How virtuoso Nicola played hard to get
She sends back score as it’s too easy to play!
VIOLIN virtuoso Nicola Benedetti sent back her new concerto to the composer – because it was too easy to play.
The Scots classical star was posted the piece by internationally acclaimed US jazz trumpeter Wynton Marsalis, who had written it especially for her.
But Miss Benedetti, 29, returned it with instructions to make it more challenging.
She said: ‘Did I ask for the piece to be harder? Yes, that is pretty much true.
‘The way I put it to him was, because 99 per cent of the time I play repertoire that was written for solo violin, my largest experience is in playing things that take a long time to learn.
‘That is where I’m most comfortable, getting something where I look at it for the first time and think, “This is unplayable”, and I’m forced to spend hours and hours trying to work out how, physically, I can get my fingers and mind around this music. So that’s what I was trying to say to him. I also sent him a lot of violin parts from pretty much every legendary violin concerto that’s in the repertoire now.
‘I was passing through New York and went to one of the music shops there and I just bought him about 50 scores.
‘Tchaikovsky, Beethoven, Brahms – just everything. He’s a studier; I’ve never come across somebody who will study something so consistently.
‘So he just studied all of those scores.’
The result is 54-year-old Marsalis’ Concerto in D, billed as a piece influenced by jazz, blues and Scottish folk music.
Miss Benedetti played the concerto at its world premiere in London last November.
Having just given the US premiere in Chicago, she will perform it again next week at the 17,500-seat Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles.
The violinist from West Kilbride, Ayrshire, will then return to Scotland for a week of homecoming concerts at the Royal Conservatoire in Glasgow in August.
Following his Swing Symphony and Blues Symphony, ninetime Grammy award-winner Marsalis, from New Orleans, – who has sold more than seven million copies of his recordings worldwide – re-entered the classical arena with his violin concerto.
After meeting Miss Benedetti ten years ago in New York, he was determined to collaborate with the musician who shot to fame after winning the BBC Young Musician of the Year Competition in 2004.