Isabelle Faust: The complete interview
Biography
“Her sound has passion, grit and electricity but also a disarming warmth and sweetness that can unveil the music’s hidden strains of lyricism …”
-New York Times
Isabelle Faust adopts a perspective on music in which ever-new experiences and discoveries are the principal focus. Having founded a string quartet when just eleven, her early chamber music experiences imbued in her a fundamental belief that performing is a process of giving and taking, in which listening is just as important as expressing your own personality.
Victory at the 1987 Leopold Mozart Competition, when she was just 15, brought with it the prospect of a solo career. However, the guiding principles instilled in her as a chamber musician remained strong. In Christoph Poppen, the long-time first violinist of the Cherubini Quartet, Faust found a teacher who shared and fostered these musical convictions. Whether performing sonatas or concertos, Faust constantly sought dialogue and the exchange of musical ideas. After winning the 1993 Paganini Competition, she moved to France, where she grew to love the French repertoire, particularly the music of Fauré and Debussy. Here she came to international attention with her first recording - sonatas by Bartók, Szymanowski and Janácek - and gradually refined her command of the most important works in the violin repertoire.
In 2003, Faust released her first recording of a major Romantic work for orchestra, the Dvorák Violin Concerto. Having first performed the concerto at the age of 15 under Yehudi Menuhin, the work has remained a mainstay of her repertoire. Her 2007 release of the Beethoven violin concerto also reflects her immersion in period performance practice - not interpreted dogmatically but used as a challenge and incentive to re-assess the substance of every note, in order to comprehend its purpose and meaning. For Faust, the ultimate importance of musical dialogue necessitates establishing a common language between performers, enabling artists to perform a Mozart concerto with an ensemble such as Concerto Köln as convincingly as with a large symphony orchestra.
It is precisely this willingness to open herself up to different musical idioms that has made Isabelle Faust a highly sought-after performer of contemporary music. The list of composers whose works she has premiered extends from Olivier Messiaen to Werner Egk and Jörg Widmann. She is a fervent proponent of music by György Ligeti, Morton Feldman, Luigi Nono and Giacinto Scelsi, as well as of forgotten works, such as André Jolivet’s violin concerto. In 2009 she premiered works dedicated to her by composers Thomas Larcher and Michael Jarrell.
Faust can be heard with her duet partner, the pianist Alexander Melnikov, in searching renditions of the chamber music repertoire in recordings for harmonia mundi. For their recording of the complete Beethoven sonatas they received the “ECHO Klassik Award” and the “Gramophone Award” among others. The recording was nominated for the “Grammy”. Her latest solo recording of the Partitas and Sonatas by J. S. Bach was decorated with the “Diapason d’or de l’année 2010” among others.
Increasing numbers of orchestras and conductors have come to appreciate Faust’s artistry in recent years: Claudio Abbado, Charles Dutoit, Daniel Harding, Heinz Holliger, Mariss Jansons, the Berlin Philharmonic, the Munich Philharmonic, the Orchestre de Paris, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the BBC Orchestras and the Mahler Chamber Orchestra are a few examples of the fruitful artistic partnerships that have emerged in recent years. These musicians and ensembles have all come to appreciate Faust’s artistry: rather than merely mastering her instrument and its repertoire, experiencing and deeply exploring music lies at the heart of her work. Isabelle Faust performs on the 1704 “Sleeping Beauty” Stradivarius on loan to her from Germany’s L-Bank Baden-Württemberg.
(http://www.impresariat-simmenauer.de/Artists/IsabelleFaust/biography-en.html)
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(note: an edited version of this interview appears in the November edition of La Scena Musicale)
Pemi Paull: You’re coming to Montreal on November 8th to perform an all-unnaccompanied Bach programme at the Festival Montreal Baroque?
Isabelle Faust: Right.
PP: Do you do a lot of unaccompanied Bach recitals, or is this something that is more recent?
IF: No, this is actually something that I do quite a lot. I worked on this repertoire during the last few years, preparing recordings of it. I released the second half of the six Sonatas and Partitas a year ago, and just this summer I recorded the other half, so I have focused a lot on this repertoire. Of course, I prepared for the recordings by playing in concert, but even after finishing the recordings, having become so involved with Bach and especially these works, I try to play them as much as possible, to keep them fresh in my fingers and to keep trying to improve. Bach is, of course, the foundation of the repertoire for violin and I would very much hope that in the coming years I will get more and more opportunities to play the Sonatas and Partitas, and not just because of my recently released CD, and the second part which will come out next year.
PP: You were playing on the Sleeping Beauty Strad. I heard that you were no longer playing on that violin?
IF: I still have it! I have had it since 1996, a long time, and the Bach recording was done using this violin, so no, that was the wrong information!
PP: I’ve been a big fan of yours for a long time, and have always thought of you, like some other notable players of this generation, for instance, Thomas Zehetmair or Peter Wispelwey, as a musician who is not grouped into a stylistic category. You are an artist who have a keen historical sense, not just of 18th century music, but also 19th century performance practice, and also contemporary music. Do you have any comment about how you approach music from different periods, how it affects your ideas about interpretation?
IF: Well, I try to study as much information as I can possibly find on music of earlier centuries. I collaborate quite often with a number of period ensembles. I also play regularly on gut strings. I play with Frans Bruggen and his orchestra quite a lot at the moment, as well as with Andreas Steier (talking now about the so-called “early” music). I’m very keen on getting as close to the original sources as possible, absorbing whatever information I can find (and there’s a huge amount of information out there, of course), and then integrate it into my own personal vision of the music that I play.
Of course, it has been incredibly exciting, and still is, to play with people who are so-called experts in the field of historical performance, in order to get, sometimes, a completely different view of pieces which I play a lot with “normal” orchestras. When I play the Beethoven concerto or the Schumann concerto with Frans Bruggen on gut strings, it is always incredibly enriching, because I immediately perceive a totally different way of approaching music that I have played for so many years, music which I thought I knew very well.
This is very refreshing to me and, of course, always creates a lot of new questions for which I am keen to find answers, which can be difficult. Difficult, because you can ask one so-called expert about something and he gives you an answer, and then the next one will give you the contrary answer! There is so much insecurity, even among the specialists, that in the end it is always the best, I find, to decide what solution is the closest to my personal feelings about a particular piece, about a particular passage. In the end, it is always going to be up to the individual to choose the right answer for themselves.
I think that this process of inquiry is absolutely necessary and that we live in a fantastic world for accomplishing this kind of work. With the internet, we have an enormous opportunity to look into manuscripts which have been digitalized. It has become so much easier to do this kind of research and maybe become more aware of certain things. This is absolutely a big, big, part of my work.
With my Bach recording, if in the end I decided not to record on gut strings but only use a baroque bow, then of course it seems much less baroque-inspired then really putting on gut strings and doing it in a clearly historically-performed way, but it doesn’t mean that I didn’t go back to those sources. I also have a baroque violin at home, and I prepared for this CD on that violin.
In the end, though, I am a violinist who lives and works now, not in Bach’s time. I play this repertoire for the public of today. We have all, of course, grown up with music which Bach never heard, living in a different world with different knowledge, and this has to be mirrored in the interpretation of Bach’s music. I absolutely think it is a very natural thing to involve the personal experiences of our times. Still, I am absolutely keen to put as much energy into looking into all the sources possible.
A huge amount of work also went into studying the manuscripts when we recorded the Beethoven sonatas, and I spent a lot of time in libraries studying the Schumann violin concerto manuscripts. It is extremely exciting to discover what kind of character the composer wanted, even from observing his handwriting, and also how different editors would interpret, maybe wrongly, maybe rightly, the handwriting of a certain composer. This is only one little aspect of the work, but it’s really highly important, I think. And then, in the end, what one does with this information is a very individual and personal thing.
I am also extremely thankful for my colleague, Zehetmair, whom you just mentioned, because he’s one of the few colleagues who takes these things extremely seriously. He always proposes a totally new way of looking at well-known and often-played pieces, and in the process inspires you to do the same, to ask yourself, over and over, the same, or even new questions about the so-called main repertoire pieces. Otherwise, they become routine, and this is the worst thing that could happen. They should always be very fresh, and I think one should never be too sure about how to interpret these pieces and what the composer actually meant, otherwise one stops asking all these questions.
PP: Speaking of Zehetmair, as I was saying before, the artists that I find most interesting today are also very involved with contemporary music and I wanted to ask a couple questions about that. First of all, if you are working with any interesting composers right now, and secondly, to what extent you find your role as an interpreter of contemporary music affects your approach to early music, in terms of things like rhetorical phrasing and gesture, and also visa versa, how playing pre-classical music affects your approach to new music.
IF: Well, at the moment I am working with a Swiss composer, Michael Jarrell. I’m actually leaving for France tomorrow to play a concerto which he wrote for me, and which I premiered, two years ago. I will be playing it for the second time, which is quite a lot of work, because technically, it is really an extremely difficult piece. If you play it once and then you only play it again after two years, it is almost the same amount of work to relearn the piece. So, I am quite busy with that at the moment, but it’s wonderful music and I hope I will play it a bit more in the near future. I also play a concerto by an Austrian composer, Thomas Larcher. The premiere was also two years ago, but unlike the Jarell concerto, I’ve had the opportunity to play this piece five or six times in the past two years. and it is very pleasant not to have to learn a completely new piece for just one or two occasions, before it is forgotten again. This is a piece that has actually been successful in this sense.
Otherwise, I always remain in close contact with pieces like the Ligeti violin concerto, which is a classic, and which is actually requested by presenters quite regularly. It’s a fantastic piece, and I love playing it! I am doing a piece by Morton Feldman, Violin and Orchestra, again next year. I haven’t performed it for many years because Feldman is a composer who must be placed carefully in a concert program, at least in Europe. It tends to be performed in special contemporary festivals and series. In this case it I will perform it in a Berlin festival where they do a lot of contemporary music. Contemporary pieces can only be programmed with a lot of attention to time, because preparing those pieces always requires a lot of time, and you can’t play a different piece every week if you have a very tight schedule with your Beethoven and Mendelssohn concertos and stuff like that!
I think it should be absolutely normal for all musicians to play, more or less, the entire repertoire available, from every epoch and century, as long as the quality of the music is very high. It is very easy for me to see, for example, Bach’s influence on Schumann and also on contemporary pieces, such as Ligeti’s music or Kurtag’s music. It is so clear that those composers were inspired by the older composers. The connection between them is easily made, and it doesn’t seem to me that contemporary music is a completely different field, or that one must be completely specialized in that field, or that it has nothing to do with classical or pre-classical music. Not at all!
Of course they all studied their good old Bach and Beethoven and whatever else they were interested in, and it all comes out in some way in the contemporary pieces. So, actually I don’t try to look at contemporary pieces like contemporary pieces, but I always try to see where a composer comes from, and what inspired him in the music of earlier composers, because they all come from somewhere! It can also come from folk music, or, in Ligeti’s case, African music, but it always comes from somewhere, it did not just fall out of the sky without any preparation.
Maybe working on contemporary music also helps us take a fresh look at the older composers, but this is less the case, I find, because, of course, music all comes from one direction. Bach didn’t know what came after him. We have all the music of the past in our ears, and the contemporary composers have all this repertoire to study. With Bach we know about his influence on the music which followed him, but going the other way, is more difficult.
PP: Do historical recordings, for instance, early recordings by 19th century artists like Joachim, also Adolf Busch, affect your ideas on 19th century music and historical interpretation?
IF: Oh yes, of course! I just released the Brahms violin concerto on CD, together with the 2d sextet, and during my preparation for that recording, I looked a lot into Joachim’s and Brahms’ correspondence. Of course, it’s wonderful, it’s absolutely fantastic that we have those little Joachim recordings. Although the sound quality is poor, they are still nice to listen to, and they do give us a very good idea of what his way of playing was. I also find the Joachim-Moser violin school to be extremely interesting, as are Joachim’s personal comments on the violin concerti.
In the case of the Brahms and the Mendelssohn concertos, he wrote down exactly what he wanted. It is wonderful that we have this information, first hand. We are also very lucky that at that time they didn’t have email, that they wrote letters, and that we have many of those letters and we can get so much information from them. It is very inspiring and gives us a lot of interesting information on how different things were, compared to, for example, the way classical musicians would normally play the Brahms violin concerto nowadays. I mean, the metronome markings that Joachim gives for the Brahms violin concerto are quite different from what one normally hears in concert performances today.
Then of course, there is everything he says about vibrato and articulation, among other things, that are not exactly what I’m used to hearing by my colleagues! Studying Joachim’s letters and his playing changed my view of the Brahms concerto quite a lot and I think it’s a good thing to listen to him, because there is nobody who comes more directly from Brahms’ own ideas than Joachim. He’s really the one who’s authorized to tell us how to play it!
PP: I find it very interesting when you go to earlier repertoire where there is no historical sound documents as there is with Joachim in the 19th century, and the historical performance practice movement is completely reliant on texts and treaties. I find that for instance, after reading Leopold Auer’s book, or to read Carl Flesch’s memoirs, and then after, when you hear the recordings of the period, you realize that they are from such a completely different sound world than even could possibly be described in a text…
IF: That is why I have the impression that the earlier the music the further away we are from it. We only have the help of early recordings from a certain point onwards, and we know so little about Bach, for example. Of course we have all these treatises from contemporaries, but it would be so interesting to have something from his hand, not only his music. His own writing would help a lot, because Bach is an exception in everything! If you read about the dance movements, which can be performed in the Italian style or the French style. And then again, Bach is a different thing in and of himself, and he just didn’t leave us with any hints, and that makes it very very tricky.
PP: Just one last question. Can you tell me a little bit about some of the artists, musicians who have been important influences on your own musical path. I know you studied with Christoph Poppen, but, in general…
IF: Yes, my most important teacher was Christoph Poppen. I did my entire studies with him. I also worked every summer with a Hungarian, violinist named Denes Zsigmondi, who is now an old man. He was important to me, and my connection to Bartok. I started learning the Bartok solo sonata with him at the age of eleven, which was absolutely fantastic, because at age eleven you don’t normally start to analyse a piece like that, but he helped me to connect with this music in a very emotional and inspiring way. He provided, for me, a kind of a counterweight to Christoph Poppen’s teaching.
I played a lot of chamber music in early years which was a teacher in it’s own right. Playing second violin in a string quartet, very intensely, from the age of eleven until age fifteen was just as much a big influence as any teacher could be, and I continued doing a lot of chamber music after I won the Mozart competition in Augsberg. I was playing solo a lot at that point, but still went to a lot of chamber music festivals. I met Bruno Guiranna, the Italian viola player who took me everywhere, including his own chamber music festival, and I learned a lot about the chamber music outside the string quartet repertoire.
One of the biggest influences of the past nine years has been playing with my piano partner, Alexander Melnikov. We do very intense work together on a very regular basis. We inspire each other, criticize each other, we have grown musically together, and that is almost like having a teacher, if you are working on such a confidential and regular basis. I have learned a lot from this duo. In the past few years I have played a lot with Claudio Abbado and this is one of the luckiest things that can happen to any musician! This has been the big revelation for me the past few years, and I am absolutely thankful that I could have, and am still having these musical experiences. I think that another musical world has been opened for me which goes beyond just learning about music.
PP: Well, thank you very much, I really appreciate your time, and I’m really looking forward to your concert in Montreal!
IF: I’m looking forward to meeting you
PP: I’ll be there. Thank you so much. Bye.
IF: Bye.
By Pemi Paull ©2011
