Scottish Music and Nicola Benedetti

Nicola Benedetti is a charming genius. She began playing music aged 4, and she told BBC 4 programmes The Cultural Life that she started learning with a Suzuki Method, while a child living in Ayrshire.  With Suzuki, you learn to play a tune immediately: so you begin with MUSIC and not with sterile scales.

Personally, I was given musical scales to practise. I learned nothing about music, and my piano lessons ended within 6 months. My kids learned piano using the Suzuki Method, and they can still play tunes even though they no longer play the piano. Thank you, Mrs Atwood!  Of course I am NOT comparing my children with Nicola Benedetti, who is one of the world’s greatest violinists.  At age ten, she went to the Yehudi Menuhin School in Surrey, in southern England – tough to be sent so young to a “boarding school” even if the musicality of Menuhin and the shared passion of music carried her through. Menuhin was perhaps the greatest violinist and music teacher of the 20th century.

Benedetti led the National Children's Orchestra of Great Britain at the age of eight; one year later she had passed eight years of musical examinations.

I went with my friends Alan and Margery Falconer to hear Nicola in concert in Glasgow, playing Vivaldi with some of the Scottish string musicians who are playing in this version of Vivaldi: a delightful short recording (and it is even worth seeing for her very spectacular dress).

Here she is playing Loch Lomond at the spectacular opening of the 2021 Commonwealth Games in Glasgow.

Like Nicola, I am very interested in music (and dance) education. Every child should play an instrument. If they can do it in Venezuela (and they do), they could do it also in Europe. We Europeans under-estimate the value of culture.

 And every child should learn to dance.

Dance is a physical expression of music.

Nicola's motto is "Enhance your own ability, be the best you can be – but don’t keep that for yourself. Share it, expose it, give it and try to enrich other people with what you have managed to achieve."  That is exactly how I consider my modest ability to dance. I try to dance MORE and BETTER, and I try to share with others – and especially with children - the joy of dance and music.

 Nicola Benedetti was awarded the C.B.E. by Her Majesty the Queen

 Nicola Benedetti’s most famous recording (Grammy Award) came from her collaboration with the modern composer Wynton Marsalis.  Try this out:

 and then the Violin Concerto in D Major by Marsalis:

Wynton Marsalis is both composer and trumpeter.