” ‘Midori and Friends’ is designed to address the absence of arts education in New York City schools,” she says in unflappably official tones. “We send in our teachers to inspire children, to unlock their creativity, to change how they feel about themselves. The first thing these children do on arrival at school in the morning is go through a metal-detector. She has all her records – collected by her mother – on a rack in her New York apartment, but she never plays them. I was the same person then as I am now.”For Midori – at 28, three years Vengerov’s senior – the past is a country she has no desire to revisit. “I didn’t have so much technique then, but the intuition is the same. And while some ex-prodigies feel impelled to dissociate themselves totally from their infancy, others stay in close contact with it.
“I remember each detail of what I thought about the music in my first concert,” says Maxim Vengerov of his five-year-old debut. For every Joshua Bell, whose equable nature ensured a smooth transition from childhood phenomenon to adult virtuoso, there is also a Kennedy – whose unstable temperament proved, for a while at least, his professional undoing. Part of the enigma lies in the fact that prodigies are not prodigies to themselves. Consider Lorin Maazel’s comment on his infant exploits, which included conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic when he was eight: “I don’t remember the period all that clearly. I do know that I found the experience utterly normal.” The gift emerges with absolute assurance, unstoppable force.More interesting is what happens to that gift when its owner grows up and collides with reality.
Lott has talent – probably more than the “Teeny Paganini”, Vanessa-Mae ( now 21 and in the news this week after sacking her mother as her manager), and she’s light-years ahead of the grotesquely hyped Charlotte Church – but as yet she shows no trace of the godlike authority Menuhin seems to have been born with.But the good Lord wasn’t always wrong. When he hailed the nine-year-old Sarah Chang as “the most wonderful, perfect, ideal violinist” he had ever heard, he was not overstating the case: listen to her debut record (also on EMI) and your belief in miracles may be restored.No one can explain the emergence of a true prodigy, as opposed to that of a child who is merely quick on the uptake. Since the life of prodigies is by definition short, the industrial supply must be constantly stoked up. This month EMI are touting the talents of a “12-year-old elf from Germany’s Black Forest”. With the aid of Mozart’s own violin, “miraculous Mädchen” Maria-Elisabeth Lott is said to provide “a new definition of virtuosity”. Among her commendations is the late Lord Menuhin’s assertion that “when she is 13 she will be just as good as I was at that age”.
Thanks to Menuhin’s early recordings on the Biddulph label, we can all make a judgment on that: mine is that the miraculous elf will have to improve preternaturally fast if she is to fulfil that prophecy by her 13th birthday in June. Since the life of prodigies is by definition short, the industrial supply must be constantly stoked up.
