Conducting a commotion

Violinist Pinchas Zukerman teaches by video link and believes every child should be given a musical instrument at the age of four, he tells Arminta Wallace.

Pinchas Zukerman answers the phone on the first ring. Then he says: "Hold on a minute, will ya?" There is a muffled conversation at his end. I could swear I hear someone say: "Pinky's just going to take this call in the bathroom." The bathroom? Oh, God. Surely not. After a few moments a calm, English-accented voice comes on the line.

"Pinky's trying to find a phone that's, ahm, in a quieter place," it assures me. We do some polite weather talk; snow, it seems, is general all over north-west Europe. "Can you hear him now?" the voice asks.

I listen. No, I say, I can't.

"Right, well . . ."

After another bit of scuffling Zukerman's voice booms into the earpiece. "Hey," he says. "Could you do me a favour?" Which is how I find myself calling a hotel in Paris and asking to be put through to the bathroom of one of the most celebrated musicians on the planet.

Talking about Beethoven, I venture when we're finally sorted, is going to be a bit of an anti-climax after all that. "Don't worry," Zukerman answers. "He probably didn't hear it." Well, you gotta laugh. Poor old Beethoven.

The programme for Zukerman's recital at the National Concert Hall in Dublin on Sunday consists of Beethoven's last three violin and piano sonatas. The composer wrote 10 altogether, most of them sunny early works in the guileless sonata form developed by Haydn and Mozart. The final sonata is a different matter entirely, with Beethoven's increasing deafness moving the music into a different dimension. Or would Zukerman agree?

"Absolutely," he says. "The only thing sonatas eight and 10 have in common is that they're in G major. But they're totally different. The eighth sonata is relatively light; a fairly typical piece from the period for this combination of instruments. The tenth is probably the greatest piece for violin and piano that there is. In my opinion. The first movement, particularly, is extraordinary. It's offbeat - five-bar phrases instead of four-bar phrases - and it's very unusual.

"When Beethoven started composing, people were writing simple C major triads. He brought music to a different sphere. For a while Mozart did, too, in parallel with him. But Mozart did it because of his genius. Beethoven did it because he felt the need to create something that was brand new. For a long time people felt that he was a maniac. I mean, how wonderful is that, to start a piece on an upbeat - bah, bah, bah, BOOM? That's amazing. It had never really been done before. And in the Eroica symphony he goes way out harmonically. Dah, dah, dah, dee, dah, dah . . ."

After five minutes in his company, even over the phone, I'm beginning to understand why Zukerman's official biography describes him, not as a musician, but as a "phenomenon". It's considerably less po-faced than most classical biogs, which tend to be studiedly dull lists of orchestras and conductors. "Equally respected as a violinist, violist, conductor, pedagogue and chamber musician," is how its author sums up its subject. It must have taken superhuman effort not to use the word "whirlwind" anywhere in four closely typed pages.

Together with pianist Marc Neikrug, Zukerman has been touring Europe for the past few weeks playing these Beethoven sonatas all over the place - notably in Valencia, where they're playing all 10 on three consecutive nights.

Beethoven, however, is not what Zukerman wants to talk about today. As deftly as a Davis Cup tennis player, he bats back the Beethoven balls, then changes the subject to music education and technology, one of his favourite topics.

Teaching is one of his great interests. In his capacity as chairman of the Pinchas Zukerman Performance Programme at the Manhattan School of Music, Zukerman has developed the use of video-conferencing techniques which allow him to give regular instruction to his violin students no matter where he is. Distance education meets Star Trek, as it were.

"Yeah, that's just one element that brings people together very easily now," he says. "It's being used more and more in the computer format. The problem with technology is software. Software needs brains. Human brains. We don't yet have enough people who understand how to do it fast enough for utilisation by our art forms. Up to now it has only been available for the superficial pastimes of society. We have the little video phones and the I-Pods and all that stuff. Doesn't mean it's bad, but we have to get it into the other areas. When you go across international borders, why do you still have to write down things on a piece of paper - your name, your birthdate? It's ridiculous. But it's because there isn't the software.

"It's the same thing in music. With video and audio together, the file is too big to send it as we do with e-mail. But it's the same technology, so we'll have it in a year - two at the most. These are things that will enhance music education. But we still need to get to grips with the reality of music education, which is to give an instrument - a recorder - to every child at four years old. That's not difficult, is it? Governments can do that."

Sponsorship, he insists, will fund such an education programme. As for the training of teachers and the enthusing of parents, he doesn't see a problem. "The children will bring the parents," he says. "We've lost 27 years of music education in the world. We have a middle class that really doesn't know enough about how culture can enhance their lives. And it's a journey. It's not that you go once or twice to the theatre, and it's not like a movie. You have to actually put yourself in that seat. You have to say, 'I'm going'. And you have to go again and again and again. We need to get more audience-friendly. We need to make it available. We need to make it affordable. All that will happen with software."

If this sounds suspiciously like pie in the sky, it might be worth pausing to take a look at Zukerman's record in Ottawa, where he has been music director of Canada's National Arts Centre since 1998. At the time of his appointment, the 20-year-old centre had fallen into the artistic doldrums. "We became less visionary, less creative, increasingly bureaucratic," it admitted in a mission statement published in 2001. "The NAC had lost its sense of purpose . . ."

Appointing a celebrity conductor who appeared as regularly in the gossip columns - thanks to his highly publicised marriage break-ups with a TV personality (Eugenia Zukerman) and a movie actress (Tuesday Weld) - as in the arts pages, might not have seemed like the wisest move. The whirlwind, however, did its job, the centre - and in particular its orchestra, the National Arts Centre Orchestra - was transformed. Zukerman is still in Ottawa, and married to the NACO's principal cellist, Amanda Forsyth, into the bargain.

Why, though, would a violinist turn to conducting - especially a violinist whose playing constantly had reviewers reaching for the thesaurus to find superlatives big enough to describe it?

"To broaden my horizons," he says.

I wait, but nothing more is forthcoming. Come on, I say - you make it sound simple. It can't be as simple as all that. "Well, I studied at school, but you can't really teach conducting. You learn by experience and by life. You have to have some obvious energy that flows from your body, and good hands. Otherwise, forget about it. Don't even go there. It's one of the enigmas of the profession. The person standing in the box. Because it doesn't produce the sound, but it's a conduit to produce the sound. So if you're a conduit you better learn all your inside and outside connections to it. That takes a lifetime. It's a long journey and a serious business. I've attempted to teach that now, too. I don't know what they learn. But if they learn something, they learn honesty. What I mean by honesty is, you better sit down with those parts - the orchestral parts - and deconsructthe symphonies and all the pieces you're learning.

"It doesn't mean you have to know every tube and every connection in the engine of the Mercedes. But you better know where it's going, at least. And keep your curiosity open. Because that will make you not only a better musician but a better person. To stand in front of 200 eyes every day, for 20 weeks a year: not easy, my friend. You get scrutinised from top to bottom. Everything you say and do - and I mean everything . . . Physical things, you know? Why is his body saying this today? Well, maybe because I have a little pain in my arm. All of a sudden it becomes a big to-do."

No different from standing up as a celebrity soloist in front of an audience, though, surely?

"Well, I've never played as a soloist. I mean, I play solos because the idiom calls for it, right? But I play chamber music. I've always played chamber music. It's a process of listening. It's fundamental. It's also a matter of life and death. That should be the whole idea of music. If you play a wrong note and it doesn't bother you, quit. Quit. Just stop it. Or somebody better tell you to stop."

While I'm trying to imagine who might take it upon themselves to tell Pinchas Zukerman to quit, he has moved on to the topic of world peace. And on this topic, as you might expect - he was born in Tel Aviv in 1948 while Israel was at war, the only child of Auschwitz survivors - he's not a happy camper.

"Our social value system, and geopolitics, and the whole combustion of what we are today in the Western hemisphere, has dropped a whole bunch of notches in real understanding of the human spirit. And I think we need to bring that back. It's very nice to know about peace among countries and brotherhood and all that shit, but how the hell do you do it? The way you do it is, you bring a Portuguese person together with a Chinese person. Or a Portuguese with a Spaniard, a Spaniard with a Jew, a Jew with a Catholic, and sit down and talk about it. Don't just say 'Hey, I'm better than you.' What do you mean, you're better than me? We're made the same way. You think your shit doesn't smell? Get real.

"The way we do it is by taking people into museums and concert halls. And by giving kids the opportunity to hold an instrument called a recorder and teaching them to blow one note. That's an accomplishment, you know, my friend? That's an accomplishment for a five-year-old. To blow one note. You know what will happen after that? They'll say, 'I feel better now.' That's it. That's the end of the story. Now you go write about that, 'coz I gotta go eat lunch."

Pinchas Zukerman and Marc Neikrug play Beethoven violin and piano sonatas at the NCH in the NCH/The Irish Times Celebrity Concert Series on Sunday