By Hugh Robertson

Karen Gomyo is on a mission to restore Dvořák’s Violin Concerto to its rightful place in the upper echelon of the repertoire.

The Canadian violinist makes her long-awaited return to Sydney in September to perform this exquisite masterpiece, one that she feels has been unfairly overlooked when we think not only of the great violin concertos, but also Dvořák’s best works.

‘This piece was neglected,’ says Gomyo from Berlin, on a recent (and rare) day at home in the midst of a busy touring schedule. ‘It isn’t like the Mendelssohn or Tchaikovsky concertos where you know that you will see it every season, performed all over the world. But I think Dvořák has really come back as one of the true staples of the violin repertoire. And I think it deserves that place, so I'm glad to see that it’s now being programmed a lot more regularly done than it was, I think, in the last one or two decades.’

For Gomyo, the connection is personal intensely, and reaches back to when she was a child and first took up the violin.

‘I chose the violin because I saw a concert by the violinist Midori, who came through Montreal when she was 14 and I was five, and I was just absolutely blown away by everything that that she was. I still remember that that performance, and it really left a deep impression on me. And I think there was really no doubt that I loved music. So, yeah, it started at a very early age for me.

‘And actually the first time I heard the Dvořák Violin Concerto was the Midori recording, which she made when she was 18 or 19 or something. That was my introduction to the Dvořák, and I really loved it.

‘So, it was one of the first concertos I learned once I got to Juilliard. I think I may have been about 11 or so, and I think I played my student recital with that piece. It has always been one of my favourites. And I think now that people are becoming more familiar with it, they realize what a masterpiece is.’

Throughout our conversation Gomyo returns again and again to the idea of a piece of music having a story, and her role as a musician is to tell that story to the audience – a tall order when you don’t have any words to help describe what is going on! But she suggests that this process has become second nature to her as a result of starting her performing career while still so young, and needing to find a way into the music that she could relate to as a child.

‘I have always come from a place of storytelling,’ she says. ‘That's how, as a younger violinist, I related to whatever music I was playing – I would literally come up with a storyline; I worked very much with imagery.

‘That approach is still in me, even though, unlike when I was a child, I don't actually write out a storybook to go with the music. But there’s always an emotional narrative, and that’s what I’m most interested in in any music. And I think that’s what everybody connects to, no matter what background you come from, no matter what culture you come from. I think when we say “music is a universal language”, I think this is what we’re talking about – it’s actually the emotionality, the connection that that everybody can recognise is the emotional components in the music.

‘I do have my own memories of playing this piece as a child and how this piece made me feel and what images I had as a kid. As I’m playing I’m not bound to one particular story, but I think within the context of these larger emotional narratives, in any given moment I’ll explore this emotional journey that I’ve drawn for myself.

‘It’s not that I follow a strict path, but there's a general direction that I've set for myself, and, and that's where I'll enter.’

Gomyo won’t reveal the images or story that she has written for herself about this work, but she does share that her connection to this concerto is grounded in something she and Dvořák share: a deep love of nature.

‘He loved the countryside,’ says Gomyo. ‘He loved nature. And I think you can hear that in this music. I'm also a nature lover. So I think that’s part of why this music always spoke to me.

‘For example, in the second movement, you almost hear the interaction between what you might find in the forest – whether it’s a bird somewhere, and then you hear, like, the horns and the distance, representing this kind of feeling of being somewhere deep in nature, deep in a forest somewhere.

‘When you walk through a forest, when you really pay attention, there is so much that one can feel. Whether it’s something that you can hear, whether it's the breeze against your skin, whether it's birdsong, whether it's reflective thoughts that are inspired by what your surroundings.

‘It’s hard to describe in words, but this is what this piece evokes in me. It’s almost a universal feeling of warmth or love. You can really feel Dvořák’s love for his own culture, and the countryside that he talked about missing so much when he was away from his homeland.

‘These are the elements that I try to evoke, hopefully a lot more eloquently than how I just described it,’ says Gomyo with a laugh. ‘I always find it so difficult to describe music – and this is why we're musicians! Because we evoke something that is generally very difficult to describe in words.’

Having said that, Gomyo is in fact very eloquent when describing this work – perhaps especially this work. And her love for the piece shines through when asked to describe the work for someone who has never heard it before.

‘The first movement is very dramatic,’ she says. ‘It's very passionate. and it starts with kind of this triumphant orchestral opening followed by a virtuosic violin solo intro. Then the last movement is full of these traditional dance-like elements. And I think because the theme of the third movement is so repetitive, it's actually something that’s very…I don't like the word ‘accessible’, but even for somebody who listens to it for the first time, I think they can end up humming that theme by the end of the last movement.

It’s just so catchy, and wonderfully exciting to listen to.