Alena Baeva: ‘Concert platforms are a place where miracles can happen’

Alena Baeva says the violin was such a part of her life that she really can’t remember her childhood without it. But what she remembers first is not any kind of child prodigy experience, even though she was only five years old when she first took up the instrument.

“Having to practise,” Baeva says, “gave me this continuous feeling of ... of going back inside myself. When I practise, it’s a kind of meditation, I would say. I observe it now. Because I didn’t know these terms when I was a child, obviously. When you practise you really try to feel your body, just trying to be as pure as possible with your physical feelings, and also trying to listen from another point of view, a different perspective.”

She describes it as “a very precious activity” and says “I learned a lot just from practising, not only about music, but about self-control, about thinking, about planning, remembering, observing. All kind of things. It’s a really, really wonderful activity. I really enjoy practising. I wish I could spend more time at it now.”

I didn’t understand it. I think I didn’t understand anything at that time, although I enjoyed it

She identifies a point of transition around the age of 13. “I suddenly started to not just to like music, beautiful music, or to enjoy mastery of playing. I fell in love with a particular piece, it was the Brahms Double Concerto, for violin and cello. It’s continued since then. I have these different fallings in love, different pieces and discoveries.”

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It might seem like becoming a professional was a foregone conclusion. And maybe it was for everyone around her. But she had other interests, too. “I always thought that, if not violin, I would study medicine. I would love to be a doctor. I am fascinated with everything connected with being a doctor or a surgeon or a nurse. The book I’m currently reading is about a surgeon. Even during the lockdown I saw an advertisement looking for nurses in Luxembourg – I live in Luxembourg. They had an open day, of course it was online. So I joined. I thought, maybe now I can study medicine. This was a time when there were no concerts, and nobody knew when they would begin again. I quickly realised I don’t have enough qualities to be in Luxembourg University, where the knowledge of at least three languages is required to even start learning.”

Baeva’s musical influences are highly varied. “I learned so much from old recordings, from books, from memoirs. I read an enormous amount. I think that’s very important for a young musician. Of course when I had the chance to meet, professionally, people like Rostropovich [the great Russian cellist, conductor and freedom of speech campaigner] it was a great moment. He influenced everyone around him. I was lucky to have some lessons with him, and I also had a scholarship from his foundation.

Some things can unfold without performers planning it. I really like when there is space for appreciating this moment with musicians – when it’s not set in stone

“He had the idea to send me to study in Paris. I was 17 and that changed me a lot, of course. I just wanted to learn French and become a francophone. That’s why I later moved to Luxembourg. His personality was brilliant, as everyone knows. I remember he demanded certain things, phrasing-wise and sound-wise when I had a lesson. And I remember clear as day I was not able to do them. I realised I cannot do what he asks and I need to find the way to do it. Throughout the years, I’ve remembered his advice from time to time. It’s really difficult to overestimate his influence.”

Baeva also mentions the Japanese conductor Seiji Ozawa “an amazing musician who founded a string quartet academy in Switzerland and Japan, just because he was interested to know more about string quartet repertoire, which is very special. It’s where all the great composers tried new ideas, a kind of minimalistic laboratory.”

And she had some lessons with Israeli violinist Shlomo Mintz. “They were very, very important for me,” Baeva explains, “because he was the first person who told me, put your violin away, and look at the score, and see where the bass is going. Before that, I admired my professor, Eduard Grach, with whom I had started to study when I was 10. Of course he was a direct successor of a great school of Soviet violin playing. He started to study in Odessa under Pyotr Stolyarsky, who was the teacher of many of the wonderful and amazing violinists of the first half of the 20th century.” David Oistrakh and Nathan Milstein were also pupils of Stoylarsky.

Although Baeva was shaped by Grach’s teaching, she says she went “quite far from the general things that were demanded in his class. But what I’m grateful to him for is that he gave us freedom. He gave us some impulse to try and become what we are, to develop our individuality. That was very important and a rare quality for a great teacher.”

I’m very, very happy that now, we performers really choose the way we want to play. We always could, but somehow it was more rigid before about 40 years ago

Baeva comes to Dublin to play the Brahms Violin Concerto with the National Symphony Orchestra under Mihhail Gerts. She first studied the work more than 20 years ago, when she was just 15 years old. Too early, she says. “I didn’t understand it. I think I didn’t understand anything at that time, although I enjoyed it. The Brahms concerto is so technically demanding. It’s not comfortably written. It needs a lot of time to get into your fingers. The Mendelssohn is much, much lighter and easier, physically. Because I learned the Brahms so young, I feel it with my body also. My fingers know what to do. And then I can really look at it from different perspectives every time I’m playing it.”

The particular orchestra, conductor and hall all feed into how she plays it. The concert platform, Baeva says, is a place where miracles can happen. ”Some things can unfold without performers planning it. I really like when there is space for appreciating this moment with musicians – when it’s not set in stone.”

She recalls reading the book Performing Brahms, and how she was inspired by the recorded excerpts on the accompanying CD, which compares and contrasts performers and performances from the early 20th century, and includes recordings by Joseph Joachim, for whom Brahms wrote his concerto.

I love when the orchestra is not just a group of musicians who wait for signals or for some external stimulation before they do things

“I was really in shock,” she says. “Because Brahms was not at all heavy, slow, big bear-like. When I was studying, his work was interpreted like that, in the German tradition, which is very heavy. Another big influence was the recordings of a pianist who was a student of Clara Schumann, Ilona Eibenschütz. Brahms really adored her playing. The way she plays, it’s so spontaneous. It is like wind, very light and very natural. I’m very, very happy that now, we performers really choose the way we want to play. We always could, but somehow it was more rigid before about 40 years ago.”

Rigidity is what an early Soviet cultural institution was set up to avoid, Persimfans, a conductorless orchestral collective, which ran from 1922 until 1932. Baeva has performed with its 21st-century recreation which, like the original, reworks the layout of the orchestra with players placed on stage facing into the centre, so that they can see each other properly.

“It was a wonderful experience,” Baeva says. “I love when the orchestra is not just a group of musicians who wait for signals or for some external stimulation before they do things. It’s ideal when everybody plays chamber music, of course. In this regard, a conductorless orchestra is a very good idea. It’s much more difficult, of course.”

It has been unbearable from day one, because nobody could believe it would start. It is an absolute catastrophe

She enjoyed the seating arrangement, and how it worked. But the rehearsals were not very easy and not very short, because everybody has something to say, Baeva explains. “There are advantages of that, and disadvantages. Everybody’s participating, and really trying their best for the outcome. But it slows down the progress, sometimes. You just need more time. But it’s totally worth it.”

Although she’s Russian, Baeva was born in Kyrgyzstan, and is married to the Ukrainian pianist and Van Cliburn Competition gold medallist Vadym Kholodenko. She speaks with great sadness of the war in Ukraine. “It has been unbearable from day one, because nobody could believe it would start. It is an absolute catastrophe. It’s a reason for everything to fall apart. My husband’s mother, she lived in Kyiv all her life, and she had to move in the first days of the war. It’s absolutely unthinkable. It’s brought a lot of tears and depression. It’s very, very hard.

“I spent almost as much time in Russia as I’ve spent in Luxembourg. I moved 12 years ago. But I’ll have a Russian passport for three more months. Then finally I’ll become a citizen of Luxembourg. And of course I have so many friends in Russia and they can’t understand how quickly it was possible to turn in this deadly direction. So many lives totally destroyed.”

Alena Baeva plays the Brahms Violin Concerto with the National Symphony Orchestra under Mihhail Gerts at the National Concert Hall on Friday, November 4th, see nch.ie