Love Duets

Monday, 11 April 2016, 9:12 am
Article: Max Rashbrooke

One of the super-couples of the classical world, Nicola Benedetti and Leonard Elschenbroich, are in New Zealand for a series of concerts with the NZSO – and performing the first piece they ever played together.

Last year the British composer Mark-Anthony Turnage wrote a piece for Nicola Benedetti and Leonard Elschenbroich, a series of ‘love duets’ for violin and cello called – with a touch of Italian flair – Duetti d’Amore. But, being modernist in nature, the duets didn’t strike listeners as being obviously romantic when the pair debuted them in concert. “Much of the feedback,” Benedetti says, “was, like, if that's love duets, the relationship's not going very well!”

Happily the truth is quite the opposite: theirs is a thriving, nine-year-long musical and emotional partnership. Benedetti and Elschenbroich first met at the Yehudi Menuhin music school in Britain in the late 1990s, when she was nine and he was twelve. Both left the school in their teens, and they didn’t become a couple until a few years later. The first piece they played together was Brahms’s Double Concerto for violin and cello – by happy chance the exact same piece they’re performing with the NZSO on this tour.

Not that it was easy playing together in the early days, Benedetti explains as she and Elschenbroich park themselves on a sofa in the lobby of the Intercontinental hotel. “Leonard didn’t want to play with me in the first year of us getting together,” she says, affecting to feel hurt. Elschenbroich says, earnestly, “No, I just knew” – by this point Benedetti has started openly laughing – “from a lot of musician couples that it can be dangerous, because rehearsing is something so personal and intense that I have seen couples split up over it. It's a natural thing to do, because they are a musician, you want to play with them. But I think until things are settled a little bit...”

Still laughing, Benedetti says, “No, it was a very sensible suggestion.”

On the surface the pair of them might seem poles apart. Benedetti, who at one time was marketed as a sort of classical music sex symbol, looks sharp in a blue leather jacket and has the bigger personality, while Elschenbroich is paler, more apparently serious, content with just a black t-shirt.

But there is no doubting the evenness and strength of their musical bond.

Even when they were both children, “I always adored Leonard's playing,” Benedetti says . After leaving music school, “We sort of lost contact for a bit. But it was always somewhere in my mind that I would love to have a trio or some kind of chamber music set-up with Leonard. That was always a desire of mine. And I thought that would be easy once we got together! But it wasn’t for the first year at least….”

So what did Elschenbroich think of her playing initially? “Well,” he says, “when I first heard Nicola's playing she was nine years old, so, um.”

Benedetti says, “I sounded amaaazing,” then laughs uproariously. “I didn't, actually. I sounded awful.” Elschenbroich valiantly tries to recall the moment – “It was at the Wigmore Hall, I think…” – before Benedetti cuts him off, saying: “Don't pretend like you remember!”

By the time they got together, much had changed, and in some ways the seniority gap was reversed.

Benedetti had won the BBC Young Musician of the Year in a blaze of publicity and landed a recording deal. “She was already a big star,” Elschenbroich says, “and I was still a student. I hadn't done any performing, really … So I was – you know – I wouldn't say threatened by it, but I was in awe of the ability of someone who was younger than me to deal with the reality of performing ... to be able to perform when it matters and all that stuff that you don't learn as a student at all. I learnt so much from her in those first few years.”

Is it ever hard for him, being the partner of the very famous Nicola Benedetti? “No,” he says, slowly but definitely. “It's never ...I have never felt that it has had any negative impact.” As Benedetti points out, they hardly have time to worry about status issues: “Basically, we are both just doing concerts all the time!”

The pair of them – she from Scotland, though of part-Italian descent, he from Germany – have lived together in various cities in their nine years as a couple, most recently in London, but Elschenbroich has just moved to Berlin. He played some concerts there recently and “just enjoyed the city very much … having been in London for eight years, I thought it was time to spend some time in Germany.” But thanks to his intense performing schedule, he estimates he has only been in Berlin for five days out of the six months he has nominally been living there. Benedetti adds: “Only for a few years of our nine years being together have we actually lived in the same city. We've been between Cologne, London, Vienna and now Berlin. We're both on the move all the time anyway.”

Playing together, as they often do, brings challenges of its own. How do they manage to give each other feedback on their playing – something so central to their lives – without ruining the relationship? “Well,” says Benedetti, “we sometimes do really well, and then other times ... less well.

I would say I'm the more sensitive of the two of us. But then again,” she adds, playfully, “maybe Leonard is less tactful!” On a more serious note, she says that the longer they’ve been together, “the more we've learnt about what the other one needs in order to be the best of themselves. With some people, their best comes out when they're overloaded with criticism and information. Other people really are not at their best with that. And that's something we’re both sensitive to now, much more so – what the other one can utilise.”

The piece they’re playing on this tour, the Brahms Double Concerto, has a curious history. Brahms had fallen out with his best friend, the virtuoso violinist Joseph Joachim, after rejecting Joachim’s claim that his wife had been having an affair with Brahms’s publisher. He needed a way to win his friend back, and, deciding that a solo violin piece would be too overt a signal, settled on a composition pitting both violin and cello against a full orchestra.

Elschenbroich says the effect is like having “a chamber music piece in the middle of a symphony … The emotion that he [Brahms] always comes back to is the love and friendship between the two soloists. The warmth and love – not so much a passionate love but a very friendly, brotherly love between the two voices. It's something that this expresses more than any concerto I can think of.”

Benedetti sees it the same way. “You have this enormous scale, and this enormous symphonic experience with all these musicians on stage and that sound, rushing towards you, of such a mass of people – and [within that] you have the joy of witnessing that real intimacy between two people, which you never experience with a solo concerto.”

Is it all the more intimate for the listener when the soloists are a real-life couple? Apparently it is. “A lot of interpretations of the piece do end up having a competitive element to them,” Benedetti says, “which I think is very unnatural to the way the music is written. So I think our relationship does help us present everything as a duo.” Elschenbroich adds: “We've actually found [that] each other can fire our playing. It was our playing that brought us together, so we have a similar approach, or interpretation.”

The Double Concerto wasn’t an immediate hit when it was premiered in 1887, critics finding its subtle beauty too “cold and frigid” in an overtly emotional era. But then, Elschenbroich says, “I often think that too! Often when I hear it played, that's what I feel.” But that’s only because many players have fallen into the competitive trap. “We do have to work hard to make sure that that warmth and lovingness in the piece is exposed,” Benedetti adds.

One of the other – more positive – claims made about the piece is that it almost creates a new instrument, a fused violin-cello, such is the closeness and connectedness of the parts. “It's always an ideal moment when you can't really tell where one sound is beginning and the other is ending,” Benedetti says. “I would say we're working towards that all the time ... It doesn't always feel like that! Because it's very hard to do. I think we do achieve it sometimes, when the sound is just … the vibrations of the two sounds fit together.”

Elschebroich adds: “When it sounds right as a fused thing, the individual voices sound really weird on their own. Because it's almost like we share the components that the sound needs, and if you split them in two, and you don't have all the components, it doesn't feel right. Sometimes when we’re playing it through, when we're rehearsing, and she'll stop, and I keep on playing, I hear how strange my sound actually is on its own.” And that, it’s fair to say, is as romantic a statement as you could hope to hear.

Benedetti and Elschenbroich’s concerts with the NZSO finish on Saturday, April 16 at the Michael Fowler Centre. More details from www.nzso.org.nz

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Max Rashbrooke

Journalist

Max Rashbrooke is a journalist and author working in Wellington, New Zealand, where he writes about politics, finance and social issues.

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