Nicola Benedetti speaks to the London Times about the Virtual Benedetti Sessions
Nicola Benedetti (Photo credit: Andy Gotts)
Nicola Benedetti: Why Everyone’s Welcome in my Shutdown Sessions
By Richard Morrison
The Times
May 4, 2020
The violinist Nicola Benedetti isn’t taking a break in lockdown. She tells Richard Morrison about her online workshop for all ages and talents.
It seems a lifetime ago, but it was actually only last November that Nicola Benedetti met me at some ungodly morning hour in a west London café, plonked several double espressos in front of us and talked me through something that had been obsessing her, she said, for the past 17 years. Since the Scottish violinist is only 32 now, that sounded alarming.
It turned out to be not alarming, simply jaw-dropping. It was, in her words, “a way to make an impact on as many people as possible with something I have a deep belief in — namely the power of music”.
A year earlier, she had launched the Benedetti Foundation to raise money for an extraordinary educational project. Benedetti would recruit dozens of like-minded performers and music teachers, people committed to raising the profile and quality of music education. By the time we met the recruiting was done and Benedetti was about to launch the foundation’s first full year of activities. There would be six three-day workshops spread around Scotland, England and Northern Ireland, each involving three different string orchestras for children of various levels, professional development sessions for string tutors and classroom teachers, and general musicianship sessions that any child could join.
“They ought to be symbolic experiences of high-octane excitement,” Benedetti exclaimed. When she is in this kind of missionary mode her conversation takes on the same fervour as her violin-playing. “Symbolic,” she continued, “because these weekends will show what music education can feel like when done at its best: getting hundreds of kids together; working at string technique as well as the basics of musicianship. They should be exhilarating for everyone.”
And by all accounts they were — the first three of them anyway. But that was then, this is now. A week after the third workshop, in Dundee, lockdown happened. It was quickly clear that musical weekends for masses of schoolchildren wouldn’t be happening any time soon. Benedetti’s 16 years of planning, her indefatigable fundraising, the inspirational energy she poured into the events — all seemed to be for naught. The programme came to a shuddering halt.
Or so it seemed, even to the woman herself, who also, of course, had dozens of concerto and recital engagements round the globe cancelled virtually overnight. “Yes, but at a time like now you have a responsibility to put your own situation in perspective,” she told me in a catch-up phone call this week. “My immediate family and friends are safe and well, so in the grand scheme of things I don’t have anything to complain about. When it came to the cancellation of the workshops, however, it did take me a few days to decide what to do.”
The obvious answer was to replicate the programme online, but Benedetti was initially hesitant about doing that. “To me it seemed as if there were, like, 50,000 musicians all streaming solo performances of Bach down their iPhones. It was total saturation on Facebook, and I felt reluctant to add yet more noise. Not that their playing was noise, of course, but you know what I mean.”
After more thought, however, she realised that disaster could be turned into opportunity. “We knew when we set up the foundation and started the With Nicky series [video tutorials with Benedetti speaking directly to the camera] that using online technology would be a way of reaching out to many more people. The trouble is that when you set yourself massive logistical challenges such as organising live workshops involving thousands of children, the online stuff can fall by the wayside.
“So I realised that the lockdown would be our chance to do something big online. That sounds horribly opportunistic at a time when there is so much devastation and heartache, but do you make the best of a bad situation or not? So with Laura Gardiner [Benedetti’s chief lieutenant, a phenomenal violin teacher from Lincolnshire] we set out to do the seemingly impossible, and pull everything together online in as short a time as possible.”
The result, the Virtual Benedetti Sessions, goes live on May 11, although if you want to take part you should register immediately (details below). To judge from the take-up for the live sessions, there will be a rush for places. The virtual sessions comprise three weeks of free online tuition covering not just string playing but general musicianship, physical and mental wellbeing, singing and rhythmic workouts and technique tips.
Again, the sessions are structured so that pupils of all ages and musical abilities can take part. “We are catering for students working at conservatoire level, and young pupils who can do nothing except bash pots and pans,” Benedetti says. “And we are creating formats in which all of them can play alongside each other at some point. We will have the most unbelievable virtuosity right next to kids who are non-instrumentalists.”
The grand finale will be a celebratory online concert at 4pm on May 31, where the rising American conductor Karina Canellakis will lead an abridged version of Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia (including specially arranged parts for inexperienced string players) alongside music by Tchaikovsky, Warlock and Tallis. How will that work with all the participants in different places?
“Well, as everyone has discovered in the past few weeks, the technology for online meetings, such as Zoom, doesn’t work for live ensemble music-making because of the time delay,” Benedetti says. “I expect there are a lot of tech-minded musicians, or music-minded techies, out there trying to overcome the time-lag problem, but there’s nothing better right now. So our tutors and ambassadors [the professional musicians and teachers Benedetti has recruited to run the sessions] will be recording the basic layers of the pieces. Then during the three weeks of the sessions we will be taking in videos sent to us by the participants, with them playing the same pieces. They will be integrated into the final product that will be shown on May 31.”
Benedetti has been careful to take into account what the reality of lockdown looks like for the young musicians she is targeting. “What I’m hearing is that the amount of schoolwork expected of children is actually quite significant and that schools are being serious about expecting students to sign in, attend online classes and do homework,” she says. “It’s not like children are sitting round twiddling their thumbs. So we have worked around the normal school day, scheduling our sessions either first thing in the morning or at lunchtimes, or like an after-school club, with sessions for conservatoire-level players stretching into the evening.
“And of course you don’t have to sign up officially to the whole three weeks. We will be on open platforms such as Facebook, YouTube and Instagram, so people can just dip in occasionally if they want.”
As with the live sessions she organised, Benedetti has been careful not to tread on the toes of the teaching profession. “We want to complement, not compete with, what music teachers and schools are offering during lockdown,” she says. “That said, looking at all the schemes for teaching children online during the lockdown, I’ve not seen much done successfully regarding music education. Yes, there are thousands of music teachers out there doing their best to transfer their teaching materials online, but in terms of any collective, national effort I think music has been left behind.”
What’s striking about Benedetti’s scheme — as opposed to most of the other online projects being hastily put together by top musicians — is that it is so firmly focused on youth and amateur music-making. I have read, and indeed written, so much in the past month about professional musicians’ attempts to keep their business alive with ingeniously streamed videos, but what’s often overlooked is that lockdown has also silenced thousands of amateur and youth choirs, choral societies, orchestras and brass bands. That has had a crushing impact, not just on the cultural life of many nations, but also on the bonds tying communities together.
“Absolutely,” Benedetti says. “We are seeing something more clearly than ever — that the most important thing about music-making is it’s a collective activity. At any normal time that would be the most amazing thing to celebrate. Right now, sadly, the collective side of music is the very thing that stops it from happening, and that’s devastating.”
Benedetti has at least one reminder of happier times to look forward to. It’s the release next week of her recording of Elgar’s Violin Concerto with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Jurowski. If it’s anything like the live performance she gave in London last year — blowing away the work’s supposed “elegiac” feel with a characterisation of tremendous energy and propulsion — it will be a welcome tonic to her legion of fans round the world.
It won’t compensate, however, for all the live performances she won’t now give in 2020. Is she feeling bereft about the cancellations? “Actually, no,” she replies. “You have to remember that I haven’t stopped rehearsing, performing, travelling or being under some sort of imminent pressure since I was 15. I don’t think that kind of life is something you necessarily crave if it’s suddenly taken away.”
So 2020 could be a chance to recharge batteries? “Could have been,” she says, laughing. “Yes, I could have done some serious self-care if I hadn’t taken on this ridiculous online project. But I can’t change the sort of person I am.”
Details of how to apply for the Virtual Benedetti Sessions are on benedettifoundation.org. Benedetti’s new Elgar album is released on May 15 on Decca for digital download and streaming.
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