Violinist Benjamin Beilman speaks about his instrument and about the music he’ll be performing on the Chamber Music Society’s 2025–26 season, The Magnificent Violin.
How did you wind up playing the violin?
Benjamin Beilman: I have to blame my older sister, Elizabeth. She started violin when she was five through her public school. My parents brought me along to her lessons. I quickly started picking up the things that she was working on and eventually I asked for violin lessons. We moved around the US quite a bit as we were growing up, and the violin was a constant for us. Anywhere we went, we always had lessons.
Were there particular violinists you heard growing up who inspired you?
My parents brought us to a lot of Atlanta Symphony concerts. I remember seeing Shlomo Mintz play and I also heard Pinchas Zuckerman. But I was most transfixed by recordings of the old greats: Kreisler, Oistrakh, Milstein, and especially Grumiaux—I have a soft spot in my heart for his playing.
You’ll be one of several CMS violinists featured on the Winter Festival concert on March 8, 2026, which is focused on the pioneering violin style of Fritz Kreisler (1875–1962). What aspects of this older approach to violin playing have found their way into your practice?
The old masters were so distinct in their personalities, but the overarching thing they established comes back to the voice, the idea that we should sound as vocal as possible. Even with technical show pieces that a voice could never accomplish, they played with a sense that there’s always breath, articulation, and enunciation. I really love that style.
You play on a Guarneri violin that was owned by the violinist and composer Eugène Ysaÿe and later by the violinist Isaac Stern. What have you learned about these musicians by sharing an instrument with them?
I’m not an especially spiritual person, but there is something about playing this violin that makes me wonder whether something might be transmitted over centuries through objects. Isaac Stern had plenty of subtlety, but listening to his recordings often feels like he’s taking a chainsaw to a piece of granite. There’s an intensity to the way he plays. I think of his famous recording of Samuel Barber’s violin concerto, where his tone pierces through like a high-powered laser from start to finish. Even if I’m not playing with the same buzz-saw intensity, you can hear it within the instrument. You feel that these players have played their sound into the violin. I get to rely on that.
Ysaÿe had a surprisingly clarion, occasionally thin but very pure sound. I can hear that as well, especially in some of his solo sonatas, which he wrote and performed on this instrument. Inside the violin, Ysaÿe inscribed a little note in red ink, saying “This instrument was my faithful companion for the entirety of my career.” When he died, he was such an important figure in Belgium that he was given a state funeral. As his casket lay for viewing, the violin was displayed on a velvet pillow above it. The instrument has a legendary, superhuman quality to it!
Your CMS recital on November 23 with pianist Gloria Chien features the A-major Violin Sonata by César Franck as well as a recently-written piece by Chris Rogerson. What connects these two works for violin and piano?
The Franck sonata was a gift Franck gave to Ysaÿe on his wedding day. Chris is a dear friend of mine, and when I got married two years ago, I asked him to write processional music for my wife to walk down the aisle to. It was originally for two violins and two cellos, but I wanted to enjoy this music myself as well. He arranged it for violin and piano, creating its current, more fleshed-out form.
On a Sonic Spectrum concert in March, you’ll be playing Demons, which Frederic Rzewski wrote for you in 2017. Are there aspects of that piece that he wrote with your approach to the instrument in mind?
I wish I could take credit for the sounds in his mind. But if you had met Rzewski, who passed away a few years ago, you would realize that he listened to no one but himself! He was an instigator, a rebel. He spoke truth to power at all times, sometimes to his own detriment. The piece came about because Music Accord approached me and said they had some funding to commission a composer. I was enamored with Rzewski’s piano piece The People United Will Never Be Defeated! He has a funny little piece for solo clarinet as well called Schtick. I thought his blend of politics and sly undertones would be the right combination. He did ask if there were anthems or chorales or spirituals that I was gravitating towards, and I gave him some suggestions. He told me that after Trump’s first election, he found himself reading Dostoevsky’s Demons, and that’s what he ended up using as a starting point for the piece.
You’ll also be playing on the final concert of the CMS season, which features late works by Schubert, including his Rondo in B minor for Violin and Piano. What did Schubert contribute to the history of violin writing?
Towards the end of his life, Schubert became aware of what was possible on the violin in part because of the Italian virtuoso Niccolò Paganini. Schubert’s music always has intimacy. Often, he only wants to write music for himself. But in the late works for violin, he starts to understand that you can be extroverted as well—that you don’t have to lose quality if you put yourself out there. These are some of my favorite pieces of all time.
The concert closes with Schubert’s towering E-flat major Piano Trio. What makes this such a landmark work for these instruments?
In the E-flat Trio, especially the funeral-march second movement, he touches on something that we all feel. It’s a sense of dread, the kind of existential crisis that we all go through at various times in our lives. But he presents beauty and respite and possibility, even when you feel like there’s no hope. The finale starts in a careless and carefree place. He goes through many different turns—almost too many—and then somehow ends in a triumphant way that you don’t expect. It feels like you should be completely lost and devastated after such tragedy. But somehow you overcome whatever it is you’ve gone through.
