The Courier & Advertiser (Fife Edition)
Young people and new designs – two sides of the same glittering coin
LIKE MANY others, I am sure, I made a point of tuning in to hear Kirsty Young – the divine, velvetvoiced Kirsty Young – with her musical castaway, Nicola Benedetti. I was not disappointed; they obviously hit it off.
As anyone who can hold a fiddle knows, stardom came early for Nicola. She was 16 when she won the BBC Young Musician of theYear Competition and is only 26 now. Her ascendancy is now accepted in what she made no bones about describing as an intensely competitive world.
What stood out for me was the impression of a remarkable young woman with her feet firmly on the ground. She credited her hard-working immigrant parents for that.
She and her sister “had what we needed, not what we wanted”. That’s something I haven’t heard for a long time.
And then there was the influence of mentor Yehudi Menuhin. He was the venerated grand old man of classical music with an incredible aura. She was 10. Having once been lucky enough to be in a room with Menuhin, and observe him encouraging a very young Chinese violinist, I have some idea why this contact would have made the mark it obviously did.
In the Benedetti home there was none of this parental bragging about “my gifted young child”. No false modesty but no conceit, either. I’m thinking now of some others with an inflated perception of themselves in entertainment and the arts.
Michael Jackson: “I have been the artist with the longest career and I am honoured to be chosen from heaven to be invincible.” Or here’s James Brown: “I’ve outdone anyone you can name – Mozart, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss. Irving Berlin wrote 1,001 tunes. I wrote 5,500.” And Bono: “We’re reapplying for the job of greatest band in the world.” Preposterous egos all.
We heard that in the immediate aftermath of her fame, Nicola Benedetti came close to something like crash and burn. There was just too much pressure, too many concerts in too short a time with too many changes in repertoire. She felt under-prepared.
At that point some might have thrown in the towel or turned to the usual comforts: drink, drugs, unsuitable partners, a giddy round of A-list parties with social butterflies. It’s an old story. Mercifully, in this case it didn’t happen. Instead we have the privilege of hearing a brilliant talent whose whole aim is to “lift my being to the highest point I can” and to share that moment with other performers and the audience.
And that is why, she explained, she goes out of her way, and makes time available, to teach children. No surprise, then, to learn from Kirsty Young’s gentle probing that Nicola is a devoted supporter of El Sistema, the Big Noise music project brought to the Raploch area of Stirling from Venezuela.
Raploch is not the most obvious neighbourhood to implant a love for orchestral music-making. It ticks all the boxes for urban deprivation. Before El Sistema, only one child there had looked at an instrument and thought “I would like to play that” and actually done so. Perhaps others had wished.
As I listened to Ms Benedetti praising the many and wide benefits for children – social interaction, confidence-building, an insight into the arts, the importance of self-discipline – I found myself wondering not for the first time why this concept, now backed in Aberdeen, has not been imported to Dundee.
There is an on-going campaign – I have mentioned it before – run by friends and admirers of the late Michael Marra, folk laureate of Lochee. Their aim is to nudge a hitherto reluctant City Council towards Big Noise.
Last week I took in the latest images of the designs for the V&A building, generally described as “futuristic”, construction for which starts in the summer. Impressive is not the word (nor, in my view, is the overtaxed “iconic”). Extraordinary is more like it. But it is still just an innate building.
What Nicola Benedetti was getting at, if I understood her correctly, was a complementary source of inspiration, a sort of musical fraternity that builds the social capital that children can acquire against all the odds to expand their horizons. This month, 55 children from Raploch are visiting Venezuela.
Recently, an ardent admirer of Michael Marra, big Donald, gave me a button badge. On it are these words: “Make the optimistic sound!” Is that not what the new Dundee is all about? Young people and new designs: two sides of the same glittering coin.