Alban Gerhardt, cellist

Who or what inspired you to pursue a career in music and who or what have been the most important influences on your musical life and career?

I am afraid the only people who are responsible for me wanting to become a musician were my parents. My father played the violin in the Berlin Philharmonic for 45 years and my late mother had a beautiful coloratura soprano voice and for most of my childhood I accompanied her on the piano with songs and arias (probably my strongest memories from my childhood). I didn’t know any life other than that of a musician, and I spent every single free minute of my childhood at either the piano or the cello, often just improvising or sight-reading opera excerpts for hours without an end.

What have been the greatest challenges of your career so far?

What a good question, and while I am sure there must have been many challenges, I can’t think of a single one right now, definitely not of a challenge to my career. Musically and cellistically I have always doubted myself, always second-guessed my choices, always being my own harshest critic, and I find it very difficult to be pleased by myself (or by others). So maybe in my first years it was quite a challenge to not show my own doubts to the wider public, as being unhappy with oneself could have the bad side-effect of people thinking less of me – and not wanting to invite somebody as miserable as myself 😉

Which performances or recordings are you most proud of?

My oldest friend from kindergarten, who has nothing to do with music, likes my Casals encore disc the most, listens to it every Sunday with his family – and that makes me very happy. But I personally don’t listen to my own recordings and couldn’t pick a single one I’d be particularly proud of. I obviously always tried my best during the recording process, but never enjoyed it very much, so it has never been a fulfilling situation. I think I taught myself from early on to always look ahead – in life as well as during a performance, not to dwell on either things that went wrong or that went especially well. I honestly can’t point out a single performance I find especially memorable as I just forget (I am extremely forgetful!). I am in love with music, and I feel infinitely blessed to be able to spend my life playing it. All the stuff around it annoys me very much (social media, travelling, etc.), but these are tiny sacrifices compared with the joy of playing music for an audience, telling them a story and trying to be as creative in every given moment as possible. This might actually be the reason I don’t recall a performance – I stay in and live every single moment, but once it’s passed, it’s gone.

Which particular works or composers do you think you perform best?

I have always been a deeply Romantic soul. The songs I got to accompany my mother with – by Brahms, Schubert, Schumann, Hugo Wolf or Richard Strauss – still move me to tears, so I think that my strength lies in the Romantic repertoire, but for the music of the 20th and 21st centuries the Romantic approach might have its benefits as well, so I wouldn’t be able to answer that question. Whichever piece I am presenting I try to play it the way I feel it by refusing to follow any performance tradition. I treat every single piece, from Bach to Prokofiev and from Haydn to Dutilleux, as though they had never been performed before, as though they have been exclusively written for me, which does not automatically make for a great interpretation, but it is definitely ‘my own’ interpretation.

How do you make your repertoire choices from season to season?

I don’t make any choices. As a matter of fact, I hate making choices, which means that for the last 30 years I have played whatever I am asked to play. It never occurred to me to limit my repertoire to a certain number of pieces, as this is what it is: limited! And who would want to limit him- or herself, especially since the cello repertoire isn’t that big anyway. In order to keep performances fresh and to avoid routine I would strongly advise everybody to play as many different pieces as possible; this might result in having to practise a little bit more, but at the same time you never lose the love for the pieces you are playing. And, for me at least, if I have to play any given piece more than five times in a row, I lose a little bit of freshness and spontaneity: I start ‘imitating’ myself from the previous night’s performance, or try to play ‘different’ just to be different for no other reason than to entertain my own bored self. No, I’d rather play ten different concertos in a month and enjoy each one of them 🙂

What do you do off-stage that provides inspiration on-stage?

I have always loved to read books, mainly fiction, and I’d say besides having attended a huge number of concerts in my life (which have always been a source of inspiration), books have had the greatest impact on me, be it Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Thomas Mann, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kazuo Ishiguro or Ian McEwan.

Do you have a favourite concert venue to perform in and why?

I grew up in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall, attended my first concert at the age of four, so this is, in the words of Boris Becker, ‘my living room’, soooo many memories, and I do love the sound in it (honest!): not too much reverb but not too dry – exactly my cup of tea.

What do you feel needs to be done to grow classical music’s audiences?

I personally would worry less about shrinking classical music audiences but more about watering down what classical music is about. Sometimes it seems to me we just care so much about growing our public that the quality of the content offered doesn’t seem to be a priority any more; for example when contemporary music suddenly sounds like second-rate film music, or performers resort to some theatrics on stage without transporting anything of the (poorly expressed facial) emotions in their music. Yes, we should reach out into the communities, visit schools, break down barriers so that kids and people who never heard a note of classical music can get a first impression, but this should never mean sacrificing integrity and authenticity of what makes classical music special.

What is your most memorable concert experience?

The latest most memorable concert experience was the opening of the season of the Berlin Phil in September 2023, Kirill Petrenko conducting Reger’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Mozart and Strauss’ Ein Heldenleben, and both pieces sounded as though they had never been erformed before – so fresh, so many nuances and so different to the ‘reference recordings’, and it made me happy that the audience noticed this. I have hardly ever heard such silence in that hall as in some of the generalpausen.

As a musician, what is your definition of success?

Besides the obvious and most general definition – being invited to play concerts over a longer period of time and getting paid for it – my more personal definition of success would be to interpret every piece in your own personal way, and not to repeat the same story the same way thousands of others have told before. It doesn’t have to be a new light, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel, but we should own the pieces we perform – or at least try to make them our own – and by doing that, we should attempt to stay completely faithful to who we are and avoid musical compromises.

What advice would you give to young or aspiring musicians?

Try to not think of music as a career but more of a calling, and try to become the best possible musician you can be. Listen to loads of music (preferably not your own instrument), go to concerts, read books and master your instrument, but when studying the score, search for your own truth, don’t listen to other interpretations, find out what the composer might have wanted and bring it to life with your own voice.

What’s the one thing in the music industry we’re not talking about which you think we should be?

I am not following at all what ‘we’ are talking about in the music industry as I come, play my concerts and leave afterwards, but I hardly talk to anybody ever. I never read about music on social media or in magazines or newspapers – yes, I read the paper, but only Die Zeit, the (in my eyes) best German (weekly) paper, and I never make it to the Feuilleton, which I also find least interesting, except maybe for the book reviews, but that section is also depressing, because my list of books I have to read is too long as it is. I can only repeat my concern, which I am sure people are talking about: the danger of trying to make classical more popular by adopting methods of the pop-industry, and also stealing musical ‘ideas’ from pop-music and pop-musicians.

What is your most treasured possession?

Never thought I’d say that, but I must: it is my Goffriller cello, which – I come to realise – I should treasure much more than I previously have. It is a unique instrument with a unique sound, and I am most fortunate to be able to play on it and call it my own.

What is your present state of mind?

Slightly restless and too much worried about the state of the world, but grateful to be able to forget about all that once I have the cello in front of me and the music around me.

Alban Gerhardt is one of the featured musicians at this year’s Aldeburgh Festival. Find out more here

(Image credit: Kaupo Kikkas)