Courtesy of Iskandar Widjaja-Hadar

When violinist Iskandar Widjaja-Hadar performed for the first time in Indonesia five years ago, spectators flouted classical music etiquette, clapping after every trick, even screaming. They just couldn’t get enough.

The same happened when he played César Franck’s Violin Sonata, at Goethe Haus on Oct 2. The audience simply loved him, applauding when pieces weren’t over yet. Some concertgoers have since sent him love letters and made flowers for him out of paper.

But wait a minute. Iskandar is not a pop phenomenon. The now 24-year-old accomplished soloist, born to Indonesian parents but brought up in Berlin, spends his days with the likes of Vivaldi, Beethoven and Brahms. His instrument is a 1793 F. Geissenhof from Vienna.

So, why the emotional outburst for a violinist’s éclat in this day and age?

His easy-on-the-eye looks would probably have served him well had he chosen the world of pop, but they wouldn’t get him anywhere in classical music.

His success has more to do with talent, hard work, honesty when he plays the violin, and a deep-rooted principle that his music is for audiences, not for himself.

When playing the violin, Iskandar says he is not looking for pure beauty.

“That is what some people do: they just look for beauty of sound. I am looking for the truth of emotions. I think life is not always beautiful and happy, and neither is music.” Iskandar told The Jakarta Post.

“I try to be touched by the feelings [expressed by the composer] when I play, in order to touch the audience emotionally.”

Iskandar says his interpretations are sometimes “shocking”, because he “feels like some music can be aggressive and rough”, so he plays it that way. If you do a YouTube search for Iskandar Widjaja, you can see some of his more energetic performances for yourself.

It’s almost as if Iskandar lets composers speak through him. “I don’t really think my character affects the music, but I try to let the music affect my playing as much as possible.”

The greatest feeling ever, Iskandar says, is when he senses people are listening and the music is reaching them.

“Sometimes there is just one person in the audience listening, so you just play for that person because it’s difficult to play for yourself. It’s possible, but it’s so much more beautiful if you can share music.”

Yes, listening to Iskandar play, and talk, will do two things to you. First, it will remind you of the finer things in life, and give you the urge to lose yourself in the complexity, insanity and depth of classical music.

And second, it will remind you that nothing great in life is achieved without hard work.

Violin was just a hobby for Iskandar, at least until he was 11. He remembers watching a concert when he was only three, and telling his mother, “I want to play violin”. Twenty years later, he is touring the world interpreting Bach, Beethoven and Paganini in famous venues like the Konzerthaus Berlin, the Tel Aviv Opera, traveling to the four corners of the world, including Spain, Croatia, Brazil, the US and of course, his parents’ home country, Indonesia. He has also won countless prizes, awards, competitions and scholarships.

So how does one become a violin soloist? Well, being born in an artistic family certainly helps.

Iskandar’s mother is a pianist, his uncle a conductor, his aunt a ballet dancer, and his late grandfather, Udin Widjaja, a very famous composer in Indonesia.

But while Iskandar was a musical child, he was not as technically developed as other moppets who had been trained seriously from a very young age — that is, until he studied at one of Berlin’s musical schools, the Hanns Eisler College of Music, and later at the pre-college division of the Berlin University of the Arts (UdK).

At both institutions, he rubbed shoulders with musically gifted children who had received technical training since the age of four. And so he learned the hard way.

“Schoolmates made fun of me, saying ‘You can’t play’.”

Iskandar practiced up to eight hours a day to reach their level, and he never gave up.

“I always wanted to be number one… everywhere, so I took it as a challenge.”

With a string of strict violinist instructors who challenged him, Iskandar eventually perfected his technique.

Studying violin at UdK from 2005 to 2010, his teacher, Ilan Gronich, formed his playing, but the journey was harsh and demanding.

“Sometimes we would work for weeks on just one or two bars to make them better. It was such tough work. I cried so many times. He yelled at me so many times too, but it was worth it in the end. It made me more precise, and intense in what I was doing, and more aware.”

Almost every day, Iskandar does violin intonation exercises by playing open strings and Paganini 24 Caprices, the hardest études ever written for violin. He also plays Bach every day because it makes one listen more carefully to intonation and sound quality, he says.

“Sometimes I invent tricky things on my violin to strengthen my muscles,” he adds, because practice is about technique.

A hard-worker by nature, Iskandar believes there is always an incredible amount of work violinists can do if they really want to understand what composers want to say and what they mean. His goal is to make a piece technically effortless, so he can concentrate on the music when on stage.

Nowadays, Iskandar doesn’t take lessons as such, but plays for famous soloists to gauge what they are thinking. They will give him comments, rather than a lesson. There comes a time when you have to develop your own fingerprint, he says.

“You can teach a lot, but you can’t teach your own way of playing. It’s very important you develop your own fingerprint if you want to pursue a soloist career.”

Very few gifted musicians can make it as soloists. But Iskandar hopes he can. Something is burning inside him, and really wants to come out, he says.

His playing has been described as passionate. It can be crazy, he says, because he feels music should have a certain amount of insanity, and shouldn’t always be reasonable.

“It would be boring. Nobody wants to hear reasonable music… Sometimes people want to indulge in the craziness of the moment.”

But the violinist also likes to play soft, or piano, because of the impact it has on the audience.

“They start to open up their ears. If you play an emotional phrase as softly as you can, but with great inner sensibility, it can be mind blowing.”

One may wonder why throughout generations, musicians like Iskandar have chosen to consecrate their lives to such antediluvian music.

“These days everything is so fast. All pop music pieces last three minutes. It’s like a package of emotions that you can consume quickly. Same with the internet and five-minute YouTube clips,” Iskandar says.

But classical music needs more time… Iskandar pauses. “I like that; you can really celebrate it [classical music]. You can go much deeper into it. I feel like classical music has this quality… There is lots of thought behind it. You can be both emotionally and intellectually challenged. I think it’s very necessary for people to listen to this kind of music.”

Iskandar Widjaja will perform on Friday, Oct. 29, with the Dubrovnik Symphony Orchestra at Aula Simfonia Jakarta (ASJ) in Kemayoran, and is likely to make an appearance as a special guest at the Vivaldi, Chopin and Grieg concert this Saturday conducted by Dr Stephen Tong also at ASJ, pending confirmation.

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