Nicola Benedetti and Maker&Son announce new collaborative partnership

Nicola Benedetti announces new collaboration with Maker&Son with performance of Ernest Bloch’s “Prayer”

Nicola Benedetti & Maker&Son collaborate in new partnership

Nicola Benedetti collaborates with Maker&Son to record the world exclusive performance of a new arrangement by the Ayoub Sisters of Ernest Bloch’s “Prayer”. Originally composed in 1924 for Cello and Piano, this new arrangement was specially commissioned by Maker&Son for violinist Nicola Benedetti and string quartet featuring Yume Fujise and Charlie Westhoff (violin), Jenny Lewisohn (viola) and Ariane Zandi (cello). This live recording was made at Kemps House, the home of Maker&Son Founder Alex Willcock. 

Through their deep love of classical music, Alex Willcock and Nicola Benedetti began exploring ways of working together. They both want to find ways to share the emotion and the experience that music can offer both the performers and the listeners. Some music has a unique and extraordinary way of elevating an experience, offering complete immersion and connection with the moment, and this is the gift they hope to share, by working in partnership. 

With so much going on in the world today - in so many ways - it’s natural to feel a sense of melancholy, or mourning. And yet, current experiences are also encouraging people to reflect, to share and learn from each other, and to communicate in different ways. The poignancy of these times and the ability of this piece to capture this zeitgeist led to the making of this new arrangement of “Prayer”, by Ernest Bloch. A composer that was so admired in his day, many considered him to be the fourth ‘B’ after Bach, Beethoven and Brahms. 

In an interview which can be watched here, Alex and Nicola talk about the serendipitous events that connected them and led to working together. They said, “Our hope is that we can share the experience and the emotional connection that we both have with classical music, with as many people as possible. We hope to share our passion and to offer that experience, or sense of being completely immersed in beautiful music.” 

Nicola Benedetti further commented, ‘Music can uplift through joy and it can console through reflection. Sometimes you are looking for something to make you feel more of what you are feeling. And through the process is a kind of cleansing, or a rebirth of your most uplifted self. I know I understand that experience myself and I am sure most people do. Sometimes you go deeper to come up. 

‘We want simply to share the internal experience that we have with music in the most visceral possible way that we can, through a camera and a screen and to do that in a way that brings people deep inside that experience. It's not easy, but we both have the same commitment to wanting to do that, for as many people as possible. So, to take a piece of music like this, that we obviously feel so much of that raw emotion for and to be trying to capture, not so much the practicalities of playing it, or even the slightly more superficial layer of performance, but allowing people inside of the mind and heart of what it is that we are experiencing. 

Your connection to music can only be what it is, there is nothing manufactured that will ever be as powerful as what your actual most powerful reaction is in that moment. The strength of the instinct that we both shared about ‘Prayer’ is more powerful than trying to match a piece to a concept or trying to match a piece to a mood. This has been the other way around, the piece has spoken to Alex, it has spoken to me, originally  when I was 10, and again now. We have a mutual belief in how that has spoken to us that we are going with… and we are trusting and we’re sharing.’ 

Alex Willcock added, ‘What we feel about this piece is how rich it is in terms of its emotional expression. Being immersed in the moment, being immersed in the emotion is something that, as a musician, you can experience in an extraordinary way. But also, as a member of the audience, there are times when something really special happens. We wanted to capture that moment, that indefinable element of immersion, (some describe as a transcendental moment) where you are literally removed from the present moment into something that becomes even more present, in a way. So, everything that we’ve wanted to do - with the arrangement, with the film, is to immerse our audience inside the music, inside the emotion and connect deeply with all that it brings.’ 

Composer Ernest Bloch combined his globetrotting musical life with a profound spiritual yearning. Born in Geneva in 1880, he studied in Brussels and moved to the US in 1916, eventually settling in Portland, Oregon, where he died in 1959. Though famous in his lifetime for large-scale works like his opera Macbeth (1910), Bloch is lesser known these days, yet some of his rhapsodic song-like compositions – notably Schelomo for cello and orchestra (1916) – are still part of the concert repertoire today. Despite being influenced by some of the leading composers of his time – including Mahler, Debussy and his teacher, violinist Eugène Ysaye – his music was essentially a late flowering of Romanticism. 

Bloch strongly identified with his Jewish faith and wrote several works directly inspired by Jewish liturgy and folklore, among them Schelomo for cello and orchestra (1916), Israel for orchestra (1916), and Baal Shem for violin and orchestra (1939). ‘I aspire to write Jewish music - not for the sake of self-advertisement, but because I am sure that this is the only way in which I can produce music of vitality and significance’, he suggested. 

Gramophone Magazine praised: “Today's Video of Day features acclaimed violinist and leading ambassador for classical music Nicola Benedetti in a beautiful performance of a new arrangement by the Ayoub Sisters of Ernest Bloch’s Prayer for solo violin and string quartet. Originally composed in 1924 for cello and piano, this new arrangement was commissioned by furniture makers Maker&Son, which has joined up with Benedetti to support her Benedetti Foundation and its music education work, just this week recipients of a Royal Philharmonic Society Award for its Virtual Benedetti Sessions.”

Watch the performance here.