View from the Green Room: Vladimir’s love affair with the Theatre Royal continues
Vladimir busking on Grafton Street 20 years ago.
Vladimir’s in existential mode tonight. He’s been wondering a lot lately… 'who am I?...how did I get here?…what am I doing?…where am I going?…is it all worthwhile?’
From the warmth of the reception, it was clear that Vladimir has a great local following. I am not surprised. His personality as a virtuoso is infectious and his cavalier Bohemian flamboyant style is enormously entertaining. His bowing is large, his gestures are dramatic and all his pieces finish with a grand flourish.
Ireland’s favourite Slovakian fiddler is here to reflect on his journey as a violinist and on just how exactly he landed in the Emerald Isle. And he’s got an interesting story to tell. He breaks his narrative with some dazzling and exciting fiddle work on Rimsky Korsokov’s ‘Flight of the Bumble Bee’ and Brahms’s ‘Hungarian Dance No 5’ that has everything with its rich melody and quick tempo that grows into a mad frenzy. He is normally accompanied by his family - all seven of them. However, on this occasion, his sister Olga accompanies him on piano, along with a couple of solos of her own, and what followed was an entertaining and informative evening.
Born into a family of professional classical musicians, there’s inevitability around his life-choices. Well…sort of, really. He did everything it said on the tin of wannabe professional musicians until the age of 18 when he decided to head off on his own. His destinations bucket list boiled down to two – Ireland or Siberia – brrrrr!
He landed here with €200 in the back póca, a fiddle and the address of a friend of a cousin. A claustrophobic bedsit’s rent and deposit left him broke with no option but to busk on Grafton Street. His dreams of becoming a success sit easily with his singalong version of ‘If I were a biddy-biddy rich, eidel-deedel, eidel-deedel man’ that tonight’s audience loves.
His busking draws crowds and offers of weddings and corporate gigs if he can only find a band. Others in the same boat rock up to Grafton Street and pretty soon they’ve got a quartet together. A gig for a tango convention poses a problem – they only know one tango in Por Una Cabeza. Pretty soon, their entire repertoire acquires a tango beat and they’re off.
Vladimir constantly reinvents himself and overcomes the challenges that life throws at him. Like when Covid came along just as his orchestra was taking off with a successful solo gig in Carnegie Hall. He plays requests on Zoom links like…Pachelbel’s Canon…Jealousy…Life on Mars and finds a life-partner in Nicola. Now they’ve got two kids together. The audience just loves the gossip about family. Real news.
"I’ve never stopped trying," he explains. This is the first concert of his mini-tour of Ireland after sell out Christmas concerts in the Three Arena. A Rachmaninoff ‘Vocalise’ - a song largely without words - is very popular tonight, while his sister Olga’s piano-solo Chopin etudes were full of national passion, pride and suffering. The synergy of an exciting solo fiddler and a brilliant pianist fashions a mini-orchestra.
Vladimir has that common touch that Irish people warm to. He loves to gossip and talks easily about his life’s journey. He mixes his music too as he’s comfortable with all genres. When he plays the Sinatra classic ‘My Way’ and the Mary Hopkin gem ‘Those were the days’, the entire audience sings along. That’s just the type of night this is.
Warm, folksy, gossipy and fun.
