Mastering the horn can take years. But Ben Goldscheider finds the whole thing a blast. Deana Luchia hears him tune up for the Barnes Music Festival.
I hear Ben Goldscheider before I see him: rich, warm notes from the horn pour out of a window and onto the street in West London where he lives.
When I enter his flat, which he shares with his fiancée, flautist Imogen Royce, the horn is the first thing I notice. It’s beautifully shiny, almost dazzlingly so, and Ben will be playing it at this year’s Barnes Music Festival.
He’s also the festival’s first ever Artist in Residence, which means he will be judging the final of its Young Musician of the Year.
His credentials could scarcely be better:
Aged 11, Ben achieved entry into the Royal College of Music Junior Department. Then, at 18, he won the BBC Young Musician Brass Category Final for 2016. So what will he be looking for as a judge?
“Somebody who comes with personality and who’s thought carefully about their programme,” he says.
“Of course the technical things need to be in place, but I want somebody who has something to say and isn’t just playing the notes. I’ll also look at how they present themselves on stage. Do they respect the fact that everybody in that room has given them their time?”
Typically, horn players work with an orchestra after their studies. Why did Ben become a soloist?
“I wanted to redefine what it means to play the horn in the 21st century,” he asserts. “I’ve commissioned more than 50 new works for the instrument and I’m playing it as a soloist all around the world, shining a spotlight on it. I love the horn so much and I want to push it in a new way.”
It was not always so. Aged six Ben played the cello, and it took an incurable, debilitating lung condition –bronchiectasis – to make him switch.
“My lung function was only 50%, and a doctor at the Royal Brompton Hospital said that playing a brass instrument could help my lungs to strengthen,” he explains. His musical parents suggested the horn.
“There’s a lot of work for a horn player, more so than with some other instruments, so their advice was actually quite pragmatic. But also the instrument is so beautiful.” And one of the hardest to master. When did Ben realise that he’d done it?
“I’m still waiting for that,” he says. “It’s a constant process of finessing and polishing. Playing the horn is a humbling experience.”
The doctor was right: the practice did strengthen Ben’s lungs and he was discharged from hospital aged 14. Now he stays healthy by running, eating well and practising the horn – something he does every day, even when he’s on holiday. He doesn’t see it as a chore.
“I love it – and if you take two days off, it’s four or five before you’re back in shape.”
He normally practises in a church round the corner. Is that for the acoustics?
“No, it’s because I feel for the neighbours, especially as what I’m mostly doing is contemporary music, blasting things out for three or four hours a day. They never complain – they’re lovely – but I feel self-conscious.”
Not for much longer though: he and Imogen are moving to a place with a garden where they’ll have a soundproof music studio; somewhere to keep all their instruments in one place. It is all so positive, and Ben is so palpably thrilled to be a musician, that I feel churlish asking if he finds it a cut-throat world.
“Oh absolutely! It’s insane. You’ve got to have so many fingers in so many different pies to fill up your year. If you can imagine doing something else [as a profession], do it – there is a large space in the industry for people who love playing but don’t want to do it professionally. You don’t have to have this pressure of needing to be the best.”
Does he ever suffer from nerves?
“Not to be melodramatic, and not to sound complacent, but I realise that what we do is really not life and death. There’s so much terrible stuff happening in the world, and I think to myself: ‘What right do I have to be scared about playing my funny tubing to a bunch of people in a room?’”
I ask about his other horns, imagining a vast collection, but astonishingly, he has just the one, a constant since he was 15. Why?
“Well, it still works,” he says simply. “Also, I’ve grown up with it. I bought it brand new, and so it’s only ever really known me, which has quite a big effect on how it plays. I really think the metal and the way that it blows, the resistance of the horn – it’s kind of moulded itself to my way of playing. For me, it feels like putting on a glove.”
