Page 59 - Aldeburgh Festival 2022 FINAL COVERAGE BOOK

In the end, as with all art, you either feel it or you don’t. Her attempts to explain

begin to sound religious, but she is not a believer. “Not only did I not grow up in a

religious environment, but my dad was an altar boy. His priest was drunk most
days. My dad had a very negative memory of religion. My mum had to leave the

Catholic church in order to marry him. So that was kind of the home religious

environment.”

Yet it becomes clear from everything she says that music is a form of religion.

“When I was a teenager I was searching in the violin for an equation that made five

plus five plus ten definitely equal exactly 20. I was looking for so much precise

detail and information with regard to my playing that I just felt would fix these
issues. And I couldn’t understand when they wouldn’t. What I was missing was a

kind of humility to the level of the volume of tiny little things in your body and

your brain that go towards doing something like playing the violin.”

This is what drives her to educate. The frustration she feels when people don’t get

it, don’t realise that music captures the irreducibility of our experience. Children

can see this.

“When you put all these things together you see they’re not all controllable. It’s

why it’s possible for a nine-year-old to play things in a way that most 20-year-olds

can’t.”

She returns to talking about the Simpson piece that she’s playing next week. “The

scale, intensity, difficulty and emotional weight of the concerto is incredible. Mark
brings all he has to all he does. He feels and expresses so deeply, thinks so

carefully and pours this into his compositions. It’s a truly magnificent work — I

love playing it and can’t wait to bring it to Scotland.’

Our interview ends exactly the way it did when I spoke to Benedetti ten years ago

— with me feeling, in spite of everything, a lot better about the world.