Nature & Nurture
Viktoria Mullova, the great Russian-born violinist, has not allowed musical lockdown to depress her. Like every soloist, her carefully orchestrated concert schedule had to be abandoned, but she was determined to carry on practising and decided to work on the Beethoven Sonata in C minor, a piece she had always wanted to play. It went so well that she now intends to record it alongside two other Beethoven sonatas – a textbook example of how to turn a crisis into an opportunity.
Her son, jazz bassist and composer Misha Mullov-Abbado – his father was the revered Italian conductor Claudio Abbado – has found the enforced break more trying. ‘It was difficult,’ he says.
‘I had a lot of stuff cancelled. I had an album, Dream Circus , out in June and was supposed to be doing a tour. That was pretty grim.
It’s daunting thinking what the future of the jazz scene in the UK is going to be like. I’ve been struggling with that.’ THE MUSICAL PERSPECTIVES and disciplines of mother and son could not be more different – a globally recognised violinist trained in the Soviet school and a young, cutting-edge jazzer – but they have pulled down the barriers that often stand between classical music and jazz to make a disc called Music We Love , an eclectic collection of pieces ranging from Bach and Schumann to Brazilian folk songs, and including three of Mullov-Abbado’s own compositions, all happily recorded just before the pandemic threw the musical world into disarray.
‘We have very different experiences and lack of experiences,’ says Mullov-Abbado, ‘so we
