Inès Bahri is thirty-two. She was born in Casablanca, trained at the Conservatoire de Paris, and has played, in the last three seasons, at Wigmore, Musikverein, and Salle Cortot, where I met her forty minutes before a Wednesday-evening recital. She is composed in the way soloists tend to be composed at this specific moment: not calm, exactly, but at the far end of a specific kind of listening.
Q Walk me through the four hours before a recital.
A
Four hours to curtain. Long walk. Alone. Ninety minutes, minimum. I do not listen to music. I do not talk on the phone. I do not eat. I look at buildings. I look at strangers. I let the day of the recital have its own weather. The walk is not a warm-up. It is the last hours in which I am a private person. Once I get back to the hotel, I am a public promise.
Q What do you eat, if not before?
A
A small meal at 3 p.m., always the same. Grilled fish, rice, a green vegetable. In cities where I cannot have the fish, a plain omelette. I have made this rule for eight years. I do not vary it. Superstition, yes. Also nutrition. It is the kind of superstition that comes from ninety-seven recitals in which I did not go on stage feeling ill, and I would like to keep the ratio.
Q You have made a distinction, in previous interviews, between "practising" and "rehearsing."
A
"Practising" is what I do in a small room, mostly alone, in the mornings, for years at a time. It is the private conversation with the instrument, and with the piece, and with the twenty specific problems the piece has for the specific violinist I am. It is boring, in a way that is also the deepest pleasure of my working life. "Rehearsing" is the promise. It is what I do with the accompanist in the last three days. It is public. It is a promise that the private conversation has happened. If the private conversation has not happened, the rehearsal is a lie, and the lie shows on stage. Nobody in the audience can name the difference. Every violinist can.
Q Do you rehearse with your accompanist here, in the same hotel, or elsewhere?
A
Elsewhere, ideally. The hotel room becomes the private room. If I rehearse in it, the private room turns into a green room, and I sleep badly. When I can, I rehearse in the hall itself, empty, in the morning.
Q An empty hall — what is it like, at ten a.m., the day of a recital?
A
It is the best room in my life. The seats are empty and the acoustic is honest. You play one long note and the hall tells you what it thinks of you. I have played in halls that lied — that made me sound larger than I am — and I have played in halls that were rude. Salle Cortot is not rude. It listens closely and then tells you what it heard. I like it.
Q Superstitions, other than the fish?
A
I do not tune in front of the audience. I tune three times in the dressing room, once again with the accompanist in the last ten minutes, and I walk on with the violin ready. Some soloists prefer the tuning as part of the walk on. I do not. I want to have handed over the practical work by the time the audience is watching. I want them to see the promise, not the work.
Q The moment before you walk on. What is it, physically?
A
It is a very specific place in the chest. Not the heart. A place slightly below and behind. It is not fear. Fear is louder. It is the sense that something has been packed for a long journey and is now, finally, being carried out to the car. If I feel the sense in the chest, I know the recital will be a good recital. If I do not, I feel it about a minute in. Both are fine.
Q You cancelled a concert in Berlin in 2024. Publicly. It was reported. Would you talk about it?
A
Briefly. I had had a difficult month. I had had a difficult year. The programme was not the problem. The room was not the problem. I could feel, at 3 p.m., that the sense in the chest had not arrived and would not arrive by seven. I called the hall director, at four, and told her. She was extraordinary about it — a woman who has been in halls for thirty years and understood exactly what I was saying without a euphemism. We refunded the audience. I was in Paris by ten the next morning. I lost the fee and made a private note in the diary. Six months later I played a longer, harder programme in the same hall. It is the recital I am proudest of. Not because it was good — it was — but because it was the one I would not have given if I had not cancelled the first one.
Q A young violinist — a woman — is reading this and preparing for her first professional recital. What do you tell her?
A
Walk. Ninety minutes minimum. Alone. Do not check the phone. Eat at three. Do not read the reviews of the last recital, whoever gave it. Do not ask your teacher, on the day, how you sound. Ask her the morning after. On stage, play the piece you have practised, not the piece you have rehearsed. If the private conversation happened, the public promise will keep itself. Then go to a dinner where nobody at the table has heard you play. Order the fish. Sleep in a room with a heavy curtain.
Q Last question. What are you playing tonight?
A
Bach, then Ravel, then Grażyna Bacewicz. In that order. If you leave at the interval, you have heard the private conversation. If you stay, you will hear the promise.
✦ End of Interview N° 05