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Gil Shaham performs Brahms' "Violin Concerto in D Major."
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GREAT PERFORMANCES: How did you get involved with the Europakonzert in Palermo?
Gil Shaham: I guess there's a little bit of a back story. I had played the Brahms concerto with Maestro Abbado and the Berlin Philharmonic a couple of years before, and it was part of a larger project. I guess they were doing a Brahms cycle for many years, recording all of the orchestral works -- the symphonies, the serenades -- and we were doing the violin concerto and the double concerto for violin and cello. We did the violin concerto, and I guess, for me, it was really like a dream come true. Such a first-class, top-notch orchestra, and Maestro Abbado is somebody I've always admired, somebody I've always loved to work with. We recorded the violin concerto, and I remember that afterwards he had a very scary illness and we didn't know if we would continue, and he pulled out of it heroically and a couple of years later we did the double concerto. This was actually his final tour with the orchestra, and so I was very honored and happy to be a part of that tour, and especially that concert in Palermo. I guess that's kind of how it came about.
GP: Since it was Claudio Abbado's final tour, did you feel any more emotional weight to the performance at Palermo?
GS: Oh, absolutely. You know, for me, I was a bit of an outsider, but even with the couple of days that I was there, you could see that this was the end of a decade-long relationship with the orchestra and Claudio [Abbado]. It was very poignant, it was very touching. And I guess I'd gotten to know those guys pretty well over the last few years. It was like a group of musician friends, kind of a field trip. You know, we're all hanging out in Sicily, and we went to the beach the night before. It was a very special couple of days. This is maybe my favorite violin concerto. It was something I'd wanted to do for years. And before our very first concert -- I don't remember when that was; I think it was two or three years before this performance -- I spent a good two years studying Brahms and studying the concerto. It was an incredible time, just reading about him and learning all of Brahms' music. Very, very special.
GP: Do you prepare so scrupulously for all of the music that you perform?
GS: I guess ideally. But most of the time I'm nowhere near as prepared as I should be.
GP: I suppose when you perform something that you've spent a lot of time looking forward to and working for there are a lot of expectations -- not simply in terms of the audience, but for yourself.
GS: You know, for me, when I got there, there were a lot of things that I thought about and a lot of things that I worried about. Even from the first rehearsal, it was just ... there's something about playing with musicians at that level. It's just fun. As I was playing, I thought, I don't deserve to be this lucky, first of all, and secondly, I should really just relax and enjoy this because this is as good as it gets. The most incredible musicians ... there's such flexibility with these musicians. There's really a feeling that you can do anything you want, and that's a great kind of freedom. If we want to try something new or play a little passage differently, there's [an] immediate response from everybody on stage. It's great. There's the most incredible vibe on stage, all this intense energy of musicians focusing. In this concert, also, the audience played a big part. They reopened the hall there, the Teatro Massimo, and [the audience was] thrilled to have Maestro [Abbado] back. It was very special, a very special concert.
GP: You've recorded the Brahms concerto, correct?
GS: We ended up recording it from a live concert in Berlin. Even that concert had a very different feel. It was part of the regular subscription series in Berlin. That's kind of what makes it fun for us and great -- every night is different, every night has different energies and different vibes. This concert [in Palermo] was much later, so I had already gotten to know a lot of the people better and it just felt more like close friends making music.
GP: In the program you discuss the Brahms concerto in terms of friendship.
GS: Yeah, I think that's very much what the piece is about. And I think for Brahms it was a very significant piece for himself, because of this lifelong relationship he had with Joseph Joachim [the violinist for whom Brahms composed the concerto]. There are a few passages in the piece that really seem to be his version of ideal friendship. Great music tells a story, I think. I think of the analogy of storytelling or a stage play, and we're sort of the actors. In this piece there's a big conflict between D major and D minor, and it should be like good versus evil. I think it's somehow related to friendship and [the] conflicts that arise and their resolution. So it was actually very nice to play this piece with people who I consider my friends.
GP: To those who aren't classical music connoisseurs, the third movement of the concerto might sound more familiar than the rest of the piece -- its melody has managed to seep into the greater cultural consciousness. Why do you think that is?
GS: I guess the third movement is kind of like a Hungarian dance, and Brahms was maybe most famous for his Hungarian dances -- "Lullaby" [is quite well known] also. When Brahms was very young, his first experience was with a Hungarian violinist. They toured Europe playing this kind of Hungarian music, and I guess this was kind of his homage to those tunes, those dances that he played. Maybe there's something about the dance rhythm that makes it more accessible. And, in a way, the piece is built that way, so that it somehow builds up to the last movement. There's something about the architecture of the piece that makes that stand out. And I guess it's true that the very first tune of the last movement kind of stands out on its own, where the first movement, you really need 20 minutes to go through it.
GP: When you were nine years old you performed for Isaac Stern and Nathan Milstein. How does one deal with that kind of pressure at such a young age?
GS: I think I was very lucky with my life. It's kind of a crazy business. Any musician, not just classical, I think when you start out you have no idea what your future's going to look like. And I think I was lucky in that my parents always insisted we have other lives. [Gil Shaham's sister is a pianist.] We were always at school, going to regular school. We went to music school on the weekends. And so there was something about that that kept us, hopefully, a little more grounded. And then, around the time I was 17, I played a concert in London, sort of my big break. I was a replacement for Itzhak Perlman, and it got a lot of attention in the media and suddenly I had many more invitations. Somehow it worked out. A couple years later I was able to make a living with music. I was really very, very lucky.
GP: How is it that you get to be first on the replacement list for someone like Itzhak Perlman?
GS: You know, I don't think I was first. I think I was probably like 50th, and somehow the first 49 couldn't make it. Really, it was just crazy.
GP: What are you working on now?
GS: I guess the next project is also something that's kind of a dream project for me. It's all music of Gabriel Fauré. The pianist that I play with, Akira Eguchi, has been a close friend for many years. We're neighbors, and we've been playing for, I don't know, 20 years together. We've always wanted to play this Fauré. We've played the violin sonata, and then we thought to make a recording of all his music. So this is something we've been wanting to do for a long, long time. And Fauré, he's a little bit of an unsung hero. He's one of those great masters of music, but it's sort of like you say: his name isn't really in the greater consciousness. I guess Aaron Copland said about Fauré, he was a neglected master. Still today it's a little bit true. Anybody who hears Fauré's music knows this is one of the greats. So we're very excited about that.
Interview by writer John Uhl for GREAT PERFORMANCES Online.
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