by erin thursby scopes1925@msn.com
What: Joshua Bell
When: January 22 @ 7:30PM
Where: Jacoby Symphony Hall at the Times-Union Center for the Performing Arts
Joshua Bell plays on a twice stolen Stradivarius violin, without the customary tails and tie associated with those that play classic music. He’s one of the new generation of classicalists bringing youth and joy to a genre mistakenly perceived as old and musty. Because of that, he’s willing to step outside the classical box to draw in new listeners. When EU spoke with Bell this week, he had this to say about drawing in a new audience: “I think that there’s a large audience of people that would enjoy classical music but that doesn’t go to concerts…It takes…something to attract them…I did something that was outside the classical realm with Josh Grogan, who’s sort of a classical pop singer…I can’t tell you how many people have written me e-mails and shown up to my classical concerts saying ‘You know, I had never heard of you before, until I bought the Josh Grogan CD. Now I bought all of your CD’s, your Beethoven and your Mozart.’ Sometimes it does take reaching out and doing something a little bit outside [traditional classical] to kind of bring them in.”
The fact that Bell’s look is appealing and youthful doesn’t hurt his CD sales either. Plus, he’s single. The most soulful relationship he has seems to be with his violin, which has a checkered past. It was stolen twice from its owner, Polish virtuoso Bronislaw Huberman, in the early 1900’s. In 1919 it was taken from Huberman’s hotel room, but was soon recovered when the thief tried to sell the hot Stradivarius. It was next swiped from Huberman in 1936, when he left the instrument in his dressing room while playing a second violin onstage. This time, Huberman never recovered the Stradivarius and had to accept an insurance settlement. This disappearance of this priceless instrument remained a source of mystery until a modestly successful New York violinist named Julian Altman made a deathbed confession in 1987. Whether Altman stole the violin himself or purchased the violin from a friend is a point of contention, but he did own it for all those years. Restoration work had to be done once the violin was recovered by the insurance company, since Altman had been too afraid to bring it in for a professional cleaning, for fear of its being recognized. Bell knew that he had fallen in love with the instrument the moment he played just two notes. For about four million dollars, the price he paid for the Strad, it had better be true love. On the back of his newest album Voice of the Violin, he holds his Strad against his cheek and chest as you would a lover, and when he talks about finding his perfect instrument, he sounds a bit like he’s talking about the person you wait a lifetime for.
“For me there’s something hard to describe, it’s just sort of a goosebump factor, when you’re playing on a violin and you just feel it…there definitely is a chemistry with an instrument when you pick it up, which involves, really, how it responds when I play.”
Bell began playing concert venues when he was just 14. Surprisingly, his bio doesn’t read like the typical story of a child prodigy, pushed relentlessly by parents with no other life or interests outside the violin. In his case, he had time to goof off and be a kid. He played tennis and almost didn’t attend his first solo recital because he was injured by a boomerang. Despite a fairly balanced childhood, his aptitude with strings was made obvious to his mother when he, at age 4, used rubber bands on dresser drawer knobs at different tensions (controlled by opening the drawers) to pluck out the notes he had heard his mother play on the piano. It’s one of Bell’s earliest memories, something he says he did “on my own, my parents noticed it and that’s when they got me a violin, probably earlier than they would have, so I’m very grateful for that.”
You can be sure that his concert will be anything but typical for the avid listener of classical music, because Bell likes taking risks and strives to play with freshness, because he believes that “a sense of abandon is something that the audience does feel. I think an audience can tell if you’re getting up sort of reciting something that you’ve been practicing for weeks.”
Schumann and Beethoven pieces will make up the first part of the show on the 22nd, but Bell will be finishing out the concert with a more modern composer, Edgar Meyer. Says Bell of the Meyer’s piece: “He manages to combine elements of bluegrass and Irish fiddle, [in] a very modern classical sound…in a very natural voice…The audience will like it on whatever level they will see it on.”
Buy tickets at Riverside Fine Arts www.riversidefinearts.org or just call (904)389-6222
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