The great director
Nicola Benedetti first picked up a violin when she was four years old – now she’s in charge of the Edinburgh Festival
Andy Gotts
- Michael Hodges
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Nicola Benedetti has a lot on. She’s just had a baby, has a fearsome practice regime, there are tours and recording plans to finalise and she runs her own classical music education charity, the Benedetti Foundation. And now, across August, she can add directing the Edinburgh International Festival to the list. “I have days of feeling a little overwhelmed,” says the Grammy and Brit Award-winning violinist when we speak before the festival opens. “Starting to organise the month, it looked like an impossible task. I’m a highly emotion-driven person, which is helpful for an artist communicating intensity of emotion, but ensuring it doesn’t spill over into unhelpful catastrophising is important.”
Established after the Second World War by Rudolf Bing, an Austrian-Jewish refugee from Nazism, and future revered head of New York’s Metropolitan Opera, the Edinburgh International Festival features music, theatre and dance, attracting world-class performers who include, this year, South Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho and the great English tenor Ian Bostridge.
Benedetti, director since 2022 and the first woman and the first Scot to be so, says this year’s festival will have “a spirit of joy and discovery”. It will also stay true to Bing’s founding vision of a culture rising from the ashes of war, though she admits culture overcoming conflict seems fanciful in our era of renewed warfare. “A Beethoven symphony is not going to impact when an individual is hell-bent on destruction,” as she puts it.
Benedetti performing in London in 2021. Getty
The festival is where generations of young Scots have first encountered great works and great performers since 1947. But not the 37-year-old Benedetti. Born in West Kilbride in Ayrshire to the Italian businessman Giovanni Benedetti and his Scottish-Italian wife Francesca, she left for England to study with the great Yehudi Menuhin when she was ten. Her childhood was a succession of dazzling achievements; by eight she was already leading the National Youth Orchestra, though not everyone approved.
“Teachers would tell me I was wasting my time playing the violin because I could be a lawyer or a doctor,” she says. “People tried to dissuade my mum from allowing me to focus on music. It was perceived as a lesser thing. But I remember at nine thinking that none of my school subjects were a patch on how difficult it is to play the violin. I thought music is so much more complex than all these things.”
Teachers would tell me I was wasting my time playing the violin
In 2004, Benedetti won BBC Young Musician aged 16. “In the following year I did over 100 concerts,” she says of that life-changing victory. “There were a huge number of challenges for me. It was not always a straightforward time.” She was marketed to the nth degree, for her appearance as well as her abilities. This led, as she puts it, to “certain photoshoots and being labelled certain things when I started out”. Independent and self-reliant, she doesn’t seem inclined to blame the older men who were running publicity and press at the time. “Could I come up with stories of somebody saying something to me that was lacking in respect? Of course. We all have things we look back on and kind of cringe at, that’s undeniable, but I don’t attribute that to anything more than the fact that I was a teenager and the things I was doing at that age were very public. Some of them, unfortunately, are documented.”
Benedetti, who received the Queen’s Award for Music in 2017, has long coupled her own virtuosity with relentless campaigning so that young people can enjoy the cultural experiences she was exposed to. It’s a tough battle when many children’s cultural horizons are foreshortened by poverty. “Tough is not a word I’d associate with myself. I’d say that I have tenacity, but also a lot of sensitivity to the environment.” When I ask what she will bring to this year’s festival, she says, “I’m focused on accessibility, on audience development, on a culture of nuance and listening and debate.”
Queen Elizabeth II presents Nicola Benedetti with the Queen's Medal for Music in 2017. Getty
Ultimately, for Benedetti, it’s about music and its unique power to affect us. “I’ve been in too many environments where there’s a lot of talking going on, and then somebody plays a note, and it’s like, why did we even bother with all that talking? The note is so much more powerful and cuts through so absolutely. It’s felt by everyone.”
But how many of us get to hear that note today? Life is all other people’s noise, hissing speakers and blaring radios. “There is a huge and overwhelming increase in the volume and complexity of the stimuli that we’re all exposed to now,” she says. “That, combined with fewer people being exposed to a cultural education, makes it an uphill struggle when you ask somebody to listen to something for two hours.”
Should we be shielding our children from the cacophony? Will her new baby be brought up in a world of noise? “Through all the education work that we are expanding upon within the festival, and all of the work that I’ve done since I was 15 years old regarding music education, these are existential issues that I ask myself about constantly. Of course, when it’s so personal and you’re bringing a child into the world, it becomes more acute in terms of your own responsibility and decision-making. We just have to take one decision at a time really.”
At the festival, Benedetti will be performing Vaughan Williams’s transcendent Lark Ascending on a Stradivarius (called Gariel), a 207-year-old instrument worth north of £2 million. I ask her if she’s ever dropped a violin and, for the first time in our conversation, she looks at me askance. “I’ve been carrying one since I was four. If there’s one thing I know how to navigate, it’s walking around with a violin in my hand.”
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Nicola Benedetti explores the history of the Edinburgh International Festival in a new six-part series of Music Matters, starting on Saturday Radio 3. The festival runs 2—24 August. For details, visit eif.co.uk
Authors
Michael Hodges
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