Page 65 - The Strad (February 2020)

Chi-chi Nwanoku (right) gives a
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‘AS LONG AS I CAN HEAR AND WALK ON TO THE STAGE,
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sometimes be uncomfortable for the audience if a performer is something that has fed your life, your psyche and your well-
struggling. I never wanted to put my audience or my family being, it brings you down, so I think it’s really important to
through that, and I couldn’t bear it for myself. at is why I am keep going on. It keeps you alive, in a way.’ Despite her fear of
going to stop.’ e timing of this decision has been in uenced falling standards, Steinbacher agrees that to ‘retire’ is no simple
in part by her desire to cut back on a lifestyle dominated by thing. ‘My violin has been with me for as long as I can
paperwork, travel, practice, performance, recording, negligible remember,’ she says. ‘Being a musician is not a job – it is who
holiday and no free time, so that she can try new things. ‘Anybody I am. As long as I have fun and enjoy it, I will play all my life,
who has chosen this career will understand how completely even if one day it is just for myself and with my friends. It isn’t
relentless it is,’ she says. ‘But hardly anyone outside this eld always about showing other people what you can do. If
understands exactly what is required to be a musician at the very something goes wrong, so what? You are making your own
top of your technique, at the peak of your musicianship. It is a hard treasure, for yourself.’
life and it is one that requires the kind of dedication that only a very have o­ days on stage, and there is nothing to say that standards
Nwanoku also points out that musicians young and old can
FOUNDLING MUSEUM / RACHEL CHERRY 2019 C says the 63-year-old. ‘If you’ve been carrying your – even if their reactions do get slower. An 80-year-old colleague
few people would allocate to their career.’
have to drop with age, or that musicians should ever stop playing
hi-chi Nwanoku’s attitude is quite di­erent. ‘Double
of Georgiadis recently decided to sell his house so that he could
bass players don’t suddenly become decrepit overnight,’
use the proceeds to buy himself a new violin; and the cellist
instrument around for 40 years, it keeps you tter for longer.
Pablo Casals famously stated, in his nineties, that he practised
I’m t and strong, and I stand up to play a heavy, large
his cello every day because he was still getting better. Indeed,
instrument when I am only 5ft tall. As long as I can hear and
studies daily and will probably do so until the bitter end.
walk on to the stage, I will perform. If you suddenly stop doing
FEBRUARY 2020 THE STRAD 63
www.thestrad.com Georgiadis’s octogenarian colleagues still practise their Ševčík