Epic Saturday - Cellist Natalie Clein on Beethoven's Triple Concerto "Whevener I hear it, I get sweaty palms."
Natalie spoke to Simon Mayo about the trickiness for cellists playing Beethoven's famous concerto for violin, cello and piano
For this week's Epic Saturday, Simon Mayo spoke to cellist Natalie Clein in Berlin, continuing our Scala Radio survey of Beethoven's music in the composer's 250th anniversary year.
Natalie began by revealing a recurring dream she's started having recently:
"It's a very strange time for us performers at the moment. I'm having dreams I'm not a cellist anymore - pretty traumatic for musicians."
"There must be a creative way of getting back and performing," asked Simon referring to the impact of lockdown on musicians and live performance amid the Coronovirus crisis. "Maybe soloists, quintets and quartets and chamber music, yes," he continued. "But the full orchestra seems a long way off. How are you seeing it Natalie?"
Natlie replied: "I don't know. I'm thinking small scale. I'm lucky enough to have all those options. I join orchestras as a soloists - I have a big solo repertoire. But I also play in small groups in chamber music. We run a festival in Purbeck at the end of the summer. We're still working out whether it can happen this year.
"They're talking about outside events. They're talking about drive-in opera. One thing I know is that when it finally happens we will appreciate the miraculous nature of live performance and communal experience like we never had before. I feel quite emotional about it really.
"Musicians generally are pretty evangelistic about the way we view our work, so we're going to try and get that across in whatever way we can for audiences. I appreciate my audience so much. It really makes you realise what a two-way event a concert is. It's so much about the energy an audience gives me as a person on stage. I'm not a cinema. I'm a living breathing person that really reacts to what I'm feeling live."
"If you've never heard the Beethoven Triple Concerto before," asked Simon, "How would you explain it, Natalie? "
"I've find it such a rich generous piece," Natalie replied. "It's C Major. It's such a sunny world. This is his middle period of composing. Its full of the joys and the power of life. He's right in the centre of life. He taps into the fundamental energy of a waterfall or an atom breaking. It's kind of pulsating with power all the way through.
"It's famously tricky for a cellist, just technically. It's really not fair. I feel like a goalkeeper who only gets noticed when he misses a goal. The violin part is pretty easy, the piano part is very easy. The cello part is a beast of a part. Whenever I hear this beautifully beautifully quiet and mysterious opening, my palms always start sweating. That's a very subjective approach. There is not one bar that's not difficult in that piece.
Talking about the recording included on Epic Saturday - with the Insula Orchestra, Natalie said: "I had performed it for International Womens Day in 2018. I experiment with playing on gut strings. This recording is strung with open gut strings. So the tension of the string is very different. So if you get nervous and your fingers sweat a bit, then that also effects shifting - the moving around of fingers on the string.
"It's also really interesting because that's how Beethoven would have experienced the cello sound. Not like the 21st century steel sound. So the Insula Orchestra invited me to go along with this experient and very grateful I had the chance to do that."
Natalie Clein was talking to Simon Mayo on Saturday 2 May 2020.
Her recording of Beethoven's Triple Concerto with Alexandra Conunova (violin), David Kadouch (piano) and the Insula Orchestra conducted by Laurence Equilbey is on the Erato label.