Review: Miriam Fried masterclass

‘Dynamics is not about volume. If we compete with a trumpet we lose. It’s about shape and about character,’ said Miriam Fried with a wry nod to violinist Yip-Wai Chow, after hearing his excerpts from Janáček’s Violin Sonata with Cynthia Tseng at the piano. In a lively masterclass at the Bowdoin Festival, the venerable Fried combined decades of instrumental knowledge with dry quotability.

Consider the plight of violinist Ugnė Liepa Žuklytė, currently studying at the Royal Academy of Music. In Schubert’s Fantasie in C major, for whatever reason, she was visibly petrified, and as we all know, it can happen to anyone. But Fried was warm and straightforward. Initially she cautioned against being imperceptibly soft, and in the process, encouraged lifting the bow arm higher to produce a more defined sound. It underlined the importance of the shoulder and back muscles in propelling the bow. But one line that lingered was grace itself: ‘We get nervous because we care.’

There were other choice comments to some of the violinists that followed, that are too good not to share: ‘There’s nothing very special about three bars of A minor,’ ‘You’re breathing, or maybe you’re not breathing. You’re breathing enough not to die,’ ‘The violin is a little box, and the bow is a stick from a tree, and we allow ourselves to be terrified by them.’

Fried is originally from Tel Aviv and the former first violinist of the Mendelssohn Quartet; she now teaches at the New England Conservatory and the Ravinia Festival. Over the course of three hours, she left little doubt that there are few instrumental issues she cannot address with insight.

BRUCE HODGES