The 2022/23 Season is a musical menagerie for the senses. The Ulster Orchestra invites you to Immerse Yourself this season, as we celebrate our artists, composers and conductors.
This week sees Ben Goldscheider making his debut with Ulster Orchestra in two venues: the Market Place Theatre, Armagh, and Belfast’s Ulster Hall, performing two concerti. Ahead of his performances, the artist kindly agreed to answer a few questions we had for him.
The French Horn is an instrument heard seldom alone, and yet when it’s featured as a solo instrument it makes perfect sense that it should be so. Goldscheider himself describes the sound of the instrument as
“majestic, heroic yet also tender and smooth. Sometimes simultaneously!”
Goldscheider, who competed in the final of BBC’s Young Musician of the Year in 2016, has since completed his studies at the Barenboim-Said Academy in Berlin under the tutelage of Radek Baborák. He has also made his debut at BBC Proms (2022), performed with many illustrious orchestras and conductors, including Daniel Barenboim, and performed all over Europe, including performing a recital in the Musikverein in Vienna, which he counts among his career highlights:
“Something about the spirit of the Musikverein made my recital debut there a very special concert. Playing Beethoven in a packed hall in Vienna-and that hall-was so unique. It was also a bonus that I was happy with how the concert went. There have been other special events; my debut in the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin, Wigmore Hall and the Elbphilharmonie all left a huge impression on me.”
Goldscheider has also enjoyed performing internationally:
“I have been fortunate enough to play in some really wonderful places, most recently in Jerusalem and Mumbai. I’m particularly looking forward to going to New Zealand this year, as well as back to Santa Barbara. I should also hasten to add that, given my partner has familial connections to Northern Ireland, it is also a great job to be coming to Belfast!”
Ben is due to perform two concerti with Ulster Orchestra: Mozart’s Horn Concerto No. 4, and Gipps’ Horn Concerto. The latter is a piece Goldscheider is intimately familiar with, having both performed the work in several concerts and recorded it with the Philharmonia Orchestra:
“Funnily enough, I recorded the work before I had the opportunity to play it live. Having now played the piece in a few concerts, what differs from the recording is a slightly more hell-for-leather approach that I take nowadays. The work is extraordinarily virtuosic and you are constantly jumping around in different octaves (four, in total). Of course, you always want to play the right notes but sometimes security can disguise itself as safety; the latter has no place in this work!”
The Mozart, perhaps the more familiar of the two concerti to our audience, is a piece Goldscheider finds to be full of character, wit and lyrical beauty:
“The challenge is how best to present these different elements in a homogenous way to the audience. I think it is a dangerous road to go down if performers start asking what they bring TO a specific work – the question should be, ‘What can we extrapolate from the work itself?”
Our wholehearted thanks to Ben Goldscheider for contributing his thoughts to this blog post.
We invite you to Immerse Yourself in our concert programme this Thursday 19
th January 2023, 8pm at Market Place, Armagh, and Friday 20
th January 2023, 7:45pm at Ulster Hall, which also includes the stunning
Nightscape by Eleanor Alberga and Mozart’s Symphony No. 36
Linz.
BOOK TICKETS FOR ARMAGH HERE.
BOOK TICKETS FOR BELFAST HERE.