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NICOLA BENEDETTI


in my path as a violinist. I’ve wanted to do this for a long time.’ The Bruch, a favourite from her concert


‘It’s a celebration of Scottish music and how Scottish music travelled and inspired classical composers. It’s most definitely not a political statement’


Image: Benedetti is part of Sistema Scotland, which helps young people from deprived areas to play instruments.


repertoire, was, she says, ‘an obvious next big romantic concerto for me to record’. But working with folk musicians is very different from a solo with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra or the NY Philharmonic. Phil and Ally come from a musical tradition of playing in pubs and being paid in pints. Benedetti is a Suzuki-trained violinist willing to get up in the dark to fly to Denmark. Through her polite, borderline diplomatic language, it sounds as if the culture clash in the recording studio freaked the bejeezus out of her. ‘They provided a community that it’s not


that common to come across in classical music, I felt really privileged to be part of their team for a short amount of time,’ she says cautiously. ‘It was, very very challenging. Extremely


challenging. The music is not an absolute entity. In classical music every note, every length of every note, and the harmonies under- neath every note, is written out. You wouldn’t dare change anything.’ That is not the case with tunes that have been played in pub sessions over the decades. ‘A lot of this was created at the time. That was quite something for me.’ It’s the difference between interpreting


something that’s already there and making it up as you go along. When Benedetti arrived at the Lincoln Centre practise room, she knew every note of Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No 1. The work of rehearsals was finding out


what conductor Vladimir Jurowski wanted to do with it. In the recording studio with Bain, Cunningham et al, it was not like that. At all. ‘There were certain things that took me


slightly by surprise,’ she says delicately. ‘It was the last second when we would decide on some- thing. The decisions and the options of what notes were being played continued to change right through the recording session.’ What the finished product is not, Bene-


detti insists, is her independence album. She is mildly alarmed by the very idea. ‘No, abso- lutely, not at all. It was decided way, way before I knew anything about the referendum and the date was set. It’s a celebration of Scottish music and how it travelled and inspired composers. It’s most definitely not a political statement.’ She is engaged with politics, however: there


are pictures and links to events in Syria and Turkey on her Twitter feed. As the official ‘Big Sister’ of Sistema Scotland, she has brought clas- sical music, with all its benefits, to the Raploch housing estate in Stirling. She uses the concert platform and the classroom as her soapbox, believing that music ‘forces you into a world beyond just practicalities, beyond things we can see and touch and absolutely understand’. For Benedetti, who is not religious, it is


almost spiritual. ‘You go into a school and play to children. Something really, really powerful can happen. That’s what music can do.’


Homecoming: A Scottish Fantasy is released by Decca on 14 July


WWW.SCOTTISHFIELD.CO.UK 49


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