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Published: Wednesday, 20 November 2024 at 09:30 AM
Violinist Vilde Frang on squaring up to epic works and coping with imposter syndrome
Who is violinist Vilde Frang?
Elgar, Stravinsky, Korngold: no one can accuse Vilde Frang of taking it easy with her choice of violin concertos this season. And that’s merely before Christmas. But Frang has never shied away from intensity, risk or hard work. They practically define her playing style and help to explain why she’s one of today’s most individual and compelling players. ‘As a personality, I always need a bit of resistance – I always need to do it the hard way,’ she explains. ‘Once I start to coast or get the feeling that things are going my way, or people are being positive, I don’t know how to handle that. It unsettles me, because it’s not supposed to be easy.’
A violinist on top of the world
Not yet 40, Frang is on top of the violin world, with her pick of calibre collaborators: she recorded the Elgar (released in September on Warner Classics) with Robin Ticciati and the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin, and has been touring the work with the London Symphony Orchestra and Antonio Pappano. She performs the Stravinsky with the Oslo Philharmonic and Klaus Mäkelä in Europe and the Chicago Symphony and Hannu Lintu in the US, and the Korngold with the Berlin Philharmonic and Kirill Petrenko. It’s not a bad dance card.
In person, she is softly spoken and thoughtful – tentative, even – just as her musical sound world is one of extreme delicacy and tenderness. One can understand why the cover of her first CD of Sibelius and Prokofiev concertos, in 2009 aged only 22, featured her softly wafting underneath a tree. This image belies her playing, though, which is also powerful and dynamic, and makes light work of the juggernauts of the concerto repertoire.
Vilde Frang… taking on the Elgar Violin Concerto
The Elgar is one such work. It’s the perfect showcase for Frang’s expressive range and poetic understanding, but it’s also a beast of a concerto, coming in at around 50 minutes of impassioned thematic material and fiendish passagework. ‘It requires a lot of stamina because you are playing a lot,’ she admits. ‘When you reach the third movement, you’re already exhausted and then you have all its hurdles to get through until you come to the cadenza.’
Her background helps: ‘I’m Norwegian so I go cross-country skiing. After ten minutes, you’re quite fed up, and want to go home because it’s not funny anymore. And then you keep on uphill and after 45 minutes, you are in the flow where you feel you have conquered something within yourself. You’re on top of the world. The cadenza at the very end opens an otherworldly palette. You’re in a very special state beyond exhaustion, so you can be very creative.’
She and Ticciati have long discussed recording the work, and she credits him for helping her understand it. ‘He introduced me to Elgar’s Second Symphony, and it completely transformed my perception of the Violin Concerto,’ she says. ‘I can’t imagine the Concerto without having heard the Second Symphony now, because they’re written basically at the same time. The Concerto was premiered in 1910, the year that King Edward VII died, and Elgar wrote the funeral march of the Symphony’s second movement in that same year. The Concerto has the same poise and expansion. It’s an epic journey more than a structure. You’re in a trance.’
The importance of performing the concerto live
The live concert experience has also been essential in coming to an interpretation of the work, she says: ‘You don’t know the Concerto until you have kicked yourself on stage once. Only then do you know where the land lies. There are so many questions that you don’t get the answer to in the practice room, but that you get in the concert hall in the moment of performance. It’s a baptism of fire.’
Vilde Frang… dealing with self-doubt as a performer
How does she cope with this level of risk? ‘The challenge of going on stage is that the mind interferes,’ she replies. ‘You start to question basic movements, like walking on a pavement: “Am I right in putting my right leg in front of my left? What if I stumble?” It’s inevitable that you may indeed stumble at some point because you’re questioning these things. It’s exactly the same playing-wise.
If I played a good concert the day before, I’m always asking myself, “How can I live up to what I did yesterday?” And that’s dangerous, because then the mind starts to think, “Oh but…” If I can achieve a state of mind where I’m curious – “I wonder what’s going to happen tonight?” – then if anything goes slightly awry, I don’t mind. I’m on a journey and maybe I stumbled, but I’m on a bigger mission than playing a note slightly flat. It’s an eternal struggle if you’re a soloist. Without risks, there’s no potential of better and worse concerts. That’s something you must live with.’
Championing lesser-known works
Playing Elgar, Korngold and Stravinsky takes her relatively far off the beaten track – none of them show up in the Bachtrack website’s top five performed violin concertos last season, for instance. Having released the Korngold in 2016 and the Stravinsky in 2022, she sees her role as being an ambassador for such works: ‘I’m ever more convinced that if a piece lights a spark inside, you have to share this story and explain it to other people. You should do anything to play it, whether it’s Thomas Adès, Britten, Elgar or Hindemith. There are so many other incredible violinists who can play Mendelssohn or Tchaikovsky.’
Audience expectations
One of the reasons you’re more likely to hear Mendelssohn or Tchaikovsky, she thinks, is that promoters like to play it safe. ‘The concert promoter says, “We have to programme what the audience wants to hear,” but actually, audiences don’t always know what they want to hear. They love to be surprised. You can see it with the Britten and Elgar concertos – there are certain pieces that just need more time, like Haydn’s cello concertos, rediscovered many years after their composition.’
This problem is exacerbated in conservatoires, and to that end Frang has a policy in her own teaching studio at the Norwegian Academy of Music. ‘What’s almost traumatised me is that students come with a selection of five violin concertos: Sibelius, Tchaikovsky, Mozart Four and Five, and Brahms,’ she explains. ‘I try to understand what made them choose these pieces. They say, “My teacher thought this would be a good choice for the competition,” or “This is what you should play for the orchestra audition.” So, I’ve written a list of pieces for them – anything except these five concertos. If you want to play for me, then play something else!’
Vilde Frang… on teaching
She feels the benefits of this herself as a teacher: ‘I’m very excited when somebody brings me the Bernstein Serenade or something like that, because that helps me to discover new pieces. That’s how it should be. Otherwise, music making becomes so dull and grey, and so restricted. Look at all this incredible repertoire that we are blessed to have as violinists.’
She also feels that teaching is overly concerned with technical matters, rather than looking at the big picture. ‘I’m slowly realising how focused teachers and students are on the tools,’ she says. ‘And in terms of instruments, we are told all the time that our playing can change and become so much better if we simply change our bow or get a better fiddle. But actually, it’s all about here [she gestures to her heart] and what life brings your way. It’s all down to impressions of life and personality. It’s very little about this [points to violin]. Yes, you need to be disciplined to be able to express the music through your instrument, but that’s where we get stuck. The focus on perfectionism and the tools of our trade is what limits classical musicians.’
Vilde Frang… her education and early years
Her own education, though, seems to have been a good balance between technique and heart. She studied with Henning Kraggerud and his brother Alf Richard at the Barratt Due Institute of Music in Oslo and remembers a relaxed approach. ‘It was a little harbour, a very safe nest to develop in peace, without being thrown into big competitions or taken out to play for famous violin teachers. These formative years were the most important for me. I just enjoyed music making and all these early impressions, not only from music, but from ballet, opera, dance and theatre.’
She studied ballet until the commitment required by her teacher became too great, but still takes inspiration from it. Her eyes light up as she remembers watching Alina Cojocaru and Johan Kobborg dancing in Eugene Onegin in Covent Garden. She dreams of working with Cojocaru and says, ‘In my next life, if I’m lucky, I would come back as a dying swan.’
From the age of 11 she came under the eye of violinist Anne-Sophie Mutter, who served as a ‘no-nonsense mentor’, and aged 12, she was plucked from her safe harbour by Mariss Jansons, looking for a local young talent to accompany in his final concert as music director of the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra. She performed Sarasate’s Carmen Fantasy and remembers, ‘That gave me a basis to step up to slightly larger-scale performances. It was certainly a milestone for me. I didn’t have any repertoire, I had no experience and I was not prepared. I was just being myself.’
Getting serious with a regular practice regime
It wasn’t until later that she decided to buckle down and work seriously. ‘When I was in my teens, I realised that I needed to practise scales and etudes, which I hadn’t done before. It was only then that I became more serious about practising, committing to a schedule of seven hours’ practice a day.’
She had wanted to study with the influential professor Ana Chumachenco (teacher of players as diverse as Julia Fischer, Arabella Steinbacher and Lisa Batiashvili). Chumachenco was too busy, however, and Frang ended up teaching herself for nearly two years while she waited for Chumachenco to accept her. She found the experience character-building: ‘The positive thing about studying on my own was I had to be self-disciplined. In all my stubbornness to get one teacher, I ended up being my own teacher. I had to learn how to work on my own and that was not necessarily a bad thing.’
Chumachenco recommended she went to Kolja Blacher in the meantime: ‘He was such a meticulous teacher, and technically speaking, it was exactly what I needed at that time.’ Eventually, her patience and determination paid off and Chumachenco took her at the Kronberg Academy from 2008-10. ‘Her lessons always felt like a sanctuary,’ says Frang. ‘She was iconic, like the Hillary Clinton of violin teachers. She was positive and had a motherly energy, but by then it was more of a supplement. The groundwork for my technique was thanks to Professor Blacher.’
Vilde Frang… future ambitions
By then, her trajectory was set, winning the prestigious Borletti-Buitoni Award and making her London Philharmonic Orchestra debut in 2007, and her first recording for Warner Classics in 2009, with countless awards and accolades to follow. Alongside her concerto work, chamber music has been a large part of her repertoire – this season including Ysaÿe and Kodály with Valeriy Sokolov and Lawrence Power, the latter with whom she also performs Britten’s Double Concerto, and she continues a residency at Wigmore Hall, partnering with Jonathan Cohen and Arcangelo, with whom she recorded Mozart concertos in 2015.
With so much going on right now, maybe it’s superfluous to ask her about the future. ‘I have no idea,’ she admits. ‘I feel extremely lucky to be able to be an ambassador for the pieces that I want to play. As long as I feel I have something to give and to say, I am blessed to be able to do so. There are so many things I haven’t yet explored, and that I need to learn – for example, contemporary pieces and certain chamber pieces that I would love to play. String quartets by Adès, for example, or Wolfgang Rihm’s String Trio. But I only think as far as my next inspiration goes. I don’t think in terms of ten years, because who knows how I will feel at that point and what will happen?’ If the last ten years are anything to go by, plenty of good things.