|
|
 |
| |
Gemma Rosefield |
| Yet another string to Gemma’s cello bow |
This year’s Hampstead and Highgate Festival sees the birth of a new orchestra, with a bright young cellist at their head, writes Gerald Isaaman
SHE Is there at the opening of the festival. And there again on the last night too, playing her Alessandro Gagliano cello, dating from 1704, her long blonde hair flowing alongside her bow.
So it is that Gemma Rosefield personifies the Hampstead and Highgate Festival, which aims not only to pay tribute to great musicians of the past but, essentially, to promote new talent and the new music of the future.
At 22 and with delightful good looks, she is already a young cellist of distinction, a veteran of two previous festivals, as well as concerts round the world. And she is also a musician who lives in Keats Grove, Hampstead, and feels the rhythms and cadences of John Keats and the drumbeats and fanfares of Edward Elgar, to whom this year’s festival pays dedicated tribute.
“I am certainly very privileged – and I take full advantage of that,” she insists with a smile.
“There are all these ghosts of the past around us. Elgar lived round the corner, which is why the festival is focussing on him this year. That is wonderful because so many talented people lived here in Hampstead, people like the cellist Jacqueline du Pre. I find many things about her very inspiring. And I have found her passion particularly rare – because it was so honest, so in your face but really from the heart.”
But it is as the first Gemma Rosefield that she wants to make her name, perhaps emulating du Pre through her love of Elgar’s Cello Concerto, which she played eight times in France last May.
“The more I played it over and over again in a short space of time, the more it becomes an experience that brought out so many differences on every performance,” she recalls. “That, in a way, is what classical music is all about. It offers endless possibilities all the time. It is a language that’s international, a language that everyone can speak.”
The festival’s opening concert, at Hampstead Parish Church on May 15, presents Gemma as a founder member of the Fidelio Quartet (Tamas Andras, violin, Maya Rasooly (viola) and Inon Barnatan, piano) with guest violinist Katharine Gowers playing Elgar’s great chamber work, the formidable Piano Quintet. They are very much rising stars as young musicians now in demand on the international circuit. And to mark that status they will be presenting too the world premiere of Light and Water, a 15-minute piece for piano and strings by Rhian Samuel, a new work written specially for the Fidelio.
“Rhian has known us all quite well over the years from being involved with the Royal Academy of Music, where we were formed,” explains Gemma.
“It’s a fantastic work, very innovative, very original. She wrote it specifically for us, for our different personalities. So it will be for people to judge on the night if it is true or not.”
Then, at the festival finale on May 23, also at the Parish Church, Gemma becomes a star part of the newly-formed Hampstead and Highgate Festival Orchestra, along with Alison Balsom and Daniel Newell, both playing trumpet, and conducted by George Vass, the festival’s splendid director. The debut evening for the new orchestra presents an eclectic programme devoted to their exacting talents with works by Elgar, including the stimulating Serenade for Strings, plus Mozart, Vivaldi – and with Gemma playing one of Haydn’s masterpieces, the celebrated Cello Concerto.
Gemma takes it all in her stride, as she has since she was born in Highgate into a family – she is the youngest of three girls – with a natural obsession for classical music but without any performers.
“It was ingrained in us, probably in the womb,” she laughs. She played the recorder and sang at school but showed no true ability at the piano. Then, halfway between eight and nine, she discovered the cello. “I picked it up at a friend’s house and found I loved the sound,” she recalls. “I just found myself drawn into it. And I formed a love of chamber music at that early age.”
From teacher Wendy Max, in Hampstead Garden Suburb, she went on to Saturdays the junior Royal Academy, and from the City of London School for Girls she moved into the highly prized Purcell School before arriving at the Royal Academy, and is now doing a postgraduate course, studying with Ralph Kirshbaum at the Royal Northern College of Music, in Manchester.
But en route her dazzling virtuosity and confidence has won her a track record of triumphs, prizes and scholarships, graduating with distinction from the Royal Academy last year, where she studied with David Strange for seven years, and grabbing three graduation prizes. Her inspiration has come from the legendary Pierre Fournier, from Hampstead’s own Steven Isserlis and others, and she has won the applause of admirers and critics playing in France, where she studied with Gary Hoffman, in Japan, Norway, in Switzerland, and twice in America at the summer Ravina Festival in Chicago, where she performed with Menachem Pressler and took part in master classes with Yo-Yo Ma and Frans Helmerson. And last year saw her successful debut as a soloist at London’s Wigmore Hall. Now she tries to balance her demanding career performing concerts round the country and abroad – she is at the Presteigne Festival in August – studying with Kirshbaum in Manchester, where this week she performed in its mighty Cello Festival, and even doing a little teaching.
“You have to find your own way of making a living,” she points out when it comes down to hard practicalities. “Aside from making yourself a better musician, you have to put food on the table and you have to pay rent, and in London in particular that is not easy. But to do that you have to have a real passion for music, one that drives you to make it all work.”
Walking on Hampstead Heath with her Dalmatian called Max helps to keep her fit, and she builds up her stamina for the grind of travelling long distances for concerts by going regularly to the gym and swimming. “But you have to be careful what you do,” she adds. “I used to love skiing and ice-skating but gave them up. I go skating very occasionally but only with five pairs of gloves on to protect my hands. I used to be very keen on tennis but even that had to stop.
“So you do have to make sacrifices to be a professional musician. Although I enjoy travelling, you just can’t go off for six months without your cello. It’s not a heartache because the music always makes up for it.
“My aim is to become the most complete musician that I can. My passion lies in the challenge of strengthening the bond of communication between performer and audience in the live performance, whereby you walk on stage as a stranger, and leave it as a friend.”
* The festival box office is at the New End Theatre, Hampstead, phone 0207 794 0022. Tickets can be collected from any venue 30 minutes before the performance begins.
Published:
Thursday 6th May 2004
|
| |
|
|
|
