Violist Annemarie Moorcroft
By Kate Baggott

Annemarie Moorcroft is principal violist of the Deutsches Symphonie Orchester, one of the world’s best orchestras. Over the past nine seasons, this 36 year-old musician’s career has blossomed, turning her into an International Woman of the highest order.

Annemarie is a long way from London, Ontario, the city of her birth. Home, for the past 7 years, has been an apartment in Kreuzberg, a predominantly Turkish and Bohemian neighbourhood of Berlin. Home is where she raises bow to viola and practises the music that has taken her around the world.

The other tenants have heard preparations for classical music’s most important events and for collaborations with its biggest stars. There have been schools in Cologne and New York, festivals in New Mexico, Banff, Japan and Salzburg. There have been solo performances with Yo Yo Ma, Leonard Slatkin and Vladimir Ashkenazy.

“Where have you been?” her neighbours ask. They know she travels about 100 days a year. “Where are you going next?”

Not bad for a late bloomer.

Professor and Dr. Moorcroft – her father is a physicist, her mother a PhD in linguistics – both love to play classical music. They encouraged their children’s musical education, but above all, they raised Annemarie and her siblings to pursue academics.

“I was expected to finish high school early and go to a university like Harvard,” Annemarie explains. “The possibility of becoming a professional musician was never mentioned.”

She did finish school at seventeen with an A average, but her marks weren’t stellar enough for a top university. Joining Canada’s National Youth Orchestra gave her a new goal.

“I wasn’t a star, but they told me I could be a musician,” Annemarie remembers. “Growing up I had the impression that a lot of professional musicians were unhappy. I don’t know where it came from, but it was the impression I had. My biggest worry was that I would become a professional and then not be good enough to play in a rewarding environment. If I hadn’t become good enough I might have ended up frustrated with no inspiring people to play with. The NYO was the first experience I’d had where I could see myself being good enough.”

Shortly afterward, her father’s job brought the family to Germany where Annemarie was introduced to a musical culture steeped in tradition. At 19 she decided to get the best training possible with teacher Rainer Moog in Cologne. Her family returned to Canada.

“Something told me that if I studied music at McGill (in Montreal) with my buddies, I wouldn’t do the work,” she says. The isolation was good for her. “Creativity is an isolating process in some ways. Musicians have to spend 5 or 6 hours a day alone practising, which isn’t exactly an attractive prospect when you’re young.”

Annemarie realised her goals later than most musicians of her calibre. The image of the child prodigy looms large in the popular consciousness of classical music. It is, largely, an accurate portrait.

“I grew up with musical prodigies,” Annemarie remembers. “I knew people who were really good when they were little and on tour by the time they were twelve. I wanted to be one, but I knew I wasn’t.”

It wasn’t until she left Cologne for the Manhattan School of Music that Annemarie got to know Midori and began to appreciate being a late bloomer. Midori, a violinist, made her professional debut at the age of 11. “I saw the lost childhood, the pressure and the threat of burn out,” Annemarie remembers, “I was glad I hadn’t been a prodigy.”

In Manhattan, Annemarie thought her German experiences were over. Not all her memories of Cologne were good. At 23, she was hospitalised for a blood clot and almost died during an allergic reaction to blood thinners. Her family, an ocean away, never knew of the danger. “I needed help,” Annemarie remembers. “It was really hard for me to learn to accept help from strangers.”

When the job offer from the DSO came, the isolation of that terrible experience was gone. Only the hard-won independence remained.

“I never feel lonely being an ex-pat,” Annemarie says. She isn’t alone. Classical music is global and the ex-pat lifestyle is the norm for most musicians. Members of the DSO come from 20 countries. Connecting with Berlin’s global community of musicians has allowed Annemarie to make music on a deeper level. She and three colleagues form the Breuninger Quartet.

“An orchestra has a strict hierarchy with the conductor at the top,” she explains. “Everyone has their part to play and the precision of bringing 100 people together is beautiful, but it’s impossible to put personal interpretation into the music. Quartet playing is musically fulfilling. It completes and complements the orchestra experience.”

It’s performing itself that Annemarie loves most. Special concerts, created by an unpredictable chemistry, remain vivid in her memory. One is a performance of the Trout Quintet in an old church near Munich. Travelling to the concert was an exercise in difficulty, then the miserly priest refused to heat the church. The piano couldn’t be tuned and finally, she had to perform wearing two sweaters and a coat.

“It was physically awkward, the audience was shivering, and we were all frustrated,” Annemarie remembers. “But we loved playing. The audience loved it. There was a mutual recognition something special was happening for all of us. Those special concerts make it all worthwhile, and how wonderful that we can’t control when they are going to happen.”

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