Strings Magazine: Julian Rachlin Among 4 Soloists Who Talk About Stepping Up to the Conductor’s Podium

Strings Magazine
By Laurence Vittes

While doing a little research during the conducting finals of the 2015 Gstaad Menuhin Festival & Academy, I discovered a pattern. Basic training for most conductors begins at the piano. However, a number of notable string players, too, have traded in their instruments for the baton with great success. Lorin Maazel started out as a violinist; Carlo Maria Giulini, a violist; Arturo Toscanini and John Barbirolli, cellists; and Serge Koussevitzky and Zubin Mehta, double-bassists.

Violinist Itzhak Perlman took the step with some success, and violinist Joshua Bell was named music director of the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields in 2011. While conducting schools and academies still turn out the greatest number of new conductors, there is an accelerating trend among young virtuoso string players to leapfrog the traditional process on their way to the podium.

In order to find out what makes young soloists want to become conductors, I spoke to violinists Julian Rachlin and Gemma New, and cellists Eric Jacobsen and Han-Na Chang.

Julian Rachlin

As a violinist, violist, recording artist, and educator, Julian Rachlin has established close relationships with many of the world’s most prestigious conductors and orchestras. In September 2015, he took up his new position as principal guest conductor with the Royal Northern Sinfonia at the Sage Gateshead concert hall, and has been guest conducting around the world. Rachlin plays the 1704 “ex Liebig” Stradivari, on loan courtesy of the Dkfm Angelika Prokopp Privatstiftung, and a 1791 Lorenzo Storioni viola. He uses Thomastik-Infeld strings.

What inspired you to conduct?

I’m not the type who plays the Tchaikovsky and Brahms concertos, then sits down until the next time. For me, the violin is not as important as it might seem; it’s not even my favorite instrument. But whether I play violin or viola, teach, or conduct, it’s all about a life in music—being curious, and staying inspired and fresh.

What is your favorite instrument?

I always wanted to be a cellist like my father, and a recording by Rostropovich was the very first piece of music I listened to when I was two, sitting with an umbrella, which I pretended was a cello with a stick as my bow.

[Editor’s Note: According to a 2015 violinist.com interview, Rachlin was “tricked” into playing violin by his grandparents, who gave him a violin at age two and a half, and claimed it was a cello.]

What were your first experiences as a conductor?

My life as a conductor started around 2005 when I was asked by the Mahler Chamber Music, the Academy of St. Martin in the Fields, and the English Chamber Orchestra to come in and play concertos without a conductor. At first, I just stood there, but when players asked me if I wanted to say something, if I had any ideas, I was surprised. Nobody had ever asked me to say anything. When I saw that the players took my ideas seriously, that they found something in what I said and what I transmitted through my body language, I began to take the idea of conducting more seriously.

How did you start developing your conducting skills?

Before I took lessons, I talked to many conductors, asking their opinion, and Zubin Mehta, Mariss Jansons, and Daniele Gatti all encouraged me. In fact, Mariss told me to take lessons from my mom—Sophie Rachlin, a graduate of the St. Petersburg Conservatory in choir conducting—together with Valery Gergiev, Semyon Bychkov, and Jansons. Of course, I didn’t want to take lessons from my mom at first, but I took one lesson and was so impressed that I’ve been studying with her now for six years.

How have you approached building repertoire as a conductor?

I’m learning one symphony a year, to make sure I will know each of them inside out. So far, my repertoire consists of Tchaikovsky 4, Beethoven 7, Mendelssohn 4, and Mozart 35, 39, and 40. My priority is still my violin, but I’m doing more and more guest conducting, including my debut at the Musikverein in Vienna, conducting Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro Overture, and Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto and Fourth Symphony.

Washington Post: Julian Rachlin in Washington with Orchestre National de France

Washington Post
By Anne Midgette

I confess I wasn’t very excited about going to hear the Orchestre National de France play a program of chestnuts on Sunday afternoon. Evidently, a lot of other music-lovers shared my sentiments, because the Kennedy Center Concert Hall was only about half-full.

Why, after all, should we want to hear the Orchestre National de France? It’s partly the presenter’s job to let us know. And indeed, Doug Wheeler, the president emeritus of Washington Performing Arts, answered in his brief and on-point remarks from the stage before the show: because the orchestra was among the first that the organization’s founder, Patrick Hayes, presented in Washington even before Washington Performing Arts came to be, and the two institutions have had a long and fruitful collaboration ever since. [Ed: The previous sentence has been corrected; it originally misstated the date of Washington Performing Arts’s founding.] Maybe knowing that would have incited a few ticket-buyers; as it was, it was a bit of too little, too late.

Why else? Because their music director, Daniele Gatti, is a heavyweight in the conducting world, and will take over the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, one of the world’s greatest ensembles, when his contract with this group ends at the end of the current season.

But we couldn’t have known some of the other reasons beforehand. For instance: because Julian Rachlin, the violin soloist in the Shostakovich first concerto, is a veritable force of nature who turned out to be the centerpiece of a searing performance of that work. And because everything the orchestra played on Sunday was pretty remarkable — even for those of us who said beforehand that we had heard Tchaikovsky’s Fifth Symphony done so often, and done so well, that we had no desire to hear it again any time soon. (An awful lot of my job these days seems to involve defending fine performances of over-familiar works.)

Gatti is a formidable presence on the podium: visually, he conveys a sense of physical power, so that his delicacy and restraint and detail take on a kind of implicit force. He used this to full effect throughout hte afternoon, starting with an exquisite, languid, idiomatic performance of Debussy’s “Prelude to the afternoon of a faun,” in which every instrument offered precision while maintaining the soft, fluid contours of this score.

But it was the Shostakovich that was the real tour de force. Rachlin, the violinist, is a small contained firebrand of a man onstage, and he eased his way into the opening movement with playing that was almost painful in its muted restraint, over the humid, brooding chords of the orchestra. The second movement then uncurled into some of the most biting fierce Shostakovich playing I can remember hearing. And when Rachlin got going into the final cadenza, he became a wild thing, a kind of inspired mad scientist in a monologue both profound and terrifying, until the orchestra finally chimed in with ferocious clashes of regretful understanding.

I didn’t even need to fight to lower my defenses against the Tchaikovsky; Gatti and the orchestra simply leveled them, with authoritative, urbane playing. Gatti even nodded to the piece’s familiarity by leaving off conducting entirely at times, keeping himself to the most minimal of gestures even in the final movement, which nonetheless seemed informed by the Shostakovich that had preceded it: more abrasive and aggressive than a triumphant resolution.

So those of us who went to this concert were pretty happy we had gone. Now, Washington Performing Arts is looking for ways to convince you that you want to go hear Ivan Fischer and the Budapest Festival Orchestra, who arrive with Marc-André Hamelin and a slightly less overworked program on February 15th. You can get tickets at a 50% discount now.

Gramophone: Julian Rachlin Appointed Principal Guest Conductor of the Royal Northern Sinfonia

Photo: Janine Guldene

Gramophone

Following their appointment earlier this year of a Principal Conductor better known as a pianist, Lars Vogt, the Royal Northern Sinfonia now complete their artistic team with a Principal Guest Conductor better known as a violinist, Julian Rachlin. Rachlin made his conducting debut with the Sinfonia in October 2013 and has since led the Israel Philharmonic, Czech Philharmonic and the Academy of St Martin in the Fields. Rachlin will be appearing as conductor and soloist with the Sinfonia in a concert at Milton Court in London tomorrow evening (November 14). The programme comprises of Schnittke's Sonata No 1 for violin and chamber orchestra, Mozart's Violin Concerto No 5 and Beethoven's Symphony No 7.

Rachlin was just 14 years old when he appeared as a soloist with the Vienna Philharmonic, still the youngest soloist to have appeared with that orchestra. Andrew Achenbach interviewed Rachlin for Gramophone in 1995 when the violinist was just 19 but already had two recordings for Sony Classical under his belt. At that time Rachlin said, 'When I'm playing, I really want to tell the people something, to move something within them, and I believe that the public will always respond to any artist who is genuinely trying to convey some sort of emotional message. After all, why should we be ashamed of expressing our innermost feelings?' It looks as if the Royal Northern Sinfonia have some exciting concert seasons ahead.