Cellist seeks meaning behind the music he plays
KITCHENER — Cellist Johannes Moser is a deeply curious man, fully engaged in every conversation and he asks more questions than any reporter.
This keen interest in everything and everyone influences the German-born cellist’s performance given he also wants to know as much as possible about the music and what is going on around him on the stage.
“What is the composer’s back story, what is the orchestra doing?” asks the cellist who performs with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony Thursday, Friday and Saturday.
On Thursday at the Conrad Centre for the Performing Arts, Moser performs “Intersections Magnetar,” a piece he commissioned to show off his skills on the electric cello. The concert is in collaboration with the Institute for Quantum Computing.
On Friday and Saturday, he returns to the classical genre performing Dvorák’s highly emotional “Cello Concerto” at Centre in the Square.
Moser was born in Germany to a Canadian mother and German father. He holds duo citizenship and lives in Cologne where, apart from his international touring career, the cellist teaches violoncello at the Cologne University of Music and Dance.
Teaching, he said, gives him an additional layer of understanding, a way to explore the music beyond the technical aspect of playing.
“If I don’t understand the piece, how can I expect to explain it to my students?” he questions. Moser also said that in every new point in his life, he sees and feels the music differently, and it’s reflected in how he plays. The Dvorák concerto performance is very different than what he played a decade ago, or even a year ago. He brings to any piece of music his own life experiences which includes love and love lost.
“There’s a lot of emotional content in this piece,” he said. “You can say that of a lot of musical masterpieces: as you change, it changes. I love that.”
This emotional attachment to music was something he grew up with as the son of two accomplished musicians.
Moser’s mother, soprano Edith Weins, is the daughter of a Mennonite pastor and has many family connections in Waterloo Region. She was born in Saskatoon and, as a young singer, travelled to Germany to study music where she met and married cellist Kai Moser.
Wiens is recipient of the Officer of the Order of Canada and is a faculty member at Juilliard School in New York. Moser’s brother, Benjamin, is a concert pianist.
With such a pedigree, one would think there would be pressure to become a musician, but Moser said his parents were more inclined to lead by example rather than pressure their sons.
“For my family, you always treated music as a normal part of life,” he said. “It was expected I’d play an instrument.”
His parents taught him to take ownership of his music, to be an independent thinker. This empowerment further fuelled his desire to make a career of music.
Before graduating high school, Moser auditioned for a university program that allows gifted musicians to leave their secondary school studies early for more intensive training. He completed his academic credits with tutors.
When asked if there was a pivotal moment in his life, Moser said yes.
It was 2002, he was only 22 and had won the prestigious International Tchaikovsky Competition which gave him an opportunity to perform with an orchestra.
“The passion I felt, I felt excited,” he said. “I’d never felt like that before in my life.”
He made up his mind, this would be his path, but the reality of being a touring concert cellist is not quite what he expected.
“It turned out to be a little less romantic, with 250 days a year on the road,” he said with a laugh.