KGNU’s Sanford Baran interviewed Grammy-winning violinist Augustin Hadelich, who will perform Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto at the Colorado Music Festival on August 1st and 2nd. Hadelich shared his musical journey and discussed the evolution of his technique, the importance of constant practice, and how the accessibility of music today helps young musicians. Hadelich highlighted his busy summer performing schedule and his upcoming album “American Road Trip,” featuring American violin and piano music.
Sanford Baran: Today, we have the pleasure of speaking with Augustin Hadelich, Grammy winning violinist renowned for his extraordinary technique and emotional depth. Celebrated for his diverse repertoire and captivating performances, Hadelich continues to enchant audiences around the world, and he’s going to be performing Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto at the Colorado Music Festival on August 1st and 2nd. Augustin, thank you so much for being with us. A real pleasure.
Augustin Hadelich: Hi, it’s great to talk to you.
Sanford Baran: To get us started, can you share with us your journey in music? How did you start playing the violin, and what inspired you to pursue it as a career?
Augustin Hadelich: I started playing violin because I have two older brothers who were already playing long before I started. So I started playing the violin at five, but I was always listening to them practice. My eldest brother played the cello and I always heard that in the house. My family would sometimes gather around the piano and sing. Of course, as a little child you want to join in, you want to be part of it. I wanted to play as well, but I didn’t pick the violin because I didn’t know what that was. My parents decided that I would play the violin because it’s different from the other instruments. It was a few years later that I first heard a really good violinist play. We didn’t have any recordings or a record player or anything like that.
My parents were the kind of people who did everything themselves. Eventually they realized you don’t have to do everything yourself. We did buy recordings and I started listening to a lot of David Oistrakh and a lot of different players. Today, young people can just go on YouTube and see all the great violinists play. Back in the early 90s, you really couldn’t do that. It was hard, actually, to get your hands on a videotape or anything like that. We didn’t have a VHS player either. It was many years until I actually saw Oistrakh play on a video. There were only a few people that I saw play live. I really had no idea what that looked like when they played. I could only hear what it sounded like, so I tried to somehow sound more like that. Maybe it has a certain advantage – you find your own way to make your sound. I ended up not holding the bow the way Oistrakh does, but trying to find a sound that has that sort of warmth. It’s much harder. I think it’s wonderful that nowadays people can just see how it’s done and the camera zooms in close. You can really see what it’s supposed to look like when it works. And I think it’s part of the reason why the really young generations, people who are 20 years or 25 years younger than me, are making such fast technical progress. The standard of playing has become so high. Many things used to be mysteries. People used to make pilgrimages to these fabled teachers, who maybe knew some secrets. It’s not like that anymore. You can basically look at it and figure it out. There’s still many things that people have to tell you, you can’t figure it out yourself, but still, I think it’s much more accessible now.
I knew that I wanted to be a musician. It was pretty obvious because it was the thing that I could do well. There was actually a time when I wanted to be a composer. I felt like that was a more noble calling. Or I wanted to do both, violin and composing. I also played a lot of piano. I had a lot of interests, but eventually I realized you have to narrow your focus a little bit to get better at one thing. It’s this phenomenon when you suddenly go to the wide world and you realize what a small fish you are. I realized how good people were playing in my generation. Basically the standard of playing was higher than I had realized. And I was like, this is going to be a lot of work. Paganini or these kinds of people composed half the time and then performed half the time. It doesn’t really work now because to be a successful performer, you have to perform all the time. You can’t just take half the year off the way people used to in the 19th century. There were six months of concerts, six months off. The other thing is the expectation from the audience – they expect everything to be totally perfect, flawless, because of recordings. Recordings are edited and as a result, it’s become expected, basically, that you play like an edited recording. And so now as a result, players make fewer mistakes, but it forces you to work very hard. Sometimes you maybe can’t take risks and there are many negative sides to this too, but it does result in nice clean performances, which is also good.
Sanford Baran: It’s interesting that to some extent, you were self taught, discovering on your own the technique that undergirds your formidable playing and beautiful violin sound. Is technique something that a violinist constantly needs to work at, or possibly even change? Or, once you’ve mastered it, are you basically good to go?
Augustin Hadelich: There’s a certain basic technique – the fundamentals of it. I would say that I didn’t change those when I was at Juilliard. Those you have to learn very young. There’s a certain layer at the bottom and then other things that I did change, they also become second nature. So now when I’m working on it, I don’t necessarily go back on those things, but it’s more to reach the point where it feels like the bow is doing what my mind wants without any effort. And when you reach that, it doesn’t necessarily stay that way. Maybe for a while it’s a little harder, but then you reach it again.
That’s the goal that you try to get to. Then new issues come up as you get older. My arm is sore, and it never used to be sore when I was young. I guess I gotta stop doing it this way, I gotta find a different way to do this bow stroke, these kinds of problems that keep popping up. These are not really things that a listener would notice, because playing either this way or that way would probably sound pretty similar because the basic bow technique behind it is the same. It’s more that it makes a difference for me in terms of the feeling of control and agility that I have, or the stamina that I have with the bow. With a good bow technique you should be able to play hours and hours and hours every day without your arm feeling tired. So that’s the sign of a bow technique that needs more work – if you’re if you’re sore after. It depends what you’re playing. So if you play the Shostakovich Concerto No. 1, at the end, everyone’s arm is a little sore because by the end you’re hitting the violin like a madman. But, let’s say you’re playing a slightly more normal piece, like the Tchaikovsky that I play at the Colorado Music Festival. It’s also a large, exhausting piece, very intense, but your arm should not hurt at the end. If that happens, it’s a sign. You gotta change something.
Sanford Baran: We’re very much looking forward to your up and coming performance of Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. My dad had the Isaac Stern recording of it. Growing up, listening to that album for me was amazing. And I could almost hum the whole thing in my head, having played it so many times. What’s your relationship and feeling about this piece?
Augustin Hadelich: I’ve always loved the Tchaikovsky Concerto. It just completely blew me away the first time I heard it and I couldn’t wait to learn it. And I think it’s such a highlight of the violin repertoire and one of the reasons why, when I was growing up, I wanted to be a violinist. I thought it was just so amazing. I still feel that way about it. The only thing that’s not fun for me now is practicing it. I think I got very tired. Maybe because it’s the same passages that basically your whole life you have to just re-practice. With this piece, for some reason, that’s more tedious than with some others.
But the actual piece, the melodies, there are moments that are just the greatest thing. I find it very exhilarating. Thinking of the first movement, how the second theme starts quite softly and then it becomes more and more impassioned and eventually, you just get swept along by these emotional melodic lines. Then he starts speeding up the tempo and raising the tension. When the orchestra comes in at the end of the exposition, it feels like you’re flying. It’s an amazing feeling. I have to say that never gets old. It’s just totally amazing. The way I play the piece has probably changed a lot over the years. Partially because I came to realize that – this piece over the past, I guess it’s almost 150 years since it was written, has gotten bogged down a little bit by baggage of tradition. The very old recordings of it are a little bit more straightforward. People just play it like the beautiful piece it is and then there’s some showy moments and that’s it.
It gradually got more and more extreme, because of the indulgence of the performers. It just becomes more and more cheesy and overly sentimental. The other thing was that people, quite quickly after it was written, started changing the piece. That’s something that they’ve done a lot to Tchaikovsky. They wouldn’t dare do that to Brahms’ music. But somehow, for some reason, Tchaikovsky, that happens a lot to his pieces. Leopold Auer was a violinist that Tchaikovsky wanted to dedicate it to, but then he withdrew the dedication because Auer didn’t perform it. But then Auer still made this version where he changes a lot of the passage work, and I think the Tchaikovsky version was already written in collaboration with the violinist. I think for the most part, I prefer the original. That was one of the things that I eventually tried to get more to what it originally was. And maybe try to approach it with fresh eyes, fresh ears. I didn’t know how I would want to play this piece. Rather than think about the way that 10,000 violinists before me have played it.
It just becomes this thing where you want to do every great idea that everyone has ever done with this piece, but if you do them all at once, it doesn’t work. That’s one of the problems. And then some of them are not great ideas and yet they’re commonly done. That’s even worse. So there are a lot of problems. It’s not just about word text, going back to the manuscript. I think that can be important though. It’s very interesting. But it’s more that for me, it didn’t work anymore because I felt like there was just too much baggage with the piece. When I started with a blank slate and then started adding expression and interpretation back in, it felt like a different piece and a piece that I was enjoying more, that had more of this exhilarating quality. One of the things I realized was that some parts of the first movement, particularly the first theme and the passage work after it, are very much like Berlin music and have these lifts and jumps in the music. Some of it’s quite neoclassical in a way. He loved Mozart and there’s this kind of elegance in the first theme.
Sometimes when right from the first note, the piece is played with this pathos, I actually think you lose something because it’s not really such a dark, brooding piece. This is one of his happier pieces, I would say. When he wrote the piece, it was like a holiday. It was not a happy time in his life, but it was a holiday within that time, and he was spending it with this violinist. They think they had an affair, the two, I don’t know. He was inspired to drop everything, write this violin concerto. He wrote it very quickly, and I think there’s a lot of love in the piece and it’s just a very happy piece.
Sanford Baran: Are there different cadenzas that violinists choose to play in this concerto? And if so, which one do you play?
Augustin Hadelich: Tchaikovsky supplies a cadenza. I think it fits so beautifully into the piece. It’s very exotic and free, and I never felt it needed something else. There’s always someone who wants to make some experiments, so probably there are people who tried to play other cadenzas. I think mostly, violinists are quite happy with Tchaikovsky’s cadenza. I am always happy when the composer writes a cadenza. It always just fits so beautifully in the piece in a cohesive way. You can’t even tell where. Otherwise you can tell where the Tchaikovsky stops and the composer of the cadenza starts. There’s always somehow a switch that gets flipped. Even when you try to match the style, it’s never quite the same.
Sanford Baran: Are there any up and coming performances or projects in the works that you’re excited about?
Augustin Hadelich: This summer is quite a whirlwind. By the time I come to Boulder, I will have played at Tanglewood and at the Hollywood Bowl and Ravinia and in Vail with the New York Phil. This is enormously fun. There’s a recording coming out at the end of August. It’s an album of music for violin and piano. American music. It’s called American Road Trip, and I recorded it recently. It’s been 20 years since I came to the United States, and I realized there’s a lot of American music that I love. We had enough music to fill two or three CDs, but we narrowed it down to one. It’s with Orion Weisse. We had a lovely time playing it. There’s some very well known composers on it – Charles Ives and John Adams. We have Copland’s “Hoedown”, pieces like that. And some famous pieces like “Estrellita” or “Banjo and Fiddle”. But then also a lot of music that even in America is known very little. I’m always amazed how little American music is known outside of America. I think it’s stunning. So basically all of these pieces are pretty much unknown in Europe. But some of the ones that are not so well known in America: there’s a piece by Stephen Hartke called “Netsuke”, which I think is a wonderful piece for violin and piano. There are these pieces by Coleridge Taylor Perkinson for solo violin that I love playing. It plays like Ysaÿe, but if Ysaÿe grew up knowing blues and jazz.
We actually stayed away from some of the most obvious. We do have one Arrangement of Bernstein’s “West Side Story”, just so the label has something that will stream a lot for the playlists. But we actually stayed away from maybe the most obvious stuff, Gershwin or Gershwin arrangements or the stuff that everyone records. The things that I think should actually be central in the well known repertoire, but that people don’t play much, and even in America people don’t play so much. Anyway, it’s coming out at the end of August.
Sanford Baran: Augustin, it’s been so much fun speaking with you. Such an interesting and stimulating conversation. And we here in the Boulder/Denver Front Range area are very much looking forward to your performance at the Colorado Music Festival on August 1st and 2nd at the Chautauqua Auditorium. So good to be with you. Thanks again.
Augustin Hadelich: Okay. Thank you so much. See you then.
