Only 21 years of age, Daniel Lozakovich has been learning the violin for three-quarters of his life. Yet he already has what really cannot be taught: his own sound. Everything else stems from that, with maturity accrued in a gradual process of which this thoughtful musician shows himself well aware. Born in Stockholm to Belarusian and Kyrgyz parents, and now resident in Geneva, he talks to me on a video call from Paris, a friendly pooch nuzzling at his side.
Having picked up the instrument at the age of six, Lozakovich made remarkable progress. “When I was younger I did many competitions but my last one was the Spivakov competition when I was 15. Then I got the contract with Deutsche Grammophon! I don’t like competitions anyway, they are hardly artistic. After all, Michelangeli got one of the last places at the Queen Elizabeth competition [in 1938].”
On the cover of his first album with Deutsche Grammophon, the sober-suited teenager gazes out into the middle distance. At the age of 16 he seems to know what it means to record Bach’s D minor Partita. Yet Lozakovich has continued to learn – about himself, about violin playing, about life – at pace. Boosted by the early support of Valery Gergiev, Lozakovich’s accelerating international career has taken him to Berlin, London, New York, Tokyo, Vienna – and now to Singapore.
On 25th March he joins the Singapore Symphony Orchestra at their gleaming Esplanade Concert Hall. On the podium is Singaporean conductor Kahchun Wong – who is himself going places fast, as the first Asian winner of the Gustav Mahler Conducting Competition, and now the new chief of the Japan Philharmonic. On the programme is the Violin Concerto by Felix Mendelssohn, which has become a central plank of Lozakovich’s repertoire in the last year or so. “It’s the most perfect concerto ever written”, he says. “It’s a diamond. You cannot change a note. In expression, structure, time, writing, everything.”
A video of Lozakovich’s performance last summer in Malta confirms that the violinist has his own ideas about a piece that hardly lacks for exposure. The challenge must be to make it fresh, I suggest. “Routine in everyday life has benefits”, he replies. “But in music it’s death. Certainly the Mendelssohn concerto has been often played on autopilot, but I think it’s one of his most tragic pieces.”
The genesis of the Concerto was typically complex, owing to the composer’s underappreciated perfectionism. While he is renowned as one of the most fluent composers ever to write a note – and he was, especially in his youth – every detail of his pieces had to be exhaustively weighed and tested. Manuscript scores of works such as the “Scottish” Symphony bear fascinating witness to the restless creative mind of a composer continually revising and abbreviating in the attempt to avoid routine and clarify thought.
Thus, although Mendelssohn embarked on the Concerto in 1838, he did not complete it until 1844, continually interrupted by the punishing work schedule which likely contributed to his early death in 1847, aged only 38. Lozakovich perceives in it that indefinable but unmistakable quality of lateness shared by, for example, the last quartets of Beethoven. “The first movement is very dark. He wrote very positively most of the time and had a very positive life until near the end, but the second theme of the first movement speaks directly to the soul.”
The violinist is not the first to speculate about the brief but intimate friendship between Mendelssohn and the “Swedish Nightingale”, Jenny Lind, and its effect on the composer’s state of mind at the time. The burning of Mendelssohn’s letters to Lind by her husband means that we will likely never know the full truth, except as we may intuit it through the music, which in Mendelssohn’s last years is troubled as never before.
The Violin Concerto shares its E minor key with the opening double-chorus of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, which Mendelssohn had revived to stunning effect in Berlin in 1829. E minor becomes the archetypal key of mourning and lamentation during the 19th century – as the programme of the Singapore concert demonstrates, pairing the Concerto with Brahms’ Fourth Symphony, which famously drives headlong into the abyss at the end in unresolved E minor. According to Lozakovich: “If you play it as a traditional concerto – and it’s too often played! – you miss the stars and the angels and the darkness in it.”
He sees the second movement as balanced in this regard: “Very angelic, with a Wagnerian central episode, which connects to a magical world that we don‘t know. And then of course the finale is quite a traditional, joyous dance, but he writes it with such perfection and taste, which is his signature. But the first two movements make a soulful confession which is almost unique in his work.” Lozakovich would love, he says, to play the Quartet in F Minor Op.80, Mendelssohn’s final masterpiece, where pain and grief take him almost over the edge, but the life of a touring virtuoso limits opportunities for chamber music-making.
Where he does get to make music with friends, it is often as not at the annual summer festival in Verbier, where he has been a welcome guest since his prodigious teenage years. In 2018 I saw him play Bach’s Third Brandenburg Concerto as one member of an extraordinary super-orchestra of soloists, opening the festival’s 25th anniversary gala, where he joined the likes of Lisa Batiashvili, Leonidas Kavakos and Maxim Vengerov. He returns this year to join Yuja Wang, Antoine Tamestit and his friend, the cellist-turned-maestro Klaus Mäkelä, in the First Piano Trio by Rachmaninov and the Second Piano Quartet by Brahms.
“Verbier brings this freedom of artistic collaboration that is unique,” says Lozakovich. “You don’t just come and play your concert and leave, you get to know your colleagues and their life behind the music. In the future I want to do a lot more chamber music.” All the same: “Each musician can be like a soloist in a trio or a piano quintet. But a string quartet really is four people who have to be in the same world. When I listen to the Alban Berg Quartett – my favourite string quartet, and I studied with Gerhard Schulz in Vienna for two years, from when I was 12 to 14 – I see how they work: they have a perfect chemistry. You can play quartets with people you like, but it won’t work without chemistry, and without being dedicated to the whole genre.”
While DG’s plans with the violinist remain under wraps for now, it would be instructive to hear his interpretation of the Mendelssohn coupled not with the old warhorse of the Bruch, but a concerto from the same period which does not enjoy the same popularity, by Schumann. They present a study in contrasts: thanks not least to the refinement of the solo writing, the Mendelssohn unfolds with such flow and ease, whereas the Schumann comes out as a tremendous struggle: another distinctively late piece, marked in this case by the composer’s mental instability at the time.
Lozakovich nods: “It’s very strangely written, and in places not well written for the violin, especially the finale. But as an expression of the soul, it’s perfect. He said that the opening theme had been dictated to him by the angelic spirits of Mendelssohn and Schubert. The concerto as a whole is a struggle between his own angels and demons. He wants to return to a former state of mental purity, but the struggle is written into the music. And the pauses! They cannot be played just as normal pauses. I feel them as close to death. In the second movement there is such beauty, and at the same time it’s like a cry for help. The harmony of the central episode speaks like tortured angels. Then this very strange Polonaise, which is a very happy finale but also quite crazy. It has a quality of manic happiness about it. The ending is the most sudden in the concerto repertoire. It just stops.”
Across our conversation, Lozakovich refers in passing to Ingmar Bergman movies and Thomas Mann novels, and they form part of a broad cultural hinterland for a violinist who needs little encouragement to think philosophically about his profession. “I see many colleagues for whom there is nothing there except the notes. But you can’t just look at the notes – and this is so true of Schumann.”
He counts among his friends the chess grandmaster Vladimir Kramnik: “I’m really interested in how he thinks during tournaments. He talks about it in Buddhist terms of ‘flow’. There is a Russian musicologist who lives in Stockholm, Mikhail Kazinik, who has a way of comparing Socrates with Bach and Einstein. For me, it is Chinese thinkers like Lao Tse and Zhuangzi who bring me closer to ‘flow’ in life, especially during performance.”
Lozakovich is inevitably frustrated by the limitations of rehearsal schedules that bring “his” Tchaikovsky or Mendelssohn into a fast-moving environment which often relies for musicianly co-operation on the fly. “To do something like the Brahms concerto properly – half a page could take an hour! I would love to change this so that our performances can be more than routine, and so that we’re all tuned in to the same mentality.”
“Sometimes people do understand you directly,” Lozakovich concludes, “and vice versa, and there is a subconscious rapport with a conductor – this is very rare! But then I am so happy.” Lozakovich made his BBC Proms debut with the Brahms violin concerto last year. “There was some rapport that began to happen during that concert – I did something in the slow movement and the violins reacted with a special kind of soulful quality.” Audiences in Singapore, Verbier and elsewhere have much to look forward to from a violinist who will always try to bring them something fresh and new minted, however familiar the notes.
Daniel Lozakovich performs Felix Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor with the Singapore Symphony on March 25th. This interview was sponsored by Singapore Symphony Orchestra.
