As a journalist and critic I’m of the view that the basis for championing any artist must be excellence alone, regardless of nationality. However, I still find it exciting when the artist or ensemble blowing my socks off just happens to be British. Occasionally I sit musing with colleagues as to why we see so few British string players at worldwide competitions and with international careers, when there are plenty on our national music scene. Are we producing national- rather than international-level players, or is there something else going on?
Those musings have reached fever pitch recently, not least because of the growing career of violist Timothy Ridout – from his signing with L’Agence artist management in Paris to winning the Prix Thierry Scherz at the Sommets Musicaux de Gstaad 2019. Then there have been violinists Mathilde Milwidsky, who last year reached the semi-finals of Hanover’s Joseph Joachim contest, and Louisa Staples, who at 18 came fourth in the 2018 Long-Thibaud-Crespin International Competition in Paris. Like buses all coming at once, we now have three young Brits holding their own internationally.
These young artists might constitute a happy coincidence. But there’s the fact that all three have gone to study abroad: Staples at the Hanns Eisler Hochschule, Berlin, and Ridout and Milwidsky as postgraduates respectively at the Kronberg Academy and the Academy of Music and the Performing Arts, Munich. This feels significant when I think of the number of major artists who’ve told me how much studying abroad challenged their perspectives – and enriched their playing – by encounters with people of different backgrounds.