We are all different. You can’t compare. There’s no formula. Three of Britain’s most promising and hotly tipped young violinists say it to me in turn. But then one is a 20-year-old working on her fifth album and performing 70-plus concerts a year. Another was thrust into the national spotlight at 12 years old and, at 17, is still planning to take her A levels as well as play her Mozart concertos. And the third admits she already felt “past it” as a teenager – until success finally came in the wake of an enormous gamble.
But what you can deduce from the stories of Chlo? Hanslip, Jennifer Pike and Ruth Palmer is that just as this country has never boasted a high standard of orchestral playing, so breaking through the ensembles into the hallowed ground of the soloist has never been so thorny. So, how do you break out of the herd?
Palmer, 28, always knew that she had the talent. “I had done a couple of Wigmore Hall recitals – but Wigmore Hall recitals don’t do what they are supposed to for young artists. Nowadays if you’re a recording artist you get a lot more attention.” So, after a marathon of fundraising, in which Palmer tapped everyone from banks to billionaires, the result was a blistering recording (with the Philharmonia, no less) of Shostakovich’s First Violin Concerto. It was duly acclaimed in The Knowledge as “so sweatily intense that one cannot turn away”, and won her a Young British Performer award at the Classical Brits earlier this year.
The Times wasn’t alone, and even though Palmer has yet to make a fraction of her investment back, suddenly people who had been turning her away had another look. “It was a promotional tool for me – so that when I phone someone up and say, ‘Hello, I’m Ruth Palmer’, they actually know who I am.”
The scariest thing about Palmer’s story is the bit that seems least surprising to her: just how few violinists leave music college and go on to a career in performance. “It’s just that people know about it now because the CD did so well,” she says. But ask how she would have done things differently and the response is intriguing. “It’s all about that transition from being a pupil to being a client in a management company – who take on a lot of people when they’re 16 or 17. When I was a teenager I was just focusing on my playing. But although you don’t need a career, you do need performing opportunities.”
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It’s a model that Jennifer Pike, now 17, followed almost to the letter. A pupil at Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester from the age of 8 (her father was head of composition), Pike is currently being “handed over”, as she puts it, from the guardianship of the Young Concert Artists Trust to the more money-minded agents at Hazard Chase. “YCAT were very good at advising,” she says. “The purpose of them is to prepare you for an agency that might take an interest, so you’re not suddenly plunged into deep water.”
Unlike Palmer, Pike’s performing profile was high throughout her teens, for one simple reason: she was the 12-year-old, youngest ever winner of the BBC Musician of the Year in 2002 – an immense boost to an aspiring musician seeking those all-important practical opportunities. Indeed, that was why she entered herself so young in the first place. “I didn’t have a plan that when I was a certain age I’d go in to win it, it was literally just for performing experience.” The reward was YCAT taking the sting out of the business side, plus the chance to combine GCSEs with top spots at the Barbican in London. “People say you can’t do both, but I’ve managed.”
Chlo? Hanslip represents the other extreme from Palmer. Had she even been offered YCAT’s services, I doubt this headstrong 20-year-old would have welcomed their maternal embrace. “I’ve been in this business for nearly seven years,” she coolly explains. “I made my first CD when I was 13 and I had managers when I was 13. I did a lot of concerts from when I was 8.”
It’s Hanslip’s story that inevitably sets alarm bells ringing, not least for any parents of possibly talented offspring. If Palmer is right, you wonder just how wise it is for the “business” to be encouraging prepubescent players to combine the tricky business of growing up with concert engagements around the world. But the strongest message from Pike and Hanslip is that they were desperate to do it: none of their decisions was foisted on them. Says Pike: “It’s not an obsession. When it’s an obsession you’re called abnormal, but if you have a passion, that’s pretty normal.”
Hanslip has taken more knocks than most have by the age of 20. Bullied at school in Germany (she had decamped there at the age of 7 to study the violin with Maxim Vengerov’s teacher, at her own insistence) and subsequently dropped by her first record company, Hanslip has nonetheless developed into a formidable, mature talent, best evinced by her latest CD for Naxos, a searing rendition of John Adams’s Violin Concerto. She even got her face on the cover, in contravention of Naxos’s repertoire-led approach.
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The next step for all three young artists is finding an instrument to match them. Both Pike and Hanslip are being assisted by the philanthropic entrepreneur Nigel Brown, who is putting together consortiums of investors to secure Pike’s precious Matteo Goffriller and Hanslip’s (even more precious) Guarneri. “It’s like Formula One,” says Hanslip. “You can’t be the best if you don’t have the best equipment.”
Whether all three will go on to shore up their successes depends in part on the vagaries of the financial market. But, most of all, they all agree that sheer, bloody-minded conviction will see you through in the end. “I’m going to sound really clich?d,” says Pike, “but it’s not being there at the top, it’s having got there; the struggle is actually the reward.”
Chloe Hanslip plays Beethoven at the Mostly Mozart festival on Jul 28 at the Barbican, London EC2 (www.barbican. org.uk 020-7638 8891); Jennifer Pike plays Mozart at the same festival on Aug 3; Ruth Palmer plays Mozart at St Patrick’s Cathedral, Armagh (www.ulster-orchestra.org.uk 0870 3331918) on Aug 24. Her recording of Shostakovich is out on Quartz