The further you get into music, the more it's a bottomless pit of learning, Martin Riseley says.
The Wellington violinist and associate professor at the New Zealand School of Music will be playing Brahms' Violin Concerto in the Southern Sinfonia's last subscription concert for the year on Saturday.
''There is so much music from different composers, you could spend most of your life mastering the chamber works of one composer - say, Schubert or Dvorak - and forget all the others. You just can't do everything. There's so much richness there,'' he said.
Riseley grew up in Christchurch in a musical family and learned violin but at 13 or 14, when he started to get better at his instrument, he grew to love the music.
''It's really that love of music itself that kept me going. It's not the best profession for making money.
"It has its up and downs like any profession, but it's that love of it that kept me going and I've never lost it over the years. I still love practising and picking up the instrument.
''That's what I say to any student. Do you really want to do this? If you really love it, then something will happen somewhere or other; if not, expand your horizons.''
Riseley (45) studied at Canterbury University then did his master's and doctorate in New York at the Juilliard School. He lived in Canada for some years, but in 2009 returned to Victoria University to teach, set up a strings programme and perform.
''It's important to me that I get to teach and get inspired by the students as much as trying to help them,'' he said.
He also feels it is important to pass on knowledge that has been passed on to him by great teachers so it doesn't get lost.
''There were people who taught me who knew Ravel and composers back in the early 20th century, so there's a direct connection. I think it's a duty, a moral obligation you have and I enjoy doing it anyway, more and more as I get older.''
In his performance he also feels a responsibility to the composer.
''The Brahms hasn't been played in Dunedin for a few years and wow! I'm the next person to play it. You have to be up to that responsibility and try to get the audience to feel that with you, or feel something.''
To get the energy across, you have to internalise everything you do in order to communicate it, but you also can't ignore the details of how to produce a good sound or other techniques, he said.
''As an artist, you are trying to put it all together and be like a conduit and make the music connect with the audience rather than you getting in the way. I love my instrument and I enjoy playing on it.
"I think, in a way, I'm just expressing on it and if I enjoy it, the audience will enjoy it too. That's the hope, anyway. If I'm not excited by it, I can't expect the audience to get excited by it.
''The hard thing is if you get too excited or too emotional, then you can't do it, so it's a hard thing. You have to pay attention to playing.
"In classical music you are playing the notes somebody wrote and to try to do what they wanted you to do rather than what you want to do, so there's this kind of challenge and it's an honour, in a way, to get to do that.''
As a violinist he loves playing music written after Bach, from the late classical and romantic period, especially Schubert.
As a conductor he likes working on classical music, such as Mozart, but he leaves later 19th and early 20th century music to others, he said.
However, he is also interested in jazz and contemporary works, but says his favourite is playing concertos with an orchestra and preparing works such as the Brahms concerto.
''I don't get tired of the piece and get a thrill when I play it.''
The Brahms Violin Concerto is difficult but not for the sake of being difficult. Brahms was striving to be like Beethoven, he explains.
''Beethoven wrote a very great violin concerto. Brahms in many ways felt in the shadow of that. It was the same with his first symphony, maybe because he was worried about living up to the expectations of being like Beethoven. He was anxious about it.''
He took a long time to write the Violin Concerto and a close friend, Hungarian violinist Joseph Joachim, gave the first performance in 1879.
''Joachim changed the violin part here and there. Not many people would do that to a composer like that, so maybe 5% of the composer of the piece was Joachim and the rest was Brahms.
"At the same time, Joachim wrote a cadenza for it. I think the cadenza's integral to the piece and, as it hasn't been done in Dunedin for a long time, I'm playing that cadenza rather than another.''
He enjoys going through the score and finding things he didn't realise were there, he said.
''Look, he's done it upside down; that's related to that. There's so much inside the music that's very academic or intellectual and at the same time full of emotional stuff.
"For some people, that's how they get the emotional stuff out, by using their brain in a way of intellectualising emotions and finding a way to express rather than pouring their heart out on the paper, which is more of an Italian style of composition.
"The Germans were always like 'I want to hang this on a big structure that's going to be more like a huge symphony' and to do that, you need more than just pure emotion. You need intellectual pieces to go along with it.''
The work is symphonic in length, at about 40 minutes, and the first movement alone is huge, he said.
''There's just a lot of moods and a lot of material in there. It's very beautiful. I've heard it tons of times and I've worked on it and it still works for me. That's the mark of a really good book or a really great piece of music.''
See it
The Southern Sinfonia presents ''Romantic Masters'' on Saturday at 8pm in the Dunedin Town Hall, conducted by Hamish McKeich with Martin Riseley on violin.
They will perform Brahms' Violin Concerto and Rachmaninov's Symphony No2.
