Inspite of maybe being happier than I have been for a long time (as described in the previous blog) I did not stop playing the cello nor enjoying giving concerts – only difference is that now whenever I have some spare time I tend to spend it on the phone with the source of that happiness which is the reason why I am neglecting my poor little Macbook.

As I wrote in a previous blog, end of July I was playing all the six Bach Suites in the Radialsystem, an alternative venue for the arts in Berlin. A friend of mine attended the concert together with a gentleman who had never listened to classical music in concert before and who was so taken by the beauty of Bach’s music that he didn’t mind at all sitting relatively still for almost three hours. This came as a surprise for me because I thought the Bachsuites were a bit too complex and not exciting enough for an “untrained” listener, but maybe because of the rather informal and different approach on stage was more drawn into the music than he might have been in a “normal” concert hall.

Lately I have been thinking about possible reasons why the cello has not become more popular among orchestra schedules. While many people when being asked about their favorite instrument name the cello, there is still an overwhelming majority of piano- and violin-concertos being performed versus rather rare cello appearances. Yes, I know they are exceptions, but in general there is often barely just one cellist per season invited to play one of the audiences favorites (Dvorak, Elgar, Shostakovich a.o.), because many artistic planners are afraid that with a lesser known concerto ticket sales would go down.

Fourteen months ago I premiered Unsuk Chin’s Celloconcerto at the Proms in London, a very rewarding as well as traumatic experience. In order to understand and communicate this technically and musically challenging work I had forced myself to play the world premier by heart; the rewarding part was the very warm reception from the audience, the traumatic one came from the fact that in the two hardest passages I panicked and got subsequently lost. Passages, I had practised as well and long as never anything before, and still when it came to it, my brain shut down and the fingers went on auto-pilot, kind of faking their way through, abandoned from their guide. Nobody realized except the conductor back then, not even the composer herself (as she claims, but I still don’t believe her!), but I didn’t care, I wasn’t doing it for the audience or for her, but as a perfectionist I always want to play as well as humanly possible, never mind if it is being appreciated or not. Until today I haven’t dared to listen to the recording of that concert, not even in preparation for last night’s concert in Tampere, Finland, where the Chin Concerto came to its second performance ever.