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Gemma Rosefield: ‘amazing chemistry’ with people she works with |
‘She soars, she floats and she is operatic’
... not bad for a girl said by her teacher to have ‘no musical ear’.
Ruth Gorb interviews Gemma Rosefield, one of the stars of the Hampstead and Highgate Festival
WHEN Gemma Rosefield was five, she had piano lessons.
“Don’t waste your money,” said the teacher to her parents. “She has no musical ear.”
The same Gemma Rosefield, now 26, was the cellist in the 2008 Jacqueline du Pré Memorial Concert at Wigmore Hall. It is hard to think of a greater honour, but one that the musical world saw coming: in her Wigmore Hall debut five years ago she was described as “a mesmerising musical treasure”. Of one of her recent recordings an Australian magazine went wild: “She soars, she floats, she is operatic, she makes you weep.”
The ecstatic reviews follow her wherever she plays – and she plays everywhere. When we met in Café Rouge in Hampstead she had just arrived, after a 24-hour journey, from a week’s tour in Mexico and in an hour’s time was due to leave for Lille (fitting in the hairdresser on her way).
She looked as fresh as a daisy. Mexico, she said, had been wonderful: a different concert every night, one in Mexico City Cathedral for the Cardinal. “A whirlwind,” she said. “That’s what I love about my job.” As for stamina and keeping fit, a huge smile and the assurance that just running from one job to the next is enough.
The Hampstead child with “no musical ear” first picked up a cello at friend’s house and thought it was rather nice. She was eight, and the redoubtable teacher Wendy Max said reprovingly that it was quite late to start. But start she did. From South Hampstead Junior School she got a music scholarship to City of London School – “brilliant for music” – before going to the Purcell School, where she says she absorbed the all-important feeling of “being around other musicians”.
That’s what it’s about, she says. “You meet new people all the time in this business, and musical relationships are so important. There can be an amazing chemistry between people you work with. You don’t have to like them – but there’s a magic. It can’t be explained. But it’s where you get your energy.”
She is at the stage of meeting other professional musicians, she says, and is still learning: her musical education continues with the cellist Ralph Kirshbaum. He takes only six students at the Royal Northern College of Music, so studying with him is a great honour. Gemma completed her Masters degree there with distinction, winning the Gold Medal – this after graduating with first class honours at the Royal Academy of Music, winning the Vice Principal’s Special Prize.
Now, a seasoned and highly praised performer, her list of engagements is breathtaking: this season alone she has given several performances of Elgar’s Cello Concerto, including one with the BBC Concert Orchestra; she will be playing Brahms Double Concerto with the London Chamber Orchestra at St Judes in Hampstead Garden Suburb in June, and one week later the Dvorak Cello Concerto at St Johns Smith Square.
This just fits in before she plays in Beethoven’s Triple Concerto in Sweden. “I’m meeting the others just a few days before. It’s an unknown – very exciting.” She is booked up until 2010, can’t remember when she had a holiday without her cello, and loves it all – except going on Virgin trains where there is never any room for her cello.
It’s not only about Beethoven and Brahms, she says, although Schubert’s Quintet in C would definitely be her Desert Island top choice. More and more she is enjoying the challenge of contemporary music. “Working with a contemporary composer is wonderful, hearing about their inspiration. My ambition? To keep meeting new people and playing new works. It’s so exciting; you’re making history.”
She likes to tell people about what she is playing, especially young people, is determined to bring music where there is not enough, and is appalled by the lack of funding for classical music from central government.
She was lucky; she grew up in a house where there was never a moment without music, and now she has her own house – a tiny quiet one-bedroom cottage in the heart of Hampstead – there is music going round in her head 24 hours a day.
Hampstead, with its tradition of so many musicians, is very close to her heart, which is why the Hampstead and Highgate Festival is so important to her. Great, she says, that its director, George Vass, focuses on contemporary music and mixes it with classics, and that the festival mixes music with so much else – literature, walks, comedy, film, the stars… “it shows that musicians and composers are normal people.”
Normal people, but with the pressure of work she describes is there time for a normal social life? “My friends are very understanding – and a lot of them are musicians. We all keep in touch; my mobile phone bills are astronomical!”
And with only half an hour before she leaves for Lille, she is last seen sprinting to the hairdresser.
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