Young stars working in perfect harmony

A Cork-based composer and violinist have formed a partnership to launch an innovative new work, writes Nicki ffrench Davis.

THE future of classical music has found two safe pairs of hands. Sitting in the park on a bright and blustery afternoon, 26-year-old Sam Perkin and violinist Eoin Ducrot, 18, are relaxing after the premiere performance of Perkin’s second violin concerto.

The concerto was written for, and dedicated to Ducrot, a calmly stellar young violinist who Perkin describes as “a born soloist”. Performed with the Cork School of Music Symphony Orchestra, it will feature again in two upcoming Proms concerts at Cork City Hall.

Perkin explains how it came about. “In May 2011 Eoin played a piece that I wrote for violin and marimba. I got to know Eoin’s style through that.” Last year Ducrot also won the Cork School of Music concerto competition, with the prize of performing with the CSM Symphony Orchestra. Perkin saw the opportunity to write a new work for the occasion.

Ducrot describes how Perkin got started. “Before he wrote it, Sam asked me about my favourite techniques and concertos, my strong and weak points. I honestly had no idea what it would be like, as all the pieces Sam has written are completely different. He didn’t give me any hints.”

The finished work provoked an immediate standing ovation at its premiere. Among many compliments received on Saturday, one stood out for Perkin. “Someone said she felt she could reach out and touch the texture, that it was a three dimensional soundworld.”

“Writing it was a big, big task,” Perkin says. “You need a long time to let your mind work things out and it seemed like an insurmountable task at first. It took me four or five months, working up to 16 hours a day, trying to work three days in row with a day off in between all that time.”

With a structure and form in place, Perkin aimed to produce each musical gesture in full as he worked, watching the pages of a fully orchestrated score pile up as he sat with his laptop, piano, violin and manuscript paper day after day. When he gave Ducrot the score it was already complete.

“Eoin is a very expressive player,” Perkin says. “He’s very melodic and he has an intense type of playing so I wanted to make it really intense.” Perkin reflected the violinist’s intensity by writing a demanding work that has him playing almost constantly, and putting much of the work in the highest part of the instrument.

“He had told me before that there’d be a lot of high playing,” Ducrot says. “Generally, composers for violin would tend to use the high octaves much less, just for virtuosic stuff. But for Sam it was the other way round. The spacing between the notes up there is much smaller, your fingers have to be really tight together, but I enjoyed it.”

It was an added challenge for Ducrot to learn the piece without the benefit of a single recording to refer to. The turning point came when Perkin wrote a piano reduction of the score that allowed him to play the whole orchestral part himself on the piano. Ducrot’s playing sparked new ideas, and, he says, “some stuff changed after I made mistakes that we thought sounded better so Sam would say, leave it in.”

Perkin has made good use of the vast musical resources of Cork School of Music, with a huge orchestra. “The orchestra gave it their all and really helped me. It was great to be able to hear it.”

The ending of the concerto is completely original, but it would be a shame to give it away in a newspaper article. Suffice it to say that the composer hands the audience the power to determine when the work ends. “When he first told me what he wanted to do at the end I was disappointed,” Ducrot admits. “But the way it turned out, the atmosphere is amazing, I can’t explain it.”

The new working partnership is an enriching opportunity for both musicians who have invested so much of their young lives in music. “Of course we have friends who are musicians, but none of our close friends are, you’d go crazy,” Perkins says. “They don’t always get the dedication but it doesn’t matter.”

* Cork Proms: Cork City Hall, 8pm Saturday, Apr 28 and 3pm Sunday, Apr 29. Tickets from Opus 2 and Pro-Musica in Cork and on the door.