Walking down Clerkenwell Road, you might not expect the attractive café at number 91-95 to be one of the hottest classical musical venues in London. The Fidelio Orchestra Café has been the unlikely hero of 2020, one of the first places to begin staging live music after lockdown. It has been bringing some of the best international musicians in London — of the calibre of Stephen Hough, Nicola Benedetti and Angela Hewitt — to perform to small, socially-distanced audiences who also enjoy a three-course dinner created by the chef Alan Rosenthal. Fidelio’s proprietor and driving force, Raffaello Morales, has swiftly adapted the café and its music to the demands of our time — and made it a smash hit.
When the café was first preparing to open early in 2019, the British-Israeli violist Shiry Rashkovsky, who lives nearby with her husband and daughter, spotted it and popped in to investigate. The result is that she has joined forces with Morales to create a new festival called Up Close and Musical. Devised pre-Covid, it was intended for last May, but when lockdown struck, it moved wholesale to autumn. With suitable adaptations and reduced audience capacity, it is set to run throughout the weekend of November 6 to 8.
Rashkovsky is hoping the event will be seen as a symbol of hope and optimism, and stresses that the venue will be made assiduously Covid-safe. “I think that the idea we’re going ahead despite London being Tier 2 is encouraging in itself and hopefully will inspire people to want to come along,” she says. “If anything, knowing that Fidelio has been working since July should be reassuring, because you know they have the requisite experience and have adapted to all the changes that have come along.”
She credits this success story to Morales’s galvanising creativity: “Raffaello is an incredibly driven person and he does not give up,” she says. “He’s like a brook: he just goes round all the stones and solves the problems. For instance, the space is relatively small, but he handles it positively; there’s no stage, but that’s good because it gives you more flexibility. When I first met him I thought it would be great to try and create a festival there because he seemed so open to ideas — and my intuition was correct.”
Rashkovsky has handpicked a fascinating selection of musicians to participate. “I wanted to bring in people who would attract an audience, but who would also question what classical music means in the first place: it’s exploration as a way of fostering interest, appreciation and understanding. These are all people I respect musically and who are also very good speakers. They represent themselves very well outside their work, explaining their art in a way that reaches out to people.”
Among them are the South African cellist Abel Selaocoe, the soprano and composer Heloise Werner, the jazz double-bassist Misha Mullov-Abbado (who recently performed in the Fidelio Café concerts with his mother, the violinist Viktoria Mullova) and the composer Gabriel Prokofiev, grandson of Sergei, whose music pushes the boundaries of all we might think classical music is and could be.
Nimrod Borenstein leads a composition workshop, there’s music from violinists Francesca Dego and Chloe Hanslip and pianists Danny Driver and Alasdair Beatson, and a Q&A session with Morales about how he has created Fidelio and made it work. Full disclosure: I’m in it, too, talking about my new Beethoven novel, Immortal. One-day and three-day passes are available and, naturally, food will be a vital element in the proceedings.
Like Prokofiev and Mullov-Abbado, Rashkovsky hails from a distinguished musical family: her parents, Ani Schnarch and Itzhak Rashkovsky, are two of the UK’s most sought-after violin professors. “My mother came from Bucharest and my father from near Odessa in Ukraine. They both got out and made it to Israel in 1974. There they met as violin students at Tel Aviv University. Together they came to the UK to pursue their careers... and here we are!” says Rashkovsky, with a wry smile. Did she always want to follow in their footsteps? “I didn’t. I play the viola. That was my great rebellion,” she quips.
She’s only half joking. While music was a way of life in the family (including her brother, Itamar, who is a violinist, though now works in the City), her switch to the deeper instrument was a meaningful change. She first played the viola seriously in a chamber group on a youth music course, coached by her mother, and found that it felt entirely natural: “I was comfortable in the middle of the music, working with the inner harmonies and with the deep sonorities and ‘growl’ in the lowest register of the viola.”
Rashkovsky was born in the UK and read political science at Cambridge before dedicating herself to music. As a British and Israeli dual-national she sometimes finds herself being a dual-national in music too. Some of the viola’s finest historical exponents were British — Lionel Tertis and William Primrose; and Israel, too, has a distinguished history and present in the field, notably with the composer Oedoen Partos and leading contemporary performers including Atar Arad, Gilad Karni, Rivka Golani and Amihai Grosz.
“I’m come from a place of great gratitude: I’m aware that it was a privilege to have access to that level of education and music-making,” she says. “But I try to find my own way. This is true for a lot of the musicians in the festival: I’m interested in artists who found their own voices.” Her direct heritage of “Golden Age” musicians from East European-Jewish backgrounds could have brought pressure besides inspiration, but Rashkovsky’s viola, she says, “gives me the space to be myself”.
Being herself has inevitably not been straightforward during the pandemic: Rashkovsky’s freelance performing schedule of chamber music concerts and recitals has been wiped out, like most musicians’, and the challenges of raising her toddler daughter under lockdown have been profound.
“I’m happy that the festival is happening,” she says, “because it’s a great source of strength to me personally to know that I’m doing something that can be meaningful for other people. While there’s so little live music, I had a golden opportunity to make something happen live, something I really believe in, regardless of corona. That’s helping me on a personal level too.”
Up Close and Musical, November 6-8, Fidelio Orchestra Café, 91-95 Clerkenwell Road, London EC1R 5BX. Full details: upcloseandmusical.co.uk
