Joshua Bell plays a round of golf during the COVID pandemic and featured in ClubLife Magazine
Photo Credit: Richard Ascroft
Playing On with Joshua Bell
By Tom Bedell
ClubLife Magazine
January 5, 2021
The pandemic's pause on live concerts enabled golf writer Tom Bedell to play a round with the revered violinist. While it may not have been "The Match," it did prove golf is the great equalizer among sports.
Last March, the month the earth stood still, was more curtailing for some than for others. Superstar classical violinist Joshua Bell was used to jetting around the world playing close to 150 concerts a year. Scratch that.
Aside from his performances as a soloist, Bell is also the music director of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields chamber orchestra in London. The group concluded a U.S. tour on March 8, 2020, and then came the lockdown. “I was exhausted after the tour, so the thought of not being able to travel for a couple weeks was kind of appealing,” said Bell. “We had no idea what it was going to turn into.”
What it turned into hit starkly home when an Academy cellist, Martin Loveday, died in April at age 62 from COVID-19 complications and an underlying cancer condition. Bell retreated from New York City with his relatively new bride, opera singer Larisa Martinez (they married in October 2019), to what had been a weekend retreat in Mount Kisco, New York. They’re still there.
Bell has been a much-lauded fixture in the concert world for almost four decades; an international sophisticate who has played for kings and counselors (and three U.S. presidents). But at 53, he still has a boyishly innocent visage and an unaffected demeanor that is as easy to ascribe to his Bloomington, Indiana, upbringing as anything else.
He knows how to focus. “If, in any adversity, you can find an opportunity, there may be a silver lining. I thought, ‘I’ll use the quarantine as a chance to catch up with my family [he’s a father to three boys from a previous relationship] and begin practicing for my own pleasure and education new works I never would have had time for.’ ”
He said this in September, when I was able to coax Bell out of a long golf hiatus for a round near his Upstate New York home.
The Sporting Life
If true that as a golfer, Bell is a great violinist, he nonetheless birdied the third hole of the day and played his companion like a fiddle. But he wasn’t aware of that. “What I like about golf is not beating someone else so much as competing with myself. It’s like breaking my record on the basketball court — a couple weeks ago I shot 22 free throws in a row. Now that’s what I have to beat.” His goal in golf: Break 80.
“I’ve always loved sports. I was very competitive as a tennis player when I was 10 to 12, but I didn’t take up golf until later, on a little par-3 course in Indiana. I went out with some friends, hit a few bad shots, then hit a perfect shot right next to the hole. I thought, That’s as good as a pro can do! This is my first day. I’m going to be great at this! It never happened, but golf always gives you the idea that it’s just around the corner.”
“You imagine where your fingers are going to land, and it has to be dead-on, very similar to a basketball shot or a golf swing.”
Bell took a lesson a few days before our round: “One of the things [the pro] was telling me was that on the practice range you use your left brain to analyze everything, but when you go out on the course, you have to let your right brain take over your feel.
“That’s like music — you practice, practice, practice using your left brain figuring out a piece. But once out onstage, that has to be subconscious — you have to allow your right brain to take over and use your creativity and emotion.”
Bell was dressed in blue, PING gear in his bag. He’s trim at 6 feet, his careless mop top hairstyle hidden by his cap, which clearly shows his allegiance to the Indianapolis Colts. (He has no problem watching any team, with up to nine hours of football on a Sunday. Some wagering may or may not be involved.)
His golf swing is serviceable, quick … a bit abbreviated. To really appreciate Bell’s athleticism, it’s best to watch him saw away on a barn burner like Ravel’s “Tzigane” or a frequent encore piece like Wieniawski’s “Polonaise Brillante.” You don’t need to be able to tell a sautillé or double-stop from a spiccato or pizzicato to have your eyes widened.
“The violin has no frets or keys as on a piano, so it’s all about feel when you make a shift — you imagine where your fingers are going to land, and it has to be dead-on, very similar to a basketball shot or a golf swing.”
Looking Back, Looking Ahead
A trio of oft-repeated stories follow Bell around: the rubber bands, his million-dollar Stradivarius, his adventure busking in the subway. Though not professionals, Bell’s family were all musical. When he was 4, he stretched rubber bands across the knobs of his bedroom dresser to pluck the sounds of his mother’s piano playing. He soon had his first violin. His parents encouraged but didn’t push him. “Thank goodness they started me young,” said Bell. “Starting young makes a huge difference.”
Once he began studying with master player and teacher Josef Gingold at age 12, the deed was pretty much done. “He became my mentor and my role model. I named my first son after him. He inspired me to get to the next level by his example: someone who became a musician and loved it so much; who exuded joy from it. I just wanted to be the same. Then I had some early success: I was 14 when I had my debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra and conductor Riccardo Muti.”
How’d it go?
“It went well,” Bell said laconically. “I didn’t get so nervous back then. I get more nervous now — in the sense that I put more pressure on myself than I did then. But I know how to handle nerves: I channel it to help me, when I can.”
He’s certainly helped by his Gibson-Huberman Stradivarius, a violin with a history worthy of an hourlong 2012 documentary, The Return of the Violin. The violin was stolen twice from Israel Philharmonic founder Bronislaw Huberman in 1919 (then returned) and again in 1936, not to resurface until 1985, following the thief’s deathbed confession. It was thought to be worth $30,000 when stolen for the second time. Bell purchased it for close to $4 million in 2001. It’s only appreciated since.
Not that many subway commuters appreciated the sound in 2007 when Bell, at the urging of a Washington Post columnist, went down into the D.C. Metro during morning rush hour with a ball cap on his head and put his wizardry on incognito display. (The event is still up on YouTube.) Gene Weingarten earned a Pulitzer Prize for his subsequent piece; Bell, for his 45 minutes of largely ignored playing, took in $32.17 from the teeming crowd, a little below his usual rate.
It was indicative of his alacrity. Though his nearly 50 CDs indicate a thorough steeping in standard classical repertoire, listeners can also find new works Bell has commissioned and premiered from the likes of composers Nicholas Maw, Behzad Ranjbaran, Jay Greenberg and Edgar Meyer. His playing has featured on numerous soundtracks, including The Red Violin. From that 1998 film, Bell commissioned composer John Corigliano, who won the Oscar for Best Original Score for the film, to create a full-fledged concerto that has entered the modern repertoire.
Bell is also willing to cross genres; he’s played with jazz trumpeter Chris Botti, an old mate from their Indiana University days, and bluegrass musicians Sam Bush and Mike Marshall.
“Those are all ways to cross boundaries. It’s always nice to not just preach to the choir; to try and break some of the myths that surround classical music. Pop culture often brands it as elitist and even boring, like a woman dragging her husband to an opera and he’s watching a football game on his phone. The truth is classical music can be the most incredibly visceral and exciting experience.”
After our September golf round, Bell went on to play three more rounds last fall. A tour of Europe with the Academy beginning in January was still tentatively on the books. In golf, as in music, he saw promise.
“After all this [the pandemic] is over, I’m counting on people appreciating the idea of live music more than ever. This year has been one of confusion, fear, anxiety … a lack of clarity and truth. Music can ground you; it’s one thing all humans can appreciate. It’s about truth, and I think people are craving that. So I’m hopeful.”
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