Soloist

What it is

A soloist is a performer playing the featured part, either alone, with piano accompaniment, or with an orchestra. See the performance section for everything related.

In a concerto, the soloist plays the solo line while the orchestra accompanies and converses with them.

The term also covers a recitalist playing with piano, and a player performing unaccompanied repertoire. The virtual piano on this site is worth having open while you practise this.

What it demands technically

Everything the instrument can do, at a level where none of it is uncertain.

Solo repertoire is written to display, so it contains the hardest passages composers could devise: high positions, double stops, rapid passagework, extended techniques, and sustained lyrical playing where any flaw is exposed.

Beyond technique, it demands projection. A single violin must be heard over an orchestra of sixty or more. This is partly instrument, partly the acoustics of the hall, and substantially technique: contact point, bow speed and weight producing a sound that carries.

And security under pressure. A passage that works in practice must work on stage, once, with no second attempt.

What it demands musically

More than technical command, and this is where soloists differ from each other.

A point of view. The repertoire is recorded hundreds of times. A soloist who plays it accurately and without conviction has added nothing.

Communication with the orchestra. A concerto is a conversation, not a solo with backing. The soloist and conductor negotiate tempo, rubato and balance in rehearsal, and adapt in performance.

Stagecraft. Walking on, acknowledging the audience, holding attention, managing nerves. Real and rarely taught.

Memorisation. Concerto repertoire is performed from memory as standard. This is convention rather than necessity, but it is near-universal and a soloist who reads is unusual.

The cadenza

A passage, usually near the end of a movement, where the orchestra stops and the soloist plays alone.

Historically improvised. From the nineteenth century onward, composers increasingly wrote them out, and standard cadenzas by other composers or famous performers exist for most major concertos.

A soloist chooses which cadenza to play, and that choice is an interpretive statement. Some perform their own.

The path, honestly

Very few violinists make a career as a solo performer, and it is worth being straightforward about that with students.

The route runs through: serious study from a young age, competition success, conservatory, more competitions, management, and then a career built on availability, reliability and reputation as much as on playing.

Most professional violinists play in orchestras, teach, play chamber music, do session work, or combine several of these. That is a good career and it is what the profession actually looks like.

A student who wants to be a soloist should pursue it, and should also understand that the skills built along the way support many other paths.

Soloist at every level

The term does not only apply to international careers.

A student playing a concerto movement with a youth orchestra is a soloist. A student playing a recital piece with piano is a soloist. The demands are the same in kind if not in degree: projection, security, communication, memory, stagecraft.

Those experiences are where the skills develop, and a student who has played a movement in front of an audience has learned something no amount of practice room work provides.

What it teaches

Even for students with no solo ambitions, preparing a piece to solo standard changes how they play everything else.

The level of security required, the attention to every detail, the experience of performing alone with nowhere to hide, all raise the baseline.

Most teachers put students through it for exactly that reason rather than because they expect a solo career.

Projection, specifically

The technical requirement students most underestimate.

A single violin must be audible over sixty or more orchestral players in a hall seating two thousand. That is not achieved by playing louder.

It comes from a sound rich in upper overtones, which carry further than fundamental-heavy sound. That means a contact point closer to the bridge, a bow speed and weight combination that produces a focused core, and a projecting rather than a beautiful tone.

A sound that is lovely at three metres may vanish at thirty. Players preparing for solo performance need to hear themselves from the hall, which usually means someone listening from the back and reporting.

Instruments differ enormously in this, which is part of why soloists care so much about what they play on.

Memorisation, and why

Concerto repertoire is performed from memory as standard, and the convention is worth understanding rather than simply obeying.

The practical argument is that a soloist facing the audience cannot see a stand well, and that memory frees attention for communication with the orchestra.

The deeper argument is that memorising forces a level of knowledge that reading permits avoiding. A player who has memorised a concerto knows its harmony, its structure and its details in a way a reader may not.

The risk is memory failure under pressure, which is real and which is why secure memorisation combines aural, visual, analytical and physical memory rather than relying on muscle alone.

Our teaching studio covers Lawrenceville, Suwanee, Milton and Decatur with private and group violin lessons. If you would like help with playing in context, call 470-789-2422 or book a no-commitment evaluation lesson.