A chat with British violinist Daniel Hope seems utterly damned by the weather gods. A few weeks ago, a scheduled in-person talk with the musician had to be cancelled due to a winter storm in London; just after Christmas, when we are supposed to have a face-to-face conversation, a massive storm has buried the New York City area in a foot and a half of snowfall.
With that, I abandon hopes of meeting Hope in person at Carnegie Hall, where he is currently rehearsing with the youthful New York String Orchestra, a midwinter training camp for young musicians founded by Alexander Schneider and for the past fifteen-plus years led by Hope’s longtime friend Jaime Laredo. But the brilliant and fiercely intelligent violinist affably agrees to a hastily rearranged conversation that takes place by phone instead to discuss his newest project, The Romantic Violinist (Deutsche Grammophon), in which he pays tribute to the legendary musician Joseph Joachim and to Joachim’s circle, which included Brahms, Bruch, the Schumanns (Robert and Clara), and Dvorak.
“Starting out with this, I only knew Joachim as the one who edited the Brahms violin concerto,” says Hope. “But in starting to read about him, I was amazed by his influence on artistic life in general in the 19th century. He re-discovered the Beethoven violin concerto for us,” Hope enumerates. “He forged relationships between composers; he forcibly introduced Brahms to Robert and Clara Schumann. He advised Dvorak. And of course he was a composer as well; I didn’t really know his music apart from the Hungarian Concerto, and so it was very interesting to me to learn about how he became a disciple of Liszt, and then broke with him totally.”
In certain ways, Hope says, Joachim and other artists of his time present a model for life as a multi-faceted, thoroughly 21st-century musician such as himself; Hope’s own incredibly varied roles.
“In those days,” Hope explains, “it was totally normal to take on all sorts of different roles and responsibilities. Mendelssohn, for example, was a presenter, he raised money, and he organized festivals. At some point, we got away from that multi-faceted musical education, and got enmeshed in the star culture that was so central in the 20th century. But Joachim and others were great helpers in spreading the musical word—back then, it was a necessity to be a guiding force as well as a player.”
“Guiding force” would be as good a descriptor as any for Hope’s own work, which extends past the traditional touring/recording circuit of a solo artist to encompass his roles an author (with two best-sellers published in Germany and a third book on the way), a broadcaster, and as a live presenter who serves as artistic partner in Germany’s Mecklenberg-Vorpommern Festival and as associate artistic director of the Savannah Music Festival in Georgia.
Perhaps an even better description for Hope’s work is to call it storytelling. “I think of my albums as much larger musical projects,” he says “As ever for me, it’s not just recording a CD, it’s a multi-year project. It’s not just putting pieces together, but looking for stories that have some kind of narrative thread, either political or historical. That’s what makes me tick,” he explains. My last recording, Air, was about exploring the Baroque; The Romantic Violinist is a way of examining Romantic music more broadly,” he explains.
Behind it all is the violinist’s voracious love of music. “I wanted to play the violin, and was lucky enough to be able to do so from early on,” he reflects. “But playing wasn’t enough for me. I had a much more all-consuming obsession with music. 99 percent of what I do, whether it’s writing or presenting or commissioning music—it’s a constant search for music, a constant addiction.”
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by Anastasia Tsioulcas
