What Is to Be Made of These Good-Looking Violinists?
Male virtuosos with high cheekbones are vexing to some high-art traditionalists
Charlie Siem
In the 2001 comedy Zoolander, Ben Stiller’s character, the fashion victim Derek Zoolander, says, “I’m pretty sure there’s a lot more to life than being really, really, ridiculously good looking. And I plan on finding out what that is.”
For the young British fashion model Charlie Siem, there is more to life than being really, really, ridiculously good looking: playing the violin really, really well. And if his new recording of concertos by Bruch and Wieniawski is anything to go by, he’s pretty good at it. These kinds of virtuoso showpieces are not easy to pull off, and Siem has a consistently pleasant sound, good intonation, and rhythmic accuracy. No surprise, he has good genes (he’s supposedly related to the Norwegian violinist Olé Bull, a contemporary of Paganini, whose “Cantabile doloroso e Rondo giocoso” completes the CD).
Is Siem too good to be true?
The music journalist Jessica Duchen suspended her disbelief on her recent blog: “Shock news: good-looking violinist can really play.”
But what does it mean to be able to really play?
The London Symphony Orchestra can really play. Their tutti at the end of the first movement of the Bruch is probably the most thrilling I’ve ever heard.
And, if Siem can really play, why does he need to coat one fingernail of his left hand with red nail polish? (And is any of that polish getting on his 1735 “d’Egville” Guarneri del Gesù—once played by Sir Yehudi Menuhin—on loan from the Elderberry Foundation?)
Maybe it’s a trademark, like the ponytail with blond highlights that makes violinist/heartthrob David Garrett look more and more each day like comedic actor Russell Brand with a violin. But at least Garrett’s ponytail doesn’t carry the risk of staining his 1716 “A. Busch” Stradivari.
Where Garrett plays crossover music—his new album Rock Symphonies features such covers as Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”—Siem plays standard Romantic repertoire. He’s a soloist in the traditional mold, unlike Garrett.
Yet Garrett can also play the warhorses—just this past July, he performed the Beethoven Violin Concerto at the Verbier Festival in Switzerland, the same festival from which violinist Gidon Kremer withdrew at the last moment because the festival had succumbed to the pressures of the increasingly celebrity-obsessed music industry. In “the poisonous development of our music world,” as he put it in a widely publicized letter to the festival’s director, “‘stars’ count more than creativity, ratings more than genuine talent, numbers more than sounds.”
This “misguided fixation with glamour and sex appeal” was trumping true artistry, Kremer opined. Although he did not mention Garrett by name, it’s possible that he had him in mind.
Charismatic violinists undoubtedly do great things in helping classical music reach wider and younger audiences (and building a teen fan base). But let’s not confuse what they do with the art of violin playing at its highest level, which is something completely different.
I suppose it comes down to this: to say of a violinist that “he can play” is not the same as saying that he is a good musician.
The great irony in all of this (and now the tables get turned) is that there are plenty of other really, really, ridiculously good male violinists who also happen to be good looking: Joshua Bell, Ray Chen, James Ehnes, Nicolas Koeckert, Philippe Quint, Julian Rachlin, Vadim Repin, Benjamin Schmid (just to name a few), and don’t forget Kremer’s own Kremerata Baltica, a chamber orchestra made up of many beautiful blond Baltic babes.
I want to live in a world where that Calvin Klein underwear model who stopped traffic on Houston Street in lower Manhattan stays up on that billboard, Gidon Kremer plays the Verbier Festival, Siem and Garrett are accepted on their own merits, and Ben Stiller keeps making funny movies.
Who’s with me?
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