Gramophone

When per­fec­tion isn’t good enough

In a world in which second-rate is often deemed good enough, viol­in­ist Nikolaj Znaider’s goal is to keep on striving, perfecting the seem­ingly impossible.

By Rob Cowan, Pho­to­graphs by Toby Wales taken at Sotheby’s – Gramo­phone, June 2002

The scene is Vienna in early spring, a glor­i­ous Fri­day even­ing. I’ve just booked in at my hotel and I call Nikolaj Znaider to arrange Saturday’s inter­view. I announce that I’ve just heard his new CD of Prokofiev and Glazunov Con­cer­tos for RCA. There is plenty to talk about. ‘You’ve cheated! ‘ he complains, laughing. ‘Even I haven’t heard it! Look, I’m com­ing into town for a drink, so if you don’t want to just chill out after your flight … ‘. So we meet. First impres­sions are of a very tall, very imme­di­ate man in his midtwenties, inquisitive, forth­com­ing and pro­foundly musical. Jascha Heifetz, the ‘Viol­in­ist of the Twen­ti­eth Cen­tury’, is among our first shared top­ics. ‘You know his record­ing of Vitali ‘s Chaconne?’ asks Znaider enthusiasticaily. Before I answer he shakes his head in amazement, ‘Aston­ish­ing! And those octaves!’ We touch on some of Znaider’s more recent musical encoun­ters. There’s cham­ber music in Lon­don with key mem­bers of the LSO (‘won­der­ful people’), Beethoven’s Con­certo under Sir Colin Davis (‘a superb musi­cian with no “airs” about him’) and work­ing with the cel­list Boris Per­ga­menschikov (‘such innate sens­it­iv­ity’). And then qual­ity time spent with Daniel Bar­en­boim, whose sense of musical line Znaider con­siders second to none. That was sig­ni­fic­ant because what first aler­ted me, as a listener, to Znaider’s viol­in­istic voice was his own sense of line. Was it part of his musical inher­it­ance, or did he take a cue from one of his teachers? His answer sur­prised me.

First, though, some his­tory. Nikolaj Znaider was born in Den­mark in 1975 to Polish-Israeli par­ents. Itzhak Per­l­man was his child­hood inspir­a­tion and the revered Israeli teacher Ilona Feher a cru­cial early adviser. Pro­fessor Milan Vitek was Znaider’s prin­cipal teacher at the Royal Dan­ish Academy of Music, though he later atten­ded the Juil­liard School under the tutel­age of the late Dorothy DeLay. That was after win­ning first prize at the Carl Nielsen Inter­na­tional Violin Com­pet­i­tion in 1992. But it was in 1997 that Znaider tri­umphed at the Queen Elisa­beth Com­pet­i­tion in Brus­sels win­ning first prize. ‘Being locked away for eight days to learn the test piece was real pressure,’ he con­fesses, ‘but once it was all over I felt incred­ibly lib­er­ated. I had done it! I was free to go!’ Know­ledge­able com­ment­at­ors (includ­ing Yehudi Menuhin) spot­ted an unusual inter­pret­at­ive slant that harked back to the great fid­dlers of yore.

But to return to that earlier ques­tion about musical line, it was around the time of the Com­pet­i­tion that Znaider exper­i­enced a pro­found change of musical heart. ‘It all stemmed from my stud­ies here in Vienna with Pro­fessor Boris Kuschnir,’ Znaider teils me. ‘In fact, you could split my play­ing his­tory into two halves: pre– and post-Kuschnir. I first went to him when I was 18, although by then I had already felt the stir­rings of a def­in­ite shift in my musical atti­tude. Before that I was happy-go-Iucky, I’d just go on stage and hope for the best. You know how it is when you’re 17: you’re naive, and I hadn’t had much con­certising exper­i­ence. Some­times it was great, and some­times not so good. There wasn’t that spe­cial. …’ and here Znaider pauses to stress the word, ‘ … awareness.’

The sum effect of that ‘aware­ness’ is that every note has to have a life of its own, its unique place in the musical scheme of things. And yes there has to be a sense of musical line. So is he say­ing that in those early days, before this new-found ‘aware­ness’, he acted merely as a sort of viol­in­istic ath­lete? ‘No, not at all. A good ath­lete is always pre­pared: he knows every move in advance. I’d actu­ally say that I pre­pare more like an ath­lete now. I remem­ber very well when we first star­ted work­ing and Pro­fessor Kuschnir said that “no mat­ter what hap­pens, don’t forget: I can­not take your music­al­ity away from you.’”

And yet real­ising that music­al­ity involves painstak­ing pre­par­a­tion. ‘When you start that kind of work, you’re aware of every move you make and you become very self-conscious. I remem­ber the scep­ti­cism in Den­mark when, after my suc­cess at Brus­sels, I played Saint Saens’ Third Violin Con­certo. We had worked on it for a year. That was lit­er­ally all we did. Everybody noticed that there had been a change in my play­ing but not every­one was con­vinced that I was doing the right thing.’ There were charges of ‘lessened’ cha­risma and a cer­tain lack of spon­taneity. But once this new method took root, all doubts were vanquished.

So what pre­cisely is this ‘method’? We meet up again on Sat­urday, though this time Znaider comes armed with a couple of violin scores. He takes out a copy of Wieniawski’s First Polonaise, Op 4, a bravura piece that will hope­fully fea­ture on his forth­com­ing RCA recital CD with pian­ist Daniel Gortler (due for release next year). Then he shows me Nathan Milstein’s unac­com­pan­ied Paganini­ana, another con­tender for the same pro­gramme. It’s aston­ish­ing. Every bar is crammed with indic­a­tions relat­ing to fin­ger­ing, bow­ing, phrasing, and how the ends of notes should sound. Then there’s the mat­ter of which notes are the most import­ant. ‘See, here, at the end of the Polonaise,’ Znaider points out excitedly, ‘every bar has some sort of circle around it, or an under­lined rela­tion­ship with the next bar, or hints relat­ing to stresses, dynam­ics and so forth.’ But how long does it take to com­mit all these incred­ibly com­plic­ated instruc­tions to memory? ’That’s part of the reason why I write it all down: the very pro­cess helps bond it to my memory. I will never for­get it. It’s like a manual. I’ll take these scores with me on a plane or a train; I’ll read through them – and it all comes back to me.’

Pro­fessor Kuschnir will brook no short-cuts. And yet he acknow­ledges that an artist’s view of a piece is in con­stant flux, which is why Znaider keeps at least three or four sep­ar­ate scores of the vari­ous pieces he’s work­ing on. ‘If I hap­pen to change my mind,’ he says, ‘I still know where I ori­gin­ally came from.’ Znaider claims that his encounter with Kuschnir came just in the nick of time. ‘It was my last chance,’ he says, halfiron­ic­ally, ‘and I was very much aware of that. My focus was always dir­ec­ted inwards. It was never merely goal-orientated, set just on my career. Of course I wanted that too but what I was really try­ing to do was to improve my play­ing and that didn’t change with the Brus­sels Com­pet­i­tion. That’s very import­ant. There was no sense of hav­ing “done it”, or hav­ing ”arrived” at some new level. My goals were purely musical and I needed to focus them.’ But it is also import­ant to ‘never stop developing’. Znaider expands the point. ‘Once you feel you’ve reached that goal,’ he says, ‘you may as well give up. You have always to strive for some­thing bet­ter, more pure, more sub­lime … even for what’s impossible. Because what is in my head is impossible: I could never play like that!’

Although Znaider enjoys the pro­cess of minute ana­lysis, he has, by his own admission, become fairly depend­ent on it. ‘I now lack the con­fid­ence to go on stage if I don’t know exactly what I want. It’s only when I’m fully pre­pared in this way that I can really let myself go. It’s a sort of con­tra­dic­tion. People say that when you go on stage you have to for­get everything, and that’s largely true. But you also have to know what to for­get. On stage you have to split your brain. One part has to be aware of inton­a­tion, another of phras­ing, or movements, angles, arms, bow­ing and bow­ing tech­nique. Part of you has to let go and be inspired, and another part has to be relaxed. There are mil­lions of things that you have to do at the same time. But… you can only learn that on stage. It’s all about strik­ing a bal­ance, and things only really come together on very rare occa­sions. You play say a hun­dred con­certs and you have that huge, grand feel­ing – a sen­sa­tion where everything seems to fit – once, twice maybe three times a year.’

When per­form­ing with an orchestra, Nikolaj Znaider prefers to think in terms of cham­ber music. ‘I really do try to involve all the play­ers,’ he says, ‘I try to pro­mote an idea of dia­logue.’ Talk­ing of his new RCA record­ing of Prokofiev’s Second Violin Con­certo with the Bav­arian Radio Sym­phony he reflects on the ‘nat­ural musi­cian­ship’ of con­ductor Mariss Jan­sons, how the orches­tra and con­ductor ’slipped into their roles with abso­lute ease’. Long takes are the norm and if edits are neces­sary, Znaider would prefer to splice between longer takes. RCA’s ori­ginal plan had been to record the Khachaturian and Sibelius Violin Con­cer­tos with the LSO under Sir Colin Davis (there was even an announce­ment about the event in Gramo­phone). A tem­por­ary lull in RCA’s clas­sical activ­it­ies decreed oth­er­wise, but it wasn’t too long be fore this latest pro­gramme appeared on the agenda. Znaider learned the Prokofiev Con­certo between 1999 and 2000, hav­ing mastered the Glazunov ‘quite a long time before that’. And while he is per­fectly happy with the res­ults, he would have been even hap­pier with a live record­ing. ‘As much as I love the medium of record­ing,’ he says, ‘the one aspect that’s lack­ing is the energy that evolves between an audi­ence and a per­former. My main object­ive in the stu­dio situ­ation is to make it feel as live as pos­sible. Of course in this par­tic­u­lar case the fact that I was record­ing on stage at the Munich Herku­lessaal helped, so it wasn’t too hard for me to pic­ture an audience.’

This con­cern for the ulti­mate in musical com­mu­nic­a­tion doesn’t only apply to the con­cer­tos. The same CD also con­tains Tchaikovsky’s beau­ti­ful ‘Med­it­a­tion’, where much is expressed within a rel­at­ively brief time-span. Znaider rel­ishes the chal­lenge of con­dens­ing a max­imum of express­ive force into a min­imum of musical space. This unstint­ing atten­tion to even the smal­lest detail isn’t the res­ult just of good music teach­ing. It originates, in part, with atti­tudes to music in the home. And to life itself. ‘Both my par­ents have been hugely influ­en­tial. My father led a rock band in Poland and my mother is a pian­ist, but they have influ­enced me in a far broader sense. They have instilled in me a sense of generosity. By that I mean the idea of shar­ing your last piece of bread with a friend. Also, the notion that any­thing you want to do you can do, except that you have to make it hap­pen. And then there’s humil­ity, doing all this work in the ser­vice of the music… not for myself, but for the sake of the com­poser. That’s why I pre­pare so much. For me there’s no such thing as a chatur (a mere “gig”).’

Znaider is a mael­strom of energy. Although his formal edu­ca­tion was cut short at 15, he sees learn­ing as a never-ending quest. Being an auto­di­dact, he’s shy about admit­ting to some fairly heavy read­ing. And he’ll listen to almost any­thing: MTV pop for relax­a­tion, though ’ser­i­ous’ music has some­times posed a problem. ’As soon as I hear some­thing classical, either I’m forced into con­cen­trat­ing on it by the power of the inter­preter, or I’m not. If I am, then I have to sit and listen and I invari­ably start form­ing an opin­ion. If I’m not drawn in, I’m annoyed by that fact – and I switch off!’

And yet as a listener Znaider makes it a gen­eral rule to focus on pos­it­ive rather than neg­at­ive qual­it­ies. ‘When I listen to records of other viol­in­ists I try to estab­lish what works, and why. What is it that these play­ers are doing that attracts people? Then I put the records aside and never listen to them again dur­ing my own stud­ies. I’ll look at the score and I’ll form my own opin­ion. Being ‘dif­fer­ent’ only hap­pens when you try to be your­self. When I recor­ded Bruch’s First Con­certo, I didn’t think to myself, ”we must make this cent­ral move­ment a proper Adagio.” I tried to make it authen­tic to myself, authentic to the piece, and to whatever com­mu­nic­a­tion we had achieved dur­ing that par­tic­u­lar record­ing. Those were my start­ing points.’

When it comes to rep­er­toire, Znaider takes his time. ‘I took a year to study the Beeth­oven Violin Con­certo before I went on stage with it. And I haven’t even scratched the sur­face of its inner mean­ing, although I’ve already played it sev­eral times in pub­lic. First I try to do what the com­poser inten­ded, then I read between the lines, add a little more here and there, a tiny effect per­haps, or a par­tic­u­lar shade. I start from nowhere, from the smal­lest point, then select a col­our in con­text. I build gradu­ally, one floor after another. The prob­lem before was that I’d start with the roof. I’d put in nice win­dows and paint the house, but there would be no found­a­tions. And I think that I now do the music a big favour by not put­ting my per­son­al­ity in before I really know what I’m doing.’

Humil­ity. Respect. Tra­di­tion. These might eas­ily be Znaider’s key-words. Here we’re con­front­ing a musi­cian who wouldn’t dream of play­ing in a string quar­tet because he has too much respect for the hard-earned achieve­ments of estab­lished quar­tets, and who won’t attempt to com­pose because he has too much respect for those who can, and who do it weIl. And his love for his fêted fore­bears is undimmed, espe­cially in those once-popular mor­ceaux. ‘Those old guys, they could cre­ate an entire world with just one short mini­ature. You had a whole life story in a five-minute piece. That’s the big chal­lenge. And that’s what we’re in danger of los­ing today. People say the smal­ler pieces are insig­ni­fic­ant, that they’re not “good music”. But it’s our duty to make them good music by tak­ing them ser­i­ously. That’s the kind of think­ing I’ve been brought up with since work­ing with Pro­fessor Kuschnir.’

When we met in Vienna, Znaider had just been listen­ing to Artur Rubin­stein play a Chopin Noc­turne, and he was still on Cloud Nine. ‘Really great musi­cians only get bet­ter as they get older,’ says Znaider. ‘Listen to ”old” Horow­itz, “old” Rubin­stein, or to Alfred Brendel now – they got bet­ter and bet­ter. The trick is to keep search­ing. So you lose a degree of crisp­ness or youth­ful exuber­ance; but it’s replaced by a wis­dom that you can’t achieve unless you really live. When I was younger people would say to me, “you’re tal­en­ted but what you need is life exper­i­ence”. And I used to think to myself, what is this life exper­i­ence they’re all talk­ing about? And now I know. It’s the will to search. That’s what makes us whole.’

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