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Interviewer: So it's that important to have a violin made by the Italian masters?
Jenson: Well, there are two reasons why it's so important. The first, of course, is that it's your wooden voicebox. You come to know an instrument, and for me, I'm no longer aware that I'm playing on a violin; I'm just expressing myself. If you can imagine going to a concert hall and Pavarotti is singing, and he gets up on stage and he opens his mouth and it's Phil Collins' voice! But can Pavarotti be the kind of artist he is with someone else's voicebox? Secondly, when I prepared the Brahms Concerto with the Philadelphia Orchestra for a concert, the concertmaster went into the seats to listen, hear the balance, and he came back to me and said "don't try to do any nuances, because they can't hear you anyway." And, at that moment, a realisation came to me that what I was doing by playing with these major orchestras, not knowing what instrument I was going to play on, maybe borrowing the week before sometimes, was irresponsible. I was not being fair to these orchestras. They expect a certain product; I've played with them before. To come back, and not be what they're expecting....you can't be intimate with a violin you've had for a few days, you can't know how it's going to respond on stage. So, I spent a lot of years just trying to find an instrument to play on.
Interviewer: The Guarnerius del Gesu you played on had such a warm tone, it sounded almost like a viola.
Jenson: Isn't it amazing?!
Interviewer: So, ideally, your instrument is an extension of your self when you do play?
Jenson: In my best moments, and now I'm feeling that more since I've had my violin now for a couple of years and it feels like it's not changing all the time, which it was going through for about a year. To answer your question: Absolutely. If you don't feel that, if you don't get it, you are not getting there! That's where I want to be that's why I play music, so that the instrument and my relationship with the music goes beyond playing the instrument, it should go directly to expressing what's going on.
Interviewer: It's sort of what Angus Young [of AC/DC] said about Eddie Van Halen: "His sound is so 'rehearsed.' He's a great instrumentalist, but you have to dig into the music itself, you've got to get in there" --
Jenson: -- yeah, and I think I've been very lucky that I started violin so young that it was my emotional language. I didn't have to struggle through my teens to figure out what I was feeling, because every time I played my violin, I could be in touch with where I am, it's like "so there I am!"
Interviewer: So, you use music to relate to the world, that's your voice.
Jenson: With myself as well, to be in touch with what's going on inside of me right now.
Interviewer: I have found that can be both ennobling and also liberating, and at the same time alienating. For example, when I was four years old, my hero in life was Rachmaninoff. And I asked my mother, "Mom, when are we going to go hear Rachmaninoff in person," and she told me, "Rachmaninoff is dead." And so, I went out into the street to tell all my friends that Rachmaninoff had died. And they said, "who's Rachmaninoff?" And it shattered my whole universe!
Jenson: I think
that what you're expressing, that shock, that moment of realization is
what I lived with for the ten years I was without an instrument.
Every second, I was just in shock. It wasn't like, "oh, I'm so great,"
but rather that I had something to offer. How do I explain this,
so it doesn't sound arrogant? There was a feeling that I was here
because I had to give what I had to give in music, and to have this shock,
this constant shock, that in my opinion, the world didn't care about what
I had to offer, and I was just there to offer it. In fact, the life
of a soloist is difficult. In fact, I had read an interview with
Yo-Yo Ma in Time, and I remember when I used to travel ten months
out of the year. You don't have friends every day, you're always
in airplanes, you get insomnia and you're changing time zones every second.
It was a great life, I'm not saying it was a terrible life, but it's very
different and it's one that the gratitude that you must get from it is
that you are giving music, and that people are getting it. So I lived
for all these years thinking "I thought this is what life is supposed
to be."
