REFLECTING ON SUCCESS

Dutch–British violinist Daniel Rowland has had multiple strands to his career – among them soloist, concertmaster, festival director and quartet leader. He speaks with David Kettle about trusting himself to make meaningful connections and go with the flow

BALASZ BOROCZ

‘You might have noticed that I’m always talking.’ Daniel Rowland is hardly exaggerating; at least, judging by the intense hour or so we spend in conversation – during which he’s disarmingly open and forthcoming about his experiences and activities.

But then again, Rowland’s got a lot to talk about. He’s kept more than busy in a wide-ranging career as a violin soloist (often directing from the soloist’s spot), chamber musician, teacher and festival director, not to mention fairly prolific recording artist. Rowland himself, however, seems somewhat surprised – pleasantly so – at how things have turned out. ‘For better or worse, I think I never particularly planned that kind of career path. Most people don’t, of course. I guess things just happen. And you go with the flow.’

There’s undoubtedly an easy-going aspect to Rowland’s outlook. But equally, there’s a side that’s passionate and driven – by connections with music, across a broad range of styles; and by connections with people, something that emerges as a recurring theme when we speak. Some of those more personal connections, perhaps, are down to Rowland’s unusual background. He was born in London but grew up on the continent. ‘My father, David Rowland, was quite a successful young composer in London, and he fell in love with a beautiful young lady from the Twente region in the eastern part of the Netherlands. They lived in London for ten years, and when I was three, they made a big move to the small Twente village of Het Stift – I think my mum was a bit homesick, and my Dutch grandpa found us a house to live in.’

As a result – perhaps unsurprisingly – Rowland feels a distinctly international sense of identity. ‘If anyone comments on it, they usually say I’m neither completely Dutch nor entirely English. I grew up in our little Dutch village, but I always spoke English with my dad. I think I somehow idealised England – we’d spend summer holidays in Norfolk or Devon. My name sounds English, but I guess I’m more Dutch. Like everything with me, it’s all a bit mixed up and paradoxical.’

It’s quite a self-deprecating self-assessment, but perhaps one with some truth to it – as can be seen by exploring some of his activities. But that international outlook nonetheless provided a particularly rich background for Rowland’s studies and early career, which was firmly centred in continental Europe. He studied in Amsterdam and Brussels, and took lessons in Paris from Ivry Gitlis, who proved a lasting influence on his playing as well as his musical thinking. More importantly, his European location helped establish a wealth of personal and musical connections with fellow soloists, chamber groups and orchestras that form a framework for his many musical activities today.

First and foremost among those ‘connected’ fellow soloists is Rowland’s wife, Belgrade-born cellist Maja Bogdanović. ‘She’s just the most tremendous musician. She’s from Serbia, but she spent almost 20 years in Paris: she went there as a teenager, when the war in her home country was still raging. [The 1990s was a complex time to be growing up in any Yugoslavian country, of course.] She has a kind of Balkan fire and virtuosity, but she also adores chamber music. So as soon as we got together, we started playing all the duos for violin and cello, and gave many chamber concerts at European festivals.’

Rowland and Bogdanović still perform regularly as a duo (they released a CD, Pas de deux, in 2020). ‘I think we have an interesting chemistry – we seem to offset and counterbalance each other nicely. I’m hugely passionate and intense and virtuosic, and Maja can be the same, but she also knows when to temper things a little bit and be pragmatic about the music. My way of playing is sometimes in the moment, for better or worse, but then she can have more of a gravitational pull back down to Earth.’

How do they manage to separate their musical and personal lives?

‘Separate? I don’t think we do!’ Rowland laughs. It doesn’t even sound like they can. ‘If we’re at home, we might be rehearsing, then picking up the kids from school, then even flying somewhere together. Sometimes we joke that we’d better make our marriage a happy one, otherwise we’re doomed professionally.’

Luckily, Rowland assures me, it is a very happy one. Their two daughters, aged three and eight months, may be a little too young for formal music lessons, but they are, unsurprisingly, immersed in music at home. ‘If you ask my older daughter what she wants to play, she’ll say the cello, like her mum – but she often tries out the piano too. And the more modernistic and intense the music that Maja and I play, the more blissfully the two of them seem to lap it all up, and even drift off into a dreamworld.

Daniel Rowland and his cellist wife Maja Bogdanović

WE’RE GOING TO PURSUE OUR INDIVIDUAL SOLO PROJECTS BUT TAKE THE QUARTET VERY SERIOUSLY TOO’

It always makes me wonder about our preconceived ideas of what counts as beauty.’

As well as being spouses, parents and musical partners, however, Rowland and Bogdanović have recently expanded their chamber collaborations into a new string foursome, the Arethusa Quartet. In it, they’re joined by two additional regular collaborators: second violinist Floor Le Coultre and violist Dana Zemtsov. ‘We’d played together a few times in recent years,’ Rowland explains, ‘and it felt like there was some real chemistry happening between us, in terms of our sound; and some things were just happening that you’d usually need to discuss. I’d had the idea of us forming a quartet for a couple of years, but I think I was maybe afraid to verbalise it – you don’t want to damage something by giving it an official stamp.’ Another concern was that none of the four musicians’ individual solo careers would be affected. ‘But then Dana said: “That’s all very clear.” What she meant was, “Of course we’re all going to pursue our individual solo projects; but at the same time, we’re going to take the quartet very seriously too.”’

Founded as recently as 2023, the Arethusa Quartet already feels well established across Europe, with performances planned for the Netherlands, Germany, the UK and the US in coming months. A key question, however, was what to call the group. ‘Some people suggested the Rowland Quartet,’ Rowland remembers, ‘but I thought that was just a joke – our name should represent something we stand for.’ In the end, their name came courtesy of a Polish composer that Rowland has long admired. ‘There’s a little piece for violin and piano by Szymanowski called “La fontaine d’Aréthuse” which I’ve loved since my childhood,’ he explains. Its eponymous water nymph is the object of unwanted advances from the river god Alpheus; but when he believes he’s finally trapped her, as Rowland relates, ‘she changes into water itself and becomes one with the river, untouchable even by the hands of gods.’ It felt to him like an apt metaphor for the ceaseless musical investigations that a string quartet carries out. ‘The moment you think you’ve got it, and you know how a piece should be done, you’re finished – you’re doomed. Every time you think it’s reachable, it remains elusive.’ The Arethusa Quartet, however, represents just the latest in Rowland’s long and significant history of playing in quartets.

Rowland won the Oskar Back competition in Amsterdam in 1995 aged 22, and four years later joined Lisbon’s Gulbenkian Orchestra as concertmaster. ‘For the first six months in Lisbon I lived with fado musicians, and, completely by chance, found that I could dive deeply into this desperately romantic kind of music. I absolutely loved it,’ he remembers. In 2005 he got a call from the Allegri Quartet in London, which was looking for a new leader. ‘I remember doing my last concert at the new Casa da Música in Porto, then jumping on a plane to London. The next day I did my first concert with the Allegri. In one weekend it was like a new era beginning, and with a very distinguished ensemble. But then after a year and a half, the Brodsky Quartet approached me, and I spent twelve years with them.’

The Arethusa Quartet (l-r) Dana Zemtsov, Daniel Rowland, Floor Le Coultre and Maja Bogdanović

PHOTOS SARAH WIJZENBEEK

Rowland performing with the Stift Festival Orchestra

ȘERBAN MESTECĂNEANU

He has warm memories of his long time as the Brodsky’s leader, and remembers how different it was from playing with the Allegri. ‘With the Allegri, there was a strong feeling of daily rehearsals. When I came to the Brodsky Quartet, however, they were still very fanatical and very passionate, but at the same time much more pragmatic: you’d rehearse when you needed to rehearse and work intensively, but then you’d go and do other things. I think if you over-rehearse, you can absolutely kill things – you have to trust instincts, preparation, even the glint in someone else’s eye. You can’t fix everything in advance.’

And, returning to those all-important personal connections, he remembers an idiosyncratic – and, he says, highly effective – approach within the Brodsky Quartet. ‘There’s always a question of how social you can be or should be within a quartet. After a concert on tour, we’d always seek out the best restaurant in town and have a wonderful late night there, whether it was in Spain or Italy or Australia. We had fantastic times together. But apart from that, we wouldn’t meet at all.’

‘I’M A FREE SPIRIT, IN A WAY. I HATE BEING PIGEONHOLED OR PUT IN A BOX’

That fragile balance between belonging and independence is something that Rowland draws particular attention to, especially in the context of quartet playing. ‘There’s a dichotomy between my feeling of loving being part of a group and feeling completely at home, and not getting edgy if someone seems to stake a claim on me. I love the pride of being in a group, with deepening personal connections. I feel I can flourish in that way – you feel that you’re comrades, you’re on a journey together, and you have each other’s backs. I find that very moving and very wonderful. But I hate it if anyone stakes a claim to exclusive ownership. For better or worse, I can’t deal with that. I think I’m a free spirit, in a way. I hate being pigeonholed or put in a box.’

Perhaps that’s another side to Rowland’s ‘mixed up and paradoxical’ character that he mentioned earlier. And it’s certainly a potential friction that he and the other Arethusa Quartet members have actively looked to address. Despite his twelve fulfilling years with the Brodsky Quartet, however, in the end it was simply the sheer breadth of his activities that encouraged Rowland to narrow his focus. ‘I was trying to manage three different diaries: one for the Brodsky, one for my solo playing and one for my festival. I ended up thinking, “Perhaps three is a bit too much. Maybe I should go back to two.”’

Rowland had launched his Stiftfestival in 2005, and from the very start it had had a deeply personal resonance. ‘It’s based in and around a medieval church – the Stiftskerk – that I could see from my bedroom as a three-yearold,’ he explains. ‘I played my first recital there when I was about 16. Then in the spring of 2005, I played there in a quartet with friends. I remember we came out of the church into a beautiful sunny day with all the flowers and ancient trees, and we said to each other: “This would be a dream location for a festival.”’

The inaugural Stiftfestival took place just a few months later, in August 2005. ‘We started quite small, with just four or five concerts.’ Since then, it’s grown hugely, so much so that Rowland now organises three events across the year: his original summer festival; Stift Musical Encounters – a combination of tutoring, masterclasses and performances which takes place in the spring; and the Midwinter Festival just after Christmas.

Rowland’s aims, however, have remained largely unchanged since 2005. They’re mainly a reflection of his personal musical passions: to bring together established classics and a healthy dose of new music, international performers and emerging artists, performance and education. So personal is the festival to Rowland, in fact, that he chose its 2021 edition as the setting for his marriage to Bogdanović. This year, the festival marks its 20th outing, with a particularly impressive programme including Britten’s Noye’s Fludde, a hip-hop Handel Messiah, a new chamber opera charting the history of the festival itself, and Osvaldo Golijov as an especially high-profile featured composer.

It was shortly after last year’s festival that Rowland recorded his latest CD, of Max Richter’s The Four Seasons Recomposed. He’d given a live festival performance with the event’s festival orchestra of friends, professionals, emerging players and students, and he wanted to capture a similar spirit on disc. ‘We did it right after the festival, and in a single day. It wasn’t easy: we were trying to get the live atmosphere, but then we also wanted it to be perfect and clean. I remember listening to the edits and thinking: “I wish we had more time to clean it up completely.” But there’s also the danger of cleaning it up to the point where it loses its life and soul. You hope to find the golden point between those two extremes.’

Rowland’s recording is a very different beast from the already iconic account by Daniel Hope. Whereas Hope’s is pristine, well oiled, perhaps somewhat cool, Rowland’s is red-hot, passionate, but with a healthy dose of human fallibility in place of immaculate perfection – which, Rowland suggests, might well be the point. ‘I first learnt the piece about ten years ago for a performance in Poland, and I fell in love with it.

I checked out recordings, including Daniel Hope’s beautiful, distinguished one, but I ended up thinking there was still something that could be added to this piece. It has so much passion: it’s a mix of cool and hot, authentic Vivaldi and psychedelic punk music – even some music you could play in a nightclub.’ It’s also a piece that Rowland is performing widely in 2024. ‘I’m doing it in Belgrade, then in Hungary in July, and in Amsterdam and Madrid with the Stift Festival Orchestra later in the year. People say that once you’ve recorded a piece you really know it, and it’s so true. It’s so much fun now because I feel like I’m there with it – I can enjoy it.’

Solo touring, a new quartet, a musical marriage, an apparently ever-expanding festival – if, as Rowland says, his career has been more about going with the flow than setting off down a particular path, it’s a flow that’s taken him in rewarding directions. ‘I think everything in my life has been a combination of coincidence and faith that it simply had to be,’ he says. Perhaps it’s a mix of chance connections and opportunities, but there’s also a clear sense of personal musical passions. As demonstrated by his wide-ranging tastes and activities, Rowland is a musician who follows his heart

– in terms of what he does, and who he does it with. ‘There’s nothing I love more than performing – it’s really in my DNA, in my soul. And if I can combine that with doing it with people I love – whether that’s professionally or personally – then that’s as good as it gets.’

ROWLAND’S VIOLIN AND BOW

TOP PHOTO ȘERBAN MESTECĂNEANU. VIOLIN PHOTO COURTESY BIDDULPH

Rowland feels particularly close to his violin, a 1796 instrument by Cremonese luthier Lorenzo Storioni, which he plays with a bow by 19th-century Mirecourt maker Nicolas Maline. ‘I bought the violin in 2006 at Biddulph’s in London, and before that it belonged to Gordan Nikolić, who was at that time leader of the London Symphony Orchestra.’ And, Rowland says, it’s his faithful companion right across his varied repertoire, and across solo, chamber and orchestral work. Even if, as he admits, there might have been competition. ‘About ten years ago, the Dutch Musical Instruments Foundation – who have always been very supportive of me [in fact, his bow is on loan from them] – called me up and said they had a “del Gesù” for me to try. Of course, I jumped at the chance. It looked out of this world, like a tiger, and it sounded beautiful. I played it for about two years, but began to realise that I was doing none of the important concerts on it, and none of my recordings. I kept going back to the Storioni. So after those two years, I called the foundation back and said, “Thanks so much, guys, but I’m giving it back. I think it needs to be with someone who’s actually going to play it, and I feel more at home on the Storioni.”’ What is it about the Storioni that Rowland loves so much? Perhaps, he says, it matches his own personality in some ways. ‘It’s like my soulmate. Like me, it can be moody and unpredictable. It has good days, and it has bad days. But I think I can tell my own personal story on it.’ It’s perhaps another personal connection to add to Rowland’s already rich catalogue.