Clutching his umbrella,
violinist Leonidas Kavakos squints anxiously against the sun into
the cloudless skies of Manhattan. "I've been carrying this thing
around like an idiot all day," he says, "and I am happy
to appear an idiot for the rest of the week."
Kavakos is in town to
perform at the New York Philharmonic Parks Concerts. Normally a highlight
of the city's summer concert season, this year's concerts fall during
the only week of rain New Yorkers have seen in months. Feeling safe
for the moment, Kavakos turns his attention to another worry. "Last
night at Avery Fisher, they are rehearsing a really loud rock 'n'
roll show on stage," he says. "You could hear it all through
the building! This cannot be good for the wood."
Spoken like a true violinist.
Kavakos, 37, is in fact
a true third-generation violinist. His grandfather played the violin
and the lute and led his own folk band in Greece. His father began
playing in the band but was sent to the conservatory to learn to play
classical violin. "In folk music you play the fiddle in front
of your chest, it's a whole different approach," explains Kavakos,
a native Athenian. "My grandfather saw the technique my father
had learned at the conservatory in Athens and thought, 'My God, if
I keep on playing, my son will see me play and the conservatory will
teach him other things—he will become confused!' so he stopped
playing altogether. This was very moving for me."
Because of his varied
experience, Kavakos' father could play classical and folk; he went
on to play in an orchestra in Athens and formed his own quartet. Kavakos'
mother played the piano. "My parents met playing chamber music.
I was born into this family where both parents were practicing a lot,
and apparently I loved to listen to them play."
Kavakos says his journey
as a violinist began when he was five years old. "I got a [half-size]
violin for Christmas under the tree," he recalls. "I had
it as a toy in the beginning, as my father didn't want me to get into
the trouble right away. For a year, I was just playing with it and
imitating the things my father was doing, but then slowly I started
having lessons with him–you know, putting the hands in position
and trying to make some kind of decent sound, the usual painful experience
of learning a stringed instrument."
Kavakos shakes his head.
"I think this is almost the worst torture you can do to a kid,
because with a piano or a wind instrument, you can produce some kind
of sound right away. But with a stringed instrument, no way. No way!
Plus a violin is so uncomfortable. . . ."
As his first teacher,
Kavakos' father was "an absolute perfectionist." Father
and son would fight and Kavakos would stop playing. "But this
would only last for two days," he confesses, "because I
loved the violin and wanted to play. After a few of these episodes,
my father decided it would be better if I studied with someone outside
the house."
So he enrolled at the
Greek Conservatory, and studied with Stelios Kafantaris. "I would
have loved to learn folk music," Kavakos laments, "but sadly
there is this mentality among folk musicians that if someone goes
on to classical music, you can't give him folk music to play, as though
folk is inferior to classical. They don't know that most classical
music was inspired from folk music. As a result, my father would never
teach it [to me], but of course the sound and the attitude remains
very much inside me."
But, from his father's
playing, Kavakos did learn the joy and necessity of improvisation
and spontaneity. "The way folk musicians feel rhythmical swings
is something everyone should learn," he says. "They don't
play written music; they have to create it. You really have to be
on your toes. If the percussion or the lute doesn't come in, you have
to survive no matter what."
Kavakos achieved success
early on in his career. A scholarship from the Onassis Foundation
allowed him to visit Indiana University where he attended master classes
with Josef Gingold. In 1984, as a teenager, he made his concert debut
at the Athens Festival. The following year, he won the Jean Sibelius
International Violin Competition in Helsinki, and, four years later,
the Paganini Competition
Those successes were followed
by major debuts at the London BBC Proms and international festivals
in Edinburgh, Salzburg, Ravinia, and the Hollywood Bowl. He also was
invited to play with the London Symphony Orchestra, BBC Symphony,
City of Birmingham Symphony, Munich Philharmonic, Orchestre de Paris,
Gothenburg Symphony, and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, among others.
Last year, Kavakos made his debut with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra.
As a chamber musician,
Kavakos has directed his own chamber-music series at the Megaron Athens
Concert Hall since 1992. He regularly appears at chamber-music festivals
with such partners as Natalie Gutman, Nobuko Imai, Kim Kashkashian,
and Mstislav Rostropovich. The Camerata Salzburg has created the special
post of Principal Guest Artist for Kavakos and he has toured extensively
with this acclaimed chamber ensemble.
His already plentiful
discography includes a 1991 Gramophone Award-winning recording of
the Sibelius Violin Concerto in D minor, Op. 47 (BIS, CD500). More
recent recordings include two collaborations on the ECM label. The
first, with pianist Peter Nagy, pairs sonatas by Maurice Ravel and
George Enescu (ECM, 1824); the second, Kashkashian's recent two-CD
set Monodia (ECM, 1850/51), focuses on works by Armenian composer
Tigran Mansurian with Kavakos performing the Concerto for Violin and
Orchestra. A third ECM project, again with Nagy, features works by
Bach and Stravinsky and is due out in early 2005.
Speaking about his Ravel/Enescu
disc, Kavakos' early exposure to folk music becomes apparent. He says
that one never plays folk music "in a melancholy way," referring
to Enescu's Third Sonata, which is based on Romanian folk music. "Even
when folk musicians are playing sad music," he says, "they
are smiling. I had this in mind as I played. I would love to hear
a recording of this piece with bad sound quality," he says, believing
that would capture the feel Enescu was after. "But such a thing
is impossible to make today," he admits. "The good thing
is that ECM doesn't go for this materialistic, earthy sound. They
go for a more . . . the sound is true."
"I'm happy about
that because none of us [as performers] is bigger than the people
who wrote the music, I tell you that. Of course, you can say that
none of these people's music would be heard if we were not here. Still,"
he insists, "the creator, the person who actually conceived the
music, is the composer, and I think that the artist should never be
bigger than the composer."
Kavakos has played music
by composers from across the classical repertoire, but he doesn't
play favorites. "If you look at my concert calendar, every week
I'm playing a different piece, and to a certain extent that is intentional,"
he says. "What I did last week, the style affects what I do next
week and the one gives to the other and takes from the other.
"There are artists
out there who play the same piece 60 or 70 times a year—who would
do this?"
Still, as his work on
Monodia shows, Kavakos has a deep affinity for contemporary
compositions, especially those steeped in the rich sacred and secular
music traditions of the Balkans. His involvement in the project began
when his friend and colleague, violist Kim Kashkashian, a longtime
advocate of Armenian composer Tigran Mansurian, gave Kavakos a recording
of Mansurian's Concerto for Violin and Orchestra.
"I was really happy
to play the Mansurian," Kavakos says, "because I like compositions
that have structure but that come together with a certain kind of
physics and emotion."
The resulting set, released
earlier this year, is the follow-up to Kashkashian's critically acclaimed
2003 recording Hayren (ECM, 1754), which featured Masurian's
transcriptions of Komitas' songs. In addition to the 1981 Violin Concerto,
Monodia includes premiere recordings of recent works and also
features Christoph Poppen and the Munich Chamber Orchestra.
Several critics singled
out Kavakos' performance on Monodia. "The economically
scored Violin Concerto is again rich in unaccompanied material and
Leonidas Kavakos seems to relish every note, especially in the many
higher-reaching passages. . . ." Gramophone critic Rob
Cowan opined.
Kavakos describes the
work as a prayer. "There is this loneliness, a monologue in need
of a dialogue, a sense of silence, of reminiscence, and all this is
trying to take shape in the music and go somewhere," he explains.
"When the piece finishes, you don't want it to go—you want
to go with it.
"One can say, 'This
is a very classically written piece.' So what? I think that people
should write classically. I am totally against this idea that whatever
is composed today should be like nothing that has ever been composed
before. What are you talking about? Doesn't Beethoven sound like Haydn?
Doesn't Haydn sound like Mozart? Doesn't Schumann sound like Bach?
Doesn't Brahms sound like Schumann? It's a continuation.
"While you are looking
for something absolutely new, are you sure you have exhausted all
the possibilities of what you have?"
What
Kavakos Plays
For the past eight years,
Leonidas Kavakos has played the Falmouth Stradivari of 1692. The Falmouth
belongs to the second school of Stradivari, the "long pattern"
violins that are slightly longer and narrower. The model was likely
inspired by Giovanni Paolo Maggini, an Italian violin maker before
Stradivari whose violins have a very dark sound. The long-pattern
line of Stradivari shares this dark quality and has a smaller sound
than later Strads.
"I consider the long-pattern
violin to be Stradivarius' golden period," Kavakos says. "But
it depends on the violin and it depends on the player. It has to fit
you in a way. This one fits me because I think the dark quality in
the sound accommodates different approaches in my playing."
Kavakos also owns a modern
instrument by German violin maker Peter Greiner and two violins by
Spanish luthier David Bagué. He uses all his violins in concert,
but says, "There is still something in the Stradivarius which
is magical. The violin is a mystery—a total mystery."
Kavakos feels fortunate
and honored to own a Stradivari, which he purchased in 1996, and considers
it a tragedy that most violinists today cannot afford to own their
own fine vintage instruments. "That's something for people who
drive this business to think about," he says. "Because the
best client for the violin is the violinist."
He also has a passion
for bows, which he says are an even bigger mystery to him. He especially
admires the bow makers of the early 19th century and owns a Tourte,
two Peccattes, a Henry, and a rare Persois.
Photo of Kavakos by Marco Borggreve
