“You do music because you have to. Not for money, but for the internal drive to get better each day. It’s a great way to live because every day is new,” says George Hlawiczka, violinist and concertmaster of the Symphony of India. In Kochi, as a guest violinist for the Cochin Chamber Orchestra’s recent concert, ‘Bows and Strings’, George says becoming a professional musician was inevitable. “Everyone in my family is a musician. My father first taught me violin for nine years for five hours every day with a six-month gap in between because I chopped my finger off.”
This rigorous training prepared George for a career playing violin with numerous chamber orchestras and symphonies world over, besides conducting several of them and even spearheading his own orchestra in London, I Maestri. In his experiences conducting, George noted that few conductors had orchestras to perform with once their formal studies were complete. I Maestri was born to fill this gap. “To conduct well, you need experience with real people and real instruments. So our concerts are shared between me and other conductors so that we learn from each other.”
A cohesive sound
With the Mumbai-based Symphony of India (SOI), George’s role as concertmaster involves playing as leader of the first violin section, and working in close contact with the string players to make them achieve a cohesive sound. In effect, he is second to the Symphony’s conductor. SOI performs through two seasons of the year in September and in February, comprising a changing line-up of musicians from both India and abroad. “It is perhaps India’s only professional orchestra and we perform a new repertoire for each season, so the weeks before the concerts are intense rehearsals, getting the new team together. The Indian players have been with the group for a while now and they definitely improve with each season,” says George.
In the three years that he has worked in India’s Western classical music scene, he says low funding, little public support and inadequate instruments and accessories challenge musicians here. Despite these, the talent here is immense, observes George, but it needs to be tapped young. “In countries such as China, Western classical music is very popular. Comparatively, in India, it is less so, probably because your own classical traditions are very rich.” The answer George proposes is to approach Western classical music for children the way Venezuela, has by training its street children. “Almost 2, 50,000 of these children now play in orchestras. Indian musicians teach to supplement their income from performances, but their pupils are often among the affluent, who may not take up music for a living. But Venezuela has shown a new path.”
George also encourages SOI’s practice of inviting foreign musicians to play with Indian ones. “India once had a thriving Western classical music tradition. I remember my tutors, who are now in their eighties, talking about this. This could be revived by interacting with, and exposure to, musicians from Vienna, Russia and elsewhere to draw from their musical practices and experiences.” Among George’s Indian experiences, he counts playing with Zakir Hussain one of the highlights of his career. “In a musician’s life, collaborating with geniuses like Hussain are the peaks, the ‘Everests of music’. That’s how you keep alive your drive. Such experiences are only a handful in each lifetime.
