Direct-to-disc LP released on Berliner Meister Schallplatten
 
I have been away for a long time. In finding my way back, Bach’s C Major Sonata was a pillar of strength, an example of how faith is the act of following the theme to the end, even when at first, all you have is a beginning. From there I found my way to the first notes of the E Major Partita and to Berlin, where I recorded them both direct-to-disc on LP.
 
My early recordings, Shostakovich Concerto no.1 and Sonata, and Bach D minor Partita and Bartok Solo Sonata, had in common a sense of grief and drama, the chaconne and passacaglia funereal rhythm: tragedy. My best work seemed to be repertoire that pulled me underground to feel connected. Orpheus. Or perhaps, if you’re reading Jean Shinoda Boden, Persephone. Human connection and empathising with pain is redemptive, but it began to feel like an emotionally exhausting vortex. To play the music of happier souls, I needed to take time out and become the engineer of my own inner life. 
 
I started exploring beyond the violin world: tango, martial arts, ballet, lots of psychology and other reading, learning a new language, learning to cook, travelling without performing, indulging in shallow dreams and discovering their end, allowing myself to be an amateur for a while and try new things, as well as engaging in intense discussions with friends and artists of other disciplines. And I wrote. I wrote for days on end, and for years. Not for publication, more like the protagonist in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. Mercifully, discovering this novel coincided with the end of the writing compulsion. 
 
Something unexpected happened. Physically, emotionally, mentally, what I was learning away from the violin started to feed back into my practice. It was a surprise to me to discover that the torque of the ochos and giros in the Tango was the same torque, reversed, as in the punch starting from the floor in Choi Kwang-Do and that that same torque diminished would show me the way to refining my left hand shifts; that the core stability integral to the pliés and relevés of ballet would help me develop my principles of - and connection between - bow distribution and posture; or that the flow that great performances have, and the meditation on stage that Stanislawski describes at the end of An Actor Prepares, have parallels with the aims of the psychological methods created for serious criminals applying for early reintegration to society and which British Olympic athletes have been using for years to hone their focus with their “head-coach” Dr Steve Peters and Sarah Broadhead.
 
Through all this exploration I was quietly learning the C Major. I wrote my first blog post as I was analysing it. As I started to assimilate the new threads, interests, and passions, I started to feel whole. More than just a violinist, but a person with a growing and healthy internal culture, I realised that the C Major is what happens after the drama. It’s what happens when life carries on, with hope. In Bach’s manuscript it follows the Ciaccona directly. Bach meant for it to be the next step. In its stoic lyricism and constant stillness like the river in Herman Hesse’s Siddartha, I found joy.
 
So it was clear when I decided to return to recording, that the C Major and its sequential neighbour, the radiant E Major which I remembered once performing on a sunny evening under the warm limestone stalactites of the Divinity School of the Bodleian Library, would be the repertoire.
 
I chose to make an LP because I wanted my recording to be an object that people treasured and valued, a piece of physical sound, analogue art that is lovingly and meaningfully created, and honoured by the listener. I know there are listeners out there who listen like this, because sometimes they write to me, or tell me. I have so much respect for listeners who really listen, because it is an immense skill that can only be formed from a love of music, and through practice, humility and dedication. 
 
These are the listeners envisioned by Rainer Maillard’s direct-to-disc record label Berliner Meister Schallplatten. BMS specialises in recording directly to an LP lathe in one take – in my case, a Sonata or Partita in its entirety - per side. That engraved LP is sent to a factory to be made into a metal version, and they print further vinyl LPs from that, which is what listeners buy. As a consequence of using this technique, BMS does not manipulate the sound beyond choosing and placing the equipment, nor do they master, nor edit. They also don’t put movement timings on the record sleeve. When I queried not writing the duration, Rainer replied, “We recommend listening to the long play, preferably with a glass of red wine”. Don’t rush. That was exactly how I envisaged my record being heard. Now for them to hear the long play, I had to play the long play. 
 
It was my first time visiting Berlin. The bright, warm spring day felt like a celebration of what I was there to do. The sun shone through the Tiergarten onto the golden statue of Seigessäule and radiated out of Rainer’s face when he showed me the equipment with its microscope through which I could see the glowing filigree lines on the black freshly lathed Schallplatte. “That’s music!” he said, beaming quietly, “I still find it incredible, just amazing”. Upstairs he and producer Philip Krause showed me the Meistersaal, a glorious, gilt, wooden panelled chamber music concert hall built in 1910 with a warm, broad acoustic: a place of immense musical history. I felt honoured, joyful, and slightly awed to be there. I could see the balloon of Die Welt through the window. 
 
The C Major was first. The fugue in this sonata is the longest fugue that Bach wrote, and he wrote it for the violin, an instrument that is not designed to play polyphonic fugues. Add to that that there are three other deep and exquisite movements all demanding dedication, that the sound in the iconic Meistersaal was being etched into eternity in real time, and a challenge emerges where the margin for error is close to zero, the emotional content requires uninterrupted meditation and focus, the physical challenge is complex and ever-present, the greats are staring at you - oh, and this is the first recording I’ve made in many years. 
 
The beginning of each take was the hardest part. In the recording you can hear my breath, because breathing out engages the calming parasympathetic nervous system, and the first movement of the Bach, the Adagio, begins with two simple notes repeated, as close to breathing, or a heart beat, as a composer can write. It set the tempo. The psychological pressure of making the judgement on whether or not I was happy with this beginning, the first 30 seconds, was considerable. If I wasn’t, then I should stop, conserve my energy and start again. The standard duration of the C Major was on a knife-edge of being too long for the direct-to-disc technique. I had to omit the repeats in the fourth movement for it to fit, and Rainer, who is a virtuosic master-engineer, performed engineering acrobatics to keep the recording quality high with the right groove width. 
 
After taking into account the time for sound check, breaks for lunch, recovery after each performance, and note taking, there would only really be time for about five takes, after which I would be exhausted anyway, and I had to be happy with the result. Every wasted take meant throwing away a Schallplatte. It meant retuning, resetting, re-preparing. A new performance. It felt consequential. Added to this, we were using a decades-old lathe for which they no longer make spare parts and which, though its longevity is a testament to its old-world quality, failed occasionally. By contrast, the custom-made microphones were three days old, flown fresh from San Francisco. 
 
Intimidating? I had faith. The music gave me that. The music and its message was the reason I was there, and it gave me courage and a light heart. Producers Philip Krause and Lukas Kowalski were kind yet attentive listeners, giving gentle critique inbetween takes, and the sessions flowed. It was one of the most exciting and fulfilling musical experiences of my life. Rainer said it was the longest direct-to-disc recording ever made. 
 
I had turned up to the sessions on spec, with no record label attached. Infinitely generous, Rainer invited me onto his label BMS during a sunny lunch break on the terrace of Caruso’s. I couldn’t believe this day could get any better. We talked about the cover. I wanted something that had the feeling of mark-making, because that’s exactly what the act of recording direct-do-disc is: mark-making. I play, and under Rainer’s scrutiny, the lathe marks. So I was delighted when he expressed admiration for the work of my cousin, the fine artist Kate Palmer, and that she later agreed to our using it. Kate’s work is subtle, intense, sensitive, intuitive, and exact. Her work has rhythm. It reads like music. It feels very close to my experience of the Bach and recording direct-to-disc. I love her generosity in letting me have it on the cover. 
 
Just before I returned to record the E Major for Side B, I was waiting on a bench in a train station. A Buddhist in red came and sat next to me. He had been studying since he was a boy in Tibet. I later found out that his name was His Holiness the twelfth Gangri Karma Rinpoche. I was feeling a little lost. He had a belly laugh that can only be described as whole-hearted joy. I had been practising in a medieval Kent church in preparation for recording the E Major in Berlin, and even with the overwhelming beauty of the silent church I was finding it hard to match the E Major’s generosity. It is so easy to think of joy as something nebulous and flighty. But birds are fighting for life too. Some of them fly so hard that they have to take mini rests mid-flight to avoid a heart attack, which is why their trajectories are wavy. They are impossible, just like bees. And yet there they are. Listening to the laughter of the monk I understood that genuine joy comes from our whole bodies, from the disputed cold landscape of a beloved country, from faith in exile, from kind strangers, from a smile, from our full effort and from our breath. He helped me find the first note. 
 
I have faith that you will listen to the long play with an open heart, and a glass of wine. 

I open my windows and the sound floods in, warm air carrying the gentle polyphonic murmur of human speech. The occasional obligato of someone passing directly below blends back into the aesthetic emanating from the bistros.

Unrecognisable conversation is one of my first and favourite memories. As a very young child I lived in the countryside, so memories of trips to places where there were large groups of people stand out. Back then, perhaps my command of language was not strong enough to analyse the individual sounds and destroy the perspective of the whole. I felt at home.

At the beginning of the summer, here in Paris, surrounded by a language I strive to understand but which envelops my comprehension, I am back to being three. It has its benefits. Perhaps it’s the reverse of a performance. Once a violinist alone onstage, outnumbered by the audience, now sitting on the other side of the see-saw. Paris performs for me alone, a secret production with a cast of everybody.

As musicians, we organise sound, practically, and aesthetically. It is very easy to lose track of what we do by doing it so closely and repetitively that the painting just becomes paint. The perspective of changing cultures offers the chance to understand the roundness of cultural experience.

I arrived here shortly before 14th July.  That weekend I attended three concerts. One was Mark Anthony Turnage, Ensemble Intercontemporain and Wayne McGregor’s collaboration with the Paris Opera Ballet on Francis Bacon; the next on the eve of Bastille Day was Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. Both of those concerts were, appropriately, at Opéra Bastille. The third, on the 14th itself, was in the Bois de Boulogne, the Parc de Bagatelle, in the Orangerie next to a rose garden that would make Hyde Park blush, the closing piano recital of the Chopin Festival given by Hélène Tysman playing Bach, Chopin, Debussy, and Ravel.

The Bacon piece was polished and passionate. Every element was completely absorbing. I loved the sense of presence, with the choreography creating spaces on the stage and in the bodies of the dancers who inhabited the music for its own sake. I think that when performance is at its best it is a led meditation, allowing the audience to live in that moment exclusively. To see this happen in a collaborative setting inspires awe.

It felt as if Philippe Jordan’s light and elegant reading of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony was not played by L’Orchestre et Chœurs de L’Opéra national de Paris, but by the large, well dressed audience, filled with families of every generation. The audience willed it into existence, aware of the importance of ideas, on the site where ideas (and food shortages) were being transformed into political change for France, exactly 226 years earlier.

Except for the two restless young boys who were sitting beside me. I’m pretty sure they hated it. Their grandmother tried and failed to calm them down, but a twenty-something couple who turned around and brusquely and successfully hushed the children demonstrated to me something that I miss in England. Firstly, a sense of community that permits a stranger to object directly to the unsuitable behaviour of a child, and secondly the sense of the importance of culture within that community to such an extent that people are prepared to stand up on behalf of the cultural experience and fight for it in the face of a possibly defensive parent. Perhaps it’s just that I’m so used to London where what should seem normal and common sense doesn’t prevail, that here I see the audience en rose. Whatever the reason, I did feel that the hope of the ideas in the music was in some way reflected in the occasion and through the collective attitude of the audience.

And it was the audience, well more like a specific member of the audience, who enchanted me at the Bois de Boulogne. Tysman’s very demanding and pleasing programme was executed with conviction and flair, in a setting that was filled with flowers, light and beauty. It’s a bit of a walk to get to the Orangerie, but once you’re there, you don’t want to leave. After the concert, like many of the other audience members, I took a stroll in the stunning rose garden.

It was a smile exchanged with a woman one generation my senior, on the gravel path; a smile that said we can appreciate this beauty privately, for its own sake, with no words, with no ambition, no fight, and no search for reassurance. We both just knew how lucky we were to be there on that sunny day, and while the rest of France had its eyes on le Champ-de-Mars and la tour Eiffel awaiting the Harry Potter-esque fireworks, we were present in that quiet moment, in that culture, in that appreciation, with nothing to prove. I loved her for sharing that with me.

So where is all this leading? I don’t exactly know. The new perspective has led me to be much more relaxed about direction. Perhaps above all, it has reinforced my understanding that culture is important because it is shared; it has a grammar that goes beyond the definition of each individual event, or even each individual. I found Schiller and Beethoven’s Freude, schöner Götterfunken in the audiences of the Bastille; in the rebellion and sensuality of the Bacon collaboration; in a shared quiet smile; in a city of tradition, care, privacy, the eternal present and a collective experience. I feel at home.

The moments pass, and it’s time for la rentrée. As I prepare to leave, I pick up Verlaine’s dark Poèmes saturniens. Even his Chanson d’automne inspires joy, because he wrote it for me, and for you, and for the stars.

I was afraid of Bach’s C Major Solo Sonata so I avoided it for years. As a student, listening to its first two movements at competitions felt like being at a decadent Roman feast, where, instead of the rich variety of meats and fruits, each course was a large steaming bowl of savoury rice pudding (and no, you don’t get cinnamon or mushrooms with that). An endurance test in all the wrong ways.

The second movement was terrifying, a fugue. Its length, its impenetrable texture, and its long, sonorous subject (the tune, repetition of which forms the basis of the composition) usually played very slowly with ostentatiously sustained bowing (these days this is called “doing the ironing”), resulted in a machine huge in both proportion and form, the sole purpose of which seemed to be to intimidate. Well, it worked. 

Then, at the end of last year, curious, I re-approached it. No performance planned, just filling the repertoire gap. 

The intervening years had seen mainstream players adopt period instruments and rescue phrasing from the grips of violin teachers. There was a collective exhale. Short, fat violin necks or not, we were all given license to play an open E rather than scaling the G string to play a stopped note in an attempt to make it sound “vocal”. We now had the choice about whether we wanted to prioritise phrase geography, gesture, or (radically), emotive association. The arguments about what is historically correct and what is not, and whether it matters or not, offered the freedom to reject authority and listen to the music on its own terms. 

Like returning to a childhood home after years of absence, the music seemed different this time, simply because I had changed. The problems had diminished. Freed from phrasing fascists, and with unexpected ease of delivery, Bach started to speak, offering more questions than answers.

Each movement presents a different challenge.

The third movement seems impossibly light. How can something marked Largo fly? Like a floating feather the size of a plane. To make magic like that, you need a huge heart. And a miracle.

The fourth movement surprised me because all the recordings in my head (other people’s live performances and recordings) were so different from what I saw on the page. No longer obliged to wallop the top note of every scale presented to me, I am confronted by a conundrum: a slur at the beginning of the first beat is where the down-bow gesture begins, with the heaviest part of the bow and the largest part of the arm’s gesture naturally making the beginning of the stroke stronger, and yet I want the slur to follow through to the top of the gesture on the second crotchet. How do I get to the top of the scale in those beats? And how do you make “Allegro” feel allegro if you’re not presenting the pulse by accenting the second crotchet? Then I realised I was listening to the recordings again. Listen to the real music Ruth! It starts to speak. Unlike in other pieces, for instance in the G minor Sonata, this fourth movement is not a show-stopper. It speaks with kindness and gentleness and it requires me to stop trying to impress everybody. It is Allegro Assai after all.

“But what about the terrifying second movement?” I hear my three twitter followers cry (or maybe not …). Well, the second movement is the most challenging of them all. Not because of competition trauma, and not just because it’s long and demanding. 

First off, the second movement is the biggest commitment to C Major I have ever played in a solo setting. 

Let’s talk about keys for a minute. Ask any group of young players what they think about E flat Major, and they will say things like: warm, deep, soft (except one person said solemn. I consider him an anomaly). Some would say that there is a tradition of associating certain keys with particular ideas (with Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony defining F Major, for example), though I’m sure you will find other people prepared to argue against that. 

The point I’m trying to make, is that we often have associations with keys, and while there may be some variation, there are things we could agree on. Of course, this provokes the discussion on how pitch has got sharper over the centuries (hence historically informed tuning) so perhaps we are superimposing associations on pitch that don’t belong there. (In fact I did practise the third movement a semitone down to see if it helped me find the right way to play it.) Nevertheless, whether or not someone felt differently about E flat Major three centuries ago than we do now playing it a semitone higher, is a difficult thing to measure, not least because the 1700ers didn’t compare the two pitches in the way that we do. So I’m going to exercise my artistic license, and play it on a modern instrument and accept that my approach is somewhat (or entirely) subjective. I know that some people will pick holes in this. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I’m going out on a limb here, saying what I think about C Major.

C Major is the first key we learn on the piano. It is the first key we learn in theory. It is the first key we are tested on in aural. On the piano, it is the template for all of the other keys. It is the home key of all home keys. Sometimes it’s boring. Definitely not very romantic – It’s got no inbuilt tension of F sharps or G flats. Uncompromising, plain old, every day, C Major. And it isn’t easy on the violin either. We don’t have a C string, and it is not one of the easy natural resonances in the wooden box, in fact, it’s the home of wolf notes (notes that crack). There’s nowhere to hide, no place for expressive intonation, and nowadays not much vibrato in Bach either: it’s just got to be in tune and you’re not going to get much help with that on the home note. 

So how is this piece inspiring? Perhaps this is where all of those young violinists hit a brick wall. The key is, well … key …

In the circle of 5ths, C Major is the starting point for every other key. Perched between G Major and F Major, it can go either way, towards keys with sharps, or keys with flats, giving it an unpredictable power.  In the first movement, that balance and power is explored, making it both more playable and more obscure, opening up multiple possible interpretative options. 

On the other hand, while the fugue modulates, it cadences in sensible, related keys: C Major, D Major, E minor, and G Major. It is so straight forward harmonically that at first glance it seems that there is nothing to it. 

But it is that empty aspect that holds the real secret of the piece. The harmonically unstable first movement provides the relief against which the stability of the fugue stands out. 

Framed by this harmonic balance, the form of the fugue comes into its own. Writing a fugue comes with restrictions: the subject, its answer in other voices, and accompanying countersubject must appear repeatedly, in multiple voices at particular times and they must all move together harmonically. Introduce the awkward violin – designed to play one note at a time rather than four part harmony – and it is amazing that Bach manages to find the harmonic adventures that he does. He takes compositional virtuosity still further. Compared to the other two solo violin fugues, this subject, with its long singing note values (it is in 2/2), is a tuneful four bar phrase rather than just being a bar or two of motivic fodder. This makes things complicated, because the violin is tuned in 5ths, has a limited range on each string, and access to intervals between two strings is generally limited to a tenth for most people (depending on how big your hands are). That means the longer the subject, the more restrictions Bach has with where he can place the anatomy of the fugue on the instrument and still make sense harmonically. Why does Bach make his life so difficult and restricted?

That’s not the only thing that puzzles me. It’s the subject. It starts on an upbeat, rises a tone to an A, and meanders around the middle of the scale, rising again in anticipation before the next part comes in. No home note at either end of the scale! Not much there for a hook or focus for the phrase. In terms of its phrase geography and harmony, it’s so middle of the road, it can’t see the pavement. Yet the shape of the phrase and the oblique use of the emphasis of the first beats give it a mystery. What is this piece for?

Having so few anchors and so little to go on in a subject that is clearly a tune and not just a motif, but isn’t quite a complete idea, forces you to commit, or get off the train. It forces you to trust the music entirely and give yourself to that moment and see where it takes you. Through the placement of the episodes, and a structure that gradually and strategically reveals the limits and the heights, both of the singing quality of the violin, and of the harmony when placed under this fugue’s restrictions, Bach’s genius gradually emerges victorious over one’s insecurities, questioning and mistrust.

Eventually I relinquish myself to a balanced, restricted, patient, focused, repetitive, even meditative experience, in safe keys but with few obvious harmonic anchors, where the rising, almost hopeful nature of the subject infuses the fugue with a peace and stoicism that I have rarely if ever seen in the solo violin repertoire. I don’t think Bach could have found this balance in any other form, or in any other key.

Is there anything more romantic than trust? I take it back C Major! This is the piece that quietly demands: get up in the morning, and dedicate yourself to daily life, to your work, and to others, without question and without any other basis than that this is the way that you serve, the way that you hope; this is faith, and love, and even if it never finds anchor, even in the face of drama and power and uncertainty, you can still offer the best of yourself, unquestioningly, lightly, and at peace.

Well, like everyone, sometimes, and sometimes more-times, I fail. Sometimes I do anything but focus on productive action in the present. Not contributing the best I can to the world, sometimes I lose the battle against time to connect with others and offer them what I can. 

But even here, Bach has an answer. The difference between live performance and composition, is that live performance, with all its risks, once over, is gone forever; composition can last for centuries, hopefully even longer. It is the longevity of the medium - composition - that crowns Bach’s message in C Major, because it matches so well with the content of the Sonata. Like re-reading messages from dear people long gone, every time I commit myself to practising this work I rediscover my immense gratitude for Bach’s humanity and guidance, where he reminds me of the great privilege offered through unquestioning, timeless, service.