FAMILY CONNECTIONS

Less than five minutes into our interview Misha Mullov-Abbado dives right in. ‘There’s an obvious imbalance in terms of where we are in our careers,’ he explains. ‘Well, perhaps not an imbalance, but we both come from very different places. This is the third or fourth of Mum’s crossover projects. So, although it’s an equal collaboration in terms of instrumental contribution, it’s clearly not in terms of player experience. For me, it’s important to remember the fact that a large part of this project’s recognition is down to Mum’s reputation and success.’

The woman he is talking about is the violinist Viktoria Mullova. The project, Music We Love, released in September, is a rainbow of duets for violin and double bass, played by mother and son and featuring works by Bach and Schumann, arrangements of Brazilian and Hebrew songs and original compositions by Mullov-Abbado. This is no vanity project. It is a serious piece of work via a chambermusic pairing fraught with risk. ‘I was very, very excited about this album,’ enthuses Mullova. ‘Firstly, because it is for a combination of violin and bass, which is unusual but beautiful, and also because I’m playing with my son, which is a dream. But, of course, there was musical risk. Will it be interesting? Will it turn out how we imagined? Will it be good enough? But also the family connection was a risk. How would we work together?’

Any risk to such a project was clearly going to be tempered by the quality of musicianship. Mullova is one of the finest virtuosos of her generation, and Mullov- Abbado a 2017-19 BBC Radio 3 New Generation Artist and winner of the 2014 Kenny Wheeler Jazz Prize. But there’s no denying the difference in performing inclinations. In such a compendium of eclectic numbers, the musical challenges must have been quite different for each artist. ‘For me,’ says Mullova, ‘the great challenge was to become more comfortable with improvising. I had started doing more improvisation in past projects, but this was much more demanding, or perhaps more expected, because Misha is a jazz musician and it was always going to be a feature of the music that we played together. That was quite scary - really scary, actually, because it’s not what I do normally as a classical musician.’ To which Mullov-Abbado adds, ‘There’s a difference between having a fixed section of a musical work where you improvise within an ensemble which then moves together on to the next thing, and improvisation with just two people. In the latter scenario, you just have to say, “This section is going to be completely open and we’re going to figure things out together spontaneously and somehow end up somewhere else.”’