Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra player Nicole Boyesen shares her most poignant career moment as part of the Musician Behind the Moment campaign.
“I play double bass. Recently we were sent off to Barnstable to do a concert only using two basses because it’s a small venue, with a loyal and enthusiastic audience. We were playing Dvořák's Symphony No. 9. With two basses!
“I was leading it and Jane Ferns was chosen to play the second part. She has just reached 30 years in the orchestra and I’ve been working with her for 26 of those years in the same section.
“We have played Dvořák's Symphony No. 9 many, many times as it’s a popular symphony. We’d had a long and exhausting journey to Barnstable. We were pretty tired and we were thinking ‘this is the end of the tour, this is the last one’. We were tired. We weren’t feeling very inspirational. But we started playing The New World Symphony and we got to the slow movement.
“In the slow movement there’s this moment where the basses have a pizzicato passage. It’s a very yearning, reflective passage and it’s just the basses.
“And suddenly, it took off between us. Just the two of us. We just kind of melted into one person.
“It was just perfectly together. It was totally sublime, a divine moment. It was quite odd really, but it was just as if we were moving as one. And that’s never happened to me with that passage before, even with the million times we played it.
“Afterwards we just looked at each other and we knew that we were both thinking the same thing. It was really beautiful. Both us of us couldn’t believe that after this many years, this many performances of Dvořák, we could experience a moment like that. That was our moment. After so many years working together. It was magical.
“It made you realise that that was what music is about. As a player, it’s those moments that make you want to be in an orchestra. We’re still talking about it weeks later!”
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