Fanfare Magazine
October 2005
INTERVIEW with Roman Mints

Coming Home to a Strange Land: Roman Mints and the New Eastern Wave
BY PAUL INGRAM

You read it here first (maybe). Western serious music is about to acquire new depth, through the influx of young musicians from Russia and Eastern Europe. A fresh group of instrumentalists and composers are in our midst, most of them are still in their 20s, and they could set the agenda for the next 20 years. You may feel you’ve heard all this before, but we’re in at the birth of the most exciting new music scene since World War Two, and if we want it, we should nurture it. These artists display precocious wisdom beyond their years, and seem as commercially astute as they are rigorously trained, but their work is driven by passion, melody, intelligence, substance, and integrity. London is close to the being the heart of all this, and one driving force is Roman Mints, a violinist born in 1976. I caught up with him at home in early Spring, just a rosin-cake’s throw from the site of my last Fanfare assignment with Julian-Lloyd Webber, in beautiful Kensington. This time though, the frosty weather was gone, and the thousands of trees so thoughtfully planted into the sidewalks of the Royal Borough were in full, magnificent bloom. Mints started playing the violin at five years of age, and like Evgeni Kissin, he is an alumnus of the Gnessin School in Moscow. Sinuous violin-lines played me up the stairs, across the hallway, and into a unique musical eyrie. Why come to London?

“At the time (1994), if you wanted to get yourself a good Russian violin teacher, you had to go abroad! I came to the Royal College of Music in London, to study with Andrievsky. He became my friend and my mentor, as well as my teacher. I worked briefly as his assistant, and we are still in touch. He is one of the best musicians I’ve ever come across, and out of all the masterclasses I have attended, his have been the best, and the most to the point, musically. It was not his aim to dominate the students, or to show how good he was. He made you realise how you really wanted to play the piece, whether you realised it or not. Not everyone could take that kind of teaching, but for me, it was the best, and I don’t regret leaving home for the experience.”

Two years into that intensive London course of violin study, aged just 20, Mints was reacting to circumstance, and to history, by founding the Homecoming Festival in Moscow, now in its eighth successful season.

“I started it with Dmitri Bulgakov (oboeist and colleague) when he was just 18. Most of the people I had known had gone abroad to work or study. The idea was to get back together, in Moscow, for the Christmas holidays, and play chamber music together. That grew into a festival, and we now run several concerts every January which are thematically based, so I have to keep thinking of a different theme for each concert! We also have a series of concerts, called Portraits, based around one or other of our participants, who we invite to play solo pieces, and some chamber music. I realised last season that we’d now become well-established. We keep ticket prices low, so we get a lot of people who couldn’t otherwise go to concerts. Pensioners for example: the people who went to Oistrakh’s concerts 40 years ago, or who knew the first line-up of the Borodin Quartet. These people may not be doing so well financially in the new Russia, but they are the ones who would queue all night for Richter’s December Nights festivals, etc., and they are the hardcore, knowledgeable music lovers. We treasure that part of the audience; another part would be the young – students etc. In fact so many people turn up these days we have to turn some away due to fire regulations, and I don’t really know who they all are!”

An example of a thematic concert? “Well, Reflections of Stravinsky had no Stravinsky pieces in it, for example. It had a Trio Sonata by Pergolesi, a Duo by Arthur Lourié, and pieces by Webern, Gesualdo, Andriessen, and others. People who pop up in your mind when you think of Stravinsky, but not Stravinsky himself. I particularly enjoyed compiling that one. Another was called Black Angels, which as well as the Crumb Quartet, contained other works with a connection to the dark side, like Scriabin’s “Black Mass” sonata, four different settings of “Mephisto’s Song” by Goethe, etc. This year’s first concert was devoted to composers who were mentally ill, or for whom there is a literature claiming that they were mentally ill. We just like to provoke thought. We’re not making a statement such as “Geniuses are mentally ill,” or “If you’re a genius you should be mentally ill!” We just pose a question, for the listener.”

Given Mints’s commitment to new music, did the Festival present its own premiers? “We commission a new piece every year. We also have an annual award for ensembles with members under 18 years of age, aimed at encouraging chamber music-playing in general. Russian music schools tend to be geared towards encouraging soloists.” And the next projects? “In the Autumn we are playing and recording the Goldberg Variations in an arrangement for two oboes, English horn, and bassoon, by Andrei Eshpai. He is 80 this year and almost forgotten, but he was a brilliant orchestrator. I’m excited about the arrangement, from what I’ve seen, though I haven’t heard it yet!” How did Crumb go down? “ I have great respect for Crumb as a composer. Some may think he makes cheap effects, but I found the precision of his work most impressive. We weren’t the first to play Black Angels (the Kronos Quartet, at least, had toured Russia with it), but it was interesting, finding the right sort of crystal glasses, then using my father’s suggestion for double sided tape to secure them. We gave the first Russian performance of Rzewski’s Coming Together, too.”

So why the over-riding interest in new work? “My fascination with contemporary music began with my mother. At that time, the time of perestroika, music publishers were not printing so much any more, but things would turn up second-hand. Mum would go and buy whatever she saw, and one day she bought a Hindemith sonata, with the sevenths in the opening theme. Now it sounds Romantic to me, but then it seemed new, and I could not stop playing it. So that’s how it all started. Then Melodiya started releasing a lot of Schnittke. Everyone would bring some Schnittke to my birthday parties: I ended up with several copies of each Schnittke album, and took the spares to other birthday parties!”

In England and abroad, this commitment has spawned Mints’s work with the db Ensemble, and his tours with the innovative and acclaimed ASCH String Trio (www.aschtrio.com). They do a superb job with the classics, but programs are always leavened with the new, or with the unknown. How does this go down with audiences? “Audiences differ. In Britain, for example, most people seem to have had some contact with music. My plumber likes Tchaikovsky, a Russian plumber might not know who Tchaikovsky is. But the people who come to concerts in Russia tend to be the intellectuals, the so-called intelligentsia who follow all aspects of art. There aren’t music clubs all over the country, as there are here.”

The oddities of the post-Cold War era’s economics gave Mints a knowledge of ‘70s rock ten years after it had been almost forgotten in the West, and left him with a respect for the passion of pop culture, at its best. “In a way I would rather listen to Jimi Hendrix, than a lot of violin recitals, today. My teacher in London, who knew nothing about pop music, would say that the reason we sometimes lose to Michael Jackson (his example: he only knew of Jackson and Madonna!) is that we don’t enjoy what we are doing as much as they do. That could not be more true. Sometimes we seem so preoccupied with making “art” that we miss the point of the music.”

Catholic tastes have not, though, led Mints and his colleagues into the murky waters of crossover. They are making something new, and some of the resulting work is electroacoustic. “It happened several years ago. I met a friend who writes both electroacoustic and instrumental music. Electroacoustic music seemed to me to be lacking something, and that something was something human. The violin can often seem to come close to the human voice, and seems capable of expressing analogue emotions, rather than digital ones! I premiered the first piece at the Purcell Room in the Park Lane Music Group series, liked it, and decided to try some more. Over the years, I had a few pieces written for me, and eventually they came together in the new album on Quartz.”

Mints’s first album on Black Box had showcased some of these new composers, in company with Pärt and Penderecki. The ASCH Trio concerts feature Dohnanyi and Röntgen, as well as Beethoven and Schoenberg. Where was this questing approach born? “My first teacher’s husband has worked for decades as a pianist with Yuri Bashmet, whose concerts I was able to hear, early on. At my teacher’s house I heard much music that just wasn’t available anywhere else. I first heard Horowitz there, and recordings of Western violists like Perlman, that I couldn’t buy in the Russian shops. I first heard Glenn Gould there, and saw him on video – a big impression for a kid. Passion, not calculation, was Gould’s driving force, though he was obviously very intelligent. The tragedy is that his talent could not really combine with anyone else. Chamber music was out of his reach. There was no compatible performer for him – not even Menuhin. Gould is a separate story.”

Did Mints want to be a separate story? “When I was growing up, I was supposed to be playing Wieniawski and the rest, and I found it too boring, and the music bad, but my teacher knew I had to play these things, to extend my technical abilities. She said I had to play all that, if I wanted to play the Stravinsky Duo Concertant! I am now happy doing what I do. I don’t want to tour extensively with the same repertoire. The typical solo career isn’t really for me, playing the Tchaikovsky Concerto 150 times. I’m happy doing my concerts and festival, releasing CDs I like. Then there is the ASCH String Trio, a big part of my life. I don’t want world domination. It’s not me. I don’t want to reflect on who I am or have been. I just want to do what I feel is right, and what interests me.”

So the conversation moves off, beyond the interview, into the depths of English Victorian poetry, to the new work by Dobrinka Tabakova, and, repeatedly, to the huge belief Mints has in the startling music of the still-too-unfamiliar Leonid Desyatnikov. From Children’s Music School No. 13 to leafy, and vibrant London, Mints and Co. have brought us a taste of a rich culture while enriching our own. The resultant mix was born of a history that spans Stalinist horror, within family memory: the reality of art’s value, and of the preciousness of life is all there in the speaking tone of Mints’s fiddle (I’ve heard it from two feet, and it’s for real!), in the control of vibrato, and in the showers of new, poignant works, all made in the New West. Time to listen-up, whether for life, death, love, or money.