I want to take Joshua Bell on a trip down memory lane. We’ll have to be quick, because he has a TED talk to prepare. It’s July 2001, and Sir Colin Davis is conducting Bach’s St Matthew Passion in Gloucester Cathedral. Bell gets up from his leader’s chair and stands to play “Erbarme dich”, alongside the alto Dame Sarah Connolly, with a piercing beauty of tone and uncanny directness. Almost a quarter of a century on, it remains among the most memorable of many unforgettable moments in that one-off performance organised by his friend Steven Isserlis.
On a video call from his home in New York. Bell looks taken back for a second. “I’ve organised a chamber orchestra for the TED talk, to demonstrate the special power of orchestral music. And just yesterday – 12 hours ago! – we played through ‘Erbarme dich’. I hadn’t played the solo in all that time. But I want to use it in the talk, as an example of the most glorious, the most heart-wrenching moments in music.”
Lecturer, orchestral leader and obbligato Bachian may not be roles we associate with Bell, but they’re all points on the curve of a complete musician. During the course of this concert season, an artist residency with the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia has given audiences in Rome the opportunity to appreciate the line of that curve for themselves. A duo recital with pianist Shai Wosner in January was followed by Bell’s return in March as primus inter pares for a chamber concert with members of the Santa Cecilia orchestra, leading Mendelssohn’s Octet and Brahms’ Clarinet Quintet from the first-violin chair.
Later in April, Bell completes the residency by wearing the more familiar hat of soloist, for which he is accompanied by the orchestra and its new Music Director, Daniel Harding, in the under-appreciated Violin Concerto by Dvořák. Three dates in Rome are followed by a short European tour in early May, taking the Dvořák to Barcelona, Hamburg, Dortmund, Katowice and Frankfurt. Bell has known Harding since his management company took the conductor on as a precociously talented teenager. “I was 21, and my agent said, this guy’s a conductor. And I thought to myself, but he’s a kid! Then I saw him, and I saw how far he would go. So we’ve been friends for a long time.”
Bell himself has been Music Director of the Academy of St Martin in the Fields (ASMF) for 14 years, and in that time conducted eight of the nine Beethoven symphonies, both from the violin and on the podium (another point on the line). He is well placed to understand from the inside what conductors do well. “It’s an almost impossible job, because you do need to show leadership. As a soloist I have asked orchestral musicians about a particular conductor, and they’ll say, ‘He’s such a tyrant.’ Or alternatively, ‘He’s too loose. We need a stronger sense of direction.’ So you almost can’t win. I take off my hat to the good ones, and Daniel is one of those. He has strong ideas and communicates them, but he does it with humour in the rehearsal. He brings a lightness to the atmosphere – but not too much, so that everyone knows when to take things seriously.”
According to Bell, Harding also “believes in” the Dvořák concerto, which still struggles to emerge from the shadow of Romantic warhorses such as the Brahms and Tchaikovsky. In fact, Bell himself only took on the piece less than a decade ago, and first played it with the Santa Cecilia in 2018, under the (no doubt helpful) baton of Jakub Hrůša. “I would not want to hear the tape of that performance now! I’ve lived with the piece a lot over the last seven years, and it feels like it’s in my bloodstream, which it wasn’t at first – it couldn’t be, no matter how much you practise.”
Bell grew up with the received opinion about the concerto which Dvořák began to write in 1879, with the violinist Joseph Joachim in mind. The Brahms Concerto was just a year old at that point, and perhaps too fresh in Joachim’s mind, because he insisted that Dvořák overhaul his work, as well as going through the solo part himself with a red pen. Once thoroughly revised, the concerto had to wait until 1883 for a premiere, which was given in Prague by František Ondříček, despite Dvořák’s dedication of the score to Joachim “with the deepest respect”.
Perhaps Joachim’s poor opinion dogged the Concerto for many years, despite its many attractions. “It always had certain clichéd remarks attached to it,” recalls Bell. “As in: it’s got some nice tunes, it’s a bit repetitive, and it’s not as great as the Cello Concerto. But people have those things to say about every great composer – Beethoven didn’t know how to write a melody, and Tchaikovsky didn’t know how to develop, and Schumann didn’t know how to orchestrate. People love to throw these things out, even when none of them are true.”
I don’t suppose anyone has ever gone up to Bell after the Tchaikovsky Concerto and said, “Nice playing, Joshua, but doesn’t the finale go on a bit?” “That’s a great example,” he replies. “There’s a piece where I grew up doing the traditional cuts. And the more I played it, the more I realised that Tchaikovsky took the theme round and round like that with a purpose in mind. The repetitions are part of the spirit of the piece.”
When Bell took a look at Dvořák’s concerto for himself, he found that “it has everything. It has the gravitas of the Brahms – but with a lighter, more Czech flavour. It has one of the most gorgeous slow movements, and it has an exciting and catchy finale that’s clearly inspired by the Rondo in the Beethoven concerto. So I quickly fell in love with it.” He points to the subtly shifting colours of the finale, while the violin dances over the orchestra: “I don’t find it repetitive at all, if you do it with invention.”
There can’t be many violinists for this concerto who have also directed it, as Bell has done with the ASMF, including a concert at the Rudolfinum in Prague. “When we did that, it felt like a piece of chamber music, because there was no one with a baton. But we can create the same feeling with Daniel, and a slightly larger orchestra in Rome.” There must, all the same, have been a special feeling of homecoming when he brought the Dvořák back to Prague. “Well, that’s what I’m trying to look at in my TED talk,” says Bell. “What do we get from listening to an orchestra live, versus an AI experience? Would we get those goosebumps from a robot playing a violin, or from a piece created by AI?
“Part of what makes a piece of music like ‘Erbarme dich’ special,” says Bell, “is knowing that there was a real human behind it, and that there are human beings performing it, with their shared history of learning, with their instruments which have a history of their own. All these factors feed into the goosebumps you feel.” He makes a pertinent comparison between different audiences. “When I play at Wigmore Hall, I know that pretty much everyone there knows the repertoire. And this makes a difference, compared to playing for an audience that may never have heard a string quartet. I don’t want to say that the Wigmore audience is receiving a message, because I hate the cliché that that music is a form of communication – it’s more like sharing an experience – but they get it. And that’s how you feel when you play Dvořák in Prague.” The robots may be coming for us, but they can never take our goosebumps away.