If any encounter can be both heart-rending and heart-warming, this is it. On
one side of the hall stands a virtuoso musician in the prime of life. Some
say he is the world’s finest violinist. Certainly you would have to go a
long way to find a human being who so obviously demonstrates such a perfect
rapport between mind and body, eyes and brain, brain and fingers, physique
and inner emotion. As Maxim Vengerov plays, so his whole torso sinuously
sways and arcs in an ardent physical expression of the music that flows from
his Stradivarius. This is the package – the handsome, 32-year-old Russian,
the mesmerising virtuosity, the priceless piece of old wood – that is said
to command fees of £20,000 or more for a night’s work in the world’s top
concert halls.
But today Vengerov plays for nothing. Or rather, he plays for love. We are in
a magnificent panelled hall at the Royal Hospital for Neuro-disability in
Putney, southwest London. Arrayed in front of the musician are about 60
wheelchair-bound patients who, in many cases, have minimal control over
their limbs, their minds – and their lives.
Rarely can such contrasting extremes in the human condition have been brought
into such charged proximity. Rarely can a man capable of conjuring such
transcendental beauty out of thin air have faced an audience that knows such
physical deprivation.
“What appeals to an audience like this, what gets through to their
subconscious, are two things,” Vengerov tells me later. “Rhythm and
serenity.”
He puts that theory into practice now. Standing within touching distance of
the front row, he makes a disarmingly simple announcement. “Here are two
pieces,” he says. “In the first, my violin sings. In the second, my violin
dances.”
That’s all we need to know. The fiddle says the rest. It soars
into the luscious melody of the Méditation from Massenet’s opera Thaïs,
and suddenly there’s a perceptible frisson in the hall. I look round. Some
patients are conducting the music. Some are nodding in time. A few start to
hum or gurgle. The Royal Hospital specialises in rehabilitating adults with
traumatic brain injuries as well as providing long-term care for people with
severe neurological conditions such as multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy
and Huntingdon’s disease. Not everyone here is capable of making a
significant muscular response to the music. But nearly everyone – nurses,
patients, families and friends (for word of Vengerov’s appearance has got
around) – is smiling as he plays. It’s as if a mysterious alchemy has lifted
spirits, eased pain, transcended the most desperate circumstances – if only
for a while.
The branch of medical science known as music therapy was introduced to Britain
from America about 50 years ago, though the power of music and dance to ease
mental illness was known to the Ancient Greeks and well appreciated by the
time that Robert Burton wrote his classic treatise, The Anatomy of
Melancholy, 400 years ago. Music therapists today are highly trained and
well regarded in the mental-health field, and much research has been done
into how and why musical activities can trigger beneficial responses in
seriously ill patients.
Vengerov does not pretend to offer that kind of clinical expertise.
Nevertheless, for the past ten years he has been an honorary Unicef
ambassador, and in that role he has played to distressed children round the
world, and particularly in war-torn Africa and the Balkans. “Music has a far
greater potential to heal than we yet understand,” he says. “In fact, it is
the only language you can speak to traumatised or brain-damaged people. And
they appreciate it. I was in Uganda, playing to children who had been
abducted by the army and made to do and watch terrible things. Brutality had
destroyed childhood innocence. They were very rough. If you tried to talk to
them – no way. But once I started playing, it was an icebreaker. They
started to dance, to play their own African music. They saw me as a friend.”
His second piece is the most famous of Brahms’s Hungarian Dances.
It’s tricky enough as Brahms wrote it, but just before it finishes Vengerov
adds a dazzling cadenza – a cascade of mercurial notes that leap from his
fiddle like sparks from a firework. He may be giving a free concert. He may
have a bruised arm, the result of slipping in his bath a couple of days
earlier. (“It is God’s punishment because I have been unfaithful to my
violin,” he says. “I have been playing the viola too much recently.”) But
for this audience he’s not going to ease off on his trade-mark showmanship.
“Of course not,” he says. “This kind of work is my first passion. This is
where I think music belongs. And it has a wonderful effect on me, too, not
just on these people here. You see, when you talk to severely brain-damaged
people, they may not understand what you are saying. But once you start
playing music, you are speaking to their subconscious. And what happens is
that the effect of that bounces back. So I, as a musician, get in touch with
my own subconscious. It goes in both directions, this therapy.”
The Royal Hospital organises 50 recreational activities a week for its
patients – everything from concerts to gardening, art workshops and theatre
(a group of actors was recently resident for several weeks). “Our programme
is about improving the quality of our patients’ lives and lifelong
learning,” says Claire Stonier, the head of social and recreational
services. “And it’s about bringing the outside in for those who can’t easily
get out.”
That’s admirable. But it’s not every day that the patients are entertained by
a world-class virtuoso. So how did Vengerov get there? The answer, aptly, is
that he’s there because of what another legendary violinist did many decades
ago. During the Second World War the great Yehudi Menuhin selflessly put
himself and his art at the disposal of the war effort – playing a huge
number of concerts (sometimes six a day) to Allied troops, and then – after
the liberation of the concentration camps – also performing to the benighted
survivors of those terrible places. The experience marked him profoundly. Some
say that he was never the same violinist afterwards. But for the rest of his
long life he devoted himself to countless humanitarian causes.
One of those, which he established with a merchant-banker friend called Ian
Stoutzker, was a remarkable charity called Live Music Now (LMN). “Yehudi had
this belief that music could help distressed people overcome their
sufferings and introduce beauty into their lives again,” Stoutzker says. “So
he conceived a project that would give young musicians the chance to earn
money at the start of their careers, and at the same time bring music into
the lives of the disadvantaged.”
Thirty years on, LMN is a phenomenal (though underappreciated) success story –
and it’s to celebrate this anniversary that Vengerov has been persuaded to
play in Putney (he also plays at an LMN Gala hosted by the Prince of Wales
at Windsor Castle tonight). Musicians are recruited fresh out of college,
given training in how to communicate to different audiences, and then sent
into hospitals, day-centres, special-needs schools, and even prisons (LMN
has recently worked for the first time in young-offender institutions). All
styles of music are offered. On a budget of just £1.3 million, 3,000
concerts a year are given to 200,000 people.
Two regular LMN performers, clarinettist Helen Paskins and pianist Ivana
Gavric, are playing in the same concert as Vengerov. “There is no
training for this sort of work that is as good as actually doing it,”
Paskins says. “Autistic children, especially, get very involved with the
music. They don’t have any inhibitions. You learn to channel that amazing
energy.”
“And as a musician,” Gavric adds, “you learn to programme music with a
specific audience in mind, which is something they don’t teach you at music
college. You also learn how to communicate. I think both of us would find it
very hard to do a normal concert now without talking to the audience.”
Every musician who has worked with the mentally or physically disabled attests
to the remarkable effects that music can have. “When Yehudi started Live
Music Now he was really just guessing about the power of music,” says
Stoutzker, himself a former violinist. “Now the science has caught up. We
know for a fact that music can unlock areas of the brain that have seized
up. And I have seen the most astonishing things: people who were entirely
nonverbal suddenly speaking again. In Scotland once I saw a woman who had
been in a wheelchair for five years get up and dance. She had the capacity
to move, but never knew she had it.”
Vengerov has had similar experiences. “Once I played in a hospital for
children with cerebral palsy in Kosova,” he says. “They warned me that there
would probably be no reaction from the children. But there was one girl,
miraculously, who started singing when I played. And you know what? Very
well in tune!”
Long after the event was due to end, Vengerov stays behind, chatting and
launching into impromptu Bach. “This sort of activity runs in my genes,” he
says. “When I was a kid in Siberia my mother transformed a school into an
orphanage for kids from the street – often children of addicts and
alcoholics. On the top floor she set up a music centre and started children
of 5 or 6 on music. The transformation in them was wonderful. Unfortunately
their older brothers and sisters then came upstairs and destroyed the
pianos. My mother was crying. But you know what? She rebuilt that music
school, and eventually the older ones started to come into the music classes
too. She is my inspiration.”
The extraordinary encounter is over. The wheelchair-bound are pushed back to
their wards. The master musician is whisked back into the whirl of
international concert life. It’s easy to think that the meeting has been all
about a gifted individual bringing joy into tragically disadvantaged lives.
But that’s not how Vengerov sees it. “I’m humbled when I meet people who
live in the face of such adversity,” he says. “I was very inspired today.
For me, these are the greatest concerts.”
For more details of Live Music Now’s work, visit www.livemusicnow.co.uk
