What do the Commonwealth Games, the Ryder Cup, T in the Park, the Edinburgh International Festival, London’s iTunes Festival, the Last Night of the Proms, a Glasgow flashmob and the BBC’s God Only Knows tribute to the power and potential of music all have in common?
Nicola Benedetti has appeared in them all. Not all this year, of course, although there’s no arguing that being a Scot has been an interesting concept and reality in 2014. Apt, then, that one of our greatest cultural exports decided that it was the right time to take a look at the music of her homeland in a less than strictly classical style. And thanks to that departure, there’s another unusual location she’s found herself in the pop Top 20, and not just in the classical charts, with the appropriately named Homecoming.
There is a romantic sweep to the music she plays here from the virtuosic Bruch violin showpiece that gives it its subtitle A Scottish Fantasy to the songs of Burns and special arrangements of tunes such as Loch Lomond.
In Homecoming she joins forces not only with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and conductor Rory MacDonald but folk musicians of the calibre of Phil Cunningham, Julie Fowlis and Aly Bain. Local audiences had a glimpse of this live in Dundee a few years ago when Benedetti performed alongside fiddler Laura McGhee; dipping her bow into the water of a different style of music conjures up shades of the pioneering combination of jazz great Stephane Grappeli and Yehudi Menuhin, whose London-based music school the young Benedetti attended from the age of 10.
It also means that in the last few years she has celebrated both sides of her family heritage in 2011 she had a great hit with Italia, tackling the baroque repertoire of her father’s native land and had to rise to the challenge of her own high standards in learning how to play very differently to do justice to the style.
She explains: “It’s an unexpected joy to be able to indulge in this because it’s not a regular thing for Scottish classical musicians to be able to play music from their own background. There are wonderful contemporary composers James MacMillan, Helen Grime, Stuart MacCrae but from the past, music tends to come from other countries, other traditions. And your whole physical demeanour has to change with different styles of playing everything about me changes because the demands are different, the movements are different, the way of making the sound and hopefully the right sounds! are different. It’s a different kind of workout. It was the same learning the baroque technique and approach for Italia.
“It surpassed all my expectations and I would like to do more together; it has added so much to my understanding of music and culture.
“It has been a great year in Scotland and I’ve been so lucky to be part of so much that was going on here. For me, most years include new experiences I’m very open to that and keen to adjust to what’s going on and embrace it. It’s been so exciting having the chance to interact with so many other people, from the opening concert of the Commonwealth Games to the Classics Marathon Day with the cream of Scottish orchestras when we had thousands of people through the doors.
“Getting that involved was amazing I don’t ever see a virtue in something being only for a few people and there’s a very personal cut-off point for me if there’s something I think doesn’t broaden the appeal of the music I love and bring people into contact with it.”
So much for elitism, then, in its negative sense at any rate; critics might use the term “crossover” with a curl of the lip but Ms Benedetti applies her own rigorous standards to everything she undertakes because she truly believes it’s important for classical music to reach people, to speak to them and mean something.
It helps that she’s young and personable but anyone who started off sniffy about her looks getting her where she is rather than her talent only has to look at the way she has handled her career and listen to how her playing has developed over the past decade to realise they are dealing with the real thing.
This young lady is an MBE, a former BBC Young Musician of the Year, a two-time winner of the Classic Brit Female Artist of the Year award, able to play an 18th century Stradivarius violin and boast, at the age of only 27, a stellar career already spanning 10 years.
She is one of a prodigiously talented and immensely hard-working elite but her goal is to share her music, not only with traditionally appreciative audiences but with those new to the concert hall, those who may never have had the chance to hear or play this music before but whose lives may very well be changed by their exposure to it and changed for the better.
She’s been given a gift, she says, and the means to hone it, make the very best of it and make her mark with it. It’s not just what she does, it’s what she is. But it’s not all about her.
She has lived in London most of her adult life but as a Scot and an Italian, she has the strongest of personal roots and musically and culturally, she is very definitely a citizen of the world.
Travelling comes built into the life of the contemporary classical soloist when I spoke to her over the phone she had just arrived in Frankfurt from Toronto, where she was working with former RSNO supremo Stephane Deneve, playing Shostakovich’s first violin concerto.
It’s a work she’s come to relatively recently and that she describes with real feeling obvious in every word on her Twitter account as “the most physically and mentally demanding, painful piece”.
This month, she’ll be performing that same Shostakovich concerto with the RSNO. It is, she says, full of complicated layers and some of the most moving, almost symphonic moments in the repertoire. And it’s the perfect illustration of both Benedetti’s ability to look at the big picture and of her determination to do the music justice.
“I’m glad I didn’t look at it when I was younger it’s all about getting to grips with the sound of the note, not so much playing it as finding what it should sound like every time you play it. It’s hard to re-create that the first time you get to know a piece so I’m grateful I did wait so that I could deal with the emotional depth and get my head round it. It’s an unbelievable challenge this piece of music is unusual in its scale, depth, drama, darkness and virtuosity it’s relentless and draining and absolutely wonderful to play!
“Everything’s collaborative to me; every single aspect of playing music, even solo performances. Of course you try to project yourself but there’s more to it. In the passacaglia section of the Shostakovich, for example, the tune starts with the cellos, then the horns, and the solo violin is a counter melody. They all come together to create something truly great.”
She knows how to pick her collaborators in real life, too; her partner in life (and in a chamber trio with pianist Alexei Grynyuk) is the highly talented German cellist Leonard Elschenbroich. He has a burgeoning career of his own and understands exactly what it takes to reach the kind of level at which he and his girlfriend are currently operating.
Although her highly supportive parents and extended family weren’t musical as such, both she and her older sister Stephanie, now a member of the contemporary Raven string quartet, took to the violin Nicola at the age of around four at one of her eight-year-old sister’s early lessons.
So was growing up with her big sister involved in music-making a good thing? “It definitely was. Even just getting through the hours of practice, it was good to have two of us!”
Perhaps that’s partly why she is so invested in being around for youngsters who haven’t had the same life chances. Her Twitter profile reads: “International classical violinist and proud ‘Big Sister’ to Sistema Scotland children”, the musical import from South America that started its Scottish life in the run-down Raploch area of Stirling and has now moved far beyond.
It’s something she believes in whole-heartedly and has thrown her weight behind as a patron, appearing personally with the young musicians from disadvantaged backgrounds who have been inspired by a closer relationship with classical music. In Dundee, it was championed by the late Michael Marra and his friends and family are working hard on bringing the Big Noise Sistema Orchestra concept to the city.
“I’m so proud of the way it’s developed it’s very difficult to establish a social and musical programme successful on all fronts and few have done it as well as Sistema Scotland. It’s an example to Scotland and to the rest of the world. People like Nicola Killearn and Richard Holloway [Sistema Scotland director and chair] are so strong, open-minded and dynamic and the kids themselves are amazing.
“These kids have played in front of their friends and family, they’ve been in a TV documentary, they’ve gone half way across the world to interact with people and cultures they’ve never met before.
“It’s about music giving them the confidence to do that. That’s asking a lot of any child from any kind of background but when you see the challenges they face it’s even more exciting and incredible.”
I mention that I have recently interviewed Nick Nairn and how he reckons that the way to improve the problematic Scottish relationship with food is through our children. “He’s absolutely right!” she says firmly. Last year she developed her own education and outreach plan, The Benedetti Sessions, and as ambassador for the BBCs Ten Pieces project she recently appeared on The One Show to talk about getting primary school children countrywide to learn a set of pieces from John Adams to Handel and Stravinsky and stimulate their own creativity in the process.
Many hours of practice each day and a general admission that no matter how good the listener thinks she is, her own inner ear will never be quite satisfied, don’t stop her loving the sound of music for herself. “I tend to listen to a lot of classical music! I did Desert Island Discs in January and my choices now would be completely different.”
Ironically given the success of Homecoming, coming home isn’t something she can do that often so this week’s Scottish concerts are a personal treat as well as a professional challenge. You can take the girl out of Scotland but you can’t take Scotland or Italy out of this girl.
And being a Scottish Italian, it’s refreshing to discover that she enjoys her food.
“I’m not obsessive about it I do have a healthy appetite and it’s great cooking at home. My mum is a great cook and I do like to cook myself. If I’m being fussy, I really don’t like soft, over-cooked pasta. It has to be done the proper Italian way.”
Nicola Benedetti appears with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra at the Caird Hall on Thursday November 13 at 7.30pm.