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By
Marion Lignana Rosenberg |
Joshua Bell. |
Top: Joshua Bell in performance. Bottom left: Romance
of the Violin was named by Billboard
as the 2004 Classical Album of the Year. Bottom
right: Bell’s newest CD features the Tchaikovsky
Violin Concerto. |
| Bell’s
Recordings* |
| Tchaikovsky:
Violin Concerto; Méditation;
Danse russe from Swan Lake
(2005). Recorded in concert, the Tchaikovsky
Concerto captures Bell in electrifying
form with the Berlin Philharmonic under
Michael Tilson Thomas.
Romance of the Violin
(2003). The first classical recording
in decades to hit Billboard’s
pop chart, this blissfully played collection
of favorite melodies is newly available
as a CD-DVD DualDisc.
Beethoven, Mendelssohn:
Violin Concertos (2002).
Bell wrote his own cadenzas for these
classic works, which he performs with
lithe, airy tone and patrician grace.
Bernstein: West Side Story
Suite (2001). Bell swings
and soars in selections from Bernstein’s
heartbreaking musical, his enigmatic
serenade after Plato’s Symposium
and songs from Candide and
On the Town.
Maw: Concerto for Violin
and Orchestra (2000).
Bell won a Grammy for this recording
of Maw’s grand, opulent 1993 concerto,
commissioned for him.
The Red Violin
(1999). Under maestro Esa-Pekka Salonen,
Bell gives feverish life to John Corigliano’s
haunting, Oscar-winning score for François
Girard’s film.
Gershwin
Fantasy (1998). George
Gershwin himself (via piano roll) and
John Williams team up with Bell for
performances from Porgy and Bess
and Girl Crazy, and other tunes.
*Highlights
from the Sony catalog. |
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Joshua
Bell is a former child prodigy turned honored adult musician,
a superstar of classical music whose Romance of the
Violin CD scored on Billboard’s pop
chart and an unconscionably handsome 37-year-old who charms
fans of all ages. One admirer groused on his website: “My
mom wanted to call me right after she met Josh, but suddenly
she forgot my phone number.”
Blame it on the lesser angels of our nature, then, if you
half-hope that the Indiana-born violinist will turn out
to be snooty or neurotic. Instead, Bell is gracious and
unimpressed with himself. He confides cheerily how he keeps
up the killing pace of a 2005-06 season that sees him careening
from America’s heartland to China, and from performing
John Corigliano’s Violin Concerto with the New York
Philharmonic to playing Bartók in Hungary.
“I’m pretty good at sleeping on planes,”
he chuckles. “Sheer will carries me through until
I have a break, and then I totally crash. I do like to meet
local people and walk around their cities, and food is a
major thing for me — I think most musicians tend to
eat a lot.” Asked how he maintains his trim physique,
Bell groans good-naturedly. “I’m not really
good with treadmills and things like that, but it looks
like I’m going to have to find more time now to do
that.”
So Bell is a mere mortal after all — though Corigliano,
when accepting his Oscar for the score to The Red Violin,
proclaimed that the violinist “played … like
a god.” The 1998 film tracing the turmoil stirred
up by a 17th-century Italian instrument proved eerily prescient,
as Bell later lost his heart to the 1713 “Gibson-ex-Huberman”
Stradivarius. The ruby-colored violin, which had been stolen
twice and lost to the world for half a century, was about
to be sold to an industrialist when Bell “mortgaged
[his] life away” to purchase it. (A connoisseur of
prized fiddles, Bell earlier played the 1732 “Tom
Taylor” Strad; his teacher, Josef Gingold, played
a 1683 Strad.)
Bell dismisses the idea that he might have had reservations
about playing for a movie sound track. “No, not at
all — I was very excited! I think that film is a fantastic
medium for music. I’m sure that if Mozart were around
today, he would dabble in film music.” Corigliano,
he says, was already one of his favorite living composers,
and two longer works were born of the Red Violin
score: the Chaconne for violin and orchestra (on Sony’s
Red Violin CD) and the full-length concerto that
Bell plays in New York in January and with the Baltimore
Symphony Orchestra under Marin Alsop in June 2006. This
fall, Bell’s playing is once again heard in cinemas
around the world, in John Debney’s sound track for
the film Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story.
Looking forward to Bell’s performances, Corigliano
praises the violinist’s “aristocratic style
— not unlike Jascha Heifetz’s,” which
“made the composing relatively easy. Josh and I were
very interactive during the recording of the ‘live’
violin études of the sound track. He was able to
make suggestions and remember all the details we adjusted
from take to take.”
Bell takes special pride in his involvement with new works
and hopes to spend more time himself composing and conducting.
“When I’m working with composers, I feel like
I’m contributing more and more each time. I’m
also working on a violin sonata — chipping away at
it whenever I have a spare moment.” Pressed for details
on this forthcoming work by Joshua Bell, he sighs. “I
wish I were more disciplined. Unless I program a solo violin
sonata by me on my recital tour, it’s hard to get
motivated. So … we’ll see.”
An artistic partner to the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra,
Bell sometimes leads the ensemble from the violin. “I’m
not calling myself a conductor yet, but I’m finding
my way there. This season I’m doing big repertoire
like Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. I’m working
towards getting up there without the violin. I may not end
up being the greatest conductor, but you have to take risks.”
Indeed, while Bell’s playing is marked by sweetness
and immaculate technique, there is also a dangerous edge
to his work. Witness the aching vulnerability he brings
to the melodies of Romance, or the quicksilver
fancy of his phrasing in Tchaikovsky’s concerto. Donald
Runnicles, who leads Bell and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s
in Beethoven’s Violin Concerto at Carnegie Hall in
December, remarks on this quality. “Every performance
with Josh is like the first time hearing a piece. His approach
is consistently inventive.”
One young man who heard Bell at last summer’s Mostly
Mozart Festival put the matter more succinctly: “This
is like a rock concert!”
Bell admits that maintaining a novel approach takes hard
work, even when returning to inexhaustible masterworks.
“You have to actively challenge yourself to keep looking
at a piece of music fresh. It’s something that I seem
to have a knack for, really and truly feeling like it’s
a fresh thing every time.” Bell programs new music
frequently — in 2006, a piece by bassist and composer
Edgar Meyer, a longtime friend — but chooses his premieres
carefully. “You don’t want to spend all that
time [learning a new work] just so you can give its first
and last performance.”
Given his openness and thirst for new challenges, Bell is
more optimistic than most about the future of classical
music. “I go into schools and talk to kids, and after
every concert I go to the lobby and make myself approachable.
In the old days, when I started performing, I always felt
that the artists were very separate.”
The closest he comes to boasting is mentioning how Romance
has brought great music to new audiences. “I’ve
gotten so many e-mails from people saying that it was their
first classical record.” Bell ends the conversation
on a typically upbeat and down-to-earth note. “In
my view, snobbery has no place in classical music. The number
of people who have come backstage and said they had never
even been to a classical concert before — that makes
me very happy. It makes me feel that [recording] Romance
was the right thing to do.” |
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Marion
Lignana Rosenberg writes about the arts for The New
York Times, Newsday, Time Out New York, Playbill and
other publications. |
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Photo
credit:
Image 1: Timothy White; Image 2: Chris Lee; Image 3: Timothy
White; Image 4: Bill Phelps. |
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