Which emotions do you live on your instrument?

Every musician has an emotional spectrum of their own. Not in terms of technique or style, but in terms of what truly lives within them and what they are willing to let through their instrument.

Yehudi Menuhin was a musician whose playing was marked above all by warmth, depth and an almost spiritual beauty. Nigel Kennedy also lets through anger, chaos and provocation, and that is exactly what makes him so unmistakable. Both are magnificent, but they are magnificent in completely different ways, because they inhabit different emotional worlds.

And then there is the insurance clerk who plays in a hardcore metal band in the evenings and lets out something there that may have no place during the day. That too is an emotional spectrum. That too is music as a release.

The question that keeps occupying me is: which emotions do you actually feel when you listen to a particular artist? And which emotions do you live yourself when you play?

One more observation I do not want to keep to myself, because it has occupied me too: those who experience someone on stage and are deeply moved do not necessarily meet the same person in direct encounter. Music can be a genuine expression of someone, but it can also be the only place where certain emotions are allowed to exist at all. That is not a disappointment, but perhaps simply the truth about art.

For me personally, my spectrum includes anger as much as fragility, exuberant joy as much as deep sadness, and the beauty of life in all its contradictions. It is always a new discovery what emerges on the violin when I simply play and listen to what is there.