Nicola Benedetti: ‘Classical music is threatened by young people's lack of basic discipline'

Telegraph

2 days ago

One day last week, the violinist Nicola Benedetti was in her office, staring at spreadsheets, when her teenage step-daughter came in. 'She peered at my computer, saw me looking at budgets, and said, 'You know how you started out as a musician... well, how do you feel about this?'' Benedetti tells me, laughing. 'It was 11.30 at night. My eyes were closing, and I knew I was going to be woken up in a couple of hours by the baby. But I've always been very clear about my purpose.'
Right now, Benedetti, 38, is apply­ing that sense of purpose to the Edinburgh International Festival, her third edition since becoming its artistic director in 2022. We've met at her office, on Edinburgh's Royal Mile, a fortnight before this year's festival opens, and she is evidently flat out. In May 2024, she had her first child, a daughter, with her husband, Wynton Marsalis – a celebrated American jazz musician 25 years her senior, who also has a teenage daughter and three older sons from previous relationships. 'There's a lot going on,' she says with a wry smile.
Benedetti met Marsalis when, aged 17, she travelled alone to New York for the first time, for a concert at Lincoln Center. Over subsequent years, they have performed together many times; he has even written several concertos for her, his first compositions for the violin. A few years ago, rumours started circulating that the pair were in a relationship, which, until now, Benedetti had always refused to confirm. I ask her why she's been so guarded.
'People don't come to my concerts because of who I'm in a relationship with; they come because I play the violin,' she says. 'And I tend not to discuss my private life because I don't think people find it interesting. But there are all sorts of things people could find out – it's not like I'm really secretive.'
I suggest that if, in interviews, she were less coy about her marriage to Marsalis, it would at least stop nosy journalists from asking about it. 'I think it's pretty much out there now,' she says, laughing. 'I really don't care any more if people want to write about it or not. I'm certainly not trying to hide anything.'
Besides, she's too busy to worry about such things. Within months of the birth, Bene­detti was back at work, conducting meetings and dealing with organisational crises with her baby strapped to her chest. 'Luckily, she was asleep most of the time,' she says, 'and because I was able to physically get stuck back into work, I didn't have that [new mother] identity crisis where you wonder who you were before this other person came into the world.'
Benedetti, who was born in ­Ayrshire, doesn't seem like the identity-crisis type. Her sustained presence in the top flight of classical music is testament not only to her precocious talent but also to exceptional resilience. At the age of eight, she was leading the National Children's Orch­estra of Great Britain. By the time she was 15, she was making major career decisions for herself, quitting the Yehudi Menuhin School, in Surrey, because she wanted to focus even more intently on her playing than the school's academic schedule allowed.
The following year, she won the BBC's Young Musician of the Year competition and signed a £1m, six-album record deal with Uni­versal Music. These days, she is regarded as one of ­Britain's greatest living violinists, ­second only, perhaps, to Nigel Kennedy. Her ­rec­ord­ings of Shostakovich and Glaz­unov's concertos are particularly sublime.
Yet Benedetti has always regarded herself less as a ­performer than as an evangelist for the life-changing beauty of classical music. For her, the main attraction of the festival directorship was the fact that it gave her 'the potential to impact hundreds of thousands of people with the arts'. As a result, she says, 'becoming the EIF's artistic director doesn't feel like a departure' from her violin career; rather, it's a natural continuation of her life's mission.
The line-up she has assembled for this year's festival is not short on surprises, both musical and otherwise. Highlights include John Tavener's eight-hour mystical song cycle The Veil of the Temple; Figures in Extinction, a collaboration between the Canadian choreographer Crystal Pite, Simon McBurney and Nederlands Dans Theater; and a new James Graham play, Make It Happen, about the role of the Royal Bank of Scotland in the 2008 banking crisis, in which Succ­es­sion's Brian Cox appears as the ghost of the pioneering 18th-century Scottish capitalist Adam Smith.
'Make It Happen throws a mirror back on to Scotland, so it will be interesting to see Edinburgh audiences debate that, which is exactly what the festival should be doing,' Benedetti says. She stops, as though wary of sounding worthy. 'But I promise there are plenty of other things that will be pure enjoyment from beginning to end. We're not always trying to change the world.'
Although Benedetti has a reputation for steeliness, today she is warm and open. Instead of trotting out the usual box-ticking guff about diversity and accessibility, she goes off-message by telling me she thinks older concert audiences are an essential part of the classical-music ecosystem.
'I found myself quoting Tony Benn during a team meeting the other day,' she admits with a laugh. 'I reminded them that each generation tends to fight the same fights over and over again. Yes, we can get excited about being the first people to swap chairs for beanbags in the Usher Hall, probably. Yes, we can push to be the most affordable arts festival in the world, which under my watch is what we want to be. But, let's be honest, there have been promenade-style performances since medieval times; ticketing schemes for younger people are nothing new; and every single person who has run the festival before me was, in their way, trying to make it open-door. So it's good to have a bit of realism and humility about what we're doing.'
All the same, few people in the arts have done more than she has to make classical music accessible. Her Benedetti Foundation, established in 2019, has worked with 100,000 people of all ages through its outreach and education programmes. She thinks listening properly to classical music for 15 min­utes a day is as important for a child as reading a book, and has complained loudly about cuts to music in schools since the subject became a victim of the then coalition government's austerity policies in 2012.
More than a decade since those cuts began to take hold, does she think the steady erosion of music education has had an impact on the amount of homegrown talent graduating from Britain's elite music institutions? 'In terms of numbers, probably not much; there are always people with money who will pay for the education that will put their children on that path,' she says. 'But in terms of who is getting that opportunity, yes, no question about it.
'Across the country today, those who are not from a more privileged background, who are studying an instrument to a high level at college, are often either foreign students who have come here to study, or have been supported by a charity.' However, when it comes to what she calls the 'Mark Simpsons of the world' – referring to the working-class Liverpudlian who became the first person to win both BBC Young Musician of the Year and Young Composer of the Year – 'who have shown talent aged four or five, been picked up by the local council and given free music lessons of a quality that enables them to really progress into a career in music? There is no question those numbers have been significantly depleted and impacted.'
Benedetti's own upbringing was privileged. Her entrepreneurial father, who came to the UK from his native Italy at the age of 10, made millions after inventing a revolutionary cling film dispenser. Her Scottish-Italian mother made her and her older sister Stephanie (now a violinist with the group Clean Bandit) practise the violin for three hours every day during the school holidays. Recently, Benedetti has found herself questioning the way she and Stephanie were brought up. 'My daughter is only one, but my sister has two children, aged three and five, and seeing her experience has definitely made me consider our own childhood,' she says. 'But both of us have a realistic, even positive view of our upbringing. It was very strict – we feared upsetting our parents, or doing the wrong thing – but we also knew we were loved to death by our mum and dad.'
Benedetti's combination of success, talent and youthful looks soon made her a magnet for attention far beyond the concert hall. By the time she was in her 20s, news­papers were running her picture alongside such suggestive headlines as 'Will Nic Air her G String?' She has also been a target for stalkers; in 2010, one broke into her London flat.
But she has never seen herself as a victim of the way she was marketed in her youth, even though her early album covers cer­tainly made the most of her sultry Italian looks. 'While the more time that goes by, the more clearly I see that, I knew what a photo looked like – I knew what I was putting on, I was not a blissfully naive 16-year-old. I was not.' And besides, she adds, 'I always had my dad saying, 'Make sure you are dressed decently.'
'The greater pressure, much more than sexism, was around the sort of music I was being encouraged to play,' she adds. Unlike the singer Charlotte Church, with whom she was sometimes lumped as two fresh faces of classical music, the young Benedetti always resisted demands that she perform 'crossover' pieces in favour of less-commercial classical repertoire. 'It's not something that is treated with nearly enough seriousness in public discourse: the power of really populist, saccharine, overly commercialised music. It's more potent than showing some cleavage, believe it or not. But even there I was in charge of my own choices. And I live by them. They were mine.'
Today, she worries that the younger generation lack that toughness and are less equipped for the sacrifices required to become a world-class musician. 'The future of classical music is definitely threatened by the changes to work ethic and mentality. You cannot cheat your way through learning a musical instrument: ChatGPT is not going to teach you the violin. It's impossible to learn music on any level with AI. You cannot fake your way to becoming a musician. Yet I think young people have become used to a lack of basic discipline in their daily lives – and that really worries me.'
While, as we saw recently at Wimbledon, it's not unusual now for elite young sports stars to have a psychologist in their entourage, according to Benedetti, in the upper echelons of music, the conversation around mental health remains 'very strange and hushed. You are just meant to get on with it. The psychological vulnerability of musicians is a very real thing. But on the other hand, you also have a choice about where you place your focus'. She's loath to spell it out, but it's clear that she thinks the younger generation have been encouraged to place too much focus on their mental health.
'I have definitely been through a period of time where the wellbeing industry, and I do mean industry, has captured my thoughts and made me believe that my focus needed to be turned inwards on my feelings. And it was the worst poss­ible thing for me. I thrive when I am focused on things that are to do with other people and are for other people, such as performance. Of course, I can only speak for myself. Other people's experiences may be different. But it's a subject everyone is nervous to talk about. You can say the wrong thing and be demonised.'
Having a child has made Bene­detti think a lot about feelings recently. She wonders, for instance, whether it's right to leave her daugh­ter to scream when she is upset: one school of thought in ­parenting argues that, instead of being distracted from their rage, screaming children need to have their emotions recognised. 'But distraction from feelings is good, too!'
Talking of which, her daughter has also given Benedetti a 'renewed appreciation' for violin practice (perhaps, above all, when she is screaming?): 'There is something rather wonderful about telling your family that this is what you will be doing for the next three hours,' she says. 'Then you go into a room and it's just you, your violin, the notes on a page, and the sound.'
The Edinburgh International Festival runs from Aug 1-25 at various venues across the Scottish capital. Details: eif.co.uk