We all know Maya Fridman from her collaboration with Jyoti Verhoeff, and the brilliant concert they gave at Paradiso Amsterdam where their new album Riven was presented. They were accompanied by the Symphony Orchestra Midden Holland and choir, resulting in a really wonderful and magical event. Jyoti and Maya also were finalists in the Grote Prijs van Nederland, the longest running pop music competition from The Netherlands aimed at recognizing new talents, where Maya won the prize of Best Musician.

Maya Fridman was born in Moscow and has been playing the cello from a very young age. She was soon recognized as a gifted child and was taken under the wings of the Foundation of Yuri Bashmet, a well known conductor and violinist who teaches at the Moscow Conservatory. In 2009 Maya graduated from the Schnittke Moscow State College of Music, where she had won many awards and obtained excellent grades during her music school and college years. Since 2010 she studies at the Amsterdam Conservatory, where she is currently working on her Masters.

Next to her collaboration with Jyoti that we know her from, Maya plays many different kinds of music. She also is a member of the jazz trio DINOSAUR, with which she toured Ireland last summer. She will be guest starring at the German folk band FAUN’s tour in 2015, and plays with them on six tracks of their new album Luna. She is working on a CD with a sonata by Schnittke, which is written in a unique style, combining serious and light music. But playing classical music is her speciality. By coincidence I found out she would be performing at a concert by the Hilversumse Orkest Vereniging, at the Morgensterkerk in Hilversum, so I just had to go and hear this performance.

The piece to be performed was Schumann’s Cello Concerto in A minor and it was really amazing to hear Maya play it. It is the most complicated piece I ever heard her play. It has very calm and meditative parts but it can suddenly switch to very agitated and back. It has three movements but they are played as one piece without breaks, lasting 22 minutes. It is very intense and Maya had to work very hard, but she pulled it off brilliantly. And she did it all by heart, she was the only one without the sheet music in front of her. The audience rewarded her with a thunderous applause when it was done.

To hear it played with a real orchestra was wonderful, there is no stereo set that can reproduce the sound of the real thing. There were no amplifiers or equipment like that, just a hall that was well made to sound good. The Morgensterkerk is a great location for concerts. And thanks to conductor Paul van der Reijden, the Hilversumse Orkest Vereniging really outdid themselves with this piece supporting Maya.

During the break afterwards I heard from one of the other guests, who knew the concerto very well, that Maya had added some small embellishments to the piece here and there, which made it even more beautiful, and that the conductor had masterfully guided the orchestra along with them.

It was well worth the trip and I hope I can hear Maya play again soon.

Of course I made some photo’s which you can find in this album.

– Kees