December 2011

Teacher Talk

A series of teaching-articles in the Strad Magazine

Where should viol­in­ists look when they are per­form­ing from memory on stage?
Daniel Arshavsky, Atlanta, US
Boris Kuschnir: The dir­ec­tion the viol­in­ist looks on stage is a very indi­vidual mat­ter, and it often depends on the player’s char­ac­ter, the piece and its tech­nical dif­fi­culties, and also the player’s nervous­ness and ten­sion while play­ing.
Some viol­in­ists focus on their violin; some look in the dir­ec­tion of the hori­zon; and oth­ers play with their eyes closed.
Maybe it’s bet­ter to think about where the viol­in­ist should not look. It’s bad when a soloist looks into the audi­ence, search­ing for people they know. It’s not good to look per­man­ently at just one spot, either – for example, the pointe where the bow touches the strings, or the left-hand fin­gers. And look­ing up at the hall ceil­ing as if search­ing for an ima­gin­ary score doesn’t look good, either.
If a viol­in­ist knows the piece they are play­ing very well, if their thoughts and feel­ings are on a high musical level instead of being con­cerned with try­ing to mas­ter the piece’s tech­nical dif­fi­culties, and if their hands are free from ten­sion and nervous­ness while play­ing, I believe that wherever they look, they will appear nat­ural to the audience.

I often see top soloists arch­ing their backs and put­ting up their viol­ins when they play loudly and high on the string. It looks impress­ive, but not very healthy. What do you think about this?
Chris­tian Gar­vey, Stock­ton, Cali­for­nia, US
Boris Kuschnir: In the his­tory of violin play­ing, a large num­ber of very good play­ers were able to con­tinue their careers in their middle and older ages.
Today, how­ever, there are very few very good middle-aged or older viol­in­ists who are still act­ive. There are a lot of reas­ons for this, and one is cer­tainly the over­use of body move­ment dur­ing con­certs, and play­ing in an unnat­ural way – hav­ing the violin too high, pulling faces, hav­ing the right elbow too high, ten­sion, using unres­trained and badly coordin­ated vibrato, and so on. The ele­ment of show becomes too import­ant for these play­ers. Although audi­ences might like to see per­form­ances like these, they shorten the period a soloist can play suc­cess­fully and still main­tain their health. It’s very hard for our bod­ies to cope with these effects for long peri­ods of time. Even aside from this, focus­ing too much on showy play­ing can also kill the music that you are performing.