Rotary: The interviewee, music star, quotes at six in the afternoon … at home. The fact, habitual until a few years ago, is completely extraordinary from the indeterminate moment in which the publicists decided to concentrate the promotion of artists in marathons of interviews in impersonal hotels and journalists accept the game. But that is another story. The fact is that, when arriving, with delay for the jam that Collapse Madrid, Malikian himself is waiting at the door of his home, an unpretentious villa in one of those urban colonies where he hears the birds to bears stone shot of the M-30, and it is he who apologizes for heat and hours. We chat in the courtyard, while in the living room, his 10 -year -old son, just arrived from the school, takes advantage of the permission to watch something on TV while Dad attends to the visit. Of course, as soon as we go, the screens ended for today.
Thanks for receiving me at home. Before it was normal, why do you think not anymore?
Thanks to you, for the discomfort of coming here. Don’t know. The truth is that I do not usually quote at home, more than anything because they tell me that it is too personal, but it does not bother me, because my house is open to everyone. Today, in addition, I am alone with the child and I couldn’t go anywhere. So better: here I am comfortable and calm.
Has Pandemia also made us different?
Of course. In my case, I don’t know if it has been pandemic, age, maturity, but I have changed. My relationship with friends, with work, with everything. I am no longer 25 years old or the ambition I had before. So many things happen, everything has changed so much that sometimes I look totally misplaced and displaced in this world without a soul.
Don’t you like these times?
Of course I like the world. I know wonderful people. But I don’t understand. I do not understand injustice, genocides, wars, of course. But neither does culture work at this time, for example.
For example?
I, to be a violinist, I had to study 20 years. That dedication has disappeared, does not exist. Today one becomes a famous one for another, it is not even necessary to be an initiation to be a musician, just like anyone writes a book. I don’t know if it’s good or bad, but all that discourages me and misplaces me. I feel lucky, I am some age and a certain career, I can survive as I am. But I am worried about my son’s future, it worries me what we are teaching children.
Well, you didn’t have an easy life either. As a child, in Beirut, he knew what the bombings are and went to Germany to study only with a scholarship at age 14.
No, my adolescence was hard, but compared to the life of my son and his surroundings, I think it was easier. I have left a war, I have had to survive only since I was 14, I didn’t see my parents for five years, I had a bad time. But I have had a life as a relatively healthy teenager. Now, with the screens, with artificial intelligence, with porn within reach of children, I think it’s all more difficult. Of course I have seen things, of course I was tempted to go to the dark, but I had music, which always guided me. I think everything is more dangerous today, by unknown.
How much did the dark?
Lot. And I crossed the lines. But there is the good. I did what I wanted and I had to cross lines to know what I didn’t want. Many things happened to me, but I have always returned to my road, which has not been the main highway, but it was my road: mountainous, secondary, but a healthy route, after all.
It is a virtuoso of the violin that fills theaters like a rock star. What do you have to do not?
The secret to arriving does not have anyone. I have been very sustained. I have not had principles. I have done everything. I have played on the street, in orchestras, in the last dot of the pit, like concertino, in bands, disguised as Castor, the violin has never fallen for me to do everything. And I have always had one thing that saved me: discipline. I could pass limits, but I knew that at 10 I had to be at home and fresh to study eight hours. Until recently, I felt guilty if I didn’t do it daily. Now, I have managed to spend one and up to two days without studying.
At this point, what do you need to learn?
It is not even to learn. It is to keep me. For me to practice, touch, it is a way of meditating. I do it for my physical and mental health. It’s like doing yoga. In addition, I always do the same, the same sequence, I enter a kind of trance.
And when inspiration comes, if your method is like a mantra?
That happens when I compose, but, for it to happen, this parallel process is necessary. Sometimes, I start composing four hours, and, of those, three hours and fifty -seven minutes, they have not served at all and the other three are bad. For me, it is still a mystery. I always imagine myself playing on stage with my teammates, we have been together for a long time. It is very tasty, the difficult thing is to find what I want to do. Then, communion with the public makes the rest.
In his next tour he will visit the United States, whose president Deported migrantsas you were, and Israel, whose leaders They kill civilian population in Gaza. How do you face those trips?
As I said: misplaced. But I’m going to make music and I thank every person who is going to see me. You cannot have prejudices with a country and a town for its rulers. The best violinists are Jews. With them is not my discomfort. My discomfort is with the things I don’t understand. I have the music to take refuge, but I live in an environment, I have a child, and it worries me.
Has paternity changed your head?
Completely. Paternity, family, age. A few years ago I had a fall that left me unable to touch for months, and, last year, I suffered an autoimmune disease that paralyzed my entire body. All that has made me reflect. I, nomad, always thought that the houses did not exist, but now my house is my family. It is something very nice and new to me. And I worry that everything has become very superficial, very fast. And that’s why I’m lost. Even in my profession. I know that I am not going to change anything, but now I dare to say the things that I do not like, like music made artificially, people who do not risk, who do not experience.
But you are a virtuoso of your instrument. When was the hair released?
It cost me many years to release it. For many years I have been very complex, very stiff, very worried about perfection. But I have learned that people do not pay an entry to criticize you, to look for the error, but that it comes to feel something, to have the soul and heart. And that is more difficult to get technical perfection.
In his shows he counts jokes. And that comic vein?
That started naturally. It seems not, but I am introverted. At first, when I played classical music, I felt the public very tense, and I started, as a way to break the ice, to tell funny stories of Brahms, or Schubert, which had fascinating lives. People liked it. Then I started counting things of mine, sometimes exaggerated, and people laughed, in all countries, so I’m still in it. It relaxes me, the public relaxes, and when the two parts are relaxed it is easier to penetrate our souls.
His wife, the filmmaker Nata Moreno, won in 2020 the Goya for Ara Malikian, a life between the stringsa documentary about you. How do you have a couple and Government?
Ha ha ha. I feel lucky because I live with a talented and wonderful woman. She has her world and mine, but we also understand each other artistically. I have fallen in love twice: once from the woman, and another of her talent.
Wasn’t it both?
Not quite. In the middle of the relationship, I fell in love with her again. He dazzled his head, the vision, the intelligent, the innovative, how brave it is in this artificial world we were talking about before. We have never had professional jealous problems, or ego. If, we have had problems when having time to take care of our son. That does affect my head. I love what I do, but now that I start the world tour, it scares me, because, as I have already told you, I am lost.
That is unpopular to say it. He is supposed to say that he wants to eat the world.
Yes, and no. I have wanted to eat the world all my life, but an age comes … I imagine it is natural, but I don’t want to eat anything. Every time I get on stage it is tremendous happiness, and if I don’t go up in two weeks, I miss it much, it is a kind of healing for me. But I have no ambition to conquer such a site, or such auditorium. I want to get on stage and play and nothing else.
His scenic presence is powerful, with his styles and his pelazo. Is it a flirtatious man?
Well, it was.
Nor?
Well, I’m still. I like to take care of myself, I go to the gym every day, but now I don’t know if I do it for aesthetic or health reasons, even in that I am lost (laughs). If you interview me again in six months I will tell you safer.
From the pit to the focus
Ara Malikian (Beirut, 56 years old), son of an Armenian family, suffered as a child the deprivations and consequences of the civil war in Lebanon until, at age 14, he achieved a scholarship to study violin in Germany. There, he spent five years without seeing his parents, during which he became a violin teacher. He has gone from the pit of the musicians in the Real Theater in Madrid to fill that same temple as a star on stage, where he has achieved his own solo style, mixing music and rhythms from all over the world in his instruments. Now present Intrudera video with actor Jaime Lorente, and a world tour.