GREAT PERFORMANCES: If you would, Josh, would you just speak about the incidents that occurred in New York on September 11, 2001? Joshua Bell: Well, I'm only now starting to emerge from the cloud that is just completely over everyone here in the city. I was home here in New York, in my apartment, when I actually got a call from my mother in Indiana who saw it on the news. I was still sleeping and she told me to turn on the television. I saw both of the buildings were already on fire by then. Obviously, it's unthinkable for anyone, but particularly for someone living in New York, who sees the Twin Towers all the time. It's just unfathomable. I went up on the roof of my building, which has a direct view of the Twin Towers, and I watched them burn and I was just in complete disbelief. I mean, I'm fortunate, I don't have any close people in my life that were injured or killed. But everyone knows someone that died. I know so many people that have friends that died. GP: How far are you from the World Trade Center? JB: I'm a couple of miles away, but still pretty close, and close to the cutoff point. Everything below 14th Street was pretty much closed off for a long time. Anyway, I canceled everything that week, interviews, and I canceled my trip to Europe, and was kind of helpless. But I was able to do a couple of things. One memorial service at Riverside Church on Sunday with some other musicians, and also got together with some friends a couple days after the event, and we played a little impromptu performance at one of the Red Cross shelters where people were sleeping, people who were out of [their] homes and were being taken care of. GP: What did you play at the Riverside Church, why did you choose what you played, and how did it feel playing for such a somber occasion? JB: Well, it was basically a service at the Riverside Church with their normal preacher, but they also brought someone from the Jewish faith and someone from the Muslim faith. It was a kind of coming together. They asked several artists: Dawn Upshaw, the soprano; [baritone] Thomas Hampson; and Mandy Patinkin, the actor, Broadway singer; and a few other people. They asked us to play something. It was basically a series of sad songs. I played the "Meditation" from "Thaïs," by Massenet, which felt right. In the service it preceded a segment led by the Buddhist representative who led a meditation for everyone, so I played "Meditation" just before that. It was also broadcast on PBS. GP: Speaking of PBS, what was your motivation for doing "West Side Story Suite" and the concert in Central Park? What does this music mean to you? JB: Well, the musical of Bernstein I've always loved. I've always found his music very touching, very moving. "West Side Story," I was introduced to it through the movie when I was a kid. And it's music that has been in my consciousness my whole life. It's music that I've always loved, so when the opportunity came to play it on the violin, because this arranger, Bill Brohn, had decided to make it into a suite for violin, I jumped at the chance because I've always loved it and I thought it would work very well. So that's how I originally got into doing this music. I certainly take it very seriously. Some of the people I mentioned it to at the time, when I started working on this project, some of my classical colleagues, when I mentioned "West Side Story," they thought, "Oh, why do you want to do that? Isn't that a bit pop or isn't that Broadway, and won't you feel funny playing 'Maria' from 'West Side Story' on the violin?" But I never felt that way at all. I think it only becomes cheesy if you approach it that way, as being somehow insignificant or schmaltzy. It's actually incredibly touching music. I love it. And the special, doing it in Central Park was kind of a nice culmination of the whole project because the story is all ... about New York and Bernstein represents New York. Even Bernstein's apartment overlooked Central Park. It just seemed right to do it and a good occasion to do it, so I was glad that they [PBS] decided to make a special from it. GP: Tell us what the mood was that night. I understand there were 50,000 people? Could just anyone who wanted to show up? JB: First of all, it's part of the New York Philharmonic [summer concert series]. They have a series in the park where they play, every summer, a couple of [free] concerts and the whole city is just invited to come, and they get up to 100,000 people at a time. So for some people, it's a tradition, coming to these Central Park concerts. I happen to love that kind of venue. Acoustically, for a performer, it's not the same as playing in Carnegie Hall, but it has a different kind of feeling. People out there picnicking or they've brought their kids; people are there to really enjoy themselves. They're ... not going into it for social reasons; they're not dressing up. They're going out there to really enjoy the experience of being outside and enjoying music in [a] relaxed setting. I really enjoyed that; it makes me very happy. On that particular night too, it was a bit scary because of course weather is a big issue with those concerts ... if it rains you're kind of out of luck. They had a rain date, but all day it was threatening thunderstorms, and up until an hour before the concert started, it was raining. That was like a nightmare for me, because I thought it was going to scare away the audience. But it cleared up a half an hour before the concert. ... Amazingly, people didn't go away, they just whipped out their umbrellas and waited it out, and there were still, I think, over 50,000 people there. There was a sea of people from my view. And they stayed, very few people left. That's very New York; they don't give up, they stick it out. And they did. In the end, it actually created a kind of neat atmosphere because the skies had an eerie ambiance; very dramatic weather, windy; it was a very neat atmosphere. GP: The PBS program and the CD are as much a valentine to New York City as to Bernstein. I was wondering if the terrorist attacks have changed your attitude towards "West Side Story Suite," in a way, or is this a tonic to the feelings that New York now evokes in people? JB: It's a difficult question. I think there are elements from the music, like any great piece of music, that transcend everything, even the story really. Elements that speak beauty in general. That's always the case with great music: no matter what the story, there are always elements, I feel, that go way beyond whatever the lyrics or story are. This music is timeless and will always, I think, be really relevant. As well as the themes, I mean the story itself -- "West Side Story" -- is timeless ... going back to "Romeo and Juliet." So that's why it's such a classic, and I think will always be enjoyed. So I don't feel that after this World Trade Center tragedy that somehow the piece is not relevant anymore or anything like that. People are saying that the world will never be the same since the World Trade Center tragedy, but this is not the first horrible tragedy that has happened. We had the Holocaust and World War II and somehow people were able to move on and of course not forget, but I guess things do go on. But I think in times like this music is that much more needed, and the arts I think really speak to people. The whole event, as far as my view of New York, it's made me even more proud to be part of New York; the way people have come together here is pretty amazing. GP: How has the piece changed since the premiere in Florida a year ago? JB: During that first performance, we were still working out kinks in the piece. That was only a couple of weeks before the recording, rather last minute to be working out stuff like that. We worked on bits of the orchestration that we felt didn't work in the concert. I altered my violin writing, things that didn't come through the way I thought they would. A lot of things you don't know until you really perform it. And I changed my cadenza, the second cadenza, the one at the end, which I wrote. During the recording session, I decided to take out a section and edit a section, which made it longer, probably. The nice thing about playing a new work is that it can always be changed. I'm still, from performance to performance, I'm changing things, or asking the arranger if I can change this or that. You can do that with the new piece because, unlike Beethoven or Brahms, you don't feel right about doing things like that, it doesn't feel right. But that's why I love working on new pieces. GP: If you could ask Bernstein any questions, what would you ask him? JB: Oh, that's hard. I don't know if I'll be able to answer this, so start thinking of another question. But I am just kicking myself that I never got to meet him, that's one big regret that I have. He died in 1990; I was 22 at the time, certainly old enough to have found a way to meet him. We had crossed paths several times; he spent time in Indiana, even in Bloomington, where I grew up and went to school. He spent several weeks there on campus, meeting with people. He was writing one of his last works there. He was holed up in Indiana about a mile from where I was. A lot of my friends that I went to school with ended up meeting him at some occasion, a party or this or that, and I somehow never got to meet him. From everything I was told about him, he was such an amazing figure. People always use the term "larger than life," but apparently he really was an incredibly magnetic personality, which you can totally see through his music. It's so "heart on the sleeve." It's all about love and celebration of life, and apparently he was all about that in everything he did. Just to be around him I am sure would be fascinating, it would be inspiring. I would have loved to play the piece for him and see what he would have to say. I'm sure he would have amazing things to say about how I should think about the music; that would have been great. And he did sign off to the idea of making this piece, just before the late '80s. It would have been cool if somehow it could have been created and I could have done it, and I could have played it for him, but it didn't work out that way. GP: What violin did you play at the concert? JB: The violin I played at the concert was a violin that I have had for nine years now, I think. It's a Stradivarius made in 1732; it's called the "Tom Taylor." Most Stradivarii have nicknames, and one of the owners that had it in the 19th century started referring to it as the "Tom Taylor," and it has been referred to since then as the "Tom Taylor." I'm actually in the process of buying another one, which I just, out of the blue, fell in love with a month ago. I'm in the process of selling mine, of trading mine and buying a new one from 1713. It's called the "Ex Huberman," ... [after] one of the great violinists from the beginning of the [20th] century. It's quite a famous violin because it was stolen from him [Bronislaw Huberman] at Carnegie Hall in the 1930s and was never recovered in his lifetime. Fifty years later, in the 1980s, it was discovered that some café violinist had played on it his entire career without anyone knowing. GP: Are you primarily responsible for the solo parts of the violin writing? JB: I couldn't say primarily, but I contributed quite a lot to the violin writing and making it work on the violin and adding things to make it more virtuosic. So a lot of the notes are mine; I also helped with the structure of it too, and the ordering of it. The original version that was presented to me was about 10 minutes longer. It needed refining, and I was very involved in that whole process, but that's the part I really love. GP: What is your next project? JB: My next recording project is for Sony. It's a more standard classical project. I kind of alternate with them between these kinds of projects, and so the next record that I'm releasing is [of] Beethoven and the Mendelssohn violin concertos. Also, with all my own ... cadenzas for the Beethoven, but I've done one ... for the Mendelssohn concerto -- for the first movement cadenza -- and I don't think anyone's ever done that before. It's part of the piece, but in fact written mostly by a violinist named Ferdinand David. I kind of decided that it's been done so many times, and I had fooled around with writing this cadenza on my own, I thought, why not put it on this record? We have so many versions of it the way it's normally heard, so I thought [I'd do] something a little different. GP: I was curious if you hope other musicians will pick up the "West Side Story Suite" and play it themselves, or do you see this as something that's purely your own? JB: For the time being, for like this first year or two, it's fun to have it be mine. I think we have some sort of exclusivity with the piece at the moment. But down the road, ideally, I would love it if people took it up, because I felt like I kind of helped give birth to it and you want to see it go on and make it into the repertoire. There is nothing more gratifying than that. I would love it if it became part of the repertoire and other violinists took it up. I've had a lot of interest from people writing me e-mails, violin students and other people who want to get their hands on the music. GP: Are you going to do this piece on your European tour? JB: I did it after the Central Park concert ... at the Royal Albert Hall, in London, which was really a neat place. I did that along with the "Serenade," which is not on the program, but on my album. In the fall, I'm going back and doing it a couple of times. GP: Can you talk a bit about working with Kristin Chenoweth? JB: I've become a big fan of hers. When the idea was presented to me to do something with her, first of all, I love working with singers, it's fun to have the occasion to do something with a singer. I learn from singers, too, whenever I play. The way I approach the violin, the violin is so vocal that I always have something to learn. But I didn't know too much about her, but some people sent me one of her albums. I just think she's very charismatic. And she is an amazingly versatile singer. She can sing opera; she can have this belting Broadway voice, which is amazing. I found her very easy to work with. And fun, she has just the right kind of spirit for Bernstein. I felt it really worked out well. Some of these crossover combinations don't always work, and I [am] skeptical about it when they try to throw me together with people from other worlds. There is a lot of that going on, so I was so pleased when I was actually able to work with someone kind of from another world, but yet feel good about it. That's what I look for in my crossover projects. GP: Speaking of things that are labeled crossover, I enjoyed the album SHORT TRIP HOME and was wondering how working in the bluegrass idiom has helped or influenced your playing in other musical styles. JB: Well, it's certainly affected my music making in lots of ways. It's very inspiring, being around people who improvise all the time. That's not something I get to be around that often. Touring with these guys from night to night, them improvising so much of it, and just seeing the way they think was very inspiring. Also, the fact that they're composing on the bus; they're writing songs and arranging and stuff while we were touring around, just being around that process I learned a lot. Also, their approach to rhythm is so different. It really made me key into certain rhythmic things that I feel I can apply to classical music too. Lots of ways it's helped me. It was a great experience. Text of an interview with Joshua Bell conducted on September 19, 2001 by a panel of reporters, including GREAT PERFORMANCES Online's Samantha Gleisten.