By Fiona Wright
One: it just happened
“So much of the story of my life,” Helena Rathbone says, “is it just happened.”
It isn’t luck, exactly, that Helena – Principal Violin with the Australian Chamber Orchestra – is talking about here. She isn’t the type of artist to dismiss all of the other, far more important factors – hard work and dedication, training and passion and talent – that go into an artistic career and focus just on luck. Instead, what she’s referring to is the unexpected consequences of decisions that never seemed so far-reaching at the time, and to the way that accident and something like inevitability have seemed so intertwined across her life.
For example: Helena has been playing chamber music since she was nine years old, when she first attended the Pro Corda music camp, held in the ruins of an abbey on the Suffolk coast. It is where she fell in love with chamber music and first learned some of its repertoire. “It spoke to me,” she says. “All music has a voice, and this music spoke to me.”
Because of this, Helena returned to the camp twice every year until she turned 18. Many of the other attendees did too, which meant, they quickly “became like colleagues” and developed the kind of rapport than any small ensemble needs. “Where you can communicate,” she says, “without anything being said.”
Helena fell in love, that is, with chamber music and ensemble performance as a child, and pursued what was in many ways the perfect training for an outfit like the ACO – purely by following her heart, rather than by design.
Because alongside “it just happened” she also says this: “I have always known this was my passion.”
“It’s always fresh, always surprising,” Rathbone says, “and we’re fortunate to have an audience that’s willing to take the risk alongside us and see what we have to offer.”
Two: my one and only full-time job
Helena auditioned for the ACO by cassette tape, and in response to a fax. She didn’t know anything about the Orchestra, but her name was put forward by her violin teacher, who had been told that they were looking for a principal second violin.
“I had always wanted to live in another country,” she says. And she had just returned to her home in London from a three-month residency in Banff, landing in the middle of January to “grey and miserable” skies. It was something she thought she would try for a while – more than a whim, but far less than a momentous decision.
When she signed with the ACO, it was on a one-year contract.
This year is Helena’s 30th with the ACO. She now refers to the Orchestra as her “one and only full-time job”.
Three: that’s another reason to stay
Several times as we talk, Helena mentions something that she loves about her job and adds, “and that’s another reason to stay”.
One of these reasons is the calibre of the Orchestra and the demands of playing within a small, tight-knit ensemble. There is always, Helena says, “a high bar”. “We are tough on ourselves and tough on each other, and you have to be at the top of your game the whole time.” Another is the risks they take with repertoire, with unusual combinations and guest performers and directors who often push the musicians in unexpected ways. “It’s always fresh, always surprising,” Helena says, “and we’re fortunate to have an audience that’s willing to take the risk alongside us and see what we have to offer.”
A third is the camaraderie: from a very early age, the “social side” of music has been important to Helena, always learning alongside others – “I had my violin friends, and my local school friends,” she says, and describes meeting up with her violin friends on the Tube each Saturday, on their way to their lessons – and finding “joy” in the music they played together. Several times, she refers to composers and guest musicians in this year’s ACO program as “dear friends”.
Most important to Helena is the ACO’s Emerging Artist program, which she was instrumental in setting up 20 years ago. Helena loves mentoring emerging musicians and takes great pleasure in the idea that she is passing on some of the opportunities and experiences she was so lucky to be granted as a student – playing alongside professionals and teachers, being exposed to different people, learning collaboratively. It is work she finds “inspiring, and intensely gratifying”, especially as some of the program’s alumni have now become her colleagues. “It is a special thing,” she says, “to be able to give some of that back. And that’s another reason to stay.”
“I never dreamt I’d get to play an instrument like this,” she says, and then corrects herself. “Or at least, it only ever happened in my dreams.”
Four: is it a Strad or something?
Helena plays a 1732 “ex-Dollfus” Stradivarius violin, and she refers to herself as its “custodian”. “I never dreamt I’d get to play an instrument like this,” she says, and then corrects herself. “Or at least, it only ever happened in my dreams.”
It is a violin that she describes as “sweet” at the top, “grainy and rich” at the bottom, remarkably even across its strings. It has taken her time to learn to how to play it.
“It’s like a relationship with a person,” she says, “you have to get to know each other, learn each other’s character.”
Helena tells me that when she travels, the violin is kept as hand luggage, stowed in the overhead cabin, and that she has to keep a watchful eye on other travellers to make sure they’re not too forceful when stowing their own gear alongside it. “There was one man,” she says, “who, when I asked him to be careful, said ‘what, is it a Strad or something?’” She mimics his dismissive tone. “And when I said ‘yes’, he laughed. He clearly thought that I was joking.”
She laughs as she recounts this tale.
Five: heart and mind and body
More than at any other moment, Helena lights up when she talks about performing. It’s clear that performing is her real passion: it is something, she says, that involves “the heart and mind and body, all of them together”. All of these facets of a person, poured into the music. “You become a conduit for the music,” she says, “and you have to, to do it justice.”
But it is the audience, too, who make performing so exhilarating – the sense that they are trusting you, going along with you, and that sometimes, they emerge transformed. “There’s always something that you know they will take with them,” Helena says, “but sometimes, you know you have changed their world.
“It is a gift to be able to give them that.”
Six: one of the most exquisite movements ever
In this concert, Helena is most looking forward to playing Beethoven’s Holy Song of Thanksgiving. It is, she says, “one of the most exquisite movements ever”, a piece that is “intense, and so beautiful”. It’s fitting, she says, that it is the last piece on the program. “Because there’s nothing you can say or do to follow that.”
Click here to discover A Musical Awakening, featuring Beethoven’s Holy Song of Thanksgiving.
Fiona Wright is a writer, editor and critic from Sydney. Her book of essays Small Acts of Disappearance: Essays on Hunger won the 2016 Nita B. Kibble Award and the Queensland Literary Award for non-fiction, and was shortlisted for the Stella Prize and the NSW Premier’s Douglas Stewart Award. Her first poetry collection, Knuckled, won the 2012 Dame Mary Gilmore Award, while Domestic Interior was shortlisted for the 2018 Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Poetry. Her most recent book of essays, The World Was Whole, was longlisted for the 2019 Stella Prize.
