Interview, Guy Braunstein on his Abbey Road Concerto

Released tomorrow on Alpha Classics, Guy Braunstein's Abbey Road Concerto is a dizzyingly virtuosic whistle-stop tour through The Beatles' iconic 1969 album, with songs including 'Come Together', 'Oh! Darling', 'Here Comes The Sun' and 'Octopus's Garden' woven into a 35-minute fantasy for violin and orchestra with Braunstein's own overture, interludes and cadenzas.

I spoke to Guy earlier this year about how The Beatles have never been far from his musical consciousness since he was a toddler, how a chance question from his young son (and the events of 2020) prompted him to explore their songs' potential on his own instrument, and how Daniel Barenboim inadvertently introduced him another work on the album which received its first studio recording at Abbey Road - Delius's still under-appreciated Violin Concerto, written for Albert Sammons in 1916...

Homepage photo of Guy Braunstein (c) Boaz Arad.

How old were you when you heard your first Beatles song?

I think I was no more than two or three, and I must have heard it on an old LP at home. Our house was always full of all kinds of music: I got hooked on classical stuff at a very young age, but I went through other phases alongside that. I listened to a lot of Israeli pop songs, I had my Led Zeppelin period - but The Beatles were never gone for long…

Then five or six years ago my older son got the bug too. We walk past the John Lennon-Gymnasium on the way home from his school in Berlin, and one day he asked me who John Lennon was. I gave him a potted biography as we walked: how he grew up in Liverpool, joined a band called The Beatles, wrote incredible songs like 'Imagine', and was assassinated when Daddy was a little boy…

My son had never heard of The Beatles before, so when we got home I showed him some clips on YouTube…I created a monster! He got so hooked that we heard nothing else in the house for the next six months: he knew every song, which album they came on, which year they were released, the lot! Normally at home we speak Hebrew, sometimes switching to German or English…during this time we had to speak fluent Beatles! Every time I got my violin out to practise Prokofiev 2 he’d say ‘Don’t play that, Daddy, play Beatles!’. One thing led to another, and eventually the songs were so stuck in my head that I started playing around with them on the violin, adding double-stops and various bits of trickery around the melodies…

What prompted you to turn those casual experiments into a full-scale concerto?

Shortly after the murder of George Floyd in 2020 I ran into a Black Lives Matter demonstration in Berlin, and wanted to add my voice in some way – I’m not very good with talking, so when I want to express myself I just play. I remembered that 'Blackbird' was written in direct correlation with the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s, so I thought it would be appropriate to revisit the song.

After I’d put the kids to bed one night, I took my violin and a pencil & paper to my studio and stayed there till sunrise working out some ideas: over those six hours I came up with a set of variations on 'Blackbird' for solo violin, and played it as an encore at a lot of my concerts. Next I did a crazy solo version of ‘Hard Day’s Night’, full of mad arpeggios, then I thought ‘Guy, that’s enough showing off with all this virtuoso stuff - just find a Beatles song that you can play artistically and make a nice arrangement for violin and piano!’.

I didn’t want to choose one of the obvious ones, so I listened to a couple of albums to pick the perfect song. When I sat down with Abbey Road I heard the first song ‘Come Together’ and thought ‘That’s my song!’...but I ended up saying that about every track on the album, because they’re all so great. So I came up with this stupid idea of arranging the entire album, but with a whole damn symphony orchestra!

The lockdowns actually enabled me to start and finish the piece within the space of a few months; if I’d had my normal concert-schedule, I’d have been snatching time to work on it in hotel-rooms between performances and it could’ve taken years! I actually managed to perform the piece quite soon after it was finished, albeit with a limited audience: with the exception of the studio recording, I don’t think I’ve ever played it to an empty hall.

Are there echoes of any particular classical composers in the orchestration?

I’ve always done a lot of arranging - other pop songs as well as opera arias and popular classics - but I never think of it as crossover. If you listen to the Abbey Road Concerto as a musician, you quickly realise that it isn’t the kind of thing that traditional crossover violinists would do: it’s very classical, and very difficult! The harmonies and melodies are pure Beatles, but the orchestration owes more to Prokofiev than anyone else.

How complicated was the process of getting authorisation to arrange these songs?

Oh, that was a headache! I’ve been transcribing and orchestrating things for decades, so I knew the procedure when it comes to applying for rights permissions, but this stuff was on a whole other level. If I wanted to transcribe Stravinsky or Shostakovich (neither of whom are in the public domain yet) I’d send a request to their estate, which probably receives three or four requests per week…the Beatles rights owners get around 10 000 per day! Every pianist wants to do their own version of 'Yesterday', and they just don’t have the manpower to turn requests around quickly. And you can’t apply for permission to arrange the entire album, either: each song is treated as a separate entity, so the process took nearly two years.

Have you had any direct contact with Paul McCartney about the project?

I’ve never managed to get near him! The closest I got was in 2012, when my friend (and former boss) Simon Rattle conducted at the London Olympics, and McCartney was doing his number right afterwards…I asked Simon if he knew how to get to him, and he just said ‘You can’t!’. He’s surrounded by people that protect him from the outside world, and I don’t know whether he’s even aware that somebody made a violin concerto out of his music! He’s written classical stuff himself (including a whole oratorio), but who knows if he’ll ever get to hear this? It would be absolutely incredible to play the piece with him in the audience one day, but I’d be scared to death waiting for his verdict!

What's the connection between the Abbey Road Concerto and the Vaughan Williams and Delius works on the album?

They also received their first studio recordings at Abbey Road: perhaps even some English people aren’t aware that the world premiere recording of The Lark Ascending was made there almost 100 years ago by HMV. (I know you all know this piece inside-out in the UK, but I have to say that it’s a different story elsewhere: I’ve played The Lark in Israel, Berlin and Paris, and hardly anybody knew it!)

I can’t take credit for the concept, because I left that to the record-label: I’m no good at dramaturgy and drawing connections! Obviously the central idea was to record the Abbey Road Concerto, so I just sent them a list of everything else I was ready to record and they found two other pieces that had something in common with the Beatles album: the first recording-venue.

The Delius Violin Concerto is far less frequently recorded (and indeed performed) than The Lark, even in the UK - how did it cross your path?

It’s a piece that’s almost disappeared from the repertoire altogether, and to explain how I discovered it we have to start with Elgar: I’ve had a deep personal connection with his Violin Concerto since I was too small to get anywhere near it, and it's kind of become my calling-card. Why? When I was growing up in Israel there was only one television channel, and one night after the 9 o’clock news (so peak viewing-time) they broadcast his Cello Concerto with Du Pré and Barenboim – all the poor football fans must’ve got a surprise!

I was instantly hooked: even though the violin was my instrument, I was desperate to find a way to play that piece. But then I found out that Elgar also wrote a violin concerto…Yehudi Menuhin came to Tel Aviv to play it, as did Pinchas Zukerman in 1982, and I decided when I was old enough and able enough I would learn and perform it myself.

When I worked in Berlin I was very close with Daniel Barenboim, who pointed me in the direction of the Albert Sammons recording: very few people know it these days, but Daniel said he considered it the reference-recording. The dedicatee Fritz Kreisler never recorded the piece, and Sammons was its first champion - but he didn’t want to record it with Elgar, because Elgar was a terrible conductor! They played it together a zillion times but Sammons just wanted someone better for the recording, so he did it with Henry Wood. Yehudi Menuhin was very young but already a great politician, and he said ‘Screw the fact that Elgar can’t conduct: he’s the composer, and that’s what’s going to make my recording famous.’ And he was right – he’s known for this concerto, but Sammons was and maybe still is the definitive interpreter.

Anyway, I said to Daniel that I’d never heard of Sammons, and a few days later he gave me a copy of his Elgar recording. I was sitting on the floor in my studio doing my taxes the next day with the CD playing in the background, and once the Elgar finished the recording went straight into some fantastic music that was completely unfamiliar to me: that was the Delius concerto. I thought I’d found a new favourite composer, but when I explored further I didn’t find anything else by Delius that was nearly as good…I find a lot of his music quite simplistic, but the Violin Concerto is something else: there’s nothing quite like it in the concerto literature of any country, and every time I play it it’s a total discovery for the orchestral players. If any conductors happen to be reading this, please know that I’m ready to do that piece day or night! 

Guy will join the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Eivind Gullberg Jensen for the Abbey Road Concerto's UK premiere next March; booking is now open.