhin, however, did
not encourage this passion at first. "He was very much at arm's
length in regards to my wanting to play the violin," Hope says.
"He'd never really taken a great interest in it and did his best
to keep a distance—quite a significant distance."
Hope began his violin
study with Sheila Nelson, one of the UK's most prominent teachers
of young children—she, of course, just happened to live near
the family home. Hope remembers his lessons with her fondly. "One
of my best memories was something we did from the age of four called
'Cowboy Chorus,' which is where we all stood in a circle and she would
play a theme," he says. "And you would take the same theme,
in the same key, and improvise and pass it on to your neighbor. That
was just amazing training, because it got rid of all inhibitions of
playing."
At age 10, Hope achieved
instant fame through his appearance on British television with classical
bassist Gary Karr. They'd met at the Menuhin Festival in Gstaad, Switzerland,
where Hope was turning pages for Karr's pianist. "What do you
do?" Karr asked the young Hope one day.
"I play the fiddle,"
Hope replied.
"All right, let's
hear it."
Hope ended up playing
with Karr in the great bassist's own arrangement of Shostakovich's
two violin duos, which they later performed on TV.
After studying with Itzhak
Rashkovsky and Felix Andrievsky, Hope came to David Oistrakh student
Zakhar Bron, who would have a major influence on his playing. (Bron
was also Maxim Vengerov's teacher.) Of his six years with Bron, Hope
says, "It was the most incredible, rewarding, hard-working, infuriating,
exasperating time."
Unlike many teachers,
Bron demonstrated on his own violin, producing what Hope describes
as "an amazing, huge sound. The two of us would play together
and people would run away screaming."
Bron was an impeccable,
and critical, judge of technique.
"I found the most
rewarding times with him were when I gave as much as I got and questioned
what he was doing," Hope recalls. "Because once he got over
the shock of somebody who'd dare to actually ask a question, you saw
the brilliance of his mind."
Around the same time,
the then-16-year-old Hope reconnected with Menuhin: "Menuhin
was very curious about Bron and admired him. He also wanted to hear
me—he probably hadn't heard me properly in about ten years. I
think he was quite shocked that I had actually taken the violin seriously
and that it wasn't just a childish whim."
From this moment until
Menuhin's death in 1999, the two became close, frequently playing
together in concert.
Menuhin figures prominently
in articles written about Hope, and it's easy to see parallels between
the intellectually voracious Menuhin and Hope. Despite the Menuhin
legacy, and with an impressive international career already established,
it appears that Hope may be ready to find a new perspective about
the role his mentor has in his life.
As a teenager, Hope became
fascinated with the music of Russian composer Alfred Schnittke, who,
in yet another stroke of luck, happened to live around the corner
from him in Hamburg. The 16-year-old Hope decided to pay a visit.
"I don't think I'd have the audacity to do that now," Hope
laughs. He found Schnittke in a receptive mood and got to know him,
later becoming the liaison when the Royal Academy of Music decided
to put on a festival for Schnittke's 60th birthday in 1994.
Hope has since recorded
much of Schnittke's music for violin.
Hope's penchant for finding
points of congruence—and for linking past and present—is
demonstrated on his latest CD, East Meets West, in which he
revisits Menuhin's famous 1960s collaboration with Indian sitar player
Ravi Shankar. When he decided to tackle the music, he contacted Shankar
for his blessing. The Indian master gave him the name of one his best
pupils, Gaurav Mazumdar.
It was, by Hope's account,
a challenging time. "I spent the first nine months just getting
to grips with the rhythmical aspects of Indian music," he says.
Sitting cross-legged on
the floor in South Indian fiddle style also took some getting used
to. "The problem is standing up at the end," he explains.
"After you play for a couple of hours, your legs fall asleep!"
The technique is substantially
different from that used by Western classical players, as Hope discovered.
"You've only got this much of the bow [he indicates about a third
of the bow] that you can really use," he says, "the way
you use it changes completely. You have a different point of contact."
Playing the Shankar pieces
got him thinking about "the connections between Indian music
and Western music and the bridges between them. Then I came across
this extraordinary instrument that Ravel designed, the luthéal."
The luthéal, which
Hope describes as "a cross between a typewriter and an organ
in brass," attaches to a piano. Ravel's Tzigane was specially
written for the instrument. "We played Tzigane with the
luthéal and I saw the kinds of things Ravel had achieved in
color: the overtones, the natural harmonics, the harp sound, the flute
sound, the cimbalom sound. It's really extraordinary."
From the cimbalom sounds
of the luthéal it was a short leap to including Bartók's
Romanian Folk Dances, and from Ravel but a stroll to the Impressionist-like
Sonata Op. 8 (1954–55) by Schnittke, which was given its world
premiere by Hope. This lovely, gentle work, written shortly after
Stalin's death in the Soviet Union when French music was forbidden,
lay neglected in a drawer for decades.
Championing forgotten
music of the past is another Hope specialty. Last year he made a
disc devoted to the music of three Theresienstadt concentration camp
composers, Gideon Klein, Erwin Schulhoff, and Hans Krasa (he interviewed
concentration camp survivors for the booklet notes). In 1995, as he
was learning the Berg Violin Concerto, he phoned the Alban Berg Center
in Vienna and found out that the British Berg scholar Douglas Jarman
was preparing a new edition of the concerto. Berg, who died before
his concerto was performed, never saw the proofs and as a result the
standard edition contains many copyist errors—including a missing
octave leap at the start of the second movement—that Jarman's
scholarship has gone some way toward rectifying. Hope gave the world
premiere of the new edition and recorded it last year, along with
the Britten concerto.
Hope has participated
in several spoken-word projects—he is the son of a novelist,
after all. With German actor Klaus Maria Brandauer and a crack chamber
orchestra, he performed Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale. Brandauer
took all the speaking parts, directed, and insisted that Hope both
play and conduct. Says Hope, "[Brandauer] doesn't really have
musical training and there are several bits in the piece where the
actor has to speak in rhythm together with instruments, so I had to
give him a nod with my head and my eyes. But we found a way of conveying
signals to each other, which is really fun, and actually I think the
piece is better without a conductor.
"Musicians have a
lot to learn from actors about presentation."
Until two years ago, it
would have seemed that Hope was heading for the life of an international
soloist, albeit one with an interest in trying new things. But then,
in another twist of fate, he was asked to step in as a last-minute
replacement for the Beaux Arts Trio's ailing violinist Young Uck Kim
on a European tour.
Hope still seems amazed
by the turn of events.
"Nobody believes
this story but it's true: I was playing at the Palace of the Beaux
Arts in Brussels on the 17th of January, 2002. I was playing the Prokofiev
Second Violin Concerto and I walked outside, backstage, with the 'Beaux
Arts' sign within view, and my mobile phone rang. It was my agent,
and she said, 'What piano trios do you play?'"
Several minutes of grilling
later, Hope discovered what he was being offered. "At first,
I thought it was a joke," he says. "I couldn't even grasp
the concept of what that meant. But the amazing thing was that [after
returning to London] I discovered I had five weeks free because Nimbus
Records had gone bankrupt [the company is now back in business] and
I had two recording projects cancelled at the last minute."
He got back on a plane
to Brussels to meet and work with Beaux Arts cellist Antonio Meneses.
The two hit it off. The next step was a plane to Lisbon for rehearsals
with the 80-year-old living legend and the trio's founder, pianist
Menahem Pressler, for the 14-day tour. "It was a punishing tour,"
Hope recalls. "Literally every day we were flying somewhere,
rehearsing a new program for another night, and that night playing
some of the greatest literature written for the trio."
Young Uck Kim's poor health
ultimately forced him to bow out of the trio, paving the way for Hope's
permanent installment in the violinist's chair. Pressler and Meneses
reassured him the trio's schedule would allow him to continue his
other work, and he was able to wrest a commitment for the inclusion
of more contemporary music on the trio's programs. Alongside Beethoven,
Schubert, Brahms, and other staples of the trio's repertoire, audiences
can expect to hear new works from prominent Hungarian composer György
Kurtág, British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage, and others.
Listening to the Beaux
Arts in concert in the humid Bath Assembly Rooms on the evening after
our first interview, I'm struck by the effortless communication among
three players despite the wide difference in their ages. A Haydn trio
is well-received, as is the Schubert B flat Trio, but it is Shostakovich's
Trio, No. 2, that electrifies the audience—even though Hope breaks
a string in the first movement.
As I watch the trio, I
find myself thinking that in choosing Hope, a young man very conscious
of his musical heritage, Pressler has passed on the Beaux Arts legacy.
It's a legacy of which Hope is clearly aware.
"That's something
that's very emotional, to still be part of that," he says. "To
play the Ravel trio with Pressler and for him to talk about the way
that Ravel describes the opening—it's a direct link to the past,
in the same way that Menuhin, if you asked him why he did a certain
bowing in the Brahms Concerto, he'd say, 'Well, I know Enescu played
it because Brahms liked it that way.' You realize we're one step away
from that."
His respect for the past
does extend to his 1769 Gagliano violin, though you might have some
doubts from the way he's blithely tossing it in the air in the photo
on the back of his Berg/Britten disc.
Not to worry: That's a
stunt violin.
The Beaux Arts Trio
tours the United States December 7–14, 2004.
