Given that Mimé Yamahiro Brinkmann is one of the world’s leading period instrumentalists, she didn’t half get some stick from her teacher.
Having enrolled to study the modern cello, Brinkmann, who performs in three Auckland concerts with NZ Barok on May 10 and 11, had been at Tokyo’s Toho Gakuen School of Music only a couple of weeks before she had her head turned by a visiting baroque orchestra.
“I walked by a rehearsal room and they were playing a Rameau opera,” Brinkmann says. “The sound of the strings and the woodwinds shocked me. I ended up listening to all the rehearsals and going to all 10 performances.”
Brinkmann saw her future, and it held period-correct gut strings and historically informed performance styles. Her professor was not amused. “He said, ‘You’ve reached this very good school – what are you doing? If you have to do this, do it somewhere I don’t have to see.’”
Next stop, the Netherlands, one of the best places to study period performance. “I was young and naive,” Brinkmann remembers, “I didn’t know anything. But the first week I was there, I went to a rehearsal of the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century.”
Spiritual home found. Since then, Brinkmann has freelanced with the starriest names in the period instrument world, including La Petite Bande, Tafelmusik, Drottningholm Baroque Ensemble and, in her home country, Bach Collegium Japan. What’s it like to play with the very best? “The good thing about coming into a great group is that they already have a sound and an established way of working. You step off a train in Leuven [Belgium] to play with [La Petite Bande’s] Sigiswald Kuijken and you already know what’s going to happen, what the concertmaster wants, how we’ll phrase things; you just fit in.”
When she turned 40, however, Brinkmann worried that she was fitting in to others’ visions a little too much, and consciously decided to perform more in small groups or as a soloist. In Auckland, she plays three concertos, by Leo, Vivaldi and CPE Bach.
They’re a trio of vivacious works, none of them perfect, but each more than simply charming. The Vivaldi – Brinkmann plays the G major concerto RV413 – was written, as were so many of his works, for the orphaned and abandoned girls of the Ospedale della Pietà, Venice. Brinkmann describes the second movement in particular as a conversation between cello and strings.
“It reminds me of an old lady talking and a little girl answering. I always find that playing period instruments is like talking. For me, that’s the difference between period and modern orchestras: a modern orchestra sings, but when I use gut strings, I’m speaking.”
NZ Barok with Mimé Yamahiro Brinkmann, Cellomania! St Luke’s Church, Remuera, Friday, May 10, 7.30pm; Saturday May 11, 2pm and 7.30pm.
