You may know Laura van der Heijden from the Walton Cello Concerto that won her BBC Young Musician of the Year in 2012, aged only 15 – a performance of preternatural poise, intelligence and intensity. Since then, Laura has kept a low profile, eschewing the exposure of other Young Musician winners, some of whom are now first-name brands.
She has trodden her own path resolutely, studying Music at Cambridge University rather than going to conservatoire, pursuing chamber music and recitals more than the international concerto career she undoubtedly merits, and recently having gone back to study – with a violin professor.
Only now, 12 years on from her BBC win, has she finally put William Walton's Cello Concerto on record (for Chandos), with Ryan Wigglesworth and BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, alongside Frank Bridge’s Oration and a concerto written for her by Cheryl Frances-Hoad, which she performs in her BBC Proms debut this month.
What did it feel like returning to the Walton? ‘I was definitely most nervous for that piece. We started the recording sessions with it, and because it’s my first concerto recording, it was a very different experience to making chamber recordings. And obviously, I put quite a lot of pressure on myself.’
It is indeed obvious that van der Heijden puts quite a lot of pressure on herself – it’s a recurring theme in our conversation. (You can also hear her discussing how musicians cope with pressure in a special BBC Music Magazine podcast interview).
Laura van der Heijden on growing up and finding her voice
When I ask how she thinks she’s changed as a player since then, she reveals, ‘Sometimes I look back and think, “Was I better then?” But I think lots of people do that. At different times in your life, you look back and sometimes it’ll be, “I was better then”, or sometimes you’ll have improved. It has so much to do with your mental state while you’re comparing yourself.
'Hopefully, I’ve found my own voice more, although to some extent that final was before I’d become self-aware. I was still very open to the world and maybe slightly naïve. I felt quite honestly myself and wasn’t afraid. Pretty much instantly after the final I felt a lot of pressure from myself – not necessarily from people around me. I felt I had something to live up to. That’s been a long process and I feel I’m just getting started trying to find out who I am as a musician, and to be that as honestly and truthfully as possible.’
Laura van der Heijden has been open about the challenges of stage fright, one of the taboo subjects of classical music, and recording the Walton brought back sometimes painful memories. ‘With pieces I’ve played since I was that age, I often have more embedded stage fright, whereas I have a different relationship to concertos that I’ve learnt later on. With the Walton, it took approaching it as “adult me” to get past some of those worries. On one hand, physically, it lies in my fingers more, so that’s good, but it’s quite hard to undo some of the fears that come with it.’
'We exchanged lots of pictures, images and stories about swifts'
Alongside Walton and Bridge sits Frances-Hoad’s new Cello Concerto, ‘Earth, Sea, Air’, of which van der Heijden gave the premiere last year. She was already a fan of Frances-Hoad, her teacher Leonid Gorokhov having recorded the composer’s Invocation, so the two started talking, looking for a concept based around nature.
‘We exchanged lots of pictures, images and stories about swifts. Maybe that explains why I’m so high up – it’s stratospheric. There were textures I said I loved – brass stabs, soft tremolo strings – and she added those in. There was some back and forth about cello technique, but quite minimal because she’s a great writer.’
Working like this with composers offers surprising revelations: ‘It shows elements of how they perceive you that you hadn’t realised. This has happened before: a friend of mine, Lara Weaver, wrote me a couple of pieces. I expected both composers to see long, gentle melodic lines as my thing, but their pieces were much stronger than I expected.
'I thought, “Okay, you’re seeing me as a feisty person, and I think I’m just melodic lines.” The concerto is also intense and muscular. It’s as much about the composer’s language as the person they’re writing for, but I found that an interesting process.’
Intensity and muscle; gentleness and melody
The intensity and muscle are evident in her Walton, and in the Prokofiev Cello Sonata from her 2018 album 1948. So, however, is the gentleness and melody. Laura van der Heijden does it all – from fragility to power, introversion to extroversion. Her playing – just as her conversation – is deeply thoughtful, personal and sincere.
Not enough for her, though, which is why she signed up to the class of violinist Antje Weithaas in Berlin: ‘I went and played to her, and she said exactly the kinds of things that I felt I needed to hear, like, “You’re not being yourself”, or “There’s a wall between your feelings and the instrument.” That’s something I’m still trying to work on. People probably wouldn’t say that if they saw me as a musician, but when you’re too self-critical you end up putting a wall between what wants to come out and what comes out.’
The work they’re doing together is as much physical as mental, she explains. ‘Sometimes, if you connect to your body more, your brain quietens down, so it’s a lot about connecting to the core and freeing up the body so there isn’t tension that stops the flow of sound. But then the mental side is, “What do you want to say? How do you want to say it?”
'She is helping me to connect in that way. My whole life, I’ve wanted to do things slightly differently, partly because it’s exciting and interesting, but also because I sometimes fear that if I’m in the normal environment, I might find it difficult to stay myself.’
Laura van der Heijden's musical partners
Perhaps as respite from this extreme self-scrutiny, one of her favourite musical relationships is with Kaleidoscope, the chamber music collective featuring violinist Elena Urioste, pianist Tom Poster and others, which performs unusual and neglected repertoire. ‘A huge part of Kaleidoscope is to perform pieces that haven’t been played very much and that’s an absolute light in my life,’ she explains. ‘They’re my dear friends and we do exciting musical projects together.’
She seems fairly ambivalent about her academic studies (‘It turns out, having gone to Cambridge, that I’m a deeply instinctive musician, and I don’t want to know names and definitions’) but credits a course on ‘Decolonising the Ear’ with changing her outlook about repertoire. ‘I hadn’t been exposed to anything about colonialism and it was mind-blowing, and has changed my perspective on my role in programming.
'When you’re in it so deeply, you’re not aware of the context: how the canon has emerged and that it doesn’t need to be that way. It’s also more interesting to programme pieces that haven’t been played as much. There’s a pressure with Beethoven and Mozart to be a certain way: with pieces that haven’t been played so often, there’s less performance history, so the performer is freer to interpret.’
Typically thoughtful, she sees both sides of the debate, though, and finds herself somewhere in the middle, as she explains. ‘It’s a strange thing to be playing old music and knowing how to reinvent your relationship to it. The classical music world has a reputation for being a bit elitist and insular, but it can be very inviting, and lots of people feel very deeply about the music that’s played.
'I haven’t found my place along that spectrum. Some people have a clear voice and want to be musical activists, and programme more daringly than I do and be very vocal. I’ve found a sort of middle ground.’
'I need variety. If I only do one thing, I get very stuck.’
Despite this uncertainty, or maybe because of it, her repertoire choices are relatively diverse and beautifully conceived. Her most recent recital disc, the lunar-themed Path to the Moon with Jâms Coleman, ranged from Erich Erich Korngold to George Walker via Florence Price and Benjamin Britten. And their previous Pohádka: Tales from Prague to Budapest included works by Kaprálová (you can read mroe about this remarkable composer in our feature on the best Czech composers) and Mihály alongside Kodály, Janáček and Dvořák.
She’s started singing in performances (‘It’s a way of accessing something for me that feels important, and it’s an easy way to make a programme more varied’) and has moved beyond the standard concertos, working on those by Samuel Barber, Bohusłav Martinů and Dmitry Kabalevsky. The mix of everything suits her: ‘I’ve figured out that I want and need variety. If I only do one thing, I get very stuck.’
At one point in our interview, Laura van der Heijden admits, ‘You’ve caught me at a time when I’m trying to figure everything out.’ I suspect she’s the type of person who is always trying to figure everything out – it’s an uncomfortable truth that the finest musicians are often the ones who question themselves most unrelentingly. I hope that she finds the answers she’s looking for, and that we get to the enjoy the fruits of her discoveries along the way.
Laura van der Heijden at the 2024 BBC Proms
Laura looks in at the 2024 BBC Proms on Friday 26 July for Prom 10, for a performance of the Cello Concerto ‘Earth, Sea, Air’ by Cheryl Frances-Hoad, with accompaniment from the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and conductor Ryan Wigglesworth. Also on the menu are Britten's Gloriana – symphonic suite and Elgar Symphony No. 2 in E flat major